Written by Aria Clarke
The new season of 9-1-1 is taking its audience to a new frontier.
The Season 9 premiere focuses on Tripp Houser (Mark Consuelos, Live with Kelly and Mark), a billionaire in a PR crisis after he spent tons of money to send stars of Real Housewives to space. When he gets captured in the mouth of a humpback whale, the intrepid firefighters of Station 118 race to his rescue. He rewards Hen (Aisha Hinds, True Blood), who gave him CPR, with a trip to space. Tripp’s team agrees with this, thinking this is just what they need to smooth things over with the public.
But why?
The public’s issue is not that the non-astronaut people he sent into space were rich. The issue is that he’s putting out tons of carbon emissions to send non-astronauts to space for no reason. So, to combat the backlash he received for doing this, he sends non-astronauts to space for no reason.
Tripp’s PR person says that everyone on the internet loves Hen, even if they still hate Tripp. But if they hate Tripp, why would anyone be happy about her saving him? No one on the internet would be applauding the person who saved a billionaire enough for a PR team to take notice and set up a publicity stunt.
Tripp also says he will donate $5 million dollars to the LAFD, so there would have already been good PR surrounding this whole situation without a random space mission. But he insinuates that he won’t donate the money unless Hen agrees to go to space. This was possibly the laziest way the writers could have introduced this plotline.
The protests about sending rich people to space were clearly commentary about Jeff Bezos sending Katy Perry to space, and it could have been effective commentary. Instead, it was used as a vehicle to send members of the 118 into space. Over the years, 9-1-1 plotlines have varied in absurdity, but this one has to be the most outlandish.
A storyline that is more grounded in reality in this episode was Athena’s (Angela Bassett, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever) avoidance of grief. It is revealed that she has been keeping herself busy and skipping family gatherings to avoid dealing with the loss of her husband.
Athena has also missed that Harry has dropped out of high school, and while this is a good way to show how absent Athena has been, it calls into question the relevance of Harry’s character.
Unlike May (Corinne Massiah, G.I. Joe: Retaliation), who has had many interesting storylines, Harry (Elijah M. Cooper, Goosebumps: The Vanishing) has never been very integral to the show. But now his character feels like more of a nuisance to Athena than anything interesting. First with him getting arrested, and now with this. The news that Harry has dropped out of high school causes little more than an eye roll because his character isn’t around enough for the audience to care about his lack of a future.
The compelling and realistic part of the episode is short-lived, however, as members of the 118 squabble about who should accompany Hen to space. In the end, she asks Athena, and Athena says yes. This doesn’t make sense, either.
Athena, while she gets into some dangerous situations, is a level-headed person. It’s hard to believe that someone like this would agree to go into space for no apparent reason. But maybe her avoidance is worse than it seems. It is ironic that the first thing she decides to do after her kids tell her to stop avoiding them is literally leave the planet.
This plotline probably should have been lost in space, but this will become another thing the fans can laugh about, like Athena landing that plane. It’ll be back to a procedural firefighter show in no time.
