Welcome to That Weewoo Show: a podcast where Alice, Bex and Ellen watch and discuss every episode of ABC’s TV show, 9-1-1.
In this episode we discuss episode 9 of the second season of 9-1-1, titled “Hen Begins”.
Hen recalls the first times she met Chimney and Athena, reliving her evolution into the firefighter she is today.
Content warnings for episode 2.09:
Bullying, hazing, misogyny, racist and homophobic language, car accident, a child at threat of drowning, flash flood, heart attack.
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Episode Transcript
Bex: [00:00:00] Welcome back to That WeeWoo Show, a podcast where we watch and discuss episodes of the ABC show, 9-1-1. I’m Bex.
Alice: I’m Alice.
Ellen: And I’m Ellen.
Bex: Thank you to everyone who has listened to our previous episodes and who has shared our social media posts and rated and reviewed our podcast.
And this week we’d like to give a special shout out to the Totally Normal About That podcast, where the hosts are totally normal about queer media. Nell and Lucia are longtime friends of this podcast, and they’ve recently released an episode talking about 9-1-1. So if you too feel totally normal about the queer characters in this show, we highly recommend that you check them out.
Ellen: Yeah. [00:01:00]
Alice: I’m super keen to listen to that one.
Bex: It’s very good. Unfortunately, it’s chock full of spoilers. So Ellen can’t listen to it.
Ellen: But I have been listening to other episodes and I have to give you guys, a thank you for shouting out this podcast in particular. I first heard it just, today, actually, I was listening to the Our Flag Means Death episode, which was great.
Great listening, very entertaining and, and thoughtful discussion as well. I really enjoyed it. So go listen to that. They talk about all sorts of different things.
Bex: You can find them anywhere that you find podcasts. Alice, would you like to tell us what happened last week on 9-1-1?
Alice: Yeah. So last week on 9-1-1, Maddie and Chim explored their relationship, while Buck 2. 0 dipped a toe back into the dating game and more than a toe into Taylor Kelly.
Ellen: Oh my god. Well, they didn’t really get that far. So maybe [00:02:00] it was just a toe!
Bex: Bathroom!
Alice: The bathroom! Yeah!
Ellen: Oh yeah! Okay. I forgot about that part.
Alice: This is why we do a refresher because Ellen does not remember.
Ellen: Clearly, clearly I blanked the bathroom part from my mind.
All right. Well, this week, this week we are going to discuss season two, episode nine, which is called “Hen Begins”. Okay. So this episode aired on the 19th of November in 2018.
Alice: It’s the first of the “begins” episodes.
Ellen: This is the first episode where we take a look back at. The past of a certain, of one particular character.
So we’re going to look at how…
Bex: Well, it’s not the first that they’ve looked back. We’ve had an origin story for Bobby. We have. Yes. But this is the first that they specifically title it, “insert character name begins”.
Ellen: All right. So the official summary for this episode [00:03:00] says, Hen relives her evolution into the firefighter she is today. She recalls the first time she met Chimney and Athena.
And we have some trigger warnings for bullying and hazing, directed towards Hen. We have a car accident, a child at threat of drowning. We have a flash flood and a heart attack. Oh my God, there’s a lot in this episode. We have… Oh, they’re all sort of related.
We have misogyny, racist, and homophobic language. It’s all directed towards Hen, unfortunately, this episode. So it does get quite heavy. There is some, you know, big feelings in this episode. And I spent a lot of the episode just wanting to punch the main culprit of this behavior.
Bex: That’s it. That’s a valid response.
Yeah. Yes. Okay.
Ellen: So we’re starting out with a montage of like Hen doing her current job, like in the, in the present day, I guess, in the present 2018 day, [00:04:00]
Bex: the greatest hits of Hen.
Ellen: Yeah. She’s rescuing people. She’s, you know, helping people as a paramedic. And she has a voiceover, which says that first responders are born twice.
First when they come into the world and the second is when they make the choice to spend their lives running towards danger. And then she introduces that this is her story. And we do start with like a table full of middle aged white men sitting around drinking in a fancy restaurant. So, you know, we’re off to a great start.
I guess.
Bex: Yes, these are all doctors that have been, uh, invited for an expensive meal at a fancy restaurant by a pharmaceutical company in the hopes that the doctors will begin prescribing said pharmaceutical company’s new drug, and this is relevant because apparently in her former life, Hen was a [00:05:00] pharmaceutical rep.
And she joins the middle aged men at the table, and we all get a jump scare because Hen, as a pharma rep, looks nothing like Hen as a firefighter.
Alice: Yeah, she’s, she’s wearing a dress, she’s got heels, and also
Ellen: She has hair! That was my first reaction. I was like, oh!
Bex: She has something!
Alice: Yeah.
Ellen: Like, I was surprised that they had, you know, given her a wig to wear as part of this particular costume.
But then I didn’t realize it was actually supposed to be a wig in character until later when we see her actually burning it.
Alice: I was very relieved, honestly, that it was.
Bex: It is, it is not a good wig. And I know we had a lot of discussions, before we recorded about why it was, whether it was not a good wig [00:06:00] because we’re just not used to seeing Hen with hair and so it’s, it could be a good wig but we’re just so shocked. Because we know it’s not her actual hair, that we’re immediately picking up that it’s not natural, or whether the costume designers decided that they weren’t going to spend the money to buy a good wig because Aisha was never going to wear it again and they were literally going to burn it later on in the scene.
Ellen: I mean, it’s not, it’s not Sam Winchester levels of bad.
Bex: It’s not Party City.
Ellen: No, it’s just, it’s, I mean, Aisha will look, will look beautiful in whatever she has on her head. Yes. If we’re honest. But yeah, it doesn’t suit her that much.
Bex: There is also, like, another level of whether it’s, yeah, the fact that it doesn’t suit her, perhaps that’s intentional, because as you said, this Hen is in heels and a dress with a cute purse, and that is not the Hen that we know in current day.
That’s not her style. It’s a very, very [00:07:00] feminine style compared to, I think, the more, uh, funky, edgy, uh, Perhaps more androgynous style that Hen rocks in present day.
Alice: I feel like it’s definitely trying for the uncanny valley type thing. Like there’s definitely the jump scare on purpose.
Bex: Well, let’s be, let’s be generous and say that, yes, it was intentional.
It wasn’t just, they bought the crappiest wig possible
Alice: Because they were burning it anyway?
Bex: Yeah, because they didn’t care. But what, what is disgusting about this particular scene is that Hen has not been invited to this dinner to wine and dine the reps on, on her merits, on her ability to sell this drug. She’s been invited because one of the doctors has a type, and apparently that’s Hen. So, Steven, her co rep, has basically, he’s pimping Hen out [00:08:00] to these doctors.
Ellen: Yeah. Yeah, it’s funny, because she doesn’t seem, like, too upset with him in particular. She just defends herself when the guy tries to come onto her, and she’s like, if I don’t like people touching me, and when they do, sometimes I stab them in the hand with my steak knife. Yeah. You know,
Bex: with their own steak knife, I think it was.
Ellen: They have a funny relationship with steak knives in this show, I have to say. They do some strange things, but you know, she’s, after all of that, she just says to this, to Steven, like, we’re selling drugs, not me. Like, don’t do that.
Bex: And Steven is incredibly insulted that she would not pimp, like, she would not offer her own body.
In order to make the sale. I was thinking like, would Steven have done that if one of the reps had liked [00:09:00] men? Like, would you, would you pimp out yourself if a rep was more attracted to men than women? And then I realized he probably would, he probably would have gone through the company, found a gay guy, invited him to dinner to try and, hand him off to the, the doctors too, that, that’s kind of the character that I think Steven has.
Yeah. Anything to make a sale. Exactly what I was going to say. Yeah. Anything to make the sale.
Ellen: Ish. Yeah. Yeah.
Bex: But that’s, I think that’s the, the nail in the coffin for Hen because she’s, she’s not that immoral. And so she quits on the spot. She says that this is the job that she took because she thought that she could help people, but that was just a story that she was telling herself.
None of this is who she really is. So she quits. And then we get Steven sort of shaking his head very disappointed at her and telling her that he’s never seen someone set their entire life on fire [00:10:00] before. And this is the first of many fire related analogies and metaphors that are thrown at Hen throughout the episode.
Alice: Yeah, it wasn’t quite beating out, like, beating us over the head with it, but it was definitely fire related. Bit of a fire theme going.
Ellen: Hen goes to a life coach. And fills in a survey to try and help her find out what she wants to do, because I guess after she, the job she thought she wanted turned out to be bust, she didn’t know what she was going to do with her life.
Alice: Mm, I feel that.
Ellen: And the life coach looks over the test and says that it only works if you give honest answers.
Bex: And she literally rips it up in Hen’s face.
Ellen: And she said, “You wrote down things you thought you were supposed to say, but this, you filled this out for me, for my benefit.” And Hen says this, “It was the jobs that I’ve had before. They’re just what I felt like I was supposed to be doing at the time.” So.
Alice: Yeah, it’s [00:11:00] interesting when you like look at her test answers and then go back and look at them again after you watch the episode. Cause like, obviously we know Hen a fair bit already. Like one of the test questions is, I make friend, friends easily. And she’s like, yeah, that’s, that’s totally like me. And then the whole episode, she’s just like, “I don’t wanna make any friends.”
Ellen: Well Chim even says, like, “Do you always make friends this easily?”
Alice: Like, it’s so funny going back and like rewatching it. Yeah. Like “I’m easygoing.” Yeah, totally.
Hen, when are you ever easygoing? So yeah, she’s clear, like very obviously not given honest answers.
Bex: So the advisor asks. What is it that Hen hates more than anything? Trying to, to find something that Hen can direct her energy towards. And Hen’s response is that she hates bullies. Which [00:12:00] is a very interesting answer considering what’s going to happen for the rest of this episode.
Alice: And also considering her best friend is a cop. What? Who said that?
Ellen: She doesn’t know that yet.
Bex: To be fair, she doesn’t know Athena yet.
Ellen: She says, she also says that “You mean like a vigilante or something?”
Bex: I do love that the advisor goes, “You know what? It might be fun. The benefits are terrible and the hours suck, but hey, you do you.”
Ellen: But she tells Hen that she has a fire within. It’s like, oh, fire.
Bex: You can get medication for that.
Alice: Gaviscon, yeah.
Ellen: We didn’t receive any money for this advertising. The advisor sort of gets up and walks around and looks a bit uncomfortable and Hen says, “Are you okay?” And she says, “I slept [00:13:00] wrong and I’ve had this pain all day.”
I’m like, Oh my God, I’ve had pain all day. No, that’s because I dug like the front garden up yesterday.
Alice: Oh my God, literally. Right.
Ellen: Yeah.
Alice: My knee has been killing me. Whose idea was it to do things on our weekend?
Ellen: Yeah, it’s not good for your body. Anyway.
Alice: But yeah, this is not, no, this is not decluttering or dirt digging pain.
Bex: No, this is medical emergency kind of pain. Because the life coach clutches at her chest and then collapses onto the floor.
Ellen: But before she does the collapsing, she does impart some wisdom to Hen. That’s, you know, “There’s a voice inside of us that when we listen to it, when we quiet ourselves, all will be revealed.”
And then she just like collapses. And it’s like, what was the reveal? And it turns out that Hen is going to save this lady’s life. And decide she wants to [00:14:00] be a paramedic. Uh, so yeah, she calls 9-1-1, you know, they, they’re going to send help, but she starts CPR and
Alice: yeah, she immediately, immediately starts CPR. Cause she, uh, was a lifeguard one summer as a kid and so still remembers to do how to do the CPR. And so when the paramedic arrived, like when the paramedics are taking her off, they let Hen know that. That Hen probably saved her life, uh, cause starting CPR that quickly has made all the difference. And yeah, Hen goes home and gushes, gushes about how great she felt and how, like, how good it was and she thinks she’s found her purpose.
But interestingly, the person that she’s gushing to is Eva.
Ellen: Yeah, when Eva showed up, I was watching with my sister in law and we’re just both like, Screeching at her and like, giving her the evil eye. Yes, I guess this is the past. [00:15:00] But I mean, Eva is not a horrible person in this scene. She’s like, she’s a little bit of a devil’s advocate to start with.
And she’s like, “are you sure this is what you want? I’m like, I don’t know about this.”
Bex: It’s not even devil’s advocate. She is just full on shooting Hen down at every opportunity. Her every idea that Hen gives her about going to train to be a firefighter.
Ellen: But then she does sort of say, “If you, if this is really what you want, I’ll be there, like, I’ll support you.”
Bex: I wasn’t convinced with her conviction. I do, there was a throwaway reference, when Eva is unconvinced by Hen’s newfound revelation and says like, “You, you can’t think that this is a sign from God.” And Hen says, “No, I think the sign came from God when I was 16 and I got shot and I lived. This is him [00:16:00] reminding me of that.”
So, I guess I should apologize to the writers because I did give them shit during the “Dosed” episode for writing that whole storyline about Hen being shot and then abandoning it to do “Hen Begins”, however, I’m going to live in my little Delulu land. And, firmly believe that they did forget, and it was only, like, as they were writing this episode, they’d already blocked it out, and then someone went, wait, didn’t we say something different a couple of episodes ago?
And so they’ve just chucked this line in, like, yep, no worries, we’ve covered it. We’re good. Yeah, let’s keep going.
Alice: We’re fine. This is fine.
Ellen: Yeah.
Alice: Yeah.
Ellen: So, not to linger on anything involving Eva, because ugh, she goes straight into the firefighter training where the, I, I just have him in the transcript as Thomas.
I don’t know if that is his last name or his [00:17:00] first name. I don’t know.
Bex: I’m going to say it’s gonna be last name, I assume considering the way they, they treat sort of the, the, the men within positions of power in the show.
Ellen: Mm. He’s basically a drill sergeant in, they. are there to, because you want to wear this Los Angeles firefighter paramedic patch, but most of you never will.
And then he just starts shouting.
Bex: It’s a fun montage where you cut back between Thomas doing this supposedly motivational speech at the beginning of the training to Hen doing various, uh, training sessions and then linking back up at the end with her finishing the training and actually passing.
Alice: We have the montage going to “Cherry Bomb” too, which I appreciated because I like that song, but yeah.
Ellen: It’s a great kind of a rocking beat for training montage.
Bex: Yeah. [00:18:00] There, there is a, a seminal moment in the, the montage where Hen, probably midway through the training there, once their, their skills are up to par, they send them, sending them into the baby doll factory to do an actual. Like, put out a fire and rescue people, and as she’s dragging the dummy that she’s rescued out and starts giving it CPR, she is thrusting so hard that her hard hat flies off, taking her wig with it.
Ellen: Oh, is that why she ends up burning the wig?
Bex: Yeah, because it’s a safety issue, because the wig is not secure, like, she’s not glued that thing down so it’s cut, it’s like making her hat fell off, and I honestly think that that’s a safety issue, that she should never have been allowed to wear the wig in the first place.
Yeah. But, that is why she burns it, because it’s getting in the way of her,
Alice: Of her dream, yeah.
Bex: Her, her dream. I do love that the [00:19:00] instructor, while he is yelling at Hen to, to not let the, the, the dummy die, when the, the hat falls off, he’s like, “Damn, Wilson, we’re supposed to save cats, not wear them.” Yeah.
But the other thing that’s really interesting about the training montage is that, is the way that the instructors are communicating with Hen, which is, they’re yelling at her. And they’re yelling at her in that, that wonderful, almost like reverse psychology. Like they’re telling her, “You’re not going to make it. I don’t think you can do this. Everybody’s laughing at you.” But it’s in that kind of tone of voice of, I need you to prove me wrong. Yeah, like push harder. Yeah, I am gonna push you until you either break or you meet the expectations that I’ve set for you.
Alice: Yeah,
Bex: And it’s really interesting that these men are treating her like this talking to her like this but you know [00:20:00] that as soon as she proves them wrong as soon as she proves that she can do it they are so proud of her.
Alice: Yeah
Bex: Like, the, the guy, she’s on a, a stairmaster and she’s got like a weighted vest on, and this guy is hounding her, like, “Come on, you can’t do it, I don’t think you can do it, everyone’s laughing at you, come on, Wilson, do it.” I can just imagine as soon as she finished it, it would have been like, “Good job, Wilson.”
And then you contrast that treatment that she’s getting from the instructors with what she’s going to face. When she gets to the 118, because there’s still that, I don’t think you can do it.
Alice: But it’s a totally different tone.
Bex: Yes. And there’s, it shows that she’s got camaraderie with her fellow trainees, because there’s a shot where they’re taking their, I guess, their final written exam and they’re all sitting at a table together and they’re sort of looking at each other going, how’d you do?
Yeah, I think I did okay. Or I’m collecting up all the tests, where they’ve clearly accepted her as one of them. Yep. Compared with. the way the 118 are going to treat her when [00:21:00] she shows up.
Ellen: Do we get an indication of how long ago this is?
Bex: I believe the wiki says that this is 2010. And they, they did kind of explain their logic in that Hen says that, you know, she started doing firefighter training when she was in her thirties. And they’ve kind of like, reverse engineered how old Hen is and when everything happened, but yeah, let’s go with 2010. So it’s what, eight years ago?
Alice: Yeah, 9-1-1’s timeline is never something we look closely at.
Ellen: No. No. It was mainly because when she turns up at the 118, and we all cheer, and she walks between the fire engines and, you know, looks like she’s a bit nervous on her first day. And then [00:22:00] she meets, well, Captain Gerrard, looking down at her from the mezzanine level.
Bex: And isn’t that, just the perfect metaphorical message for Gerrard, that he’s up above looking down on her.
Alice: Mm hmm.
Ellen: And he says, you’re prettier than most, I’ll give you that. It’s like, instant dislike. Yeah, he’s just generally an asshole to her. And then he calls out, “Guys, there’s someone I want you to meet.” And we get Introduced to some of the remaining members of the 118 since we, there’s a lot more of them later, but we don’t get to meet them in person.
Uh, one of them is Chimney…
Bex: I think the 118 is just always got like your core group and then there’s everybody else. So that’s not a, that’s not a Bobby thing. That’s just the 118.
Ellen: That’s just how it is. Yeah. Yep. So we have Tommy, we have Sal and we have Chim who [00:23:00] introduces himself as Howie. So, he hasn’t got his nickname yet.
Bex: Yeah, this is pre Chimney.
Yeah. So, Chimney comes along somewhere between, so 2010 and 2018, somewhere in those 8 years. Yeah. We get Chimney. But yeah, Gerrard is an absolute arse because Tommy asks, “Oh, who’s this?” And Gerrard just goes, “This is our new diversity hire.” And Chim’s face just falls. And he tells the captain, “You know, there is another way to say that.”
And Gerrard just goes, “Yeah, we’re screwed.” and walks away.
Alice: I do just want to mention as well, when Gerrard’s like meeting Hen, he’s just like, “oh yeah, there’s the woman’s locker room.” And the woman’s locker room has a ping pong table in it, which he says he’ll move out in a week if Hen’s still there. [00:24:00] The woman’s locker room is literally like, just like the men’s locker room that we’re used to, so it’s a glass room, but there’s literally just an A4 piece of paper with “woman”.
Like, not even plural, woman, and it’s handwritten on a piece of paper, taped.
Bex: Yeah. Yeah. So when you look up with Tommy and Sal and, and Gerrard coming to the, the mezzanine level to see her, it’s just an array of white men and then an Asian man.
Alice: Yeah.
Bex: So immediately she’s going to be thinking, shit, I’m the only black person.
Yeah. And then it’s, oh shit, not only am I the only black person, I’m the only woman. I feel so sorry for her because she’s been dreaming about this all through training. She’s so excited for this. And she walks in and this is what she’s greeted with.
Ellen: Yeah. I mean, she must have known it was coming to a certain extent, I guess, but, yeah, to be faced with a hostility right off the bat [00:25:00] is pretty daunting.
Bex: Yeah. I mean, I’m, I’m guessing she assumed that the way that the training instructors and the way the other trainees welcomed her, because we weren’t really given any indication that they were being racist or misogynistic to her.
Ellen: Yeah.
Bex: They were just treating her like a trainee. So I guess even though Eva had warned her that.
that firehouses were like country clubs full of old white men. I don’t think she expected this level of bullshit.
Ellen: So the other thing, interesting thing we get in this episode is we meet Tommy for the first time, who I, I guess it does he come back before season seven again, or is he just?
Bex: I don’t think it’s going to be too spoilery to say that there is going to be other Character Begins episode from this timeline, [00:26:00] from this era.
So Tommy will appear, because obviously we still need to see “Chim Begins”.
Alice: Yeah, Tommy will return.
Bex: So Tommy will be in that episode, but other than the flashbacks, we don’t see him again until Season 7. Yeah.
Ellen: Okay, so this scene, they go up to the kitchen, or to the eating area, at least. They’re sitting around eating a meal, actually having a family dinner without apparently being a family.
Bex: I think it’s all takeaway, though. It is all eating different things. Like, Chim’s got tacos.
Ellen: Right.
Alice: Yeah, so it’s always, I made a note that it’s always takeaway.
Ellen: Yeah, that no one there is enough of a cook to cook for anybody else. Which I mean, in a workplace is probably how it really is. I mean, people bring their leftovers.
Bex: Also considering that later on Gerrard yells at Chimney to get out of the home ec class when he’s up there simply [00:27:00] helping Hen wash the dishes. I’m going to say that Gerrard views cooking as women’s work.
Alice: Yeah. I think later on he like tells Hen to go make them dinner too.
Bex: Yeah. Oh yeah, he does. So, if there’s no women in the firehouse, there’s nobody to be cooking lunches and dinners for them.
Yep. Just the little, the little, the little digs,
Ellen: yeah. Extremely toxic. Anyway, they’re having a conversation about what Sal did on his, on last night, and apparently he went to see Twilight.
Bex: His girlfriend dragged him to see it.
Ellen: Which he, he, he thought it was okay. He didn’t, he couldn’t tell you what happened, but he liked the look of Kristen Stewart.
And Hen agrees. But I don’t think anyone pays her any attention in that part.
Bex: Well, Sal says, “Yeah, that’s something that I can get behind. You know what I mean?” And he’s sort of looking at Hen while he says it, and it’s, [00:28:00] that’s just gross.
Ellen: And then Tommy says. that she’s too brooding for him and Sal’s like, “Oh, maybe you’re more of a team Jacob kind of guy.”
Tommy’s like, “I don’t even know what that means.” And Chim says “He’s insinuating that you’re gay.” And Tommy like blows him a little kiss. It’s like,
Bex: Oh, yes. Which is a very interesting scene.
Ellen: Yeah. Since we do find out later.
Bex: Yeah. Yeah. So the, the Totally Normal Podcast sort of discussed In their 9-1-1 episode, they talked quite a bit about Tommy.
And, I don’t think that at this stage, the writers could ever have conceived that they were going to need this character to come back and be gay. So then it’s, what, what was Lou Ferragno Jr. doing with this performance that it was so easy for everyone to just [00:29:00] automatically believe that he was gay?
Ellen: I mean, this is before it was like You know, rude to, to be calling people, you know, it was just things that boys did when they spoke to each other. Like calling each other gay is just one of those things. So
Alice: yeah, especially back in those days, it was like definitely a thing.
Ellen: Anyway, Gerrard comes and sits down and Chim asks Hen where she’s from.
And Hen says she’s from right here in LA. And they, they make, like Chim says that he would have bet money that she was from the East coast. And you just have that kind of vibe and Hen’s like, “Thank you for the compliment?” And Tommy’s like, “New York bitchness is a compliment?” I’m like, Tommy, what the fuck, man? Shut up.
Bex: I, I didn’t quite, I guess the only reference I have for, calling, saying that someone was like East Coast vibes is that [00:30:00] West Wing episode where, um, they mentioned that Toby has that very New York sense of humor, which I didn’t understand until he explains that they’re calling him, that they’re saying that he’s Jewish.
So I wasn’t quite, we’re missing the context for why exactly it’s, it’s called a semi insult.
Alice: Yeah, I feel like this is another one of those things that American TV shows do, where they reference American things and then just, like, don’t expand on them.
Bex: Yeah, because everybody watching would immediately know what they mean when she says she has East Coast vibes.
Whereas, first of all, I have to look up, wait, which one is the East Coast?
Alice: Mate, I had to look up earlier who Rosa Parks was. So like.
Bex: Oh, okay. So now I knew who Rosa Parks was.
Alice: Like, I had a vague, like, but I was just like, is that who I’m thinking of? Yes. [00:31:00] But yeah, America does really like, just like dropping stuff like that into their TV shows and being like, Oh yeah, everyone will know what we’re talking about.
And it’s like, no.
Bex: Well, they do it again because Gerrard picks up the conversational baton and asks specifically where in LA Hen is from. And she says Inglewood. And he repeats it really disdainfully. Like, “ah, Inglewood.” And I’m like, okay, what the fuck happened in Inglewood?
And so it turned out Inglewood was one of these really contentious neighborhoods where it was mostly white, but the African Americans, the black communities were all on the edge and then they were slowly creeping, like moving in, desegregating the, the communities and the white communities fought back. Like they were seeking permission from the government to desegregate the schools because they wanted [00:32:00] to keep the white schools and the black schools.
Alice: Oh my God.
Bex: And as the black communities increased, the white community started to leave and now Inglewood is almost exclusively a black community. And I could, this all happened sort of in the seventies and the eighties. So I can imagine that Gerrard is old enough that he would have been, he would have seen that in the news.
He would have known what was going on in Inglewood.
Alice: There you go.
Bex: And then he goes off on a rant, just out of nowhere, Chim starts trying to change the subject. And Gerrard is like, “Eight women were recruited. Three of them made it through the academy out of a hundred and stations of LA. I ended up with one of the three. What did I do to deserve this?” Yeah, charming.
Ellen: Yeah, and Hen says under her breath, and what, “I can make an educated guess.”
Alice: Yeah.
Bex: She did mention to the life coach [00:33:00] that even when she’s trying to do what everyone thought about her, she’s always had a bit of a mouth to her. She’s never been afraid to let people know what she thought.
And so we get a little bit of, we get a little bit of a preview of that because Gerrard snaps at her and says, “Do you know how much it costs to put a woman through the Academy?” And Hen’s just like, “Same amount it costs to put a man through the Academy, I guess.” Long story short. Gerrard is afraid that because the mayor of California, Los Angeles, I’m not entirely sure, wants to be able to tick the box to say that female recruitment is up, firehouses are more diverse, that they are pushing female recruits through, whether they are ready or not.
And Gerrard is convinced that Hen is one of those diversity hires that was pushed through and graduated, even if she didn’t meet the standards of the other firefighters. And he is worried about putting the lives of his men in the hands of someone who [00:34:00] isn’t up for the job.
And he’s worried about the poor son of a bitch who dies because Hen can’t drag his ass out.
Alice: The thing is though, like, this is clearly bullshit because he literally just said, That not all of them made it through. So if they were just pushing them through, like all eight that were recruited would have been, would have made it through.
Bex: Exactly. I also wonder whether he actually went and talked to the instructors. Like what is the standards for female recruits versus male recruits?
Alice: Yeah. He wouldn’t have spoken to them.
Bex: It didn’t look like they were giving Hen any special treatment.
Alice: God, no.
Ellen: He gets up and leaves the table and so do Tommy and Sal and Chim sort of says, “Captain’s just old school.”
And Hen says, “Old isn’t the only word that comes to mind,” but she tells him that don’t worry about her. She can go after herself kind of thing. [00:35:00] And Chim says, “I just wanted to make sure you knew you weren’t alone here.” And then he gets up and leaves Hen sitting alone at the table where she looks quite sad.
And I have to say that this episode, seeing all these other people who are being so horrible to her in a familiar space. was really uncomfortable. Like, I’m watching it going, this is all wrong. And then I will say that I watched the following episode afterwards and I was, it was so nice to get back with the people, like to be back with the regular cast.
It was just so nice.
Bex: I think maybe that’s the point.
Ellen: I, I’m sure it was. Yeah, it was a difficult episode to watch this one just for
Bex: It’s like, I keep thinking of, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the first episode where Buffy goes to college and that episode is so uncomfortable. And I hated [00:36:00] watching it until I was reading something which said that they intentionally made that episode so uncomfortable, so, making the audience feel so out of place because that’s how Buffy felt.
Yeah.
Ellen: I mean, it’s doing, it’s doing its job. Yeah.
Bex: Yeah. So that’s, I think it’s kind of what we’re going here, and it does not feel like she fits in here.
Ellen: And neither did the rest of us.
Alice: Yeah. Neither do we.
Bex: Yes. So we’re going to see Hen go on a call with the 118, because it’s been, have we mentioned that it’s been raining in this episode?
Because it has been raining nonstop.
Alice: The whole episode, it’s just raining.
Ellen: Yeah. They, it started raining back before, like when Hen arrived at the fire station, basically. That’s when we first see the transition scenes involving rain.
Bex: Never stops. Yes. It’s just going to constantly rain. Uh huh. which I wonder was [00:37:00] that, was it raining in LA when they were filming this?
Do they film it in LA or are they filming in Vancouver?
Ellen: No, it’s, it’s filmed in LA. I looked that up as well.
Bex: So it wasn’t like raining a lot that week or have they just had the, like the rain makers going constantly wasting, you know, thousands and thousands of liters of water.
Ellen: Yeah. I was just sitting there going, isn’t LA in the desert? Like. Does it actually rain like that?
Alice: Not quite, like LA’s coastal, so.
Ellen: Yeah. I sort of got the impression that it was a bit like, like Perth kind of, you know, climate. Like it was just, they, they get a lot of rain over there, but it’s mostly storms. You know, it just runs away because it’s all sand. Yeah. It’s a dry.
Alice: I just love that you’re like, yes, it’s West Coast. It must be Perth.
Ellen: No, but Perth does have a climate like that, you know?
Alice: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Ellen: I’m sure they have rainy weeks.
Alice: Like pretty beaches, hot weather.
Ellen: Citizens of LA, do you ever have
Alice: Does it rain? Yeah.
Ellen: I’m sure they have.
Bex: But not just like, does it rain, [00:38:00] but does it rain like
Ellen: Does it rain continuously for
Bex: If you had shown me this episode and said, this was filmed in Seattle, I would not have thought that you were lying.
I would have gone, yeah, okay, I believe that. Yeah. Because, you know, Seattle has a lot of rain, or at least, no, that’s what Grey’s Anatomy tells me.
Ellen: Twilight.
Bex: But it’s
Ellen: It just rains the whole time. It’s just,
Bex: it’s not just that it’s raining. It’s like, torrentially, continuously raining over the span of a couple of days.
Which leads to
Ellen: Enough that they have, yeah, a mudslide down one of the mountains.
Bex: Yeah, so that’s going to be the first emergency of the episode, is that we have a mother and a daughter, whose house gets decimated in a mudslide. Like, the poor mother is out in this nice little sunroom, which is all glass, which I’m sure is absolutely beautiful on a normal day, but it absolutely [00:39:00] provides no protection when half the mountainside just comes rolling towards them.
Ellen: Yeah.
Bex: So the 118 gets dispatched.
Ellen: And the daughter comes out of the house into the rain and she is absolutely caked in mud. Like her face is just covered in mud.
Alice: This was another one of those scenes where they built us up to really care about the characters and then we’re just like, and horrible things.
Bex: Yes.
Ellen: Yeah, cause this girl has left her partner. You know, we try and they, they do it quite efficiently, really. Like they just had this little conversation about how it’s okay for you to stay here as long as you need to. And I’ll go sleep in the sunroom. You can have my room, you know, and then bam, mudslide.
So quick emotional building.
Bex: Yeah. So not really drawing it out. It’s just a little bit of world building. Here are our characters. Here is why they are in this situation. Let’s put them into position [00:40:00] and scene. Yeah. So poor old, Dianne, who is the mother in this situation, is buried up to her neck in mud and not surprisingly, she’s having trouble breathing.
So Hen and Chim are trying to administer medical aid, trying to keep her breathing while, Gerrard is yelling at the gentleman to start digging.
Alice: Like immediately just walks in and goes, “Gentlemen”. It’s like, yep, you’re okay.
Bex: You do have a woman on your team now, Gerrard. Dianne loses consciousness, so they try to haul her bodily out of the mud by like the one arm that she has free, and I’m just looking at her shoulder joint going, that can’t be good.
Yeah. Because she’s not moving, and they come to the conclusion that she’s being pinned by something under the mud.
Alice: Hen, [00:41:00] however, is like, no, it’s, it’s just mud. And they’re like, yeah, there’s too much water. It’s like quicksand. And Hen just goes, “Or, not enough.” And instead of like actually expanding on that, she just starts talking about building sandcastles and what happens when the tide comes in and they’re like in an emergency, they’re trying to get this woman out of the thing.
And they’re just like, what are you talking about? And she just immediately runs off. Yes.
Bex: Does not explain herself, does not ask permission, just goes, I have an idea and runs out of the house.
Alice: Yeah. So Gerrard goes, “Where are you going?” She goes “To fetch a tide.” and we get Athena.
Ellen: Yay. I cheered when I saw her. I was like, oh, someone familiar. I mean, we’ve already had Chim, but you know. Yeah. Yeah.
Bex: But Chim in this episode is weird because it’s Chim, like, not even Howie, but it’s Howie. It’s Howie. He’s not behaving the way we know Chim to behave. [00:42:00]
Alice: Yeah, whoever the fuck Howie is.
Bex: But Athena is Athena no matter what time zone we’re in. So she is getting the residents of the area to evacuate.
She’s trying to, like, move them out of the street when Hen yells at her and asks her to feed her the line.
Ellen: And she’s like, “Where’s the fire?”
Bex: And Hen’s response is, ugh, “If this doesn’t work, they’re going to burn me alive.” Again with the fire metaphors.
Ellen: But Athena does what she’s asked to do, which is good, and Hen dumps a load of water into the mud and it works. They find a log that’s pinning her down. They rescue her. Her daughter’s name is Kylie, but spelt K I L E Y.
Bex: It’s like Riley, but with a K. [00:43:00] Yeah.
Ellen: Interesting spelling.
Bex: Oh, not as interesting as Dianne, which was literally Di Anne.
Di Anne, yes.
Ellen: Well, I’ve seen Dianne spelt like that before with two Ns, but,
Bex: In a situation where she’s literally dying on screen?
Ellen: I mean, I would never would have known that Kiley was spelled that way unless I was looking at the transcript. So anyway. Yeah. So they get her out, but, you know, Hen is trying to calm Kiley down saying, you know, “It’s not your fault. It’s nobody’s fault.”
And Gerrard pulls her aside and says, “She’s going to be DOA.” And Hen says, “I know.” so, it’s a tough one for all of them. And Gerrard says, “You got her out with enough time for her daughter to watch her die.” So.
Bex: Yeah, it’s, it’s, I don’t think he would ever have thought of using the hose to loosen the mud to find the obstruction to help get the patient out.
But instead [00:44:00] of congratulating Hen or praising her for thinking outside the box, he’s just shooting her down and saying that she showed them up. Yeah.
Alice: Yeah. Yeah.
Bex: Like, tiny, tiny, fragile egos of the white male. But Athena is watching this entire interaction, and when Gerrard walks away, she runs up to him and gives her her phone number.
Get it, Athena!
Ellen: It’s pouring! It’s pouring with rain! How did she even find him and all that mess? But she recognizes, you know, a, another, a woman in the biz who needs assistance, hands over her number. She’s even asking her out for a drink. I know a great bar on the West side.
Alice: Yeah. Go Athena. Hen’s like, no, I’ve got a girlfriend.
Anyway, yeah. So Athena says that she’d tell him that it gets better, but Hen would know she was lying, [00:45:00] so just call her. Then we get an ad break and when we come back, it’s It’s still raining.
Ellen: Lots of street, street rain scenes in this transition stuff.
Bex: It’s very pretty.
Alice: It is actually, yeah.
Bex: They’ve got the, the lights being diffused by the rain.
Alice: I actually, I’m wondering if this is the episode I was watching when I made our logo. because like my, the one where I made our logo, I was just like, yeah, yeah. Like LA street at night with rain. It’s, it’s going to be perfect. I don’t think it rains the entire show except for this episode.
Bex: It’s very atmospheric.
Alice: It is. And it was very nice watching this earlier, cause we’ve got like a rainstorm happening in Melbourne tonight. And so everything’s just rainy and wet. And I’m watching this like all tucked up in a blanket with the heater on with the rain outside like so nice.
Ellen: Oh [00:46:00] cozy So cozy meanwhile, it was like 30 degrees here Disgusting anyway
Alice: So yeah, so still raining, Hen’s in the kitchen of the 118 washing dishes because clearly that’s her job
Bex: She’s, she looks like she gets stuck with all of the, the crap jobs.
So like there was an earlier scene where after they’d returned from a call, she had to clean and put away all the equipment that the boys just dumped at her feet.
Alice: Yeah, literally the boys just throw it at her.
Bex: So yeah, I’m not surprised that after lunch she is, or after dinner, she is put on dish duty.
Alice: Like it’s a little bit of probie, but this is, this is too, yeah, it’s too much. Yeah. Yeah, but Chim walks up and starts to help.
Bex: He says, “I probably don’t have to tell you to never let them see you cry” and, and Hen’s like “this isn’t the first rodeo, it’s just the first time that this has happened in a job that I actually care [00:47:00] about” and it’s really getting her down.
And Chim tries to tell her that he understands and she is not buying it because as far as she’s concerned, he is. Part of the problem. He’s still a man. He, he, he, he might not be treating her as overtly bad as Gerrard is, but he’s not helping.
Alice: Yeah. She says “You benefit from a system that keeps women that look like me down.”
And then Chim has the line, “you always make friends this easily?” Which according to a career aptitude test, she makes friends super easy.
Ellen: She totally makes the, makes friends easy.
Alice: But Gerrard from downstairs, like, screams up to Howie to quit screwing around in home ec class and get down. And Chim starts to walk away, but turns back to Hen and says, “Look, some unsolicited advice. It doesn’t have to be me, but you should talk to someone about this. You’re not gonna [00:48:00] survive if you take this on all by yourself, Hen.”
And then we get some more shots of LA, and it’s still raining!
Bex: It is still raining, looks like the, the rest of the 118 have gone out on a call while Hen was left back at the firehouse and she is polishing the ladder truck, which Gerrard is incredibly impressed about, because he walks up behind her and whistles.
At the sight of
Alice: Wolf whistles.
Bex: I’m really hoping that it was at the sight of the fender and not the fact that Hen was bent over as she was polishing the fender, but I would not put it past him if he was whistling at her ass. Yep. But apparently she has, the entire firehouse is spic and span. She has polished the ladder truck, she cleaned the heads, she cleaned the geese, grease traps in the kitchen, she got the cobwebs out of the rafters, [00:49:00] because she, she wanted to imp, she wanted to impress Gerrard, she wanted to prove that she was doing a good job.
And he is dutifully impressed, but then puts his foot up on the fender to retie his laces, but his boots are caked in mud.
Ellen: Yeah. He starts out being really nice about things. He’s like, “you remind me when I, of myself, when I was a rookie, I wasn’t going to let my captain down.” And then he puts his muddy boot on the thing and Hen’s face just falls.
She’s like, Oh my God, here we go.
Bex: Yeah. He brings up that, when he was a rookie, one of the things that he did was he would always check up on their patients, and asks, well, basically he tells Hen, “You checked up on the mud lady, didn’t you?” Like he’s been checking up on her checking up and turns out he was right.
She didn’t make it. She was DOA at the hospital. [00:50:00] And so Gerrard sort of twists the knife a little bit and goes, “I can’t help thinking. That there’s something we could have done differently.” Putting that
Ellen: What could they have done differently?
Bex: So the only thing I can think is that because Hen thought outside the box and went and got that hose, wasn’t following Gerrard’s orders, that he is going to blame her for that woman’s death, which I think, I don’t think she would have made it out alive regardless of what they did.
God, no. But he just wants her to feel bad. He wants to break her down. Not to build her back up and make her stronger, but just the, what did she say at the beginning about bullies? And let me find that specific quote, because it’s exactly what he’s doing. Finding people at their weakness, at their most vulnerable, and attacking.
That’s exactly what he’s doing to her. Yep. She cared. And so he’s going to [00:51:00] use that against her.
Ellen: But then he twisted even harder by saying that “If you ever go against my command again, you won’t be cleaning out grease traps. You’ll be cleaning out your locker.”
Bex: And then he very snidely tells her that she’s missed a spot.
Ellen: Ugh, such an arsehole.
The alarms ring and Hen, sort of, gets ready to go, but Gerrard says to her, “no, you’re sitting this one out. I want you to think about what I said while you’re prepping dinner.”
Bex: Once again, women’s work. Mm hmm.
Ellen: Yeah, so she just has to stand there while the trucks leave. And Chim just sort of walks past on his way to the ambulance and looks at her. Gives her a look, but doesn’t help in any way.
Alice: Well, he reached, he was the last one to reach out and she pushed him away.
So I like, I can’t blame him for this.
Ellen: Yeah.
Bex: There’s also the, you know, I don’t think it’s [00:52:00] unreasonable to say that he’s been through this shit with Gerrard. So he’s not going to stick his neck out. It looks like he’s kind of got to a spot where he’s at least accepted, if not welcomed, and don’t think he’s willing to risk that.
Especially if Hen’s not going to sort of reach back out to him. But that just means that Hen’s got more time to go drinking.
Ellen: She decides to take Athena up on her offer and finds Athena at the bar and Athena comes over and gives her a hug and Hen’s like, Oh, okay.
Bex: Oh, you’re a hugger.
Ellen: Okay.
Alice: ,Watch the steak knife.
Ellen: Athena says that she remember what it was like starting out and I invited a couple of folks to join us. Hope you don’t mind. And then Hen’s like, Not really up for socializing, but okay.
Bex: Because Hen, Hen imagined that it was just going to be her and [00:53:00] Athena. And suddenly it’s her, Athena, and God knows how many other people.
Alice: Yeah, Hen’s like, Oh, what a nice date. And then Athena’s just like, “Oh yeah, I invited some friends.” And she’s like,
Bex: Oh my God, I wonder if she thought if it was a date.
Alice: I mean, she’s with, with Eva, so hopefully.
Bex: But yes, there are other people at the table. We have, Casey, who literally introduces himself as the gay firefighter from the 115.
And Bethanne, who we don’t find out Bethanne’s sexuality, but I’m assuming she’s there because she is a female officer with the LAPD.
Alice: Yeah, we never see those people again. No.
Ellen: But they have a lovely time. They laugh and tell stories and clink their glasses together a whole lot. Yes. Casey tells a story of how they, how they knew he was gay from the moment he walked in the door.
Alice: Well, I mean, he did throw glitter in their face. I’m not [00:54:00] sure.
But yeah, he says he was the strongest guy in the firehouse and all he ever wanted to be was a fireman, be a hero. But yeah, they. Obviously beat him down, and he says it got so hard that his boyfriend told him to quit and told him to find a new dream. So he found a new boyfriend, Bethanne, meanwhile.
Bex: She tells a similar story where she’s, one of her fellow officers asked her if she knew how to fire her weapon.
And she said, I graduated first in my class from the Academy. And this guy’s wondering if I know how to discharge my weapon. Yeah. And Athena also has a story where she had a partner that she used to work with who told her that he always wanted to taste some chocolate and then put his hands on her.
And she, she told him if he ever wanted chocolate he should go to Carvel. I don’t know what that means and I did not look it up.
Alice: I’m [00:55:00] assuming it’s like a chocolate shop, maybe?
Bex: I don’t know, but the point of the story was that if he ever put his hands on her again he’d be eating chocolate through a wired jaw.
Alice: Apparently it’s an ice cream shop.
Bex: In Atlanta, Georgia. Wait. Is Athena from? No, she grew up in Florida. Why the hell is she talking about something out of Georgia? I don’t know.
Alice: But yeah, there’s one on Santa Monica Boulevard, so.
Ellen: Oh, okay.
Bex: That just seems like a really weird reference.
Alice: Another one of those American references that
Ellen: It was probably an ad or something on TV about it, about having chocolate at Carvel.
Alice: But yeah, so she, she told him that he should go to Carvel and that if he ever touched her again he’d taste it through a wired jaw.
Ellen: Yep. But she says that You know, change doesn’t happen overnight, but it does happen. So you go in there tomorrow, do your work, outshine them, and they don’t get to determine [00:56:00] who you are.
You decide that. And they all drink to that.
Bex: That does fire Hen up. Yeah. Because the next day she goes into the firehouse and she climbs up onto the ladder track and starts honking the horn and everybody comes running to see what the hell is going on and she gives this very impassioned speech.
Basically she says, I’m here to stay, if you’ve got a problem with it, you leave because I’m not going to.
Ellen: She looks like she’s on the verge of tears the whole time.
Bex: She does.
Ellen: Oh, but she, she’s not going anywhere. And before anyone can sort of, you know, make any kind of response, the alarms go off and they have to go.
Bex: Oh, we did get enough time for a very sarcastic slow clap from Gerrard.
Ellen: Yeah.
Bex: But thankfully that’s all he can do before the alarm goes off.
Alice: Chim does look very impressed while Hen’s doing her speech.
Ellen: Mm hmm. Yeah. The rest of them are kind of standing around with their arms crossed.
Alice: Yeah, the other, the [00:57:00] rest of them are just like, oh, okay.
Bex: I mean, Tommy does look a little chastened. Sal looks absolutely unimpressed.
Ellen: There’s a lot more people there.
Bex: Yeah, there, there are a lot of people there, considering how little we actually know about the 118.
Ellen: So they go to a call. It is still pouring with rain. It’s nighttime, and. They pull up to a guy who’s standing in the middle of the road waving his arms. It’s like a limo that’s overturned. And this guy didn’t see what happened, but he just came upon it and called it in. And they go to investigate.
Gerrard tells Tommy to get the jaws, so they rip off the door and there’s some people inside. The driver’s already dead, but There’s a guy who I’ve labelled in my notes as Party Boy, says that there’s five of them. Please hurry. They manage to get him out. [00:58:00] And he says that all he remembers is that one second Mark was lighting the bong, and the next we were upside down.
They were just having a party.
Bex: They were having a party. I really hope that Mark was one of the kids in the back and not the driver. Because that would explain why the limo is upside down if the driver was lighting a bong. But I don’t think that that was the case because Hen and Chim have noticed that there is yellow paint scrapings on the rear of the limo.
Ellen: I thought it was the front, but it could be the rear.
Bex: Oh, who knows? It’s upside down and spun around, but there’s, it looks like that they’ve hit something yellow. And there are also White roses strewn across the ground, which you could, I mean, if it was a limousine, you could be thinking, okay, maybe it was a wedding.
So there were from sort of a bridal bouquet, but the fact that it’s a bunch of kids and they’re high as kites, I don’t think that they would be having [00:59:00] flowers anywhere in the limo. So she comes to the conclusion that there was another vehicle involved in the collision that they need to go find to see if anybody else is in trouble.
Ellen: But Gerrard’s not interested in that.
Alice: He immediately shuts them down.
Ellen: He’s like, “I’m not diverting resources just because you saw yellow paint. Go and sort the people out who were wounded.” And Hen just goes, I reject that order. And off she goes heading, she heads into the bush at the side of the road.
And Chim’s calling out after her going, “He’ll have your job.” And she says, “If I don’t do this, I don’t belong in this job.” And off she goes. And
Bex: Howie is like looking between sort of Hen, Gerrard, his patient, obviously torn about what he. is going to do. Eventually he decides to follow Hen. Yeah. Just like, [01:00:00] this guy’s fine.
Ellen: So they head off down the hillside and as usual, Chim’s like worried about their job.
Alice: We actually get some, like some Chim poking through, which is nice. cause like, it’s just been very like subdued Howie, like he’s trying to reach out, but like, it’s not really the Chim that we know.
Ellen: Yeah.
Alice: And yeah, he’s got like, got some sass in this.
Like he’s like, I thought it was a pretty good speech, but you know what pisses me off about all this? The rain. I had it ordered stopped half an hour ago. And I was like, yeah, I guess you got about as much pull around here as I do. So they find more flowers, which Chim says they can use at their funeral.
So more Chim sass.
Ellen: They do find a dead guy on the ground though.
Bex: They do find a dead guy, which Hen immediately says, “That’s the flower vendor. He had finished up his [01:01:00] day, was probably heading home and got hit.” And I’m going, Oh, okay. So just
Ellen: She’s the ghost whisperer this week,
Bex: like the, the whole making up or coming, jumping to conclusions is not just limited to medical conditions.
Like she can just look at a scene and know exactly what was going on. It turns out she was wrong for the most part, because they then find a shoe, which I’m assuming is not a shoe from the guy on the, the, on the dead guy, which means that there was somebody else in the van.
Alice: It’s also the weirdest, like, when she calls out that there’s a shoe.
Ellen: Yeah, why would there be a shoe outside of the car?
Alice: But there’s also like, they, they’ve like clearly gone back and recorded it later.
Ellen: Oh, really? Is it not raining as much?
Alice: Yeah, it’s like really loud. I don’t know. It’s just weird.
Bex: I wouldn’t put it, I mean, it’s, it’s not outside the realm of possibility that it was [01:02:00] ADR
Alice: Yeah, I think it was ADR, but, and they just didn’t mix it properly.
Bex: Yeah, so they’ve had to get Ayesha to come back and do it again.
Alice: But yeah, it just sounded really weird. Like, I was like, what is happening? Anyway, so
Bex: The shoe leads them to a body of water, which I’m uncertain whether this was a natural body of water or whether this is floodwaters that have risen.
Ellen: I was guessing it was some kind of drain or a creek or something that was down the bottom of the embankment next to the road that’s swollen with floodwater, I guess.
Bex: And there is a van underwater, but somehow the brake lights are still on.
Ellen: Yeah, and the headlights. It’s, yeah, it’s weird.
Bex: Yeah. I mean, I know that they need the lights on in order to be able to find the van since it’s dark, but I don’t understand why. Because there’s not headlights, it was literally just the red lights of the Or did we see headlights?
Ellen: There were lights at the front, yeah. Yeah. But, but, I mean, if it [01:03:00] had been submerged, wouldn’t the electricals no longer work?
Bex: It shorted out the lights.
Ellen: I don’t know. I don’t know.
Bex: Drama. It’s for the drama. But anyway, we needed, we needed them to see the van so that Hen can dive into the water and pull out the other occupant and the owner of the shoe, who was the flower of who is, I’m guessing the flower vendor’s kid.
Alice: I, I just remembered that during the earthquake, Hen finds the shoe as well.
And I’m starting to think she just finds children with shoes.
Bex: She’s like some kind of kiddie Cinderella prince. Is
Alice: this your shoe? Oh, shit. That doesn’t even fit.
Ellen: I don’t know how she managed to get into the car and get the kid out of the car.
And
Bex: in the time that it took for her, for a chimney to strip off his turnouts.
Ellen: Yeah. And he sort of wades in and starts [01:04:00] shouting at the top of the water as you do when your friend is under the water like that’s not gonna help. But anyway, they pull out the kid and they put him down on the, on his back and he doesn’t have a pulse.
Apparently he’s hypothermic. She starts doing CPR. I’m guessing she has quite a good pace here. Seemed all right to me?
Alice: I didn’t notice anything wrong, so yeah.
Ellen: Chim calls for help and Gerrard actually says assistance is on the way. So that’s good. But meanwhile, they’re trying to get the kid to breathe and every now and again, Chim stops, like says, hold, hold, no pulse.
You know, they keep doing it, but eventually they get a pulse and the kid starts coughing up some water and Hen’s just burst into tears. And of relieved crying. And Chim’s just like, sorry, I should keep calling him Howie. [01:05:00] He’s not Chim yet. He says, “Is this going to be a regular thing, the crying?
Because now you got me going and I don’t know how to handle it.”
Bex: “Please don’t tell the other guys. Okay.”
Ellen: And I think he’s probably the only one who says good job, Wilson, at this point, because I doubt anyone else does until later.
Bex: Yeah.
Ellen: But yeah. So I’m guessing the next scene must be the next day because it’s now daylight, but it’s still raining.
Bex: It’s still raining, but yeah, Hen is arriving at the station, in civilian’s clothing. So she must be coming to start her shift. It looks like everybody else is already there. And as she walks in, Sal and Tommy come up to her and, Sal gives her a nice work yesterday, which, there’s something about this man, everything that comes out of his mouth just sounds sarcastic.
There’s this split second where I’m wondering, is he about to shit on her again? And then [01:06:00] Tommy chimes in and says, “yeah, you know, we would have found the car eventually, but eventually would have been too late.”
Alice: Yeah, like I was like is Tommy really being an arsehole right now? And then he like corrects himself and he’s just like, yeah, no, you made the right call.
Bex: Yeah. It’s, it’s like the, you know, I’m, I’m gonna, I have to sort of puff my chest out a little bit and, you know, be a man, but I will reluctantly agree that you did a good job. And they, when Hen very sort of self deprecatingly says, no, I just got lucky Sal’s like, screw that you’re good and offers her his hand.
So she shakes hand with him. She shakes hands with Tommy, which is progress.
Alice: It is. Yeah. But then Chim comes up behind her and says that the captain wants to see her in his office. And he has such a, like, a sad look on his face. Yeah. So Hen [01:07:00] goes, “It’s been nice working with you.” Chim goes, “You don’t know what’s going to happen in there.”
Bex: No, she doesn’t. But you’ve just come over, warned her that she’s got to go to pretty much to the, like, fire principal’s office and you look like someone’s kicked your puppy. I mean, I don’t think they’re going to have cake and flowers in there for you.
Alice: And also says that Captain Gerrard hates her, not because of how good she does the job, but because of who she is.
Ellen: And Chim just kind of nods and goes, “I guess you’re right,” and then sort of shakes her hand.
Bex: I love watching this scene in retrospect.
Ellen: Yeah, it’s great. And then off he goes. She goes upstairs and knocks on the door. And inside the, Office are two unfamiliar men. One of them introduced himself as Commander Roose.
And she says, “I know who you are, sir. I remember you from the brochures about recruitment,”
Alice: which is hilarious.
Ellen: Yeah. It’s like meeting a celebrity. [01:08:00] This is Captain Cooks. “Since you’ve started working here, we’ve received numerous complaints” and she’s just like, “Oh no, no, no, no, no. I just, if I could just defend myself.”
Bex: But apparently the complaints have not been about you, or about for Hen, the complaints have been about Captain Gerrard. And Hen is confused because she’s never complained, and Cooks, the, the captain says, “no, your co workers have complained pretty much on your behalf.”
Ellen: Yeah. And she wants to know who.
But he doesn’t want to tell her, he’s like, that information is privileged.
Bex: Yeah, I don’t think you ever find out that kind of information. One of the co workers has apparently compared Captain Gerrard to a particular condition best cured by Preparation H. And I really want to know who that was. In my head it was Chim, but I don’t know.
Ellen: If anyone [01:09:00] doesn’t know what Preparation H is, it is a hemorrhoid cream.
Bex: Yes.
Ellen: An apt description.
Bex: Yeah, but long story short, Gerrard has been removed as captain of the 118.
Alice: I don’t know how he didn’t get fired, but sure. Let’s just remove him. Let’s just remove him. I’m sure that’ll fix all the problems.
Ellen: Let’s hope remove him actually means fired.
Bex: I, I don’t know that it is possible to fire someone sort of this day and age unless they do something so egregious that you have no choice to. I would, I would point at all of the, the priests in the church that just get moved around from parish to parish until they run out of places to put them. I’m pretty sure that they did the same thing with Gerrard, they just moved him to a different firehouse.
Alice: Yeah. But like the, like religions under a whole different [01:10:00] thing. Like these people work for the city. So like for the government. Anyway, Gerrard should have been fired. Campaigning for his firing. Fuck that guy.
Ellen: He probably did something horrible in another station anyway and got booted.
Bex: I’m just assuming that the, the complaints just got too much that eventually LAFD just could not ignore it.
Alice: Yeah.
Bex: So he’s out, Captain Cooks is in until they can find a permanent leader of the 118, and Hen is not going anywhere. Yeah, they even say that she’s the future of the LAFD. So she very happily goes downstairs to the women’s locker room, which I think is It’s still just the general locker room, and Chim is waiting for her when she comes out and she realizes he knew exactly what was going on and he set her up.[01:11:00]
Alice: Oh, he even says it’s revenge for making it so hard to be friends with her.
Ellen: And she says, “Thanks for following me down the hillside.” And he, he goes, “The first of many, I’m sure.” Like, Chim, you have no idea.
Alice: It’s like, I like that. They’re like, Oh, look how progressive, like it’s become since Captain Gerrard left, but also all the, like, they’re all just men and hen still.
Ellen: Yeah. They’re still all just. Still dudes.
Alice: Oh, I think there’s like a B team member who’s a woman.
Bex: Yeah, it’s either Castillo or Jackson. I’m not entirely sure which one is which, but there are women in the background and whoever, whoever Tameka is, unless Tameka is Castillo or Jackson. I’m sure that there are other women, but yes, the core is just, [01:12:00] is mostly, it’s like white men, Asian American.
Younger white man, brown man, Hen,
but I think I still prefer that to the forced diversity of lone star.
Alice: I was waiting for you to bring it up.
I’m like, I’m not going to say anything, Bex will bring it up and sure enough. It definitely feels less forced now that I’m into season three.
Bex: Yeah, I still, I don’t think you could pay me to stay with the show that long.
Alice: Like, if you do want to watch it, I’d say just go straight to season two. Cause season, like, you could maybe watch the last like two episodes of season one, but like, just go straight to season two.
Cause it’s so much better. I’m actually addicted now.
Bex: I don’t think I have the capacity to be addicted to another show right now. I got too much on my plate with this one.
Alice: Yeah. It’s fine. Once we [01:13:00] get to the crossover, we’ll, I’ll hook you in. Anyway, finish off this episode. Let’s finish up this episode.
Bex: We’re going to go back to another voiceover from Hen to sort of wrap up her story.
Alice: Yeah. So she says “We are born with innocence. Then as we grow, we are cursed with a question. Why, why are we here? Is it all just chaos or do we have a purpose?”
Bex: And this is kind of all being overlaid of Hen responding to an emergency, but it’s, it’s nothing special that’s going on on screen.
It’s not even like a montage of all of the different things that she does. It’s literally just a minor traffic accident and a guy sitting in the middle of the road. So we just see Hen pull up, get out of the ambulance, go over and start treating him. I guess they really wanted us to focus on the voiceover.
Ellen: Yeah. But what she says next is really impactful anyway. It’s when, when you were scared, when you were [01:14:00] hurt and when you’re in the wrong place at the wrong time and et cetera, I won’t read the whole thing out cause it’s really long, but I am the first one there to help. I am here to stand between you and the chaos.
I am a first responder. That is my purpose. And I’m always just a phone call away. It’s like, Oh, thanks Hen. Thank you. First responders.
Bex: So that is how Hen began.
Ellen: Hmm. Yeah. I, while I enjoyed hearing about how Hen got into and the things that she had to put up with to start with, I’m glad to see the back of this episode because it was all a bit unfamiliar, but in a familiar setting, like in the 118 firehouse and everything, it was like, yeah, uncomfortable for a reason, but yeah.
Alice: It’s really good as part of, like, it’s very [01:15:00] bingeable. Like it’s good to be like, oh yeah, that happened, and then immediately go to the next episode. But waiting a week for it would have been hard.
Ellen: Yeah.
Alice: Cause it’s like, no, but I want the rest of my boys back.
Ellen: Yeah. I was glad to go onto the next one immediately after this.
I was like, I need to see Buck’s face, it was, it was very nice to….
Alice: Yes his face, Ellen. Yeah.
Ellen: Yeah. I dunno.
Bex: But from memory, no, I’m just thinking Buck isn’t the one that takes his shirt off in this episode. Yeah.
Ellen: There is a bit of Eddie chest happening in the next one. Oh yeah, there is. That’s by the by. We can talk about that next week.
Bex: Yes, we will.
Ellen: All right. So what do we have to look forward to next week? We’ve got our boys back,
Bex: We have a very early Christmas episode because this one aired November 26th, but it’s called “Merry Ex mas”, [01:16:00] and it is very definitely Christmas because the summary says, the holidays are anything but merry for the first responders in the, the fall finale.
So they had a bit of a hiatus after this one, which considering how this one ends was brutal. The holidays are naughty and nice for the first responders who must deal with a stampede at a toy store, a mistletoe stunt gone awry, and neighbors competing in a Christmas light showdown. Bobby contemplates his future with Athena, Chimney and Buck attempt to lift Maddie’s spirits, and Eddie must decide if he wants to give his son what he really wants for Christmas.
Alice: Yeah, bit of a deep one next week.
Bex: For their triggers. In case anybody is worried about what the next episode will hold. We have car accident with [01:17:00] severe gore. We have some claustrophobia. We’re going to have some flashbacks to, domestic violence and I don’t know that that’s a trigger necessarily.
It says, like, returned service member. Maybe that’s a trigger in that you’re going to need your tissues? I don’t understand why that one would necessarily be a trigger, but.
Ellen: Well, it might be if you lost a service member.
Bex: Ah, possibly, yes. And Christmas. So if you’re triggered by Christmas, don’t watch the next episode because it’s going to be all about Christmas.
If you have a fear of Santa. Do not watch this episode.
Alice: I have a fear of Christmas. I might have, I might need to bow out.
Ellen: You’re not allowed to bow out. We need you. I will [01:18:00] say, watching this, it was very strange to have all the Christmas music and stuff involved with Christmas in the middle of August, which is when we’re watching it.
So yeah.
Bex: It would have been weird to have it at the end of November too. Well, I guess. Cause this would have been what Thanksgiving, so it’s, I guess they just needed to get it out before the, so they got a Christmas episode out somewhere around Christmas.
Ellen: Doesn’t Christmas start after Halloween?
Bex: For us, yes, but in the States, they’ve got to go through Thanksgiving first. So they go from like pumpkins to turkeys to Santa.
Ellen: Right. Right. Anything else to say about this particular episode before we wrap up?
Alice: I like them going into the origins.
Ellen: Yeah. It’s nice to see where they come from.
Alice: Hmm. They just get sadder and sadder too.
Ellen: Oh, great.
It’s, it, it’s weird. Like this episode’s just strange because we’ve had so [01:19:00] many episodes with the same people every week. And then now we get to this one where there’s a whole bunch of new people and it’s like, It’s just a bit jarring.
Alice: It’s interesting watching Tommy in, like, after watching Season 7.
Ellen: Yeah. He’s a bit mean in this one, like, I guess he’s just trying to fit in with the way that, like the culture that Captain Gerrard has brought to the place. But it’s not an excuse for making mean comments and whatever. I guess he kind of comes around in the end and says she did a good job, but maybe only because Sal finally decided that he was going to tell her it was a good job.
Bex: I’m only assuming that they came around because Gerrard got the boot. So they knew that Gerrard was out and they’re like, shit, we’ve got to, you know, get our act together or we’re going to be next.
Alice: Or did they also make complaints?
Ellen: Yeah.
Alice: Because surely it wasn’t just Chim, because if it was just Chim, they would have been like,
Bex: I’m going to say the, [01:20:00] I’m going to say the B shift.
Alice: I also assumed it was the B shift, but.
Bex: Oh, let’s, let’s give him the benefit of the doubt and say that yes, Tommy secretly lodged a complaint against Gerrard. Sal, Sal definitely didn’t. I think that the interesting thing about “Hen Begins” is that with some of the other origin stories. They cut back and forth between present day and past day, whereas this one was fully past day.
Alice: Yeah, there was nothing tying it into the present?
Bex: Yeah, it’s it’s a it’s a standalone episode. You can completely skip this episode and it’s not going to affect the current storyline. So, I don’t know if that works as a structure or whether it’s better to have it. The begins part as literal flashbacks.
Alice: I think having them as flashbacks is better. Cause it like,
Bex: I’m just, [01:21:00] I’m just thinking about, without going into detail, the way that they structured “Chimney Begins”, the way they structured “Eddie Begins” versus the way they structured “Hen Begins”, I feel like those episodes are more impactful than, than “Hen Begins”. Mm. So I think even like Bobby’s origin story was flashbacks.
Alice: It was, yeah. Yeah.
Ellen: Interesting. All right. So if you, we’d love to hear what you thought about this episode. If you would like to get in touch with us, you can let us know on social media, our social media accounts are all thatweewooshow, or you can email us at contact at thatweewooshow.com, or you can leave us a comment.
Apparently Spotify now does comments directly on the episode posts. Oh, I’m not sure. I haven’t actually seen that in action yet. So I don’t know if it’s all podcasts that you can do that on, but, yeah, if someone has [01:22:00] a moment and they could try it out for us, that would be awesome. Cause I’d really like to see how that works.
So our website also has transcripts of our episodes and other ways that you can follow us. So. Go and check that out. It’s just thatweewooshow.com. And thank you all for listening this week. And we’ll talk to you next week for episode 10, which is called Merry Xmas. See you then.
Bex: Bye.
Alice: Bye.
Ellen: 9-1-1 is a fictional show, but many of the situations portrayed happen in the real world too.
If any of the topics we’ve discussed in this episode have affected you, please know you’re not alone. You can call or text numbers in your country for help. Just Google crisis support in your location to find out the number. If you enjoy our podcast, you can help us out by leaving us a review on Spotify or your preferred listening app.
And by sharing our social media posts, find out more at ThatWeWooShow. com. [01:23:00]
[First outtake]
Ellen: I was totally blindsided by like their, their Our Flag Means Death episode, and they’re like, Oh, I was just listening to this, That WeeWoo Show podcast. And I’m like, what?
Bex: See, I haven’t listened to that episode because I I’ve never watched Our Flag Means Death. So that,
Alice: You’ve never watched Our Flag Means Death?
Bex: Look, I have a thing about the New Zealand accent. Okay. I can’t watch shows with the New Zealand accent.
Ellen: I mean, you get used to it after. It is weird to start with, but you do get used to it and it’s fine.
Alice: Like I, I can’t, I can’t really talk because like one of my, one of my other servers has been, like obsessed with Deadpool and Wolverine and a whole bunch of them are like thirsting over Hugh Jackman and I’m like, I can’t, I can’t, I cannot do it.
It’s like, it feels like he’s like my uncle.
Ellen: Yeah, he’s very dad-coded.
Alice: Yes. Yeah. [01:24:00] Like, like he’s just, he’s been there all our lives.
Bex: He’s the Aussie dad. We can’t.
Alice: Yeah. Yep. That’s it. Like, can’t deal with it. And they’re just like, Oh, the accent though. And I’m like, no, I want to smack him.
[second outtake]
Alice: I do that all the time with, um, SPN Then and Now.
Ellen: Oh, right. I haven’t listened to any of that yet. I keep feeling like I should, but
Alice: it’s some episodes are really, really good. And some episodes I just want to smack them. Like sometimes they just go like too sarcastic. And I’m like, guys. Like, I understand that you’re tired cause you’ve just had a weekend of cons, but like, please just focus a little bit on the episode.
It also depends on what guests they’ve got on. Cause sometimes like the guests are really, really good. And then sometimes they’ll like interview a guest star and they’re just like, “Oh, it was 20 years ago. I don’t remember. And forgot to watch the episode.” That happens very rarely. Like it’s happened like twice in the five seasons that they’ve done, but they just [01:25:00] they just finished season five and the last episode Rob was like, “I, I think I can, I think I can see why people ship these two.”
And Rich is like, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” And we’re like, Rich, you, you directed the confession. Like stop being a dickhead.
Ellen: Yeah. I don’t think you can get out of that one.
Alice: Rich was like, “yeah. When, when like. When Castiel pushes Dean against the wall, and then like, Dean says something about like, Castiel looking at him, like he’s going to get laid.
Like, I, I kinda, I kinda see it.” And Rich is just like, “oh, I must’ve missed that.” And Rob’s just like, “nah, I think, like,” we’re like, oh my God, guys, like stop being dickheads.
Ellen: Well, I couldn’t believe that Linda Carter was the one who mentioned Destiel.
Alice: Oh my God!
Ellen: I was like, what is happening?
Alice: I’m like, they’re like, Oh yeah, Misha Collins.
And she’s just like, yeah, Destiel. And we’re like, well, that’s not what was said, but keep [01:26:00] going.
Ellen: I was sort of like, does she actually, does she actually know about this? Or did she just look up Misha and find like a bunch of stuff about Destiel? Ah, so funny.
Alice: Who is Misha Collins? Ah, he’s known for fucking another guy. Awesome.
Bex: Eye fucking.
Alice: I’m sitting in Bunnings waiting for my lunch. And like, I was trying not to like scream about it because obviously I’m sitting in the Bunnings cafe and my face must’ve been doing the weirdest things cause I’m like, Oh my fucking God, that was Linda fucking Carter, like what the fuck just happened.
Ellen: That happened to me when, like on November. 7th or 8th or whatever, whenever the Spanish dub thing happened. And I was, I was sitting at, in a room full of people, like looking at my phone and I’m like, tears are coming down my face. I’m just like, I need to tell somebody.
Alice: Yeah. Right. So I’m like screaming in Gospels of Profound Bond.
And we’re just like, what about like three of us posted it simultaneously [01:27:00] in three different channels? Because like, there’s like an other, there’s an other fandoms channel. So like obviously someone posted in there because of Wonder Woman. Then there’s an SPN chat and then an SPN cast channel and simultaneously in all three, we were all just like, what the fuck just happened?
And then we were talking about how, like, like with the election coming up. the Supernatural team have the opportunity to do the funniest thing. And I’m just like, all we need is Jensen posting one gif on his socials. We don’t even need a reunion, just this. And then I posted the like, the, manip of, Them kissing.
Yeah. And another one’s just like, or he releases the confession tape and then just turns his phone off.
Ellen: Oh my God.
Alice: For an entire year. , like, yeah, his con con He cancels all his con appearances.
Bex: Yeah, yeah. Just [01:28:00] disappears from sight.
Alice: Yeah. He completely vanishes , like Misha wears more and more of his clothes without commenting.
And someone else goes, he Skype calls into the last Supernatural con of the year. I’m like wearing Cas’s trench coat and nothing else.
Ellen: Ah, wild times,
Alice: but yeah, it’s, it’s insane. Poor Misha’s just like, yes, I am super political. Please take me seriously. And even Linda Carter’s just like, ah, it’s Dean Winchester’s top, that’s nice.
Ellen: I really hope she’s really into it. That would be just the best.
Alice: I just, it was just like, that’s not even what was being discussed, Linda Carter.
Ellen: Okay, we should probably talk about 9-1-1.
Alice: Yeah, what show are we watching?
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