The Big Picture

Season 7 of
9-1-1
starts with major disasters challenging the characters’ personal lives.
The emergency calls in the episodes continue to relate to the characters’ struggles, merging drama with action.
The premiere sets up a multi-episode arc with heavy emotional stakes, indicating a deeper focus on character development.

It’s hard to top an earthquake or a dam breaking or a tsunami, but somehow 9-1-1 manages to keep doing it with each passing season. At this point, the show is clearly coming for Grey’s Anatomy’s crown for most dramatic disaster episodes (though it’s still hard to top the plane crash from Grey’s). It also seems fitting that Season 7 of 9-1-1 starts with one of the biggest disasters yet, now that the show has switched over to the ABC network. Season 6 ended with a lot of new changes for the 118 — Chim (Kenneth Choi) and Maddie (Jennifer Love Hewitt) just got engaged, Hen (Aisha Hinds) and Karen (Tracie Thomas) are adopting a new baby, both Buck (Oliver Stark) and Eddie (Ryan Guzman) are starting new relationships (not with each other), and Athena (Angela Bassett) and Bobby (Peter Krause) are going on a cruise together! But, because nothing can ever go smoothly, Season 7 starts by throwing all of that into disarray in true 9-1-1 fashion.

9-1-1 Explores the high-pressure experiences of the first responders who are thrust into the most frightening, shocking, and heart-stopping situations.Release Date January 3, 2018 Main Genre Drama Seasons 7

At the Beginning of ‘9-1-1’ Season 7, Everything Goes Wrong
Kicking it off at the top, it’s clear that just because Chim and Maddie are finally getting married, things will not be smooth sailing. In fact, panic has already set in for Chim at the idea of a marriage that might “calcify” or fizzle out over time, after he encounters a particularly cantankerous couple on a call. So, rather than stress out about wedding planning, Chim and Maddie’s new plan is to stress out over a strict schedule of date nights to keep themselves in the “Honeymoon Phase.”

Meanwhile, since the break between seasons, it seems that Buck has, yet again, lost another girlfriend. Natalia (Annelise Cepero), the death doula he met toward the end of Season 6, is no longer in the picture, despite the season ending on the fact that they seemed to be interested in each other. On the flip side, Eddie and Marisol (Edy Ganem) are still going strong, but his priority is his son, Christopher (Gavin McHugh), who is now old enough to enter the dating scene himself. Eddie is shocked to realize that his son is a bit of a player, having multiple girlfriends at the same time, and decides to send in Buck to talk with him about it. This culminates in the discovery that Christopher still has a lot of unresolved feelings about his mother’s death and feels abandoned as a result.

To top all this off, Bobby and Athena are on a bit of a honeymoon on a cruise, but what seemed like an amazing little getaway for the hardest first responders in Los Angeles turns out to be a disaster in more ways than one. Athena is anxious about the vacation now that the two of them are just meant to relax, worrying that something will be missing from their relationship if there isn’t some tragedy to deal with. This, obviously, makes her vacation with Bobby awkward as she continuously avoids him or puts off doing things with him while they’re on a boat for the next two weeks. (Plus, she has an irrational fear of cruises thanks to the 1972 disaster movie The Poseidon Adventure.)

‘9-1-1’ Continues to Merge Character Development With Wild Emergency Calls

Like most episodes of 9-1-1, the emergency calls the team gets are related conveniently to some issue they are struggling with in their life at the moment. In the premiere, the calls relate to Chim’s fears — first with an old couple who don’t seem to care whether the other lives or dies, and then a younger couple who end up trapped together in a hot tub. This is what 9-1-1 has always done so well. While the emergency of the week is always somewhat wacky (with this episode introducing vaginismus and penis captivus in the hot tub), it is often more about the 118 rather than the actual people who need help. Other procedurals might center around the accident or tragedy, but 9-1-1 uses the event to help develop its characters.

Realizing that he’s pushing things and being too militant about the dating idea after the hot tub call, Chim decides to calm down a bit more. Rather than adhering to an exhausting schedule of dating, he buys a hot tub for the two of them and resolves to focus more on their future wedding. It’s clear that Chim and Maddie’s nuptials will play a large part in the upcoming season, but after so much tumult, we’re begging for them to just get the happy ending they deserve.

And while Buck’s pep talk to Christopher doesn’t seem to go anywhere, Eddie gives his son a letter written by his late wife, Shannon (Devin Kelley), before she died. It’s interesting to see 9-1-1 continue to develop both Christopher’s growth and mourning process, but also how Eddie and Buck co-parent Chris. While Eddie is clearly dating Marisol, Buck is still an essential part of their family unit. Fans who might like Eddie and Buck together may have caught a couple of throwaway lines about sexual tension, and it makes you wonder if the switch over from Fox to ABC could affect the potential of a romantic relationship between the characters.

Related Every Season of the ‘9-1-1’ Franchise, Ranked by IMDb “9-1-1, what is your emergency?”

‘9-1-1’ Season 7 Sets Up a Multi-Episode Arc

While we’ve known that the cruise episodes will take over a span of three episodes, it isn’t until the end of the premiere that we truly get into drama on the high seas. Leading up to that, the episode is mainly about Bobby and Athena, who can’t seem to communicate about Athena’s apprehension. When she suspects one of the ship’s passengers of killing his wife (both characters previously appeared in an episode on a call for the 118 back in Los Angeles), Bobby accuses her of avoiding him. But, when Bobby realizes that Athena has a point, then it’s time to step back into their first responder shoes.

We learn that the couple was targeted by a group of thieves who believe that they have access to a lot of cryptocurrency; as a result, they’ve taken the man’s wife hostage and are demanding a ransom. Before anything can be done, pirates board the cruise ship and are ready to attack. It’s an amazing start to the season, holding heavy, dramatic, and emotional stakes for Bobby and Athena. The opening disaster does feel a bit disjointed since Bobby and Athena are alone in the water while everyone else is back in LA. Still, you can’t deny both the scope and the potential.

As the show becomes more interwoven, some things are made immediately different with the switch in networks. 9-1-1 is diving even deeper into its characters rather than relying too heavily on just the procedural element. Specifically, in one scene where we see Buck and Eddie talking while clearing out a burnt car, we don’t really know what happened to the car itself, and the show doesn’t make a point of showing us the action. It knows that viewers are more interested in this conversation between the two of them, and the scene that plays out reflects that. Season 7 of 9-1-1 kicks off with an amazing start by setting up what could be one of the most memorable disasters on the show to date — and with an even heavier emphasis on character, the show feels primed to succeed even after such a large behind-the-scenes shift.

9-1-1 9-1-1 Season 7 shows immense promise and feels poised to be one of the best seasons of the series. Release Date January 3, 2018 Main Genre Drama Seasons 7 ProsThe scope and size of the series have widened without coming at the cost of character.The series leans into relationships that make the season stronger as a result. ConsThe first episodes of Season 7 might feel disjointed due to the fact that Bobby and Athena are separated from the rest of the 118.

9-1-1 Season 7 premiere on Hulu in the U.S.

Watch on Hulu