“Everyone’s Going To Be Just a Little Off”: ‘9-1-1’ Showrunner Teases the 118’s Reactions To Bobby's Death

The 118 is about to go through the wringer during the remainder of 9-1-1’s eighth season. Last week, jaws dropped when showrunner Tim Minear made the creative choice to kill off Peter Krause’s Bobby Nash. The difficult decision was one that no one saw coming and even took members of the cast and crew by surprise. We know from promo material that this week will largely focus around those very first waves of grief as the crew attends the hero’s funeral, and what Minear has described as “a mass casualty event” will also begin to play out in the penultimate episode. But, on a personal level, what can we expect from the folks closest to Bobby? Well, according to Minear, “Everyone’s going to be just a little off their equilibrium in these last three.”

For Oliver Stark’s Buck, who viewed Bobby as a father figure, the showrunner teased,

“Buck is trying to lean on himself. Because Bobby says to him, ‘You’re going to be okay and they’re going to need you,’ and that’s going to confuse Buck. He’s not going to quite know what to do with that.”

Meanwhile, for Bobby’s wife, Angela Bassett’s Athena Grant, Minear had something more cryptic to say, revealing, “You’re going to see Athena try to achieve a miracle that she didn’t get with Bobby.” As for the rest of the characters who are shaken by the reality of losing one of their own, Minear says that he’ll be exploring the various types of grief that different folks can feel.

“Well, they’re all leaning on each other, and yet they’re all kind of fractured at the same time. Finding an equilibrium for that grief, it was very important for me that I had a run of episodes after the event so that the audience could try to get their bearings with the characters to grieve with the characters. So all the stages of grief will be represented in the last three episodes with all the characters.”

Grief On the Screen and Off

Not only are the fictional characters of 9-1-1 feeling those unpleasant pangs of grief, but so are the actors who portray them. Kenneth Choi, who appears in the procedural as Chimney, admitted that he pushed back against Minear’s decision to axe Bobby from the story. During the episode, it appeared as though Chimney would be the one to succumb to the deadly virus before his co-worker made the heroic call. In a recent interview with Entertainment Weekly, the actor admitted that he was waiting for the creative team to “reverse course” up until the moment of filming. Meanwhile, Krause’s other co-stars took to social media to share their upset with his character’s death, penning heartfelt messages about their time working with the actor on the long-running ABC series.

9-1-1 is now streaming on Hulu.