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[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for 9-1-1: Lone Star Season 5 Episode 6 “Naked Truth.”]
“She has been through enough!” So says Gina Torres (rightfully so!) about her character, Tommy, on 9-1-1: Lone Star.
The latest episode, as the Fox drama reaches the halfway point of its fifth and final season, begins with Tommy calling Nancy (Brianna Baker) into her office to discuss a nude photo she accidentally sent to the group chat; the paramedic captain spotted a concerning lump. Nancy then revealed to Mateo (Julian Works) that she does have reason to be worried: her family history. Her great aunt, grandmother, and mother died of breast cancer. Even before getting the mammogram, Nancy had resigned herself to thinking she had cancer, Baker tells TV Insider as part of our 9-1-1: Lone Star aftershow, First Response, with her and Torres this week.
“I think it’s the thing that’s been haunting you and you’re always just waiting for when it comes for you. And I think the way that Nancy is and lives is maybe like someone who is like, you know what? I’m probably going to get cancer and very young, but I’m not going to tell anybody and keep my world really small,” explains Baker. “And so then I think when it showed up, all of the fear and memories of the past and her family was right at the front door and she was ready to just open it and be like, take me.”
But then came the twist. The lump was just a macrocyst, not a tumor, though Nancy will need to be checked regularly because she has dense breasts. Tommy, however, who went for a mammogram just to support Nancy, wasn’t so lucky. The doctor found something, and “it’s bad.” That hadn’t even been on her radar.
Kevin Estrada / FOX
“It certainly wasn’t on mine,” admits Torres. “I don’t think it was on Tommy’s mind. She has been through enough. That’s how I felt.”
The star points out that as first responders, they know they’ve signed up for possibly dying on the job; it happened earlier in the season with the chlorine gas. “But then something like this happens and you’re not prepared for it in the same way, and there’s this sort of psychological adjustment that you make around death. And it might be because this, you don’t have control over. You don’t feel like you have control. I haven’t consented to cancer,” Torres continues.
Going forward, Tommy will struggle. “She really tries to take control of a situation that she doesn’t really have control over,” according to Torres.
This episode was also a test for Nancy and Mateo’s relationship. She tried to push him away, and instead, he was all ready to shave his head for her, leading to a sweet “I love you” exchange when she went to see him as she waited for her results.
“That brings us closer together, this moment. And we’ve had moments like that in the past, more towards Mateo. But this one, I feel like it peels back a layer of Nancy a little bit more. It’s interesting when you find out with someone that you’re with things that they won’t reveal to you or things that they think that they should hide from you, and it kind of colors them a little in more fully. And I think you are going to see Nancy being more open to Mateo, but they will have some tribulations in the later part of the season,” cautions Baker.
Both Torres and Baker love their “TNT days”—Tommy, Nancy, and T.K. (Ronen Rubinstein)—but they had mixed feelings about the scenes they’re sharing for this storyline. “To have this storyline pop up and know that that relationship is now going to shift into a much deeper connection outside of the firehouse, I was looking forward to it on one hand and really not at all on the other,” shares Torres.
Baker agrees, adding, “There is a mirror effect of how close we’ve gotten on the show. I met Gina when she became Tommy, so we’ve kind of gotten to know each other on the same wavelength. And so then this storyline was—I knew it would be sad, but it was actually more sad because of the way they have Tommy looking.”
Watch the full video interview above for more from Torres and Baker about this episode, the show ending (which Torres also addressed in our last aftershow with her), and what they took from set.
9-1-1: Lone Star, Mondays, 8/7c, Fox