3.11: Seize the Day

Welcome to That Weewoo Show: a podcast where Ellen, Bex, and Alice watch and discuss every episode of ABC’s TV show, 9-1-1.

In this episode we discuss episode 11 of the third season of 9-1-1, titled “Seize the Day”.

The 118 respond to a skydiving trip gone wrong, a bank rep injured in a home repossession and a lovestruck assistant whose lunch run almost ends in disaster; Athena and the family come to terms with Michael’s health.

Content warnings for episode 3.11:

discussion of brain tumor and treatment. fish/fishing, choking, foster parenting (positive), gore (evisceration).

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Episode Transcript

Maddie: [00:00:00] 9-1-1, what’s your emergency?

Ellen: Welcome back to That Weewoo Show, a podcast where we watch and discuss episodes of the ABC show, 9-1-1. I’m Ellen.

Alice: I’m Alice,

Bex: and I’m Bex.

Ellen: Thank you everyone for listening today, and I hope everyone is doing really well wherever you are around the world, especially people who have been leaving comments and, sharing like our posts on social media.

Thanks very much for that. Um, Bex, I believe we had someone who had a, a shout out for us this week that we need to shout out back.

Bex: Yes. A very special shout out to Sol on TikTok. Uh, their username is @317sol. They made a lovely video where they were shouting out their favorite [00:01:00] 9-1-1 podcasts, which happened to include our little podcast in the list, um, along with, um, other great podcasts such as Station 118, the Buddie (System) podcast, and the First Respondcast.

I think I got all those right. Um, so thank you so much for listening.

Ellen: Thank you.

Bex: Thank you so much for, uh, sharing with TikTok how much you love all of these podcasts. We really do appreciate it. Um, we don’t have a Kofi or a Patreon. We rely on people like you sharing, sharing our podcast to get our message out.

So thank you very much. Yeah.

Ellen: And we’ll try and include lots of Australian random information for you, just ’cause we know you love it.

Alice: Yeah, I was glad to hear that someone liked it because I really enjoy talking about random Australian things, so while also questioning Americans.

Ellen: Yes. Okay. So, [00:02:00] um, Alice, you wanna tell us what happened last time?

Alice: Yeah, so last week on 9-1-1, the 118 celebrated Christmas at work. And while Bobby was given the all-clear from radiation poisoning, Michael was given his own health news. He has a brain tumor. That’s right. It was all sad, sad and happy, very up and down last week.

Bex: Then the show went on, uh, hiatus. And this episode, which is episode 11, airs three months later in March of 2020, um, and it is called “Seize the Day”.

And the official promo that was sent out says that the 118 responds to a skydiving trip gone wrong, a bank rep injured in a home repossession, and a lover assistant whose lunch run ends in disaster. Meanwhile, Athena and the family come to term with Michael’s difficult health decision. And Chimney’s half brother from Korea, guest star John Harlan Kim unexpectedly shows up on his [00:03:00] doorstep.

Alice: Yeah, we have another Aussie joining us. So exciting.

Bex: And our triggers for this week, if I can find them. We have discussion of brain, tumor and cancer and said treatment. We have the trigger wanting to just says fish. Just says fish. Um, I’m going to assume that it’s the choking on the fish that is the particular trigger, not the existence of fish and the sport of fishing.

Ellen: Yeah, there’s a, however, it’s a catching of a fish.

Bex: Well, if it’s the catching of it’s a catch and release. But if it’s still, if it’s the catching of fish that is an issue for you. There is a scene in here that you do not wanna watch. Um, there is the discussion of foster parenting positive in this instance.

And we have, my favorite: gore, um, in this instance referring to is evisceration. And, uh,

Ellen: this episode’s got it all,

Bex: very, [00:04:00] very, very prominent evisceration. They do not hide the evisceration. It’s great. I just keep thinking of the little Television Without Pity, Demian going “Gore!” Every time I see that word.

Have I not told that story?

Ellen: No,

Alice: I don’t think so.

Bex: So, so back in the day and like back in the day, I’m like talking about the early two thousands. Um, there was a, there was a website called Television Without Pity. All they did was like recaps for TV shows.

Ellen: Right.

Bex: And every, uh, recapper had their own kind of style and the Supernatural recapper had a dragon in their little, um, like profile picture.

Yeah. So the recapper started incorporating the dragon as a character who was watching the episodes with him. And every time there, it’s being Supernatural when you know, you know what happens in the episodes, anytime there was any kind of blood or [00:05:00] guts or gore, we would just get all caps italicized, an entire stream of exclamation points of this dragon screaming “GOOOORE!!!”.

He loved the gore.

Ellen: Right.

Bex: So that’s just,

Alice: yeah. You definitely have not told that story before.

Ellen: No, I have never heard of that before.

Bex: I really wish you can’t find any of the recaps. Television Without Pity went, um, they took it off, they took it off the internet and they didn’t archive anything. Oh. I really wish I could wa I really wish I could read Demian’s, um, Supernatural recaps again.

’cause they were so good. Raul. The Dragon’s name was Raul. Okay.

Alice: Wow. It’s so sad so much from like the early. Yeah. Like when, um, supernatural was first airing, so much of that stuff’s gone now. Yeah.

Ellen: It was a long time ago.

Alice: Like the forum? Yeah, like the forum that I used to go on where like, [00:06:00] I, when I first was watching Supernatural, so when season two was airing, like that’s, that does not exist anymore.

And it just like, it’s so sad. ’cause I had friends on there that I’ve lost contact with.

Ellen: Yeah.

Alice: And I’m just like, oh man.

Bex: So much fandom stuff just gets lost.

Alice: Yep. Like these days more is saved and backed up other places. Um, but back then, like we had no idea.

Bex: Probably because the elders of the fandom are thinking back.

Like, we remember back in the day, we lost everything. So we are gonna save every single thing we can.

Alice: Exactly.

Ellen: Yeah. But if it’s on Tumblr, good luck ever finding it again because

Bex: Oh good lord.

Ellen: Their search function is just absolutely useless.

Bex: It’s terrible.

Ellen: Anyway. 9-1-1.

Bex: Yes. All right,

Ellen: let’s talk about this episode.

Bex: Let’s leaving, leaving Supernatural behind. Coming back to 9-1-1.

Ellen: That’s old news.

Bex: This episode, “Seize the Day” was written by Lindsay, um, Beaulieu, I [00:07:00] hope I’m pronouncing that name correct. It looks very French, um, who previously wrote “Rage”, um, and directed by Sarah, whose name I don’t recognize as a director.

Ellen: Sarah Boyd. Yeah.

Bex: Um, although I did like your comment in the group chat when you were watching this, that you thought that this episode should have been written by Kristen Reidel.

Ellen: Well, it just had her, her kind of, uh, style in it. Like, you know, family oriented,

Bex: the constant and the constant repeating of the episode title?

Ellen: the constant repeating of the episode title all the way through.

I was just like, yeah, did she write this? No. It was someone else. Amazing.

Bex: Someone else. But the style has seeped into the writer’s room.

Ellen: But we do start at an airfield with a mother and daughter going on an adventure together. They’re gonna do skydiving. And the the daughter is not into it.

Alice: Not even a little bit.

Ellen: No. No. [00:08:00] But her mom is like, “Come on, we’ve, we’ve gotta, you know, this is on the bucket list and we, we need to do it. We’ve gotta do stuff together and seize the day.”

Bex: I love that her daughter’s just like, “I swear Dad dying made you weird.”

Ellen: Yeah. She suddenly decided she’s gotta do all the crazy things. After that, I guess

Bex: She said to, they made a pact to spend more mother time together. Although the daughter Lizzie questions whether jumping out of a plane is like mother-daughter activity. Um, but

Ellen: hey, she’s got a name!

Bex: The daughter, yes. She’s Lizzie.

Ellen: Mom didn’t get a name.

Bex: The mother did not get a name. Um, in this episode, pretty much every single character gets a name in the closed captions, but not all of them get named in the episode. So I’m sticking by my rule. If they get named in dialogue or if there is a way that I can find out their name, then I [00:09:00] will use their name.

Otherwise, they are just with whatever title I can come up with. Um, so the mother counters her daughter’s complaints that, you know, skydiving is not exactly something that they, that she considers as mother daughter activity with, “Well, it’s not as though I have grandchildren to keep me busy,” and then immediately starts trying to get those grandchildren by wondering if their skydiving instructor Stefan is single.

Alice: Yeah. Poor Lizzie’s just like mortified and immediately distracts Stefan. And it’s just like, “Oh, is that our plane?”

Bex: Pay no attention to the crazy lady. Uh, that is indeed their plane. And we cut to the plane taxiing and taking off and then reaching cruising attitude.

Alice: Yeah. So mom’s very enthusiastic about this.

Is she even, she even helps open the door.

Bex: She’s even helping Stefan open the hatch. [00:10:00]

Alice: Um, meanwhile Lizzie’s standing like way back and is like, uh, no thanks.

Ellen: The whole back of the plane opens up. Like I don’t, I’ve never been skydiving before, but is this like the type of plane that’s always used to skydiving? ’cause that looks terrifying.

Bex: It looks like one of those like military cargo planes.

Alice: Yeah. But much smaller.

Ellen: Yeah. Or like a, a paratrooper type thing that they fall out of the back of, you know?

Bex: Yeah. Um, I’m very interested as to what kind of like skydiving this is. ’cause whenever I’ve seen people go skydiving, it’s usually tandem.

Ellen: Yeah. I think when you’re a beginner you have to do tandem. Right?

Bex: But it’s like, this is Stefan with the two women and it doesn’t look like it’s gonna be tandem. It looks like they’re all sort of going to jump solo.

Alice: Yeah. They’re all just bailing out themselves. Yeah.

Bex: I don’t know the, the, whether that’s safe. I mean it’s a moot point ’cause we don’t get that far in the story. [00:11:00] Nobody’s going skydiving,

Ellen: They don’t get to jump out of the plane.

Bex: No. Because all of a sudden something in the plane, clangs and bangs and the plane drops, which sends everybody in the back who is not strapped in, like slamming up into the ceiling and then back down onto the floor. It looks like Stefan gets knocked out and he is, he falls and lands right on the edge of the hatch and Lizzie tries to grab him and pull him back, but instead she grabs his parachute and starts hauling the parachute out of his pack.

And then I don’t know how she does it, but the parachute gets wedged in a metal rack on the side,

Ellen: thankfully

Bex: of the, I, I don’t know how she did it, but it gets wrapped around this rack and then the turbulence, Stefan falls out of the plane, but the parachute gets like he’s anchored in because the parachute is like wedged in this [00:12:00] metal rack.

So he ended up just like flapping around like some kind of human kite under the plane.

Ellen: Yeah. Oh my God. Do we know if this is actually someone doing a stunt or like are they just flying around with a dummy, like hanging out of the back of the plane? I’m assuming they,

Bex: I don’t know but it, I would really hope it’s a dummy.

Ellen: Yeah. And later when they’re trying to rescue him, like surely that wouldn’t be a real person. It looks quite convincing. It doesn’t look like, you know, when they were, when Chim was lifting Tommy or anything like that. It actually looks like a person,

Bex: it’s not the pantyhose dummy being flailed around, it it might actually be like a crash test dummy or something. Something that’s got some, a little bit of substance to it.

Alice: Yeah. So all the skydiving planes, sorry, tangent already. Yeah. All the skydiving plans I can find, they all go out the side.

Ellen: Okay. Who knows? It, it’s like, you know, dramatic. For the drama.

Dramatic. Yeah, for the drama. We’ll, for the drama, we’ll [00:13:00] allow it to,

Bex: for the drama for this to happen. It probably had to be this kind of plane.

Alice: Yeah. But yeah, I have no idea what type of plane it is.

Bex: No, I don’t care enough to look this one up either.

Ellen: Um, the mum actually calls 9-1-1 from the plane and says, “Stefan’s gone.”

And the dispatcher who’s not Maddie this time asks what she means and he’s, and she’s just like, he’s hanging out of the plane. So the 118 are, are sent to the airport and I’m not really sure what they’re intending them to do because they’re on the ground and these people are in the air. But anyway, um, Bobby’s looking at the plane.

Bex: I’m assuming they’re there to like, mop up everything when it all goes spectacularly wrong.

Ellen: I mean, put the, put a fire out when they land or like, you know, if he falls out, I, I don’t know. But anyway, it doesn’t matter because they saved the day. Um, [00:14:00] Bobby is looking at the plane through, through binoculars so he can, he works out that the parachute is snagged on something.

Um, he, so the, the guy’s hanging underneath the plane or behind the plane and, Eddie says he hadn’t, hasn’t said anything on the radio. Might not be conscious, but yeah, they, they, they’re trying to work out how to get him down and Bobby has like a light bulb on his head, comes up with this crazy plan that just might work.

Bex: I love that he immediately looks at Buck and just goes, “how’s the leg?” And Buck’s like, “Uh, screws are out. We’re feeling great.” He’s like, “Great dispatch?”

Ellen: Have I got a job for you.

Bex: “I need to talk. I need to talk to the pilot.” and then suddenly Bobby’s in the truck, they’re driving down the, uh, the runway.

He’s talking to the pilot, he’s telling the pilot that he needs the pilot to make [00:15:00] an approach. He needs the pilot to try and land. And the pilot’s like, “I’m sorry, what? You want me to land? Even though I’ve got Stefan like waving around underneath me?” And he goes, “No, I just need you to get low enough so that we can grab Stefan,” and the pilot’s like, “Where are you guys?”

And then as like the seventies electric guitar kicks in, which is a song “Spirit of the Sky”, I had no idea what it was called, but I recognized the music ’cause it was my dad’s kind of music. The camera pulls back from Bobby in the cab of the engine truck to reveal Buck and Eddie anchored to the top of the truck.

Ellen: Yes.

Alice: Yep. They are surfing the engine truck.

Bex: And that is actually Ryan and Oliver up there.

Ellen: Oh my God. Wow.

Alice: That’s amazing.

Bex: So the idea is that the plane is going to come down low enough that Buck and Eddie can grab Stefan, release him from the parachute, and then the plane [00:16:00] can land safely. Um, but as we see, it’s not quite as easy as that because you’ve got, this plane has to match the, the, uh, the speed of the truck, but it also has to be low enough that they can reach Stefan, but not so low that they don’t, he doesn’t like bang him into the truck and it takes them a couple of tries before they, they gets it, they get it right.

Ellen: This is an absolutely insane plan. I Yeah. It’s like it can go so wrong. So wrong.

Bex: It’s, it’s about, I mean, this is the man who decided that the best way to stop a runaway car was to get him to run into the back of a truck. So, are we really surprised?

Ellen: Yeah. I mean, I, I’m glad it works. It doesn’t, you know, they, they have one approach and it, it’s too high.

It’s too fast. They can’t grab him or it’s too high. Like they can’t, they can’t get ahold of him, so they try again. Um, [00:17:00] the pilot says something like, he’s gonna have to pla he’s gonna have to land if he’s that low or something.

Bex: Yeah. Bobby wants him to use the flaps, which means he’s gonna put the flaps up and if he does that, it’s going to do something to the plane, which is gonna make it impossible for him to regain altitude.

So once he puts the flaps up, he has to put it down.

Ellen: So it’s like this is the one chance that we have to do this right.

Bex: Yes.

Alice: Yeah. No pressure.

Ellen: Yeah.

Bex: No, but it works, thankfully. Um, Buck, because he’s got like go-go Gadget arms, um, is able to grab Stefan and releases his parachute. He and Eddie pin him to the top of the engine pretty much with their body weight while the plane, uh, lands in front of the truck and then everybody slams on their brakes so they don’t crash into everybody else.

Ellen: Yeah. It’s a, it’s a really, uh, the tension in this scene amazing.

Bex: It’s,

Alice: it’s, it’s so good

Ellen: fun for everybody.

Alice: The music is awesome [00:18:00] too.

Ellen: Yeah.

Bex: It’s an amazing scene and I really, I know we were talking, maybe it was our season one wrap up, that like bemoaning the fact that we don’t get DVDs anymore because this, I would love to have seen how they actually shot this.

I wanna see the behind the scenes Yeah. Of how this worked. How much of it was practical effect, how much of it was CGI?

Ellen: Yeah. ’cause it looked very convincing.

Bex: It was, and apparently Kenny wasn’t on set with his phone to like film tiktoks for this, so we have no idea.

Ellen: Yeah.

Alice: Well, TikTok wasn’t really a thing back then.

Bex: That’s true.

Ellen: When was this? 2000. I mean 2000? 2020!

Alice: Yeah. They were filming it at the end of 2019.

Bex: So, I mean it was a thing, but it was like “Dancify” or something and it was mostly young people just doing like lip syncing and dance challenges and things like that. The grownups didn’t get into it until like Covid and we had nothing better to do.

Alice: Yeah. We had nothing else to do. Yeah, [00:19:00] yeah.

Bex: Uh, but Stefan is fine. They get him on a gurney. Hen thinks that he’s a little beat up, but she’s sure that he will be fine and he will fly again.

Ellen: Yeah. And Lizzie and her mom are fine,

Bex: but Lizzie has to get one more dig in and she turns to her mother and says, I hope that this is going to be the end of your flying and your matchmaking.

And unfortunately she says this as they’re following the gurney, um, towards the ambulance, um, past Buck, Eddie and Bobby who are hanging out on the front of the engine truck and the mother stops goes, “Well, that reminds me,” looks at BA Eddie, and goes, “Are you boys single?” And what I love is that they look at each other like, I don’t know, are we single?

And then looks back at the mother. Like, I know,

Alice: like there is no, no question answered here.

Bex: No, they don’t answer. [00:20:00] And I’m sure it’s meant to be like, uh. Why are we getting asked this question?

Ellen: Yeah. Excuse me?

Bex: It’s really weird, but like the, the clown in my head is going like, I don’t know, are we single? Like, how are we gonna answer that?

So I did a little bit of Googling and while this particular version of events is not real, there have been multiple instances of people getting their parachutes caught on airplanes and having to be rescued.

Alice: Oh.

Bex: Um, I think my favorite one was the one in Denmark about 10 years ago where they just got the plane to circle while they covered a field in like mattresses and foam pads and crash mats.

And then just got the plane to land as softly as it could.

Ellen: Oh.

Bex: And the guy got dragged like about 600 yards along these foam pads, but suffered no serious injuries.

Ellen: Wow.

Alice: Yeah. Wow.

Bex: Um, but the [00:21:00] one that I think that this particular emergency was based on, happened in the forties and it was a paratrooper, um, jumping from a plane.

Um, his parachute got caught on the wheel of the airplane and he ended up dangling underneath. Um, they were flying out of an airfield. Another pilot had just landed, so he just like got back in his plane and it was one of those, it was an open top plane. So he went up in his plane and he flew underneath the paratroopers plane.

He had a knife in his, he had a knife. Somebody gave him a knife just before he took off. Um, and so he like flew under the plane, under the paratrooper and just cut his parachute cord so he could drop into the plane cockpit with him.

Alice: Wow.

Ellen: That’s out of a movie.

Bex: So that’s where I think they got the inspiration from. So it’s not a firetruck, but it’s still pretty damn impressive.

Alice: Yeah. Yeah. That’s insane.

Bex: Yeah.

Ellen: All right. So from that [00:22:00] heroics to a very somber Bathena family,

Bex: it’s a family meeting

Ellen: Grant Nash family.

Bex: And it is, it’s all of them. It’s the kids, it’s Bobby and Athena, and it’s Michael all sitting around the table.

And the kids look nervous as hell because as May said, “Every time you guys sit us down like this, it’s bad news.”

Ellen: Mm-hmm.

Um, it is good and bad news, I guess., They just want like, Athena’s trying to like prod Michael into telling them what’s going on, but he’s not really saying. He’s not really talking. So she’s like, “We wanted to give you an update and what’s happening with your dad.” And then she’s like, looking at Michael going, well?

Bex: Come on Dad.

Ellen: Let’s do it. So he says the good news is the tumor didn’t grow. But it didn’t shrink either. So he’s going to have to have surgery and Harry’s like, “Brain surgery?”

Alice: like no leg surgery [00:23:00] for his brain. Harry, come on.

Bex: So it sounds like over the, the three month, um, hiatus, Michael has been having radiation therapy in the hopes that it would shrink the tumor, um, rather than going in and doing brain surgery to have the, to remove the tumor.

Um, but it hasn’t shrunk the tumor as much as they’d hoped, which kind of leaves The only option is going in and removing the tumor and then having more radiation to get rid of what gets left. Um, which May is absolutely horrified with the idea that they could go in and cut out the tumor and not get all of it and still have to do radiation afterwards, which no one kind of explains to her exactly what it means to be like cutting the tumor out.

So if you tried to get everything, that was a very high risk. If they take part of Michael’s brain, [00:24:00] like the, the really important parts that could, you know, impair his functions. So you wanna remove as much of the tumor as you can without actually cutting away the brain.

Alice: Yeah. ’cause gen, like if it’s just in tissue they can take bigger margins.

Bex: Oh yeah. You just hack it out and then you can replace the tissue with like tissue. You do like skin grafts and Yeah. Replacements. You can’t really do a skin graft on your brain.

Alice: Yeah. Your brain won’t grow back.

Bex: No.

Ellen: Yeah. It’s risky.

Bex: Especially the position, like the part of the brain that Michael’s chin is in, it’s already affecting his behavior. So who knows what excising too much of that area could do.

Ellen: But, um, they both, like both Michael and Athena try and, um, you know, reassure them that they’ve got a great team of doctors, they’re gonna trust them, stay positive, you know, business as usual, like [00:25:00] studying for your maths test. Harry,

Bex: it’s apparently Michael is bribing Harry.

Ellen: Yeah. To get a minus or above, he’s gonna get a, a GameStop card, like a,

Bex: it looks like it’s like an all expenses paid, um, shopping, shopping spree at GameStop. If he gets an A minus or above, which Harry is like, “Oh yeah, I’m gonna go study right now,” and leaves the table. But, um, May, doesn’t really look convinced.

Alice: Yeah. May’s very worried.

Bex: Yeah. I think she understands the implications a little bit more than Harry does.

Alice: Yeah.

Um, but then we go to another doctor’s office

Bex: for a completely pointless scene.

Alice: Yeah, we’re looking at x-rays of legs instead. Um,

Ellen: yeah. It’s a doctor who’s not like Apocalypse World Michael.

Bex: Yeah, I think Apocalypse World Michael is like an emergency doctor, whereas this guy appears, I’m guessing he’s like orthopedics since he is

Alice: Yeah, [00:26:00] he’s, he’s a leg doctor.

Bex: He’s specifically a bone doctor and he, it looks like he’s, he’s Buck’s bone doctor. And in this scene we finally wrap up, um, the, the crush injury story arc, which makes,

Alice: why does Buck’s bone doctor sound so dirty though?

Yeah. Um, but yeah, so they basically, they’ve taken the screws out of his leg. The bone has fused nicely where the screws were. There’s not much scar tissue. Basically he is in perfect health again

Bex: and he no longer

Alice: ’cause they’re like, yeah, this is too much issue.

Bex: And he no longer needs to be on the blood thinners because it was the screws that were causing the blood clots.

So without the screws, he’s no longer at a risk, um, of clotting. Um, so he’s in perfect health.

Alice: Um, he does also tell his doctor that he feels good and he was standing on top of a moving firetruck the other day and didn’t [00:27:00] even twinge. And the doctor was like, “yeah, I’m gonna pretend I didn’t hear that part. Uh, ’cause I don’t wanna operate on your other leg.”

Bex: Yeah. The duck is funny. Like Buck is a little bit, um, like “That, that, that’s it. I don’t need to see you again?” And the doctor’s like, “Well not unless you get crushed by another firetruck.”

Ellen: He’s like, “uh, no thank you.”

Bex: No.

Alice: Um, did you notice like Buck is in full, I,

Ellen: He’s like, “No offense, but I hope I never see you again.”

Alice: Buck’s in a full gown for this scene. Like, what the fuck were they checking with him in a full gown?

Ellen: Yeah. They were X-raying his leg.

Bex: That seems like… American listeners, please tell us, is it normal for you to go to appointments and have to change into a gown? Because I have to tell you that that’s not,

Ellen: On TV, they do that a lot. Right?

Bex: That is not normal in Australia. No. You very rarely get in a gown unless you’ve kind of been admitted into hospital.

Alice: Yeah. Like I, yeah, unless you’re admitted

Ellen: or you’re [00:28:00] having some kind of, um, you know, a, like a breast scan or something that involves having to look at areas underneath your clothes, then you then you sometimes have to have a, a gown.

Alice: When I had an internal ultrasound, um, to check for cysts, I had to get put a gown on, but like I could still wear like a t-shirt and stuff. Like I didn’t have to be fully naked.

Ellen: Yeah.

Bex: But for an x-ray?

Ellen: For ultrasound and stuff.

Alice: Yeah. Like the only time I’ve had to put the gown on is when I’ve I’ve done the ultrasound.

Bex: So yes. American listeners, please tell us, when you go to the doctors or you go to some kind of specialists, do you usually have to gown up

Alice: even if you’re just getting your leg looked at?

Bex: Um, so while Buck is getting a full clean bill of health, um, it is Chimney’s birthday and Maddie is making him a birthday dinner, although she’s not doing very well.

Ellen: Yeah. Oh, he’s trying [00:29:00] to help. He starts chopping something up and Maddie’s like, “what are you doing?” And, um, she like tells him off for helping because it’s his birthday and he’s not allowed to help.

Bex: I’m more concerned with the fact that the recipe calls for water for meatballs, but then doesn’t specify how much water or when to include it in the recipe.

And so she is like forming the meatballs and then dumps like a cup and a half worth of water on top of the fully formed meatballs.

Alice: Yeah. She just has like a little jug and just like shove, like splashes the water on top. It’s like, what is happening?

Bex: So I’ve got, I’ve got a Pyrex jug like that. That’s if it’s the same size as mine, that’s two cups worth.

Alice: Yeah.

Ellen: Yeah.

Bex: Like, like, you know.

Alice: But why on top of them? I don’t understand.

Bex: I don’t understand either,

Alice: but the timing of this though was so funny because Bex and I were discussing meatball recipes with another friend of ours, Lucy, and like, [00:30:00] literally they were discussing meatball recipes and then all of a sudden Maddie’s making meatballs with water.

And I’m just like, what? Like, is she boiling them?

Bex: But no, I mean, if you’re gonna boil them, you boil them in the sauce. Yeah. And if, I mean, she says it helps them putting the water in helps the meatballs turn in, not turn into tiny little rocks. If anybody who’s listening understands, like, I put milk in mine to moisten them,

Alice: did we look up any water-based meatball recipes?

Bex: I, it just horrified me too much. I don’t think I wanted to, um,

Ellen: You know I would put, like, I put egg in and stuff to hold it together, like I

Bex: Oh yeah, yeah. Put the egg into mine.

Alice: Yeah. Egg and breadcrumbs.

Bex: Yeah.

Ellen: You want it to be sticky, not, not runny.

Bex: Like it’s, I put a little bit of milk into like soften the breadcrumbs, which just helps keep it moist.

But there is no water anywhere near my meatballs. And if you’re gonna boil them, you would boil them in the [00:31:00] sauce.

Ellen: Yeah. Strange.

Alice: Yeah. So I, all I’ve seen with, I’ve just Googled “meatball recipe water”, and the only time they mention water is to, um, like put the breadcrumbs in it, to soften it.

Bex: Okay, but you don’t use a fucking cup and a half.

Alice: Oh wait, hang on. Just in time for Father’s Day, ultra tender meatballs with a surprising magic ingredient. Water and lots of it. Okay, let’s see. Other great meatball recipes rely on milk or salty cheese or even mayonnaise for the tenderness and personality. This one has the most unexpected secret ingredient of all: lots of water.

Bex: Okay, but define lots of water. And when are they putting it in?

Alice: No, they’re putting it in on the mixing stage

Bex: so they’re not like, no, Jesus Christ, Maddie. Okay. So even if water is a part of the recipe, it’s not at the stage that she’s doing it.

Alice: No, and it’s, it’s again to rehydrate the bread crumbs.

Bex: The bread crumbs, okay. Yeah. So she’s [00:32:00] just all kinds of wrong.

Alice: I dunno what she’s doing.

Ellen: She says, “If you wanna help, figure out how long the meatballs need to cook in the sauce, because I would hate for your birthday dinner to kill us.” So she is cooking the meatballs in the sauce.

Bex: So I don’t know why she puts them in the water.

I mean, it all works out because apparently they are very edible. Either that or, you know, typical not quite teenage boy, but still growing boy is shoveling them down. Um, but yeah, this, this just not good.

Ellen: Um, we’re just gonna have to try making these meatballs with heaps of water.

Bex: No!

Ellen: And see the results.

Bex: Not in this economy. I’m not spending that much on mince and eggs just for something that’s completely inedible.

Ellen: That’s fair enough.

Alice: Anyway, yeah. So Maddie sucks at cooking. Um, Chimney also used to suck at cooking. She, so maybe Maddie needs to, to hang out with, with Bobby.

Ellen: She’s following a recipe apparently. So, I don’t know.

Bex: Chim comes back from [00:33:00] the bedroom where he has located his phone, discovered that he has a voicemail from his father, which he is absolutely shocked at because his father never remembers his birthday. And just as he starts to listen.

Alice: Yeah. He’s so excited, it’s so sad.

Bex: Just as he starts to listen to the voicemail, there is a knock on the door.

 So, Maddie says, “no, you go listen to your voicemail. I’ll answer the door.” And she opens the door and there is a young Korean man standing there, and they’re both just sort of staring at each other.

Ellen: She’s like, “Hello, can I help you?”

Bex: Uh, the young man asks if Howard is home, and Maddie’s like, “Yeah, he is. And like, who are you? Why are you standing at our doorstep?” And the young man introduces himself as Albert Maddie’s like, “okay, cool. Are you a friend of Chim’s?” And Chim appears behind her and says, “No, [00:34:00] that’s my brother.”

Alice: What a shock. Considering the synopsis didn’t tell us anything about this.

Bex: Oh, no. Complete surprise. And so we cut to a few minutes later where Albert is shoving meatballs and garlic bread in his face.

Ellen: The synopsis did tell us about this.

Alice: No, that’s what I was saying. It wasn’t a surprise.

Ellen: I was like, hang on a minute. I’m sure I remember the synopsis saying that. Okay.

Bex: Yeah, I mean they even said like, Albert played by John Harlan Kim, just, you know. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

Ellen: Chimney’s half brother. So no surprises. Okay. Alright.

Bex: And I mean, we, the audience knew that he has a half brother because we’ve met Albert before, but Maddie definitely had no idea that Albert existed.

So I, yeah. So either Maddie’s meatballs turned out okay even after she like drowned them, or Albert is starving after taking a, I don’t even wanna think about how long flight from [00:35:00] Korea. Um, or he’s just a growing boy and growing boys just eat a lot. Mm-hmm. Or a combination of all three. I don’t know. Uh, but he’s very polite and he tells Maddie that she’s an amazing cook.

He wouldn’t say that if he saw the way she was making the meatballs, but based off the end result, apparently she’s an amazing cook.

Ellen: Yeah. I didn’t realize until this point that Chim and Albert had never actually met each other before. When Maddie actually says, I can’t believe you guys have never met before.

And I’m like, I can’t believe I’ve never met before either. I didn’t know that.

Bex: Well, no, because Albert’s been in Korea and Chim’s been in America the entire time.

Ellen: Yeah. And ’cause his dad went back to, I think we find, like it’s explained later, I mean, to me, who couldn’t remember it much about the previous episode because his dad went, his dad left Chim and his mom in America and went back to Korea and had his other family. So

Bex: that started a whole [00:36:00] new family. Yeah. And so Chim has like seen Albert through Skype and we get told that he got photos sent to him by his stepmother, but yeah, they’ve never met in person.

Ellen: Yeah. And he said, Albert says, “I’m sorry about your birthday. If I’d known, I would’ve brought you something besides myself.”

It’s like, oh, he’s crashed his birthday dinner.

Bex: Yeah.

Ellen: But apparently the message that the, their father had left for Chim was not a birthday message. It was, um, all he could talk about was the fact that Albert had run away from home.

Bex: And Albert just says like, “I did not run away.” And both of the grownups just look at him like, really?

It’s like, “Yeah, okay. I ran away, but not from him. I ran away from him. You know how he is.” And Chim’s like, “Yeah, no, I don’t really know who, how he is.”

Ellen: Yeah, it’s funny, I was expecting, like, I, I, I guess I, I know now that this, this actor is [00:37:00] Australian, so he’s doing really well with a, with a foreign accent already.

But, um, to my ears anyway, um, I was kind of expecting him to have less of an American accent and more of a Korean accent.

Bex: And I think they’re probably walking a very fine line on how much of an accent John uses. So obviously he’s, he is, for those of you who don’t know, John is Australian. Yeah. Um, so. He’s, he’s got an Australian, normally he has an Australian accent, like it’s a little bit American ish because he spends so much time in America.

He, most of his work these days is in America. Um, so it’s kind of like Oliver, you know, Oliver’s mostly British but sort of slides into American.

Alice: Yeah. Occasionally American comes out and we’re like, what was that?

Bex: So yeah, John’s already putting on an accent, but I guess they’re, they’re trying, they had to decide how much of a “English is not my first language” kind of [00:38:00] accent they wanted to put on because there is the risk of just going completely stereotyped and being very, very racist in their depiction of Albert.

Um. So they’ve gone with the American accent as though he’s learned from an American speaker or from American television, but a very formal, very stilted English. So he doesn’t use contractions. He’s very, uh, almost very flat in his, the way he speaks at times.

So apparently he has graduated from university. The reason that he ran was he’s graduated from university and he apparently has to go to graduate school now. Um, but he does not want to do either. He does nott wanna go to graduate school, or he doesn’t wanna go to graduate school to study what his father wants him to study. Um, so that’s why he ran. He ran to [00:39:00] strike out on his own to stop living in his father’s shadow.

Ellen: Now, Chim can see the family resemblance.

Bex: Yeah, I like that. That’s like, yeah. Maddie asks Albert, “So what do you want to do?” And Albert’s just like, “I have no idea.” And Chim’s like, “Oh, well there’s a family resemblance.”

Ellen: Yes.

Bex: So he’s going to strike out on his own onto Chim’s couch. Which appar… which Maddie Green Lights.

Ellen: Only if it isn’t any trouble? Yeah. Maddie’s just like, yeah, of course you can. It’s fine.

Bex: Maddie, where are you living that you can immediately just say that it’s okay. Like is she living with Chim at this point?

Alice: I don’t know, ’cause she got out of the…

Bex: yeah, she got out of the murder dome. But now where is, where did she end up living?

Ellen: Well, we don’t, we don’t, we never see her anywhere else, so, no.

Bex: Yeah. Maybe she, she seems to spend a lot of time at Chimney’s place.

Ellen: Yeah.

Alice: Interesting. It’s almost like they’re dating.

Ellen: I thought they agreed they were dating.

Alice: I [00:40:00] think they are now.

Bex: Yeah. So after they’ve, um, resolved that issue, uh, Maddie proposes a toast and everybody also raise your glasses because we’re gonna get the episode title sort of, um, and they toast to seizing the day and Chim gets up to get himself some more wine and sort of mutters bitterly to himself and seizing my birthday.

Yeah.

Alice: Chim’s not too impressed.

Ellen: Okay, so we’re going to the fishing. So this man and his wife, Roger and Cheryl,

Bex: we actually get names.

Ellen: Yes, yes. The man is having, and the Roger is having a great time fishing in this catch and release lake, and

Bex: I think Cheryl’s having a great time sitting and reading.

Ellen: Cheryl. Yeah, she’s sitting in the sun. Not really interested in fishing, but she’s having a nice time.

Bex: It’s, she’s so [00:41:00] engrossed in her book. That, uh, like Roger catches a trout and he’s all, you know, really excited. There’s something about it being a rainbow trout and it’s so good. There’s gonna be a pot of gold at the end of it.

And she’s just like, “Uhhuh honey, that’s nice.” Doesn’t even look up from a book. Um, and he gets pouty. He’s like, but, and “mom, you weren’t even looking!” Like he said,

Ellen: it’s like, “I thought we were doing this together?”

Bex: Together. And she’s like, “no, I said that I would come with you. I did not say, Roger, please teach me how to catch a fish that I’m not even allowed to keep.”

And I feel so much for Cheryl because I have been in this situation.

Ellen: Oh,

Bex: mm-hmm. My ex was an angler. He loved to go fishing. Um, and in the early, early stage of our relationship, like he begged me to come fishing with him. So he took me out to a lake to teach me how to fish in. The only thing I caught were weeds and algae.

And I was fucking miserable. [00:42:00] Oh, no. I would have, I would’ve, I would’ve quite happily have gone with him and like sat and read a book while he did that. But no, he insisted that I actually try and cast and I hated it, so

Ellen: That’s fair. I’m with Cheryl on this one. It can be very boring.

Alice: It’s so hard to, I used to go out in the boat and I’d just be sitting up the front reading.

Uh, they’d be like, look at that. And I’m like, sh

Bex: Apparently Cheryl is better than all of us. ’cause she puts down her book when Roger tells her to seize the day.

Ellen: Ah, yeah.

Bex: And allows him to show her how to bait her hook and how to cast.

And she even catches a fish at the end of it. Um, although while he was catching amazing rainbow trout, she just catches his tiny little catfish.

Ellen: It is a really tiny fish.

Bex: It’s, [00:43:00] I think Cheryl, even there’s a line where she comments that the bait was bigger than the fish. Yeah. Um, and she wants to, she’s taken it off the hook and she’s about to throw it back and Roger’s like, “No, no, no, no. We need to get a picture of it, you know, document it, picture it didn’t happen.”

Um, and so Cheryl’s like holds up the fish with this really sort of dubious look in her face and Roger’s like, “No, no, no. That’s not how you do it.” And so he does like the typical man on dating app holding a fish pose.

Ellen: Oh yeah.

Bex: Um, which is, you know, only sort of stage one. Stage two is he tips his head back and holds the fish above his open mouth, like he’s about to eat the fish. Um, which jokes on him because he does end up eating the fish. Ugh. Because the fish slips from his fingers straight into his open mouth and because of like the angle of his throat is completely open and the fish just slides straight down his, his throat [00:44:00]

Alice: gross.

Bex: So Cheryl of course calls 9-1-1 and Maddie answers this call.

Ellen: She sends the 118 as she does.

Bex: She swears she works on commission. Yeah. Chimney gotta get paid. Does she split between Chimney or, and Buck like 50 50? How does that work?

Ellen: I don’t know. They both go together, so it’s fine.

Bex: Yeah, I don’t know. But so the 118 are dispatched, uh, they, they make their way across to where, please tell me my eyes were not deceiving me and Cheryl was not doing CPR by pressing on Roger’s stomach.

Alice: Oh, Jesus.

Bex: Because that’s what it looked like.

Ellen: Uh, he’s not breathing his airway’s blocked.

Bex: Well, yeah. ’cause he is got a fish like down his throat.

Ellen: Yeah. And they, they sure. Um, then that the, there was no hook, like they got the hook out [00:45:00] or Cheryl got the hook out.

Bex: Um, when they get there, Roger’s mouth is like covered in blood and there’s spatters of blood on his chest.

So I’m thinking, so Bobby’s obviously thinking that the hook is caught and it’s tearing up his esophagus. That’s why his, his mouth is bloody. Um, but turns out no, it turns out Catfish and Alice can probably tell us if Chim is correct in this, um, catfish have little spikes on all the fins. It’s,

Alice: they do, actually, I’ve,

Bex: and that’s what’s shredding up the throat.

Alice: Probably, probably not all catfish, I don’t know. But um, yeah, we’ve like caught some at work in nets and they’ve got stuck in the net and we’ve had to like try and get them out.

Ellen: Ugh. So it is actually stabbing into his windpipe. Ugh.

Bex: Yeah. Hen gets the laryngoscope down there and she’s thinking that it’s either the, um, the barbed fins or the, the gills are, um, lodged in his [00:46:00] trachea.

Funnily enough, she’s got the, like the little camera down and the, the fish is tail is still wagging. Yeah, it’s wiggling around. And I’m seriously doubting that that fish would still be alive at this point. Like, how long can a fish live out of water?

Ellen: I don’t know. But, um,

Bex: Alice, how long can a fish live out of water?

You’re our, you’re a pet expert, a fish expert.

Alice: Um, yeah, it, like, it probably wouldn’t still be alive, but I don’t know how long, dunno how long it’s been since it went in

Bex: or how long it took for the 118 to respond.

Alice: Yeah.

Bex: Okay. I’m,

Ellen: I don’t know how you watch this without gagging, you two. So I was just like, oh,

Bex: I love that they, there’s a shot where Hen is successfully retrieving the fish and she pulls it out of his mouth and they cut to one of the extras.

Who is sort of standing watching and he turns away and [00:47:00] vomits.

I’m just like, yes, sir. I feel that.

Alice: Yeah. It just, it cracked me up so much when the tail wiggled on the, I’m just like, yep, okay.

Ellen: Roger, just starts coughing up blood and it’s like,

Bex: yeah, as soon as the fish is, is out of his throat, he immediately wakes up again. ’cause apparently on these shows, you know, that’s what happens. They,

Ellen: yeah. You don’t stay unconscious.

Bex: No, no. You immediately wake up. So they decide to take him to the er, er to make sure the fish didn’t do any serious damage.

And as they wheel Roger away, Roger said this, this bit’s really weird and I’ve never really understood it until I, I read a little bit further ahead. Um, he says, “This is better than watching paint dry.” It’s such a random sentence. It almost feels like a callback to a previous conversation they’ve had.

Ellen: Um, does she not say anything [00:48:00] about watching people fish is, like watching paint dry?

Bex: No. There’s nothing about that in the first part. But then I discovered, um, that the promo for next week, next week’s episode specifically mentions a couple’s fishing date goes awry.

Alice: Yeah. So this episode was actually supposed to be in next week’s episode, so

Bex: this scene was meant to be in next week’s episode, and they’ve cut it from that episode and put it in this one.

And I’m wondering if, if it had en when they shot it for the next week’s episode Fools, um, whether it was a much, much longer scene and they have,

Ellen: well, it only needed to be a little bit longer, just enough for them to mention paint drying.

Bex: Yeah. I wonder if there was a conversation that happened before they went fishing that was talking about like, I’d rather watch paint dry.

And then they, they cut that and, or maybe they put in something about, you know, seizing the [00:49:00] day to make it fit into this episode.

Alice: See, now I wanna know if the seize the day line seemed dubbed, hang on. Just gotta check something.

Bex: Or maybe they didn’t shoot it until, and so they sort of rewrote it on the, the day, like, actually no, we’re not gonna put it in that episode.

We’re gonna put it in this one. So we’re gonna rewrite that scene. Um, and it was a last minute edit, but yeah, that line, I, I wanna know what was going on. Like, what did we lose when they switched it from one episode to the other? And why did they switch it? Was this episode running so short that they needed to put in this scene?

Yeah. Or was next week’s episode running so long that they they couldn’t include it?

Ellen: Yeah. Well I didn’t notice any extra long, like cut scenes or like, you know, um, intermediate scenes or anything.

Bex: Five minutes of a truck? Yeah. Driving around aimlessly? No, no, this episode was packed already. Oh. So although we [00:50:00] did have, like, you’ve got this one, you’ve got that random little scene with Buck in the doctor’s surgery that I don’t think they needed, but

Alice: When he says seize the day, he’s not on screen.

Bex: Oh. So maybe it was ADR.

Alice: So I think it was ADR

Bex: just to make it fit the episode. Interesting.

Ellen: They didn’t have enough seizing of the day. They needed to add some

Alice: Yeah, I reckon it was ADR because she’s looking like she’s looking up and you hear him like he’s off screen. Yeah. And you just hear his voice say, “Come on babe. Seize the day.”

Bex: Yeah.

Alice: Okay. Interesting.

Ellen: Hmm. All right. Where are we next?

Bex: Chim is having

Ellen: Chim’s at home,

Bex: a Skype conversation with his father.

Alice: Lucky Chim.

Ellen: Yeah. And this is one of those odd conversations that, um, where his father is speaking in Korean and Chim is replying to him in English and they both completely understand each other, um, which is fine.

It, it’s [00:51:00] just an odd way of having a conversation. I don’t know.

Bex: I think we’ve had this discussion. I mean, we might have had this discussion during “Chimney Begins” where we had other scenes of Chim talking to his father, and there was like discussions of how much Korean does Kenneth actually know? Um, versus whether it’s like a character choice of like, no, I’m American.

I’m going to speak English. And his father, ’cause his father obviously knows English because he came to America, he was working in America, but he’s obviously, he’s making a conscious choice of like, no, I am in Korea. I am Korean, I’m going to speak Korean. And so they’re both like being very stubborn and refusing.

Alice: Yeah. I think they’re both being stubborn.  

Bex: Refusing to, to, to share the language with the other person, but um, but yes, they both understand each other completely because while Chim is not, is choosing not to speak Korean, he obviously still understands it enough that he knows what his father’s saying. [00:52:00] Um, which is basically that Chim should have not allowed Albert to stay with him, that he should have sent him back home to Korea.

Ellen: Yeah. He says “He’s a boy. He cannot be trusted to make decisions on his own.” Chim’s like, “He’s 20.” He, he can do what he likes, basically.

Bex: Yeah. He’s a grownup.

Ellen: Yeah.

Bex: Um, and he counters that, you know, he was making those kinds of decisions for himself well before he was 20. Um, and his father just says, well, “No, that was your choice.”

I. Chim’s like, “Hmm, was it though?” And Mr. His father says, uh, “You are not gonna blame me for your failures.” And Chim’s counters again. He says like, “I haven’t failed. I have a good life. I have a good job. You know, I’m saving lives.” Um, and his father comes back with “And foolishly risking your own. I want better than that for my son.”

And that knocks [00:53:00] Chim for six. He just goes, “Your son singular. Great. Glad I know where we stand.”

Ellen: Yeah. At first I thought he was talking about Chim, but No, Chim just took it the other way.

Bex: Oh no. I don’t think he was ever talking about Chim. Like he wants better than that for Albert. Albert is his son. I don’t know who he considers Chim at this stage, but not his son.

Ellen: Yeah. And then his dad hangs up on him.

Bex: He looks visibly upset with this conversation.

Ellen: I wonder if he even wished him happy birthday in the end.

Bex: Probably not.

Alice: I doubt he remembered.

Ellen: Uh, all right. So it is time to go to work at the 118 station. Um, there’s all sitting in the kitchen eating, eating cake.

Alice: Yeah. ’cause at least they remembered about Chimney’s birthday.

Ellen: Chim still looks a bit, he, he still looks pretty down even though that he’s having birthday cake. And Bobby asked if he can take some [00:54:00] cake home for Harry and May. Because there must be heaps of it by the sound of it. And so, yeah.

Bex: I don’t know, it looks like it’s not one of those giant sheet cakes.

It’s a, it’s one of those like normal cake size boxes. So I’m guessing either nobody else in the 118 got any cake or it’s a deceptively large cake, or they had multiple cakes.

Ellen: This is enough cake to take some home, then yeah,

Alice: maybe Chim wasn’t in a cake mood.

Bex: It was enough cake for like the core members of the 118 and nobody else got one.

But the mention of Harry and May prompts Buck to ask about Michael, and we get an update about the decision to go for surgery. Bobby tells us that he, he thinks that Harry is okay with the news, but that he’s worried about me because she’s got a better understanding of what’s going on, which causes Chim to sort of mutter about, “Older siblings don’t have the luxury of blissful ignorance. They understand the truth even if they don’t want to,” and Bobby kind of looks at Buck like, [00:55:00] what the hell is that all about? But for once, Buck knows what that’s all about. Yeah, Buck’s got the inside scoop, so he turns, but uh, he knows what’s going on, but apparently he’s not got the memo that apparently he is not supposed to know what is going on.

’cause he turns to Chim and says, “Oh, I guess things aren’t going too well with Albert.” And Chim just looks at him like, “How the fuck do you… wait. Maddie told you?” Maddie told you. And Buck is like, “Oh. Damn. Um, sorry. Was she not supposed to tell me?” ’cause like they tell each other everything.

Ellen: Yeah. So now we went over this last time.

Everyone tells everyone everything. You know, they’ve gossips. There’s no secrets in this place.

Bex: Nope. Um, so that lets the, uh, the younger brother out of the bag and Chim has to tell everybody that he has a younger half brother from Korea who showed up on his doorstep, which they all think is awesome.

Chim’s not so [00:56:00] convinced.

Alice: Yeah. Eddie’s quite excited. But yeah, Chim’s like, I don’t think you need to meet them. Meet him.

Bex: Yeah, he’s gonna be going home soon. Um, but what’s interesting is while the men are at the table gossiping, hens off in the background, working feverishly on a computer, and Chim is telling everyone that, um, even though like he shares DNA biologically his family with Albert, he still feels like a stranger.

And then Hen sort of pops up behind Chim and starts handing out papers to everybody

Alice: from a folder too. It’s very organized.

Bex: She’s got a manila folder like Karen. Karen knows her shit. Um, but as she’s handing out papers, she tells Chim that family comes to us in different ways, which I really appreciate because there are some writers on this show who will remain unnamed who push very hard blood family and blood relations and biological family. But I love [00:57:00] that Lindsay is pushing the found family aspect of the show

Ellen: and she tells Chim that, um, don’t think you’re gonna send him home without meeting all of us.

Bex: Uh, thankfully Chim gets saved by Eddie, very confusedly handing up, holding up the piece of paper and asking he what it is that she just handed out.

Alice: Um, yeah, apparently Eddie can’t read because it’s like, there’s a heading that clearly says talking points regarding Henrietta and Karen.

Bex: I’m pretty sure that he, like, he read that it was talking points regarding Henrietta and Karen. He just had no idea why he was being handed talking points regarding Henrietta and Karen.

Alice: Um, Eddie is there just like, who the fuck is Henrietta?

Bex: So it turns out that, um, as we saw at the end of the last episode, um, Karen and hen have moved forward on the idea of becoming foster parents. And they have put down the [00:58:00] members of the 118 as their character references, and one or all of them are about to get calls where they need to vouch for the two of them.

And Hen is adamant that they need to sing their praises to the highest of heavens. And specifically these very 26 praises. Um, because

Ellen: she’s listed 26 qualities.

Bex: The stakes, the stakes are very, very high and she doesn’t need any of them going off book.

Alice: Yeah. They, she doesn’t want them improvising, which is fair because the 118 have one brain cell that bounces in between them.

Besides Hen who generally has the brain cell

Ellen: and, and when interviewed they make up stories.

Bex: And considering this, um, Alice what we’ve seen Buck can do when he’s trying to be helpful. Um, yeah. It’s not gonna end well for Hen

Alice: Yeah. “She drives an ambulance one time she hit a car, but that fine, [00:59:00] like that wasn’t her fault.”

Bex: Oh my God. But no, instead apparently Buck needs to explain, needs to tell the interviewer that, um, Hen plays the bassoon. She was first chair and Buck is probably very willing to do that if he knew what the hell a bassoon was.

Yeah. I do love that. When I, um, when I get these, the notes that we’re working off the transcripts, there’s no attribution to them. It’s just lines of dialogue and I have to like move them around and add the attribution and as soon as I got to the line, what’s a bassoon? Without even watching the episode, I just immediately gave that line a buck.

’cause I knew out of all of them, he was gonna be the one who’s gonna turn to somebody and go, what’s a bassoon? Yeah.

Alice: It’s very Buck. Oh, bless his little face.

Bex: Didn’t see he being a bassoon player though.

Alice: No, [01:00:00] no. I could see it. It’s definitely a band geek sort of thing.

Bex: Oh yeah. Yeah. I’m like, I can imagine that she was a band geek.

I specifically can imagine her being like marching band. Um, just didn’t see her playing the bassoon. I don’t know what instrument I saw her playing, but

Ellen: she’d probably play a mean trombone or like a clarinet or something.

Alice: I was thinking clarinet.

Bex: And then isn’t clarinet just a bassoon on steroid, isn’t it bassoon just like clarinet on steroids.

Alice: On steroids, exactly.

Ellen: Like the bassoon is like a, an oboe on steroids, I guess.

Bex: Yeah. But similar. But isn’t an oboe just like, like you start with the, the clarinet and it evolves into

Ellen: Yeah. Oboes are next level, because it’s harder, yes.

Bex: And that like the, the mega evolution of the clarinet. Yeah. Yeah. Like Pokemon

Ellen: different reeds. Different, yeah. Anyway,

Alice: the bassoon’s, the Charizard of the family. Yes.

Ellen: Yes. [01:01:00] Okay. So next emergency.

Bex: Yes.

Ellen: Uh, a man’s working on his front garden. Um, he’s doing something

Bex: I couldn’t work out whether it was just fixing the garden or it was actually renovating the entire house. There’s also concrete around in the garden, like building materials, right? There’s scaffolding, there’s piles of stuff, there’s con, there’s a stack of bags of concrete up front.

Um, but it’s all kind of a moot point because according to Harrison, who has just pulled up in his car, that’s not his house anymore,

Ellen: um, yeah, he’s defaulted on the loan. “You, you keep ignoring me and the notices that we sent. But, um, you can’t sell this house if you don’t own it. And we’re seizing your property.”

Yeah,

Bex: he tries, he gives, um, the not property owner, uh, who is Mr. [01:02:00] Blakely, um, a cash for keys offer. The bank is willing to pay for his moving expenses if he signs over the deed. Um, and Mr. Blakely basically takes the cash for keys offer and tells him where to shove it.

Ellen: He just checks it on the ground.

Bex: He is like, actually, he says, you know, like, um, Mr. Blakely says, “Have you ever heard of the stand your ground law?” And Harrison says, like, “It’s not your ground!” So he calls 9-1-1 to report a trespasser on the property. Um, but before, Maddie can get sort of any more information out of him other than the address. Mr. Blakely has decided that the best way to handle this situation is to get into his little mini skid steer loader that he’s been using for the construction work and run Harrison down.

Alice: Literally, he just runs him over. [01:03:00]

Bex: We don’t see any of that, because we cut to Maddie at this point. And all, Maddie, we can hear what Maddie hears, which is just an engine revving and Harrison going, “No, no, no, no, no!” Um, and then um, Mr. Blakely comes on the line and just says, I think I’ve done a terrible thing.

Alice: Yeah. No shit.

Ellen: It’s when I watched this the other day, um, I was kind of looking, looking away from the screen at this point, and I hadn’t seen the, the little digger that he runs him over with until he started running him over with it. And I’m like, well, where the hell did that thing come from? He was just digging in his garden a minute ago and now he has a little digger.

Bex: I’ll say, they didn’t do like very, obviously the camera like cuts to the digger being in the corner and like holds on it for five seconds so that you know that it was there, it was just tucked in the background.

Ellen: He was just in the background. Yeah. Yeah.

Bex: So, yeah. Um,

Ellen: but yes, yes. All we can hear over the nine one one call is just the guy [01:04:00] going, “ah!”

Bex: And then when we cut back to Saddle Peak Drive, we see that, uh, poor Harrison is like wedged under the caterpillar treads of the little loader.

Ellen: Yeah. Ouch.

Bex: Yeah, we go to commercial, we come back, we’re gonna continue with the same scene. And as the 118 arrive, uh, Mr. Blakely is being very, very helpful. He like runs out to greet Bobby and sort of usher him in to show him like where it’s happened. Um, and I think I’ve watched far too many sort of crime and police procedurals where people have like, “It was an accident, I made a mistake.”

And then they like dismember the body and like bury it in like five different states and it takes forensic anthropologist to put it back together again. Um, it was very refreshing to see somebody make a mistake and then immediately own up for it and try to fix it.

Ellen: Yeah. Yeah. He could have just run [01:05:00] away, but no, he stayed around.

Bex: He could have stayed like backed over him and backed over him again and then buried him under, like, under the house or something. I don’t know.

Ellen: Yeah.

Alice: You mean the bank’s house?

Ellen: But he does hang around long enough to get arrested.

Bex: Well, he sticks around long enough. Like he, and he doesn’t put up a fight when they do arrest him, so I appreciate that.

Ellen: Um, yeah, so they do manage to get the digger off the guy off Harrison, by

Bex: once again, we have Hen operating heavy machinery,

Ellen: Bobcat driver Hen

Alice: we do,

Ellen: she loves it. She manages to get the lever, the, the machine up on its bucket, to get, you know, enough of it off the ground that they can pull him out and like by yanking him out like that must have made his injury like so much worse.

Bex: Even worse. Yeah.

Ellen: Yeah. Like, [01:06:00] I don’t know if, yeah. Anyway, obviously they didn’t know that he had a hole in him.

Bex: Like he couldn’t stay under here. They had to get him out and like, I think it, it’s like the, the damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

Ellen: Yeah. What else are they gonna do? They can’t just, they can’t climb under there to see what’s going on with him, so,

Bex: no, no. But um, yeah, they get him out. Chim says that he feels something and they have to turn him. Um, they’ve ruled out spinal injury, so they flip him onto his side and Chim peels back his shirt and. There is like little loopy sausages stuck to, um, Harrison’s back because there was a hole in his back and his intestines are now hanging on the outside of his body.

And this would be the point where Raul would start screaming “Goooore!!!”

Ellen: Right.

Bex: I love it as they’re discussing this, Mr. [01:07:00] Blakely sort of like, “Wait, he got eviscerated?” Like comes around, looks and is like, “Oh my God.” And it just bolts.

Ellen: Yeah. He’s going off to throw up.

Bex: Exactly. Yeah. He very much is.

Ellen: But, but the paramedics are very much like in control of this. They, they notice that his spine’s okay. Like they make sure he is moving, his spine’s okay. They, they like clean him up. They pat it up, give him loads of morphine. Apparently.

Bex: Apparently Eddie has seen this before, which does not surprise me considering where his, like medical experience has come from. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Um, so yeah, they’re, they’re dousing the, um, afflicted area with what’s either saline or sterile water to try and wash away all the dirt that got lodged in it when they dragged him out of the hole.

Ellen: Oh yeah.

Alice: Um, and then they strap [01:08:00] him onto the backboard on his side.

Bex: Yeah, so obviously they can’t have him lying on his intestines while they’re outside of his body. Um, and they can’t have him on his stomach either. ’cause, you know, he still needs to be able to breathe and shit, so yeah, he’s like, he’s in the recovery position, strapped to the gurney so he can’t move.

Ellen: Bobby calls the head to the hospital to make sure they know what’s coming and to have the surgeon standing by. ’cause he’s gonna need to be stitched up immediately.

Bex: Yeah. You think?

There is a nice transition here. So LAPD show up, um, and they arrest, they arrest Blakely and he’s sort of staring after the ambulance going like, “I can’t believe I did this.”

And then we cut to Harrison inside the ambulance saying, “I can’t believe he did that.”

Ellen: I can’t believe he’s still like conscious. I mean, I guess he’s been given a bunch of morphine, so he’s like high as a kite, but he,

Bex: oh, he’s so high.

Ellen: He does say, [01:09:00] “I hate my job. I need to change my life. Am I a terrible person?” it’s like, yeah, you are flying high right now.

Alice: I love that he’s, he does try and say Carpe Diem at some point, but comes out completely wrong.

Bex: Carpe Deum, which just always reminds me of, um, that epi, that line in Buffy or Buffy says something about where somebody says like, Carpe diem. And I think Xander mistranslate that as “Fish of the Day” and Willow has to very patiently say, no, not carp, Carpe and seize the day.

Ellen: Yeah.

Bex: Um, Chim and Hen are in the back of the ambulance with Harrison and they’re amused that he’s talking. They’re pretty sure that it’s the morphine. Um, but it’s a good sign. As long as he’s talking, he’s conscious, he’s fine. So they just decide to keep him talking. I love this bit. Um, so Chim decides to continue the conversation thread and says, “So if [01:10:00] you weren’t a bank guy, what do you think you’d be doing?”

And Harrison says, “Well, I wanted to be a firefighter as a kid, but now I don’t think I have the guts.” And Chim and Hen just look at each other.

Ellen: They just laugh.

Bex: They wanna laugh so badly and that they don’t know whether it’s appropriate. But then Harrison starts laughing at his own joke and they just start cracking up.

Ellen: Oh God. Don’t have the guts anymore, buddy.

Alice: It’s so bad.

Ellen: They’re not supposed to be on the outside of your body.

Bex: Yeah. As they’re coming up the stairs and they’re approaching the table. ’cause um, I mean, I don’t know why there’s he saying that because it’s. Like Eddie and Buck and Bobby, and they were there and they, they were all there. They saw all what it was. So like, they know what his story is gonna be. Um, but they don’t get to, um, go first and explain the, like, [01:11:00] talk about the grossest cases they ever, they’ve, um, they’ve ever had while they eat.

Because one of the firefighters steps to the side and we see that Albert is sitting at the, um, at the table and everybody’s having a great time with him. And actually Albert says that he called, he wanted to see where they work, and Bobby said that you were on your way back from the hospital. Chim is not impressed.

Alice: Yeah. So Albert’s like, “Oh, I heard you saved a man’s life.” And Chim’s like, “Oh, we don’t really talk about that stuff here.”

Bex: No. But Hen gets so excited, she’s like, “Yes, tell your brother what we just did. He’s gonna love this story.” And Chim just glares at her and says, “Yeah, no, we don’t talk about that.”

Alice: But like, Chim just walked in going grossest cases to talk about while we eat, and now he is just like, oh, we don’t talk about that’s,

Bex: We don’t talk about Bruno’s like No,

Ellen: He’s just not interested in uh, getting to know Albert.

Bex: No. Even though everybody else is like Buck saying, like, “He even gave Cap a [01:12:00] tutorial on how to make Mandela!” Albert’s like, “They’re Mandu.”.

Dumplings, which Albert says, you know, “They’re great. You can make them in advance. You can freeze them and then just pop ’em in a pan and eat them for lunch.” Um, he takes them to ball games as snacks and like Eddie’s little radar goes up and wake, “Wait, you like baseball? Like, we should go to a baseball game together.” He’s col like he’s collecting all of the 118 members.

Ellen: Yeah.

Bex: And to Chim’s absolute horror.

Ellen: Yeah. “He’s like, he’s not gonna be here that long,” but Hen just kind of punches Chim, “Hi, my name’s Hen. I’m your brother’s longtime bestie.”

Bex: “I’m sure you have a lot of questions about your brother,” and Albert’s like, “Yes, I do. Do you know why they call him Chimney?”

Everybody would like to know why they call him Chimney. Yes, please. Somebody tell us why they call him Chimney.

Ellen: This is definitely my,

Alice: but instead [01:13:00] we go to a commercial.

Ellen: This is my favorite ongoing joke. This one

I love they keep bringing it up.

Bex: I hope they never tell us.

Alice: No, me too.

Bex: Because as soon as they tell us it’s, it’s not, it’s not gonna live up to the hype.

Alice: Yeah, no. Like I’m almost finished New Girl. And at the end of, so there’s seven seasons of New Girl. I’m on season seven. At the end of season six, they have a whole episode about Schmidt’s first name because it’s not revealed, like they go to great lengths to hide it, um, throughout the entire show.

Yeah. And then it’s, and now like it’s revealed and I’m just like, no, that was disappointing. Like I wish we hadn’t known.

Bex: Yeah. Oh. So petition for us to never find out why he’s called Chimney. Just let the Fanfic writers play with it.

Alice: Exactly.

Bex: But then Chim needs to stay out of ao3 and not get his ideas on where Chimney got his [01:14:00] nickname from, from the fan fiction writers.

’cause apparently that’s where he is getting all his ideas now.

Alice: Yeah. Tim, please get off ao3. It’s fun, but also you’re gonna stop,

Bex: you’re gonna get sued at some point dude

Alice: it’s all fun and games until he finds the first Omegaverse fic

Ellen: Oh God.

Alice: And then, Buck gets pregnant and everyone’s like, hang on a minute.

Bex: And suddenly 9-1-1 takes a very drastic right turn.

Ellen: Oh my God. I hope that happens. That’ll be amazing.

Bex: Look, ABC is progressive. I dunno that it’s that progressive. All right. Can we get this next emergency out of the way? Because I hate this one. Like my secondhand embarrassment. It’s, it’s just too much. Oh my God..

Ellen: It’s is very over the top, isn’t it?

Alice: It’s cringe.

Bex: Oh, yes.

Ellen: Okay, so let’s, let’s speed run. Um,

Bex: all right. [01:15:00] We have Justin. Justin is the office gopher. He has been sent to pick up lunch for the office. Um,

Alice: yeah, he gets sent to, sent every, um, every day to get lunch for the office. He knows everyone’s order.

Bex: It seems like he knows the, um, the woman working behind the counter at the deli pretty well as well. I guess you would if you’re seeing them every single day.

Alice: But it seems like they might actually be friends ’cause like they’re chatting about their personal life.

Bex: Yes.

Alice: Or his personal life at least.

Bex: Justin, Justin’s personal life at least. Yes. As well as Justin going to this particular deli every single day. There is a very cute guy who also goes to that deli every day that Justin lusts after from afar.

Alice: Um, yep. They’ve never spoken. Um, Justin’s pretty sure that the cute guy does not know his name,

Bex: which then the, uh, the cashier who, um, again, in [01:16:00] the captions, she’s given a name. It is never used in the episode.

Alice: Never.

Bex: Um. When Justin bemoans, the fact that Cute Guy doesn’t even know his name, she just very loudly shouts “Order for Justin, to go for Justin!” and looks over her shoulder to make sure that cute guy is paying attention, which he is.

Alice: Oh yeah, he’s paying attention. Um, and she’s like, cool.

Now he definitely knows it, knows your name. So yeah, it goes back and forth. The cashier is saying, “Just talk to him.” Justin’s saying, “Oh, it’s too embarrassing.” Um, apparently Justin adjusted his schedule to match his.

Ellen: Yeah, but he won’t speak to him.

Bex: Yes. The cashier claims that his one order of his one order of boiled bunny away from being a stalker,

Ellen: and he’s got the words because he has written a note on like a menu and he hands it over,

Alice: “Right there under sandwiches.”[01:17:00]

Ellen: Ugh. Yeah. She’s like, “why will you not just go and talk to him?” But anyway, um, the guy

Alice: Justin’s like, “Why? What would you say?” And the cashier’s like, “Hi, I am Justin. Wanna hook up?”

Ellen: Yeah, Justin’s like “Shakespearean,” but, um, Miles, who is the cute guy, takes his, his order’s ready, so he is taking the bag and the cashier says, “You have to go now because he’s leaving the other side of town and you will not be able to see him anymore after this. So go and do it.”

Bex: How does she know that?

Ellen: I assume she’s also been speaking to Miles.

Alice: Yeah.

Bex: So she tells Justin to seize the day and everyone takes another shot. Hmm.

Alice: That just, it reminds me of, um, so a friend of mine worked in an office for like, over a year and they went like every, I think it was like Thursday, they went to the same like cafe for lunch, and it was like small, like owned by the people who work [01:18:00] there.

And they chatted to them all the time. Like they ended up knowing their names and everything. And then she got another job and left. And I think, well, they all, I can’t remember exactly what happened, but, anyway, she went back to have lunch with the people like 18 months later and they were like, “Oh my God, you’re still alive?”

And she was like, “Uh, yes, I just got another job. It’s okay.” And they were like, “We thought you’d died.”

Ellen: Aw, aw. She didn’t say goodbye?

Alice: But she felt so bad.

Ellen: That’s so sad.

Bex: No, that’s probably one of those things you don’t think about.

Ellen: Yeah, I guess so. You just don’t turn up one day and they’re like, what happened?

Alice: Like, I’ve had places where I’ve like, you know, got the fixation on a certain meal.

So I’ve gone up, gone to somewhere like once a week and then just stopped going. And I feel like they also think that I’ve died and I’m just like, “No, I am just autistic. And the. I cannot stand that food anymore.”

Bex: If Reddit is to believed they have definitely missed you. ’cause I do remember reading a Reddit thread along [01:19:00] these sort of lines where people have talked about going to restaurants, getting particular meals, and then just stopping and then going back.

And the people in the store are just like, “Oh my God, you’re still here, you’re still okay. We were so worried about you. We haven’t seen you in so long.”

Alice: Oh, literally we’ve got quite regular customers and when I left my last job, ’cause I was at my last job since the store opened, so I was there for like quite a while.

I knew like the, all the regulars knew me, a lot of them had like jokes that I just lived there because I was there so much. Um, and yeah, like when I was leaving, whenever my regulars came in, before I left, after I’d like given my notice, I let them know that I was leaving because I also hated when I knew like saw people all the time and then they vanished and I was like, oh,

Ellen: aw, that’s,

Bex: justin decides that yes, he is going to seize the day. Um, he grabs the order, which is like ridiculous. Could we just talk about this orders, [01:20:00] it was like a kale salad with chicken steak and pork chops on top of it. A BLT for David without the b, l or T, which does that just leave bread?

Alice: Like, is it just bread? Um, something also had thousand Island mixed with ranch. Was it?

Bex: Oh yeah. He wanted the, the thousand island dressing mixed with the ranch dressing, which just No. Oh yeah, just no. Uh, so he grabs his orders and he starts, I guess walking back to his car, but he’s also looking around frantically for Miles.

Um, and he’s paying so much attention to where Miles is that he does not notice the construction people walking across the footpath in front of him with a large copper like piping or over their shoulders. Um, and they coat hanger him. He gets it straight in the throat and he goes flying backwards.

Ellen: Yep. He can’t breathe. He’s like got [01:21:00] his throat’s looking really bruised and red already.

Bex: Yep.

Ellen: And he’s gasping on the floor. People are gathering around like, and Miles notices that something’s going on and he runs over and he is like, oh my God.

Bex: Yeah. He, he was somewhere like way further down the street and then all of a sudden he’s yeeting people left and right to get through the crowd to get to Justin.

Ellen: And he’s the one who calls 9-1-1.

Bex: He calls 9-1-1.

Alice: He’s the one who calls 9-1-1.

Bex: So we just get Chim and Hen this time, ’cause I’m guessing it’s purely medical, there’s no like fire rescue needed and Miles is the one that does all the talking because Justin can’t. Um, and it’s very cute because Chim asks if Miles knows the victim’s name and he knows a lot about Justin.

Like to Justin.

Alice: Yeah. Apparently Miles has also been stalking Justin

Bex: Apparently, because he not only [01:22:00] knows Justin’s first name, he knows his last name, he knows where he works and he knows that he has a nut allergy. Yeah, possibly

Ellen: That cashier has clearly been gossiping with everybody in the place.

Bex: Justin is freaking out at this point and he looks, and Miles says like, “He looks like he’s trying to talk. What is he trying to say?” And at which this is the point that I like, dive under the blankets, under the pillows and start screaming because oh my God,

Alice: it’s so cringe.

Bex: The um, We hear the cashier say, “No man is an island. But two men together can share the world.” So she has decided that this is the perfect time to read Justin’s love note to Miles out loud.

Ellen: It’s really cute. But also

Alice: the paramedics are trying to do their job.

Ellen: He’s clearly not okay with it as well.

Bex: Oh yeah, because he’s trying to,

But she

Ellen: just keeps going.

Bex: He tries to kill her with his eyes ’cause that’s the only thing that he can communicate [01:23:00] with. Um, at one point she goes off on a tangent. And says that, you know, that Justin is very single, very nice, very dateable, and he literally lurches upright waving his hands.

If he could say anything, he would be saying, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. But it works because at one point Justin is trying to say something, I feel like the closed caption says “kill.” Um, I don’t know whether he’s trying to say like, I’m going to kill you, um, for doing this, but, Miles asks, you know, “What is he trying to say?”

And Chim and Hen who are horrified that they’re stuck in the middle of some kind of Cyrano situation. Yeah.

Ellen: They’re, they’re like giving each other side eyes through this whole thing going, what the hell?

Bex: Um, Chim decides that he’s going to help, help him, help a guy out and asks Miles if he would like to accompany Justin and them to the hospital in the back of the [01:24:00] ambulance.

And when Miles says yes, the crowd burst into applause and ah, as if they’ve just, you know, he’s accepted some beautiful romantic proposal of marriage.

Alice: Yeah.

Bex: Rather than just, you know, sitting in the back of an ambulance.

Alice: Yeah. Shit that would never happen. Like, someone falls down on the street and everyone’s just like, oh, that guy’s probably drunk and keeps walking,

Bex: Oh my God. It’s just,

Alice: anyway, just the very unromantic, um,

Ellen: I was gonna say maybe they needed a, um, a romantic kind of interlude since they missed out on Valentine’s Day. ’cause we skipped right to March.

Bex: But I don’t, like I said, maybe it’s just that the secondhand embarrassment because No, but why is this romantic?

Ellen: ‘ cause he wrote him a note and he can’t, and it’s being read out by someone else against his will.

Bex: Yeah, it’s the against his will part that I have a real problem with at this point.

Ellen: [01:25:00] Yeah.

Alice: Oh. Like that poor cashier is so done with their shit.

Bex: I do love, like she gets when, um, because he’s otherwise uninjured, they don’t bother putting Justin on a gurney.

They just like haul into his feet and he walks under his own power to the ambulance. And as he passes the cashier, she just like gives him this big shit eating green and like double thumbs up. She’s so proud of herself.

Ellen: Oh God. I mean, lucky for her it works out. Imagine if he’d been like, “Oh no, I, I I need to go back to work like, see you.”

Yes. Anyway, later, um, Chim and Maddie are going to their favorite karaoke bar, which we have seen them go to before. I’m guessing it’s the same one.

Bex: I’m going to,

Alice: it looks like the same one.

Bex: Yeah. I was about to say, how many karaoke bars are there in LA and then realize the stupidity of that statement.

Ellen: There’s probably load, but they, I assume they have a favorite one that they go to.

Bex: Um, ’cause it, it was like a [01:26:00] badge and ladder one, right? It was where all of the first responders went. So I’m guessing it’s,

Ellen: oh, that’s right.

Bex: It’s the same one. So it must be like Chim’s birthday week. ’cause this birthday celebration seems just to be stretched out over many, many days.

Ellen: Oh yeah. The birthday boy, I just assumed they were going there after work. I didn’t realize it was a,

Bex: I think it’s still birthday celebration, but like, either this is the longest day known to man, or this,

Alice: It must be birthday week because Chim says that he’s heard more from his father in the past week than the entirety of his life.

Bex: So Maddie’s just one of these people that has like birthday weeks.

Alice: Yeah. Then she’s just like, tonight’s about you put your phone away and let’s focus on the birthday Boy.

Ellen: Maybe his birthday was on the Monday and, and they couldn’t go out until the weekend or something. Maybe.

Bex: Yeah. I’m gonna assume that it fell onto one of their like 48 on or something. So they haven’t had a chance to go out and celebrate. But, but anyway, [01:27:00] they’re going to celebrate his birthday at karaoke bar. Um, Chim is very apologetic about the fact that he keeps harping on about Albert. He’s just, he’s very willing to go and not talk about Albert except who should be at the karaoke bar up on stage with Hen but Albert.

Alice: And they’re singing “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart” as well.

Bex: Badly too.

Alice: Oh yeah. It’s awful.

Bex: Hen seems to be doing okay.

Ellen: Yeah. Hen’s got a great voice there,

Bex: Albert. Not so much. Yeah.

Alice: But like it’s such a couple-y song.

Bex: It is. It’s

Alice: Chim’s just like, are you kidding me?

Bex: It’s Elton John. And who? Uh, English singer Kiki Dee

Ellen: Oh, okay.

Bex: So yeah, it was a duet with Elton John. A little bit later in the evening. Um, he, Eddie Buck and Albert are playing pool while Maddie and Chim are sitting by the bar [01:28:00] watching.

Alice: Um, yeah. Buck and Albert are getting along like a house on fire,

Bex: which makes sense ’cause they’re sort of close in age.

Alice: Yeah. Closer in age. Probably closer in age than Buck and Chim are?

Bex: Mm-hmm. Yeah, because Chim’s,

Alice: I’m trying to work out what season we’re on

Bex: season three,

Alice: so Buck wouldn’t be 30.

Bex: Oh no Buck’s still in his twenties.

Alice: Yeah. Um, whereas Albert is 20.

Bex: Yes. So yes, it’s very understandable that, um, that

Alice: and Buck’s a child anyway, let’s be real.

Bex: No matter how old he is, Buck is very young at heart. So yes. He and Albert have bonded. Yeah.

Alice: But yeah, Buck says that sometimes you’ve gotta put a little mileage between yourself and home, so you figure out what you want and who you are. And Eddie helpfully goes, “If I hadn’t enlisted, I’d still be working with my pops.”

And they’re like, “Don’t encourage him to go off to war.”

Bex: Yeah. Maddie scolds him. “Eddie, don’t encourage him to go off to war.” Hen tries to contribute to the conversation by saying, “Everyone has [01:29:00] their path. You just do you, Albert.” And he goes, “Yes, I will, I will do me.” And Buck’s like, just like “Phrasing, dude.”

Albert and says that he like, when while he’s doing him, he will just need a little bit of his brother’s co courage. You know, because he’s very, um, very impressed with Chim.

Alice: Yeah, ’cause Chim did not let his fa let father dictate his life. He took a stand, got out, came to America to follow his dreams.

And Chim’s just looking at it from the bar, and he’s like “There was no stand. I didn’t get out. I was left behind, uh, most of my life. All I wanted was for him to see me, to be proud of me, to be proud to call me his son. But no matter what I did, I was always invisible. ’cause you were the only son he cares about.”

Bex: At, at this point that Kenny’s starting to slur his words and you realize that like Chim is just drunk as a skunk at this point. He’s just been,

Alice: he’s drunk and [01:30:00] over it.

Bex: And he’s, he’s, he’s getting in like sad morose, angry drunk. He’s not happy drunk. He tells Albert that, you know, everything’s so easy for him. He’s never had to work for anything. No. “Everybody loves you!” And he, the throw his arms open and he knocks his beer bottle over and he kind of stops, looks at it, straightens it, and then continues.

And I wonder whether that was like an accident that Kenny accidentally knocked it over with his gesticulation, but because he stayed in character and just kept going, they just kept it in.

Ellen: Yeah, it did look that way. Yeah. I wondered the same thing.

Bex: Yeah. Um, but before he got sidetracked by the beer, um, the point is that everybody loves Albert, including all of Chim’s friends who were

Alice: Yeah.

Bex: All love Albert. And he’s kind of angry about that because [01:31:00] Albert had a family. Chim never had a family. These people are his family. And Albert does not get to take that family away from him too.

And Albert’s like, “I don’t, I don’t wanna take anything away from you. I’m your brother.” And Chim’s like, “No, you’re not my brother. I had a brother. He died.”  

Alice: Yeah. His name was Kevin and he died.

Bex: Yeah. So at this point we real, we remember how young Albert very is because he looks like he’s about to burst into tears. He throws his pool cue onto the table and bolts from the bar.

Ellen: Yeah. Chim says, “you came to me because you needed something from me.”

And yeah. It’s a bit unfair, Chim. ’cause he, he came to you because you were a safe place to run to.

Bex: Yes, he was.

Alice: He came to Chim because he idolized Chim.

Bex: Yeah. And he like, he considered Chim his brother. [01:32:00] Yeah. And he was just had all of that, um, idolization and, uh, brotherhood just smashed to tiny little pieces in front of him.

Ellen: He’s been rejected.

Bex: Yeah. So Buck goes racing after Albert, and Hen and Eddie just glare at Chim. At which point Chim realizes that he’s done bad.

Alice: Yeah. He’s like, “I know, I suck.”

Ellen: Oh Chim.

Alice: So after commercial, we go to Chim’s place and Chim’s just feeling sorry for himself on the couch while Maddie’s on the phone in the other room.

Yeah. And she’s talking to Buck and after she hangs up, Buck’s got Albert. So Chimney asks if Albert’s okay. Maddie says that Buck said he’s gonna let him stay with him for the night. But she’s worried about Chim and he, Chim actually admits like “I was working out my childhood trauma on a kid who doesn’t deserve it.”

Ellen: Yeah. At least he [01:33:00] admits that he or realizes that he’s fucked up.

Alice: Yeah.

Ellen: But he explains to Maddie that he, his father is the one who likes Albert more than him. His, he was never close to his father, and he, he spent years trying to bridge the gap, but he just wasn’t interested in being a father. And it turns out he wasn’t interested in being a father to Chim. But like Maddie tries to convince him that he, we, they don’t know what his relationship is with Albert.

Like, it can’t be good otherwise he wouldn’t have shown up here. And he, she’s like, oh, “Trust me. I know.” And Chim’s like, “No, you were running away from your husband. That was different.” And this is where Maddie says that “I ran to my brother. He was the one I could count on.”

Alice: I think this is the first time that we’ve actually heard about

Bex: this is the first time we get a little bit of the, the Buckley parents, the Buckley family law.

Um, we find when Maddie says that they are [01:34:00] not bad people, but they are bad parents.

Ellen: Yeah. Her mom and dad aren’t bad people.

Bex: Yeah. Like, Ooh.

Alice: Um, and she says the mistakes that they made with. Maddie, they made them with Buck too.

Bex: Meh,

but that’s, that’s an issue for a later time. We’re gonna, we’re gonna

Alice: Yeah. That’s, that’s a later issue. That’s, but yes. Like I see what she means. Like he, like Chim thinks that his dad was the per like a terrible father to Chimney at a great father to Albert. But Maddie’s trying to say no, just because Albert lived there longer, like lived with him longer doesn’t mean that he was a good dad to him either.

Bex: Yeah.

So we’re gonna leave Chimney to mull over that and we’re gonna go see another father. We’re gonna go to Michael’s apartment. Where May…

Alice: and this the first time we’ve seen Michael’s apartment?

Bex: I think this is the first time.

Ellen: Yeah. I don’t think I’ve seen it before. So, yeah.

Alice: Because [01:35:00] yeah, normally he goes over to,

Ellen: he spends all the time at Athena’s.

Alice: Yeah. So clearly in the hiatus they built a new set.

Ellen: Yeah. And clearly May has a key. She just lets herself in.

Alice: Well that makes sense. ’cause she goes there after school.

Bex: Yeah. I think it’s more that like, she like didn’t knock, she literally just let herself in because Michael was very surprised to see her. Yeah. Had he known that she was coming, I don’t think he would’ve had all of the very, um, highly personal paperwork spread out over the table, which in this case, the camera does focus on and zoom in on.

And we get a really good look at what the paperwork is so that the audience is understands, like, look at this paperwork. You see this paperwork, this paperwork’s important. Um,

Ellen: yeah, I mean, it means that they don’t have to, the, the characters don’t have to explain it as much, I guess if they just pointedly show us what it actually is,

Bex: but then she says it anyway.

Alice: I just could. Um, [01:36:00] I’ve just got Nickelback’s like “Photograph” in my head now. (sings) Look at this paperwork.

Bex: I’m sorry. Nobody wants to have Nickelback stuck in their head.

Uh, but the paperwork,

Ellen: unless it’s behind a, a Buck and Eddie scene,

Bex: no. Even, not even then. No. It would just taint Buddie. No, thank you.

Ellen: Oh, wasn’t it, wasn’t it in another episode?

Bex: No, it was Ed Sheeran.

Alice: That was Ed Sheeran.

Ellen: Oh, that was a different photograph song

Bex: yeah.

Ellen: Okay.

Bex: We accept Ed Sheeran. We don’t accept Nickelback 

But the paperwork is Michael’s will, he’s updating his will. Which is very sensible considering he’s going in for major surgery. I’m also going to assume he probably hasn’t done [01:37:00] it since the divorce. Yeah. So it was about time he did that.

Alice: So the, yeah, big, big, um, big letters on the papers on the table say “last will and testament” in big letters. Um, did I say big letters enough? I think I said big letters.

Bex: How big were the letters?

Alice: They were pretty big.

Ellen: They focus in on those big letters.

Alice: And they were letters. Yeah.

Ellen: But he does explain to May that the reason he’s doing it is because it’s risky and he doesn’t know that, like there’s no guarantees, it could go wrong.

Alice: Yeah. It’s not just because he thinks he’s dying. Um, it’s just safeguards.

Ellen: Yeah. And May asks why he didn’t tell them? And he’s like, “well, I didn’t wanna scare you.” And I was thinking like, he did tell them, that was the whole round table discussion thing, right?

Like he told them he was having brain surgery. Did they think it was gonna be easy? Like,

Alice: well, they, he, the thing, he didn’t tell them that without the brain [01:38:00] surgery he could be dead in a year.

Ellen: Yeah. I mean, I thought that was already known, but May seems to be really upset by learning this information. And she asks him if he’s scared and he just kind of breaks down.

Bex: Decides to be honest.

Ellen: Oh, this is really sad.

Bex: Yeah. Like I get, I get that he’s, he’s scared. She is still a child though.

Alice: Yeah. She’s like, what, 17? If she was doing college applications?

Bex: Yes. I don’t know that this kind of emotional, what’s the word I’m looking for? Like the emotional unburdening that he’s doing is appropriate to his 17-year-old daughter.

Alice: Yeah. Please, please don’t trauma dump on your teenager.

Bex: Ey, that’s what I was looking for. Trauma dumping.

Ellen: I mean, his, his, his thinking patterns [01:39:00] are kind of disturbed by this thing anyway, so maybe he’s not yes. In control of his emotions that much.

Bex: This is possibly the tumor talking.

Ellen: Yeah. I didn’t want to say that ’cause that’s kind of freaky, but Yes.

Alice: Yeah.

Bex: Oh, I think I say it later on in the notes somewhere.

Ellen: Yeah.

Bex: Um, but May tells him that he needs to stop planning for his death, that he still has options. And as long as he has options, as long as he still has his family, there is hope. Um, and we’re gonna see later that Michael takes this completely the wrong way.

Ellen: And they have a very sweet moment where he says, “When did you grow up on me? I love you.” And then they have a big hug and it’s really cute.

Bex: Probably when her mother locked her in a van with a dead woman.

Ellen: Yeah. She’s been through a lot.

Bex: She really has. Okay. From one emotionally [01:40:00] fraught conversation to another, uh, we are going to cut to Buck’s loft where, uh, Buck opens the door to find Chim.

Chim thanks him for letting Albert stay there. Um, and then Buck promptly makes himself scarce.

Ellen: Yeah. He like senses the awkwardness and, and hightails it out.

Alice: Yeah. He’s just like, I’m gonna go take a shower, bye.

Bex: Apparently his shower is upstairs in the loft, which is interesting.

Alice: He has an en suite.

Bex: Yeah, that makes sense.

Alice: There’s also a bathroom downstairs. Where’s like behind the, between the,

Ellen: that tiny apartment has two bathrooms.

Bex: Where’s the bathroom downstairs? And how do we know that there’s a bathroom downstairs?

Alice: Because it’s in one of the later seasons.

Bex: Okay.

Alice: So next to the stairs, like it goes to the lounge room and then the stairs, and then there’s a little room with a door. That’s a bathroom.

That’s the downstairs bathroom.

Bex: Oh, okay. Um,

Alice: and then upstairs he has an en suite.

Bex: Oh, wonder is it like an actual…

Ellen: So he doesn’t have to climb downstairs in the middle of the night.

Bex: Is it an actual bathroom [01:41:00] downstairs or just like what they call the water closet, which is like, it’s literally a toilet.

Alice: It might just be a toilet. I don’t, I don’t think we actually get like a full view of it.

Yeah. But there’s at least a toilet in there.

Bex: Okay.

Alice: So it’s prob like, it’s probably just a toilet and a sink type thing.

Bex: Yeah. A half think they call it a half bath? Something like that.

Alice: Something like that. We just call it like a separate toilet,

Bex: Regardless, Buck has pissed off upstairs. Um, we never hear water running.

’cause you know, why would they bother putting that on? So I, I like to think that he’s just like hiding upstairs and eavesdropping on this conversation.

Ellen: He’s lying bed like listening.

Bex: Yeah.

Alice: He like turns on the shower and then just walks out and watches them.

Ellen: Oh. But Chim apologizes to Albert and “I’m sorry about the things I said,” and, Albert’s like, “No, you’re right. Uh, we don’t know each other. I will pack my stuff and get out of your hair” he’s not going back to Seoul. There’s nothing for him there [01:42:00] that he’s staying in California.

Alice: Yeah. Chim’s like, “What about your parents?” And Albert goes, “Well, my mother says she can’t wait to visit me here in California,” whereas their father will not speak to him until he’s back where he belongs.

Bex: So Chim tells Albert the story of how he ended up in America, and I can’t remember how much of this we got in “Chimney Begins”. Um, yeah, I can’t,

Alice: we knew the basics, but we didn’t get the details. Yeah. So we knew that his mother had died,

Bex: but I don’t think we’d, I don’t think we’d found out why they’d moved to, to America had we?

Alice: No.

Bex: So we find out that

Ellen: I think you, um, I, this is me finding out for the first time, but I think you guys might have explained it a little bit in when we did “Chimney Begins” because I,

Bex: so we may have retconned it back because we’d seen this scene.

Ellen: Yeah, I think so.

Bex: Yeah. But I think that,

Alice: but it was definitely mentioned that Chim’s mom died.

Bex: Oh yeah. We knew that. But I couldn’t remember the whole,

Alice: and we [01:43:00] knew that like he lived in California with his mom because

Ellen: he stayed behind when his father had gone,

Alice: the Lees took him in.

Ellen: Yeah,

Alice: But yeah, we didn’t get the, all the details.

Bex: Yeah. So in this scene we find out that, um, Mr. Han had moved to America for work. Uh, whatever business he’s in, I don’t think we even know that much.

Alice: Um, he’s a very important business man.

Bex: He’s a very important businessman doing a very important business things in America. And so the family moved to America with him, uh, was supposed to last for two years.

They ended up staying there for six years. Um, Chim moved, this happened when Chim was five. So by the time he was 11, um, his father was ready to move back to Korea. Um, but his mother didn’t wanna go. She loved it. She wanted to stay in America. Um, Chimney wanted to stay with his mother, [01:44:00] and so he says to Albert, “I’m sure that you can imagine how that went over.”

And Albert says, “Yes, like a metal balloon.”

Alice: Um, so Chimney corrects that. It’s a lead balloon, but yes. So his father went back to Korea without them, and just assumed that Chim’s mother would come to her senses, but she didn’t. Um, instead she got sick. She got cancer. She fought like hell for a few years, and she died a couple weeks before Chim’s 15th birthday.

Bex: He tells Albert, Albert that he was always jealous of Albert because he thought that, um, Albert had a family because his, like I said earlier, his stepmother would email him photos of Albert in the family, which I think was just her being kind. But I think Chim felt like it was rubbing salt and the won’t.[01:45:00]

Mm-hmm. Where Albert counters that he likes Chim’s family better. He likes Buck, he likes Maddie. He likes the 118 and it was nice getting to know them.

Alice: And Chim goes, “Good, because, fair warning, they’re around a lot. Hope you can handle that.”

Bex: So Albert gets to stay

Ellen: Yay!

Alice: And Chimney calls him his brother rather than just half brother.

Bex: And up in the loft, Buck starts clapping

Alice: Buck’s like “Yes. A new bestie!”

Bex: I get to keep my friend

Alice: not allowed a dog in this loft, but I can have an Albert. Uh, so after the commercial break, we go back to the Bathena house.

Ellen: Yeah. And they’re gonna have a barbecue or they’re having sunday lunch or something.

Bex: I have no idea. They’re grilling. Bobby’s grilling. I have a feeling that Bobby does a lot of grilling. [01:46:00]

Ellen: We do see him doing a lot of grilling.

Bex: Yeah. Yeah. Um, Michael brings out adult ice teas, uh, for him and Athena and normal ice teas for Bobby and the kids and Athena questions whether he should be drinking, if he’s having brain surgery tomorrow and he says, well,

Ellen: tomorrow

Bex: “actually, um, actually no, I, I’m, I’m not having surgery tomorrow ’cause I canceled the surgery,” which everyone is like, why?

Ellen: They all stop and go, “What? Did something change?”

Bex: And May’s just like, “Oh daddy, that is not what I meant.” He’s like, “no, I know, but I’ve decided I’m just going to focus on my life and what I have now rather than focusing on my death.” And yeah, this is the way I’ve, like, I’ve got the note that says, you know, I dunno that a man with a brain tumor that [01:47:00] makes him sleepwalk and and do all sorts of other things should necessarily be making this kind of life altering decision on his own.

Alice: Yeah. Unfortunately, unless he’s so, like he can’t make the decisions ’cause of his impairment. I know he’s, as long as he’s still got his own power of attorney Yeah.

Bex: Legally he’s still, he can make, he’s still mentally competent. Um, I just, I think whatever that Yeah. Still does. Yeah.

Ellen: He should probably have some support in this decision rather than just,

Bex: or some kind of therapy.

Ellen: Yeah. Yeah. Discuss it with a few people first before you…

Bex: yes. Like run it through a committee,

Ellen: cancel you your surgery.

Bex: You just like unilateral and like, I understand that it is his life and it is, you know, he should, he. Has the right to choose his medical treatment, and if he chooses that he doesn’t want to undertake surgery or get the treatment, that is his right.

It’s just, it does not play that way in this scene. The way it plays [01:48:00] is it’s the, it plays as it is a, a selfish decision and is the wrong decision.

Ellen: Yeah. Little bit. Yeah.

Alice: But, yeah, so MA’s now terrified because MA’s like, well, he’s gonna die

Bex: and it’s gonna be all her fault because she told him, she didn’t tell him, but he took it as her telling him not to have the surgery.

Alice: Yeah.

Ellen: So they’re all a little bit confused.

Alice: But anyway, yeah. So Michael’s decided that he doesn’t want the surgery and they’re not happy about it.

Bex: Yeah, because he doesn’t even say that like, “I’m gonna go and do another round of radiation.” It’s just like, yeah. It’s literally, he’s just decided to, I’m not having the surgeries.

It’s like he’s stopped treatment altogether. He’s just gonna live his life and let the tumor take over.

Ellen: Well, he says, he says he is not giving up. He’s gonna keep fighting, but he’s gonna seize the day in the meantime.

Alice: Like, is he gonna keep fighting the Belle Gibson way with fresh fruits and

Bex: no, good Lord,

Ellen: essential [01:49:00] oils? I don’t know,

Alice: yeah.

Bex: No. Was she ever into essential oils

Alice: and coffee enemas?

Bex: Was she just the, the um, the fresh food?

Alice: She was about like Whole Foods. She didn’t even have brain cancer.

Bex: No, but she believed that she did,

Alice: apparently.

Bex: But then she also believed that she was like 25 or something, even though she was like,

Alice: no. But one of her birth certificates said she was 25, so she was living as a 25-year-old.

Ellen: Who are you talking about? I don’t even know who you’re talking about,

Alice: can you tell I just finished, um, Apple Cider Vinegar.

Bex: Please watch Apple Cider Vinegar.

Ellen: Oh, that woman. Okay. Alright. Okay. Now I,

Alice: I’m so glad that Beck’s also knew that what I was talking about.

Otherwise I just would’ve been rambling like a mad person.

Ellen: I was confused for a little while.

Bex: Belle Gibson was all over my TikTok for a little while and especially that, um, 60 Minutes interview with Tracy Grimshaw.

Alice: Oh my God. The 60. Yeah. At the time I believed, not at the time Belle. Did you ever have cancer? [01:50:00]

Bex: “I believed that I did. Yes.” Anyway, before we go off on a completely another tangent, while the Bathena,

Alice: Bex and I will be covering Apple Cider Vinegar, uh, in the next episode.

Bex: See I haven’t even watched it. I just remember all the Belle Gibson shit from when it actually happened.

Alice: Oh my God, it’s so good. It’s actually so good. Like I binged there were like five episodes and I binged the first four all in one night and then it was like 3:00 AM and I was like, okay, I have to go to sleep before watching the next one.

Bex: Okay. Before I go off and watch Apple Cider Vinegar while the Athena family are melting down.

Everyone else at the 118 is over at Eddie’s house, having some kind of either continuation of Chim’s birthday or a welcome to the family Albert party. I don’t know what’s going on here, but

Alice: Chim also doesn’t know what’s going on because he even says, “Do you ever think it’s weird that we spent 50 something, 50 something hours a week together and still hang out?”

Um, but it is like, [01:51:00] “nah. What’s it saying? You got the family you were born into and the one you choose. Well, that’s what the 118 is, the family we choose.”

Ellen: Ah, found family.

Alice: Meanwhile in the living room, the kids are all playing and by the kids we mean Buck, Albert and Chris.

Bex: Yeah. Once again Buck’s at the kids’ table.

Yeah. Uh, but then it’s a really weird cut because we go from seeing Buck on the couch to where he like levitates and teleports to the kitchen. Yeah. He walks into the kitchen, he tries to take something off one of the plates that… maddie is in the kitchen by herself, slaving over all the food in Eddie’s house.

I don’t know what’s going on there.

Ellen: Yeah. I thought they were at Chim and Maddie’s house for a while until Buck says this next line.

Bex: Until the, the line. Yeah. So,

Ellen: and I didn’t even realize they were at Eddie’s until that point.

Bex: Um, yeah. So let’s, let’s like speed run to get there. So,

Alice: Buck brought cookies and is [01:52:00] annoyed that Maddie hasn’t put them out.

Maddie says it’s not time to dessert. And why are you acting like you made them yourself? Um, Buck’s like, “I drove myself to go buy them.” Yeah. Good on you, Barkley. You can drive. We’re so proud of you.

Bex: He doesn’t understand why he had to bring cookies in the first place though.

Alice: Um, yeah. So Maddie shamed him into bringing something and Maddie goes “Because it’s what you do when someone invites you to their house, you don’t show up empty handed.”

Bex: And Buck says, “This is Eddie’s house. I’m not really a guest.” Aw.

Alice: And Buddie Shippers around the world, freak the fuck out.

Ellen: It’s so sweet. I mean, they probably feel the same way about Chim and Maddie’s house because they’re over there all, he’s over there all the time too.

Bex: I don’t know. I’m gonna say that he probably, he feels like a guest at Chimney’s House. Yeah. But there’s a, there’s a other, there’s this other level of [01:53:00] comfort at Eddie’s house. The same with like, Eddie probably doesn’t, and consider him a guest, consider himself a guest at Buck’s house because you know he’s got a key.

Alice: Yeah. Considering Eddie’s barged into Buck’s house several times. Yes.

Bex: There’s just like split households with those two.

Alice: Yeah. Dunno why they’re renting separate houses.

Um, anyway, so Buck says that like, Buck’s like you’re a good sister. I’m lucky to have you. Maddie says that, uh, they’re lucky to have each other. And Chris and Albert are still at the table. Albert’s cleaning Chris’s face, which is real cute. ’cause like obviously Albert’s brand new and is already like, oh yes, I am also adopting this child, the communal child.

Bex: I’m gonna say he’s just, he’s following in Buck’s footsteps.

Ellen: Yeah. Like this is he, I only only just met this child, but I would already lay down my life for them.

Bex: Yeah. He’s watched, he’s watched. This is, he’s watched Buck and is just assumed, oh, this is how we treat this child. So I, [01:54:00] I would also treat this child as if, as if he is my own

Alice: Buck’s like, “Yeah. So that’s Bobby. He’s like my dad. Um, that’s hen who’s like my sister. That’s Eddie. We have a kid together. This is the kid. This is our kid. He’s a communal child.”

Bex: Um, but while Albert is being like really cute, with Chris, um, Chim’s sitting on the couch and Maddie’s standing behind him behind the couch.

They’re, they’re watching this go down at the table and they’re, they’re both, um, they’re both very touched by what they’re watching. Maddie says that he’s very sweet and she’s amazed that he turned out the way that he did. If what Chim has said about his father is to be believed,

Alice: and Chim says that who he is now has nothing to do with their father.

Bex: Maddie apologizes. Uh oh, she’s [01:55:00] sympathetic. She’s sim she’s sorry that Kim’s father wasn’t there for him. That he then says that Chim deserved better. And he says, “You know what? I had better. I had the Lees and now I have all of you. And I’m pretty lucky.” Aw, yeah. I love that. We keep, we get another, we get the Lees back.

Ellen: Yeah. Well, we kind of needed to have them if we were having this conversation about what happened with Chim’s real family or blood family. But it’s, it was nice to see them on screen later on. But anyway, um, we’re not there yet.

Bex: No. But even just like the, um the acknowledgement by Chim that he had a family in the Lees.

Alice: Yeah.

Bex: This, like I said, this episode pushes the found family and the chosen family. Um, narrative pretty hard and we love it.

Alice: Absolutely.

Bex: And we’re going to [01:56:00] continue with the, the found family and chosen family because hen and Karen are about to expand their family ’cause they are getting their first foster placement.

Although now that they’re sitting in the office ready to, um, to meet their first foster fostering foster kid, um, Karen’s freaking the fuck out.

Ellen: She looks so nervous.

Alice: Karen’s like, are we ready for this? And Hen’s like, after three months of paperwork and home inspections and background checks, it’s a little late for cold feet.

Bex: She reminds Karen that they weren’t ready with Denny. So, and that worked out fine, that they’re, they’re gonna be fine this time.

Ellen: Yep. Funnily enough, they say that sometimes you gotta take a leap of faith and they don’t say seize the day at all in this scene, but they are indeed seizing the day.

Bex: It’s, it’s not really a seize the day kind of situation.

Ellen: No.

Alice: As [01:57:00] soon as they said leap of faith, all I could think about was, um, Spider Verse.

Ellen: I still haven’t watched it.

Alice: Oh my God. It’s, how are we friends?

Bex: It’s very good.

Ellen: I’ve got it there.

Bex: They need to get, they need to release, the third one.

Ellen: But I just haven’t watched it yet.

Alice: I’d rather them not rush it. Like, I want it so bad, but I want it to be perfect.

Bex: It’s not going to be, it’s not gonna meet with anyone’s expectations

Alice: either way. I’ve still got the first one.

Bex: Yes.

Alice: The second one was also pretty good.

Bex: Yes. Uh, but back to 9-1-1. Um, as they, as hen and Karen come to the understanding that yes, they can do this, they have to because the door opens and the, I’m guessing she’s CPS officer,

Alice: social worker?

Bex: Social worker, I don’t know. Yeah. Some woman walks in, um, with this adorable little black girl in her arms and introduces her as Nia.

Ellen: She’s such a cutie,

Bex: and Karen and Hen [01:58:00] look at this little girl, like she’s the most precious thing on earth.

Ellen: Oh, she is though!

Alice: Because she is the most precious thing.

Bex: She’s adorable.

Ellen: She’s so cute.

Um, and now we have another scene. This episode is full of like little scenes. Yes. It switches back and forth a fair bit, but

Bex: very like emotional, emotionally resonant scenes.

Alice: Yeah. It’s um, like tying up some things, continuing on some things and starting new things. Yes. ’cause it’s back from hiatus.

Bex: Yeah, true.

Alice: But yeah, we’re back at Chim’s house where Maddie apparently doesn’t live because she comes in asking if she’s late.

Bex: Okay. So where does she live?

Ellen: I just figured she was getting home from work, but she’s dressed up, so maybe not unless she

Alice: Yeah, she, well, she says she changed like four times,

Bex: which means that she was at another location, changing clothes.

Where does she live?

Alice: Somewhere.

Bex: I feel like she’s just [01:59:00] camped out in the break room at dispatch at this point. She’s like sleeping under her desk. She’s showering down in the gym.

Alice: Um, but someone who does live with Chim is Albert because Maddie asks where he hid all of Albert’s stuff and apparently he’s just shoved it into closets

Bex: because that’s what you do.

Alice: That’s what I do.

Bex: Um, but the reason that Maddie changed clothes four times is because she’s incredibly nervous because this is literally her meet the parents dinner and she really, really wants the Lees to like her.

Ellen: Yeah. There’s a knock on the door and they, and Chim opens it and it’s the Lees. And so, and we haven’t seen them since “Chimney Begins”.

Bex: Yeah. Mrs. We saw Mrs. Lee when Chim moved into his apartment in ” Chimney Begins”.

Alice: Yeah. But Mr. Lee wasn’t quite ready yet,

Bex: so I don’t know how

Ellen: That’s right. Yeah.

Bex: How much [02:00:00] talk they’ve had since then. So this is so cute. So Mrs. Lee rushes in and gives Chim a hug and then she part almost passes him off to Mr. Lee who hugs Chimney so hard I swear we can hear ribs cracking and Chimney squeaks.

Alice: Yes, it’s great. So they’ve clearly made up, um, between like “Chimney Begins”, which was a long time ago to be fair.

Bex: Yeah, yeah.

Alice: Um, and now, which is really good.

Bex: Yeah. But he’s obviously they don’t see each other enough ’cause he’s obviously missed him.

Alice: Yeah.

Bex: And then Mrs. Lee immediately beelines on Maddie. And Chim introduces Maddie to Mr. And Mrs. Lee, “the people who helped raise me.” And I don’t think Mrs. Lee heard any of that ’cause she’s just immediately hugging Maddie. Um, but Mr. Lee definitely clocked it and he’s [02:01:00] looking at Chim he’s like, yeah, I heard what you just said and I’m incredibly touched.

Thank you. Yeah, Chim’s looking back at him like it’s all true.

Alice: And that’s the end.

Bex: And that is where we end this episode.

Ellen: Yeah, it was a great episode.

Bex: It is a lovely, it’s a lovely episode.

Ellen: You had feels

Alice: it’s a good return from hiatus.

Ellen: It had really gross stuff.

Alice: We’ve got Albert.

Ellen: We got Albert. We, Albert gets, I assume is gonna stick around for a while, right?

Alice: Yeah. Uh, yes.

Ellen: Yeah. Forever? Or is he It is just this season.

Alice: No comment.

Ellen: Oh!

Bex: You’ll have to keep watching? Yeah. But it was good. I mean, we had the, um, the episode title kind of shoved down our throat a little bit, but it didn’t feel obnoxious. Um, we had good ensemble as well as individual storylines for most of the [02:02:00] characters.

Ellen: We had action packed, packed in

Bex: action. There was drama, there was laughter,

Alice: there was fish down throats,

Bex: there was tears. It was, it’s a good one to come back from, back from hiatus with.

Ellen: Yes. Yeah. Yeah. So what’s, what’s the second of the season gonna bring? Well, let’s start with next week. What, what, what’s next week gonna bring,

Bex: uh, next week, the 118 respond to a viral stunt gone haywire. It was supposed to be a disaster at a couple’s fishing trip, but we’ve already done that. Um, and an epic first date fail. Oh God. Is that this one,

Alice: yeah. I was looking at the trigger warnings and I was like, oh, no.

Bex: Uh, yeah. Um, meanwhile, Athena investigates a woman who doesn’t remember being shot in the head, and Eddie is forced to have a difficult conversation with Christopher.

[02:03:00] Um, so trigger warnings for next week. We have domestic violence. Uh, we have more gore in the form of bulging eyeballs.

Ellen: Ooh,

Bex: we have gun violence and we have a character is assaulted. Yes. And the next week’s episode is called “Fools”.

Ellen: Um, so let us know what you thought of this episode. You can leave us a comment on your listening place of preference, uh, or you can send us email all of the information that is on our website, which is thatweewooshow.com.

And thank you very much for listening this week, and we will see you next time to talk about episode 12, which is called “Fools”. 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 [02:04:00] know you are 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 thatweewooshow.com.

[first outtake]

Alice: I mean, to be fair, you did watch 9-1-1. You just watched,

Bex: I watched the wrong episode,

Alice: season eight.

Ellen: Oh yeah. How are we feeling about, like, you don’t have to tell me any details, but is it positive? Good episode?

Bex: 50 50? Like there was 50 50 sort of crying, screaming, throwing up, and then 50 50 ranting at Alice about the episode.

Ellen: Right?

Alice: I mean, it was better than Dr. Odyssey. Uh, um, we, we were not impressed by the Dr. Odyssey episode this week.

Bex: No.

Ellen: Okay. I don’t know [02:05:00] either of the, shows, so it’s

Alice: Dr. Odyssey’s actually good.

Ellen: Yeah. But, um, I’ve been meaning to start watching it, but I just, I haven’t

Alice: We kind of made a joke that we should start a Dr. Odyssey podcast as well.

Bex: Then my response was, it would be two hours of me simping over Daddy Jackson and then just ranting about how unrealistic every single thing on the show was.

Ellen: Like we do already?

Alice: Literally. Yeah. But worse,

Bex: I think. I feel like there’s a little less simping on this show though.

Alice: Yeah.