9-1-1 Recap: Full Lethal Weapon

If you’re going to call a 9-1-1 episode “Hotshots” — also the name of the TV show that Bobby worked on before he switched places with Gerrard — I think it should feel like an episode of that fictional series. Give me the beautiful heightened-reality absurdity, not the deeply unpleasant cop drama we get instead. While the return of Brad Torrance is meant to lighten the mood, the only real respite this week is Buck’s embrace of his new identity as a baker to distract from his heartbreak. As a wise woman once sang, “Mama, it’s amazing what baking can do.”

After being largely absent in the last episode, Athena is back in full force at the start of “Hotshots,” and she’s wearing an incredible undercover ensemble: thigh-high boots, a leopard coat, and one of the worst wigs this show has seen. She’s at a jewelry store to assist in a sting targeting Flash Rob, who’s been using Discord to organize evil flash mobs (redundant) that commit robberies. Athena is desperate to collar the anonymous Flash Rob, and she almost gets lucky when she runs into him and his distinctive neck tattoo right outside. But Rob makes a run for it, and Athena’s pursuit ends abruptly after she pulls her hamstring. She doesn’t say, “I’m too old for this shit,” but given the themes of the episode and the later Lethal Weapon reference, she probably should.

The first 9-1-1 call of the episode comes from Encino Studios, where Hotshots is currently being filmed. “It’s a bloody mess out there,” Brad says, which absolutely implies a literal bloody mess but instead means that there’s a passed-out stuntman dangling from an aerial ladder. (I don’t need carnage every week, I just think the phrasing was deliberately misleading, Brit slang or not!) When the 118 arrives, Bobby discovers that Gerrard is doing a terrible job reigning Brad in, hence the stuntman being put in a very dangerous position because Brad wanted a close-up. Even though Gerrard complains about what a nightmare the show’s star is, he still seems pretty in love with Brad, which is just part of this episode’s muddled characterization.

Back on the law side of things, Athena limps her way into Captain Maynard’s office where she gets two pieces of bad news: Flash Rob was able to evade capture, and Athena is being saddled with a probationary officer named Sparks. “You know I work best alone, not wet nursing some greenhorn,” Athena says, but that amazing line is not enough to keep Maynard from pairing her up with a probie. As it turns out, Sparks is a huge fan, rattling off a number of Athena’s major accomplishments, though strangely not that she recently landed a plane. How quickly they forget!

Once they’re paired up on patrol, Athena is generous enough to make conversation with Sparks, who shares why he wanted to go into this line of work. His dad was a con man and an abusive drunk, and one night he finally got the cops called on him. They didn’t do anything, and here’s where I thought Sparks would say police inaction inspired him to become a better kind of law enforcement officer. My personal feelings on that aside, it would at least be less alarming than his actual explanation: The cops scared the hell out of his dad, and Sparks has been thinking about that “real power” ever since. A million alarm bells go off in my head — and in Athena’s. Of course, it doesn’t help that her training suggests every street corner is riddled with cop-killers and drug dealers. I know she wants Sparks on alert, but this is the kind of paranoid thinking that leads to reckless endangerment of civilians.

Athena shares her concerns about Sparks’ live-wire personality with Hen. It’s always nice to get a scene of these two together, but it’s so obvious where this storyline is going that it’s hard to feel all that invested. Athena’s intuition is telling her that Sparks is in law enforcement for all the wrong reasons: power, glory, control — yes, listen to that inner voice! At the same time, she’s stubbornly refusing to use a crutch for her pulled hamstring and thinks it’s possible her distaste for Sparks comes from her own insecurity about not being able to keep up. Two things can be true at the same time! Get this guy off the street, please.

No one listens to me, however, and Athena and Sparks return to patrol. Sparks has found videos on the dark web that show Flash Rob in the back of a delivery truck, which leads the two officers right to their suspect, shipping company employee Caleb Sandstrom. (Now that we know it’s an alias, let’s acknowledge that Flash Rob is a cute pun.) Caleb, once away, makes a hasty escape, this time in a truck, and before Athena can stop Sparks, the probie has jumped onto the back of the vehicle. Athena is in pursuit and calls Maddie to get more cops on the scene, but Sparks is not waiting for backup. With some well-timed distraction from Athena, he’s able to climb into the front seat next to Caleb, ending Flash Rob’s reign of terror. Adding insult to injury, the probie thanks Athena for the assist.

Finally, Athena is ready to follow her instincts, telling Captain Maynard that Sparks went “full Lethal Weapon” and is bad, bad news. Sure, it looked cool as hell, but at what cost? Maynard reassigns Sparks to Officer Vargas, as if that will solve the problem. The department spends a lot of money on training new officers, which means they can’t be chucked out even if they show Riggs-esque tendencies. Sparks arrives in time to hear Athena “talking trash” and tells her that her real issue with him is, “I am faster than you, I am hungrier than you, and I am younger than you.” This guy is so clearly a villain — it boggles the mind that only Athena seems to see it.

Athena’s husband’s problems are a little less of a ticking time bomb, but equally contrived. Chief Simpson arrives at the 118 and says Hotshots production is desperate to have Bobby back. Although Bobby doesn’t want to leave his team again, it’s not that simple — Hotshots donates a lot of money to the LAFD budget and can’t be completely ignored. The solution is for Bobby to My Fair Lady Gerrard, turning him into a more palatable version of himself so that he can remain the technical advisor on Hotshots and leave Bobby free to stay captain of his firehouse.

This does not go well, of course, because, as Bobby tells Gerrard, “You can be a dick.” Bafflingly enough, Gerrard starts crying. He loves being technical advisor on Hotshots and he just wants Brad to like him. There’s probably not much to be done there — Gerrard is deeply unlikable! — but Bobby agrees to take Brad out on a date (not his phrasing) and talk up the 118’s former captain. At a very classy bar, things quickly go off the rails when Bobby tells Brad he will not be returning to Hotshots. Clearly wounded, Brad decides to take out his anger on the waitress (who is also a fan!), making her cry over putting an extra olive in his drink. The whole thing is so sudden and over-the-top that I thought it was a bit, or perhaps an episode of What Would You Do? — but no, Brad really just sucks. Bobby snaps and calls him an “entitled manchild” before threatening to kick his “limey ass.” And here I thought there was something special between them.

The resolution to the Sparks storyline is exactly what you’d expect. Sparks and Officer Vargas pull over a woman who identifies as a sovereign citizen and therefore refuses to comply. I really didn’t like the way 9-1-1 treated this whole thing as a joke, especially because it could not have been clearer where the scene was going. Even after Athena arrives and attempts to de-escalate, Sparks loses control when challenged and ends up shooting the woman because he grabbed his gun instead of his Taser. I don’t need to explain that this is a real thing that happens — or at least, a real defense used in these situations — and while the show is aware of the gravity of what Sparks does, it crossed a line for me. Sparks is an irrelevant one-off character, and his shooting of an unarmed woman with her daughter in the backseat exists solely to propel Athena’s arc forward, making the moment feel ugly and unnecessary.

In the next scene, Athena is finally using a crutch at a hearing to determine Sparks’ punishment. The motorist he shot will survive, but she has a massive payout coming her way, and Sparks is looking at assault with a deadly weapon. Maynard apologizes for not listening to Athena, and Athena says she should have listened to her own body, because she’s not getting any younger. Could we not have arrived here without someone shooting an unarmed woman in front of her child? Now Athena wants another probie to train because “the next generation could use some guidance out there,” which feels like a massive understatement given what we just witnessed.

Athena won’t be the only one in the family with a probie. At the end of the episode, Bobby — who has become a celebrity in his own right after TMZ posted the video of his Brad Torrance takedown — gets a visit from his least favorite actor. “Your words blasted the entitlement out of me like a truth enema,” he tells Bobby, and I’m so irritated by this turn of events that I can’t properly enjoy the line. Hotshots has written Brad’s character into a coma so that he can join the 118 to shadow Bobby, a nonsensical turn of events even by 9-1-1 standards. Is it wrong that I hope Brad gets taken out of commission with a serious injury next week?

Call Log

• I regret lamenting how abruptly Brad’s story seemed to end a few weeks back because I felt like there was more there between him and Bobby. This is not a character I’m eager to see more of at this point!

• It doesn’t help that the episode has him switch from dim enthusiast to cruel monster and back again. Yes, yes, actors are crazy, but this strikes me as weak writing. The same goes for Gerrard suddenly having a lot of feelings.

• Look, I don’t expect 9-1-1 to take an ACAB approach to depict policing, but I think the show has generally tried to provide nuance instead of blatant copaganda. That’s why I was so frustrated by the “one bad apple” Sparks storyline and Athena’s very mixed messaging throughout. Sometimes, I do hold the series to higher standards!

• There was so much going on this week that I didn’t get to elaborate on Buck’s baking. Every time he thinks about reaching out to Tommy, he bakes something, which Bobby points out is a valid coping mechanism. “Don’t discourage him,” Chimney tells Maddie. “I love loaves.” As someone who stress-baked banana bread last week — I get it.