SPOILER ALERT: This article contains spoilers from Monday’s episode of Fox’s “9-1-1: Lone Star,” titled “Impact.”
The sky is literally falling when Fox’s “9-1-1: Lone Star” concludes its second-to-last episode Monday. The members of the 126 brace themselves for the impact of an asteroid they found about just minutes before, and the audience waits for next week’s finale, which will reveal the fate of not just our beloved heroes, but all of Austin. And, should they survive this cataclysmic event, there are still all the loose ends in their personal lives that will need to be tied up.
Is Owen (Rob Lowe) really leaving the 126 to go back to New York? Will TK (Ronen Rubinstein) and Carlos (Rafael Silva) find a way to adopt Jonah after all? Is Tommy (Gina Torres) actually dead when we last see her lying on that couch, following months of chemo that have proven unsuccessful in treating her cancer? Will Mateo (Julian Works) be deported? How will Paul (Brian Michael Smith) help Jax?
Here to answer all your burning questions ahead of the “9-1-1: Lone Star” series finale is showrunner Rashad Raisani, who has worked closely alongside series creators Ryan Murphy, Tim Minear and Brad Falchuk to bring the “9-1-1” spinoff to a close after five season. In this interview with Variety, Raisani even speaks to how he thinks “9-1-1” (now airing on ABC) will one day be able to top this world-ending finale with an emergency that somehow rivals the impending apocalypse on “Lone Star.”
Where did the idea for this final emergency come from? And it’s teased at the top of the episode the asteroid won’t be the only part of the emergency in the finale, yes?
The high concept of this episode being the asteroid and the secondary crisis it causes for our characters — our cast and our crew, we’d all found ourselves in this sort of end-of-the-world feeling for us when our show was canceled, in all of our minds, too soon. I think that was infused in where we wanted to end this season, and put all of our characters and our audience through this feeling that the world was just ending too abruptly. And that’s the theme of these last two episodes, in all of the storylines, and also in terms of our actual emergency.
We were looking for an emergency that started with that theme. So then the two ways that the world could end too soon would be, 1) the asteroid, which we thought was the perfect metaphor of what we felt like, and then, 2) the thing that the asteroid causes in the finale, which I won’t fully spoil, if you couldn’t deduce it from the opening of this episode.
After this, do you think it’s going to be pretty hard for “9-1-1” to top this series finale when it comes time for that show to end on ABC one day?
It’s funny, because Tim and I work hand in hand. We both are executive producers on both shows, and so we’re always thinking we have to make each episode, whether it’s “Lone Star” or “9-1-1,” you look at each one and say, “What’s the best thing that we can do for this moment of each particular show?” And we never pull punches. One thing we often have to say is, “Wait, you can’t do that. We just did that on Episode 5″ of this show. You can’t do that kind of emergency or that viral video, because we already did it.” But we always want the best for both shows, the biggest for both shows, and I’m sure that we’ll figure something out for “9-1-1.”
In this episode, we find out TK and Carlos are not being approved to adopt Jonah strictly because of their high-risk jobs. Does that mean that one of them will quit their chosen careers so they can proceed with adopting him?
I once read that, “There is no meaning without sacrifice.” So to make the most meaningful decision of one of their lives, somebody is going to have to make a decision. This decision gets made before the apocalyptic event, in either case, as you’ll see in the finale. But I think you’re onto something.
At the end of the episode, it’s heavily implied Tommy has died due to the effects of her cancer, and she even sees her late husband Charles welcoming her into the afterlife before she appears to pass away. Can you confirm whether she’s dead going into the finale?
I’ve said when we did this whole journey with Tommy’s cancer and with Gina, the actor, as well is we really were going to have to go all the way. And a big part of it was also an opportunity in this episode for Tommy to have it come full circle. And to be to be frank, I took a lot of heat for ending the Trevor and Tommy relationship, but part of why we did it is because I knew this was where we wanted to take her character full circle with this love of her life. And not to get too personal, but when my mom, right before she passed, I was in her hospital room, and she was telling me about how her mom and dad had come to visit her that morning. And it was so vivid for her. She wasn’t saying it as if, “Oh, they’re ghosts.” She was just saying it as if it happened. And then she passed not long after, and it gave her such comfort. And I think that stuck with me.
And it was actually Tim Minear who said we should find a way to get Charles back in the show before it’s too late. And that was a deep anchor of inspiration that we really wanted to get to. And it seemed like this was the way that we could really show what that love of her life meant to her, and also this cancer battle was going to require the ultimate, I don’t want to say price — but that she’d have to go to the ends of herself. So that’s what I’ll say about it.
You get into two big character storylines in this penultimate episode: Mateo being deported and Paul mentoring a nonbinary teen who is endangering themselves in stunts to gain acceptance and popularity. Why did you decide to approach these two topics with so little time left in the show?
Like I was saying before, part of the theme of these last two episodes is that your world could end at any moment. And for Mateo, he’s just at the gardening shop with his girlfriend, and he thinks he’s having an existential moment when she reveals that she doesn’t want to get married, but then actually, no, the real existential threat is because of his tenuous DACA status, even an injustice could cost him everything. And what you’ll see in the finale, I think, is it’s going to lead Mateo to the ultimate place of growth in this series by doing it. So that was part of it, to tell that Mateo story at the end.
And then as far as the Paul story, funny enough, when there were about four episodes left of our show, Brian Smith, who plays Paul, came to me and said, “Look, in the pilot of this show, the way that Owen is able to convince Paul to stay in Austin, is he says, ‘Somewhere out there in Austin is a kid just like you looking who doesn’t feel accepted for who they are, and maybe one day they’ll see a firefighter like you and believe that they matter.’” And he said, “Wouldn’t it be cool if before the show wraps, we made good on that little promise?” And I thought that was a brilliant idea. So Brian is the reason why we did that story, because he brought that up from the pilot and that led to the Jax story.
Owen is just about to tell the 126 about his plans to leave and move back to New York to head up the city’s fire departments when the asteroid alert comes in. Should they all make it through this, is Owen going to proceed with his decision to leave Austin?
Well, first he has to live. I’ll say that. I think what we wanted to show in this episode is that you can make up whatever thing you want to make up in your own mind. “I’ve thought about it. I reflected on it. I’m going to do this,” and then real life has something to say about that. And how do you deal with it when your plans get scuttled, because fortune turns its back on you. So you’ll see him experience that. You know, if you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans. That’s what happens for Owen.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
