[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for 9-1-1: Lone Star Season 5 Episode 7 “Kiddos.”]
So much happens in the latest 9-1-1: Lone Star that Ronen Rubinstein is right when he says it feels like it should be two episodes.
First of all, we finally meet T.K.’s stepfather, Enzo (Henry Ian Cusick). He stops by for T.K.’s birthday, and to the paramedic’s shock, he’s arrested for securities fraud, conspiracy, tax evasion, and wire fraud at his party. T.K. struggles to reconcile the stepfather he knew who raised him with someone who could do that, and it’s his father Owen (Rob Lowe) who says he can be both good and bad.
“I love that we reveal that Enzo was the reason T.K. actually became a firefighter, and Owen was the reason he almost didn’t become one,” Rubinstein says in TV Insider’s 9-1-1: Lone Star aftershow, First Response. (We have all three members of TNT for this one!) There’s more to come from that relationship, too, with Cusick back for more. “I think that little speech that Owen gave T.K. probably changed his mind a little bit for the better, about not being too hard on Enzo and maybe giving him a moment to really understand why he’s doing this. We’ll find out, but I think it’s giving Enzo, I guess, grace like he said in that scene with Owen. So now he has to take his own advice and give Enzo grace and hear his side of the story.”
T.K.’s relationship with Owen is also changed in this episode, and not just with him telling his father he’s why he almost didn’t become a firefighter. In their last scene, T.K. makes sure Owen knows he literally saved him and everything good in his life is because he never gave up on him. Even though he’s never been the perfect father, he’s still a great one.
Kevin Estrada/FOX
“I think there’s a beautiful parallel for the last five years of Owen and T.K. and them coming together at the very beginning to Austin, and then seeing them both grow separately as humans and coming in together when they need to and then going separate directions when they need to and then coming back together,” says Rubinstein. “And I think Episode 7 is a perfect example of just when you think maybe it’s going to be a pretty bad split, because that’s pretty harsh to hear from your son, ‘You’re actually the reason why I didn’t want to become a firefighter,’ and then for them to make up so beautifully at his birthday…”
Speaking of that party, there’s some great karaoke—to “Under Pressure”—with T.K. and Enzo, who then brings in Owen. Rubinstein loved that since he’s in a band. Still, “I was feeling the pressure,” he admits. “I kind of want that still of the three of us singing framed. It’s just like T.K. and his two dads and how important they both are to him, and just crucial to who T.K. has become as a man. And again, it’s just such a beautiful image, I think for the three of them to come together, especially the song, it’s very specific. They picked under pressure for a reason. I think the lyrics are very telling.”
Related‘9-1-1: Lone Star’: Gina Torres & Brianna Baker Talk Tommy’s Future in Heartbreaking Storyline
Elsewhere in the episode, Tommy (Gina Torres), after learning she has breast cancer, has a mass removed but insisted on continuing to work—until she collapses and her daughters have to call 9-1-1. It was only then that she realizes she has to take a step back and appoints Nancy (Brianna Baker) to be interim paramedic captain in a heartbreaking scene to end the episode.
“That was a scene where we were discovering with each take the different levels and variations of grief on both sides for both of them,” shares Baker. “There’s just so much in that moment because of their relationship, their history, Nancy’s history with her family and cancer, but then also her partner, Tim Rosewater—I believe she’s traumatized from him dying from a volcano rock. And I think she’s put so much in Tommy, and Tommy is a mother figure to her and to think about what happened with her mother.”
Fox
Adds Torres, “You’re coming to terms with your own mortality in that way. Not only does Tommy have to confront the possibility of leaving her girls without a parent, not even just one, but none, and the effect that that would have on them, [but also] leaving a job that means so much to her that is just such a huge part of who she is and how she moves through the world to not be able to do that. And it had so little to do with trusting who I’m going to pass the torch along to and so much more to do with the trust and the belief in the woman that’s in front of me. And so it was bittersweet.”
Watch the full First Response aftershow above for much more from Rubinstein, Torres, and Baker about this episode and what’s ahead for T.K., Tommy, and Nancy.
9-1-1: Lone Star, Mondays, 8/7c, Fox
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