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[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for 9-1-1 Season 7 Episode 4 “Buck, Bothered and Bewildered.”]
For its 100th episode, 9-1-1, one of the most consistently exciting, heartfelt, and simply entertaining shows on TV, delivers one for the books, setting Buck (Oliver Stark) up for a new romance and to figure out what that means for him.
For most of the episode, Buck’s seemingly jealous that Eddie (Ryan Guzman) is leaving him out and has formed a new friendship with Tommy (Lou Ferrigno Jr.), the former member of the 118 who flew them in a helicopter to Athena (Angela Bassett) and Bobby’s (Peter Krause) rescue when their honeymoon turned into a disaster. Eddie and Tommy fly to Vegas to watch a fight? Buck’s bothered. Eddie’s son Christopher (Gavin McHugh) can’t stop talking about Tommy? Buck rants to his sister Maddie (Jennifer Love Hewitt). Eddie invites Tommy to join a weekly basketball game that Buck always says no to because he hates the sport? Buck invites Chimney (Kenneth Choi) along (ostensibly to bond as soon-to-be brothers-in-law) and ends up spraining Eddie’s ankle during the game.
But when Tommy stops by Buck’s to clear the air and assure him he’s not taking his place, Buck tells him he wants to get to know him. Trying to get his attention has been exhausting, Buck admits, and Tommy kisses him. Though he has to leave for a shift, the two make plans for Saturday, and Tommy tells Buck to call Eddie. (For scoop on that conversation to come, read here.)
Disney/Chris Willard
Showrunner Tim Minear has been thinking about exploring this “for a while, but this year just felt like the right time to do it,” he tells TV Insider of what he calls “the bi Buck arc.” “I often just let the story tell me what it wants to be a little bit. It just felt to me like the opportunity had presented itself.” Originally, he was going to bring back Arielle Kebbel as Lucy to be the pilot in Episode 3, but she booked Rescue: HI Surf.
“The next logical step was to go to this character of Tommy, who hadn’t been in the show a lot, but he was in the flashback episodes and he left on good terms. He started as this morally compromised character who was sort of under the thumb of Captain Gerrard [Brian Thompson] when everything was very repressive at the 118. But by the time he left in ‘Bobby Begins Again,’ they’d made him a cake. He had sort of started to become one of the gang,” explains Minear. “And I also felt like Lou had a lot of charisma in the scenes where he was allowed to not be an asshole. There’s a scene where they’re all sort of comparing scars. It’s Hen and it’s Chimney, and then Bobby comes in and we can see that Tommy’s already kind of bonded with the two people that we actually love, and I felt like he had a lot of charisma in that scene.”
The showrunner had already been planning this arc for Buck when he realized he’d be bringing Tommy back. “I really liked the idea of playing this with a character who wasn’t just invented for this arc, who had at least a little bit of a presence in the universe,” he says, pointing out, “We didn’t know a lot about Tommy, so it just felt like, well, maybe I’ll just roll the dice on this. And I think it’s working out.”
Prior to the beginning of the season, Stark told us that Buck’s open to the things that make him happy. Tommy is “definitely going to be part of what makes him happy,” the star confirms now, though adds his previous words weren’t “about anything knowing specifically what was going to make him feel good, but just whatever those feelings were or whatever they arose from, sticking with that and following those feelings.” Nevertheless, “I think we can expect some of that” with this arc, he says.
It’s one that will be playing out for some time. “It’s going to be a thread of working out how to proceed and what this means for him and that may or could turn out to be that it doesn’t actually mean that much for him, that it’s not a big change, that it doesn’t need to be a big life switch for him,” Stark continues. “And I think there’s actually something more loving and accepting about that, that he’s still Buck, he’s just found this thing that he’s also okay with and is going to make him feel good and that that’s okay.”
While 9-1-1 has only shown Buck with women, that doesn’t necessarily mean that a history with men just hasn’t come up, but according to Stark, “I think this is a first for Buck. I think it has maybe been a long time coming and I don’t ever think it’s been conscious. I would lean heavily on this as absolutely a first for Buck.”
Going forward, Buck will “lean on family [including Maddie] and found family and look for support because there is going to be a moment or moments of questioning who he is and what does this mean for him, and it’s a big change,” says Stark. “He’s absolutely going to have to lean on his loved ones and hopefully be supported by them.”
As we’ve seen and is even brought up in this episode, Buck hasn’t had the best of luck with relationships (though he had already decided not to date anyone he meets on a call). His path now could change that. Why? “He says it a few times in the episode, and it’s almost a juvenile way to put it, but he thinks Tommy’s really cool and he’s, as we will discover, really okay with himself and he’s really proud of who he is,” Stark shares. “Buck has had all these different identities over the years and has been searching for something. And even when he’s thought that he’s so okay with himself and has accepted who he is, he hasn’t really, right? Because then we’ve seen him go back on that and try something new. So I think there’s something about Tommy’s confidence that is very endearing for Buck.”
But he understands why Buck has stuck in that cycle. “We all find ourselves looking for something a lot of the time: What’s the thing in my life that I’m missing? And I think this may have at least been part of it for Buck.”
In general, Stark’s enjoying “finding new things as [the arc continues], playing these scenes out and not necessarily knowing beforehand how they’re going to feel in the moment. So it’s quite an exploration for me as an actor as well to discover these scenes and have feelings come up and play out. It’s a really exciting time and I feel also that the writers are excited to tell this story, which always feels good on my end of it. I know that Tim has really loved writing this story for Buck, and I feel that when I step onto the set.”
What do you think of the latest development for Buck? Let us know in the comments section, below.
9-1-1, Thursdays, 8/7c, ABC