2.05: Awful People

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 5 of the second season of 9-1-1, titled “Awful People”.

Maddie goes on a ride-along with Athena, while dealing with a seemingly perfect dispatcher; Hen must figure out how to save her family.

Content warnings for episode 2.05:

multiple minor car accidents, homophobic and racist protesting at a funeral, a gunshot victim, drug overdose.

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Episode Transcript

Bex: [00:00:00] Welcome back to That WeeWoo Show, a podcast where we watch and discuss episodes of the ABC show, 9-1-1. I’m Bex.

Alice: I’m Alice.

Ellen: And I’m Ellen.

Bex: Thank you to everyone who’s listened to our previous episodes and special thank yous to those who have reached out to answer questions that we’ve had or share their thoughts on episodes and to those who’ve rated and reviewed us on Spotify or Apple podcasts.

If you have enjoyed listening to our unhinged screaming about this show, then the best way to show your love is to share it, spread the word about us and help us get in more people’s ears. So what happened last week, Alice?

Alice: So last week on 9-1-1, the 118 found themselves “stuck” [00:01:00] in various situations. Chim realized his life wasn’t changed by his near fatal car accident.

Athena had to decide whether to accept a long awaited promotion, and Buck wondered whether it was time to move on from Abby after Eddie introduced him to his family, which is totally just platonic dude bro things.

Bex: Oh, yeah, they’re just besties.

Ellen: Episode four!! (laughs) But no, no, we’re up to episode five now. Season two, episode five, which is titled “Awful People”.

This one first aired on October 15th, 2018. And the summary goes like this. Right. Wanting to see the faces behind the 9-1-1 calls, Maddie goes on a ride along with Athena while dealing with a seemingly perfect dispatcher back at the call center. Meanwhile, Hen must figure out how to save her family from permanently falling apart and the first responders deal with emergencies, both at a military funeral [00:02:00] and a movie theater.

Yeah. And a movie theater.

Alice: I don’t even remember the movie theatre.

Bex: When was the movie theatre?

Ellen: I don’t think that this movie theatre one is in this episode at all.

Alice: Why was there a movie theatre? I don’t remember there being a movie theatre.

Bex: No. There was the, we had Athena at the cemetery, Gloria was the main, like, accident.

There was no movie theatre.

Ellen: No, there was just Eva being awful.

Bex: Yeah, there’s Eva, there was Gloria. That was it. It was Eva and Gloria. There were no, there was no… Where the fuck did they come up with a movie theater?

Alice: I have no idea where a movie theater is. Yeah.

Ellen: I’m confused. Okay. Let’s just say that last sentence again.

The first responders deal with an emergency at a military funeral. How’s that? And later on we can work out if there [00:03:00] actually is a movie theater in this episode. Okay. Okay.

So triggers… Triggers for this episode include a car accident, multiple minor car accidents. We have homophobic and racist language from a Hollywood Westboro Baptist Church type group at the, at the funeral. We have a gunshot victim and we have a drug overdose.

Bex: So this episode was written by Kristen Riedel and directed by Kevin Hooks.

Ellen: Yeah, we’re starting to get into the pattern now of Kristen Riedel episodes. I know you guys aren’t particular fans of hers.

Alice: Yeah. Should we apologize in advance that if anyone likes this episode maybe just skip this podcast episode because Bex and I have a lot of feelings.

Bex: Why don’t we discuss the episode and then at the end of it we can start ripping this episode to shreds so that if anybody actually did like this episode they can listen to us talk and break down the [00:04:00] episode and then they can stop listening before we start screaming about it.

Alice: Yeah but if we don’t scream in the middle of it, I may fall asleep.

Bex: There will be like minor screaming, like situational, contextual screaming, but then we’ll do like overall screaming at the end.

Ellen: Okay. Okay. I mean, the main thing with this episode is it is another one of those ones where the theme is very present at all times.

Bex: It is an, it is another themed episode and it is

Alice: It’s just a terrible theme, too.

Ellen: Yeah.

Bex: It’s a horrible theme, and I think it suffers because it is

Ellen: It’s awful.

Bex: It’s, it followed oh my god, no. It suffers by comparison because last week was also a themed episode, but last week was a much better, in my opinion, version of how to do the themed episode. And because we were saying how great well, it’s… Like “Stuck” is one of my favorite episodes and then going from the highs of stuck to this [00:05:00] one.

Ellen: It’s a letdown.

Bex: Yeah. It’s so

Alice: like “Stuck” we had a lot of physical plus metaphorical. This is just, whereas this is just like, you can’t, “Awful People” is just a terrible theme. It’s a terrible theme.

Bex: Well, let’s get into it.

Ellen: All right. The sooner we get into it, the sooner it’s over. Then we don’t have to talk about it anymore. (laughs)

Bex: Pretty much. Yeah. So yeah, so we’re going to start with our cold open, which, I mean, we can just summarize it and go, the Porch Pirate is back.

Alice: The Porch Pirate is back. I was actually, like, I suck at remembering like characters when they haven’t been in like a lot of episodes. I actually recognized her, so I was very excited.

Ellen: I didn’t recognize her until Athena came along and said, “You’re the Porch Pirate.” I’m like, Oh, it’s her.

Bex: So exposition cop is useful. (laughs)

Ellen: In this case, yes, she was.

Alice: In this one [00:06:00] episode, exposition cop does something well. Yeah.

Bex: Okay. So Porch Pirate is back and she is running a new scam. She’s running insurance fraud.

She’s putting herself in situations where she is going to get injured by someone else’s fault and get an insurance payout. So we start with her pretty much positioning herself right behind a guy who is backing out of a car space and pretending that he has hit her. Yeah. But that’s not her only particular scam.

She’s also doing, Oh, I’ve slipped on a puddle of sauce, which I accidentally not on purpose at all spilled on the floor in the mall so that the, the mall has to pay out for my slip and fall.

Ellen: I mean, it’s obviously working all right for her because she’s getting checks and like, you know, Making the claims.

Bex: The irony is that there is a [00:07:00] montage of the Porch Pirate running her scams to Donna Summers, “She Works Hard For The Money”.

Ellen: Yeah, she works hard for the fraud.

Bex: Yeah. Yes. But it kind of backfires because she is at a mall deciding to run a, another hit and run fraud. When she positions herself behind the car of an elderly woman who she assumes is, you know, unstable, would be, probably wouldn’t, yeah, see the best, perfect target for pretending to be hit, but as she’s getting herself in that position, she gets sideswiped by a van.

Ellen: Actually, that, that view through the back window of her just getting taken out by this van was actually pretty funny. Oh, I laughed, yeah. Yeah, I mean, it’s awful to say. I mean, so to speak. But I laughed.

Bex: It was, it was good.

Alice: Can we, can we fire Ellen every time she says awful?

Ellen: I’m just being on theme, okay? I’m leaning into the Kristin you know, line.

Alice: [00:08:00] But yeah, that did make me laugh.

Bex: It did. Yeah. Yeah, I do admit that was, that was quite clever, the way that it was just happening in the background. So if you were focused on the old lady in the foreground, you may have missed what was happening behind her, but yeah.

So we get a 9-1-1 call and the 118 get dispatched.

Alice: In which truck?

Bex: The engine truck this time,

Alice: Probably don’t need a ladder for a hit and run.

Bex: No, I’m assuming that if it was a traffic accident, they would probably more need the hoses to put out any fires.

Ellen: Yeah, I’m surprised they actually bought a truck with them.

Like, wouldn’t it make sense just to bring the ambulance truck or whatever, like they only need.

Bex: If they needed the tools to extract her from the car though, that’s in the truck. [00:09:00] I don’t think the ambulance would have the jaws of life for instance. And they probably didn’t know when they left the firehouse that it was just, you know, she was just under the car.

They just got told hit and run. I don’t know.

Alice: So who knows? Anyway, yeah. So they get there and The poor old lady says she didn’t know what to do. She was afraid to move the car. And we see the porch pirate still wedged under the car and she’s sort of like yelling at them. “Do any of you have a pen? I’ve got a partial license plate. Someone should write it down.”

And Eddie’s like, “don’t, don’t worry about the license plate. It’s it’s on the back of the car.” And Porch Pirates like “not this car, the car that hit me.”

Bex: Buck and, Buck and Eddie are focused on helping the Porch Pirate. Chim and Hen wander over and they’re just staring at her like, “wait, don’t we know you?”

[00:10:00] And, like, these guys are the, apparently they remember all of their calls.

Alice: Chim’s line is kind of like, it’s, it’s nonsensical, but it is kind of great. He just goes, that’s right, never forget a femur. (laughs)

Bex: But we don’t get the full kind of introduction or full memory until Athena wanders open, wanders over, because apparently she’s been called as well.

And she tells Buck and Eddie and reminds Chim and reminds the audience that it’s the damn Porch Pirate, whose name we find out is Lorraine.

Ellen: Yeah. And she asked her what her scan is this time.

Bex: Yeah. She does not seem to like Lorraine.

Alice: Can’t imagine why.

Ellen: And then Lorraine, like they’re, they’re sort of helping her out and loading her into the ambulance.

[00:11:00] And she’s making out that they didn’t treat her properly last time. So she, she, maybe she has to sue them. And Hen’s just like, yeah, right. Like, okay.

Alice: Hen, Hen’s like, “you gonna sue us now?” And she goes, “no, you folks are city employees. You don’t make that much. But the city, some deep pockets there.”

Then Chim and Hen slam the door shut. And Athena mutters,

Ellen: “Awful woman.”

Bex: So if anybody is. Taking a count or taking a shot for every time. I don’t think we ever get “awful people” as the entire title, but every, there is multiple and repetitive use of the word awful. So start your counts, start pouring them shots.

Alice: Just grab the whole bottle for this episode.

Bex: [00:12:00] Ugh. Seriously. So we, then we are going to check in with Maddie, who is having a day. She is taking a call, and the caller is verbally abusing Maddie, who is simply trying to get enough information so that she can do her job which the caller does not seem to appreciate, and when Maddie finally tells her the ambulance is on her way, the caller swears at her and hangs up the call.

And Maddie, in frustration and anger storms away to the break room. It’s not like you can really cuss out your caller in return, can you?

Ellen: But there’s someone in there. Gloria is there and she hands Maddie a muffin, and she said that these are delicious and paleo. And so

Bex: I forget, it’s 2018, we’re still sort of on the height of paleo.

Ellen: Yeah, this must have been the height of paleo fad. [00:13:00] I mean, a lot of people still do that kind of thing. But it’s more keto these days than paleo. Right?

Alice: I was gonna say, yeah, two, 2019 I think I went keto. So

Ellen: yeah. It’s a similar kind of deal, isn’t it?

Bex: Ish. Paleo is just eating sort of whole foods. Yeah. Nothing that’s really processed, caveman food.

Alice: Yeah. Whereas keto’s just like ate bacon. Who cares?

Bex: Yeah. Fat and protein. That’s right.

Ellen: Anyway,

Bex: so if it was a keto muffin, it would just be like a bacon muffin.

Alice: No. It would be egg and bacon.

Ellen: Yeah. Bacon and egg muffins. That sounds great. Yeah. No, no carbs.

Alice: That’s it. No carbs.

Ellen: But paleo muffins Maddie is like, “I can barely make lunch.”

But Gloria says, “no, I got them from the bakery, but don’t tell anyone.”

Bex: [00:14:00] Yeah, Gloria’s rocking this like, sweet, grandmotherly vibe. So yeah, letting people know that she doesn’t actually hand make her muffins would be a serious blow to that image that she’s trying to put out.

Ellen: Yeah. So she talks Maddie around like, you know, every day can be a bad day.

“There’s, I’ve been cursed out in every one of the 200 languages that are spoken in Los Angeles.” And Maddie says and it’s, like, “I used to work in an emergency department, like, it’s not like I’ve never been yelled at before.” And then she comes to the conclusion that she thinks it’s because these, the people in the ER were in her face and she could see them, that they were, they were scared or in pain and the people on the phone, she can’t see.

So it’s different.

Bex: Yeah. The people in the ER, there were a reason that they were being awful, whereas she doesn’t know what’s going on with the people on the other end of the phone. Gloria suggests that Maddie goes out and sees the people that she’s hearing on the other end of the phone.

Alice: [00:15:00] We do hear first another awful line where Maddie goes, you know, “They don’t mean to be so,” and Gloria goes, “Awful?”

And so we take a shot.

Ellen: So that’s two, yeah, yeah, I’m keeping count here.

Alice: Yeah. Yeah. We also get a conversation about Gloria’s Stan?

Ellen: Oh yeah, her husband, yeah.

Bex: You assume it’s her husband.

Ellen: Yeah, she never realized how right he was until after he was gone when he said that “you can’t bring those people home with you, Gloria.”

Alice: So Maddie apologizes and Gloria says, I’m told he’s in a better place now. I wonder where he is.

Ellen: Yeah. He does. She does admit later that he was, he’s not dead. Like they’ve just divorced.

[00:16:00] I mean, so he is in a better place, apparently away from her. So yeah, they, she decides that she’s going to organize a ride along to go and, you know, join in with the police to see what’s going on every day. And then Gloria’s watch beeps. And she says, “ah, it’s time to save the world, the break time’s over.”

Bex: So Gloria leaves, passes Josh, who was coming into the break room, and we get a little bit of Josh explaining who Gloria is, when Maddie expresses how amazing she thinks that Gloria is. And Josh says, that “She is the place’s Celine Dion, she just gets in here every day, getting on that stage and giving it her all,” which then sets up a montage, which we think is going to be this wonderful montage showing Gloria in her element, being the amazing 9-1-1 dispatcher she is.

[00:17:00] And the first call, yeah, she’s great. It then sours very quickly.

Alice: Very quickly.

Bex: It’s the first call is probably. A lit is, I mean, they’re all legitimate calls, but the first call is a medical emergency. A guy shot himself with a nail gun. Gloria is very calm, very cool. She offers medical, she dispatches help, she offers medical advice.

Ellen: Yeah.

Bex: The next call is a guy reporting glass breaking in the house next door. To which Gloria asks, “are you really calling because you heard glass breaking?” And when the caller explains, “well, my neighbors are in Florida right now, so nobody is at home,” Gloria says “the real crime here is going to Florida this time of year,” and that he should call a glass repairman and hangs up.

And it just gets worse from there.

Ellen: [00:18:00] Yeah, I was, I thought I’d be, like, I didn’t think I was paying as much attention to this as I should, because when she said something like, I think it was the next one where she says like, a guy like says, says that his bike got stolen and she was like, “did he break your legs?”

Then there’s he says no and she goes, “well go chase after him and get it back!” I’m like, what the hell is going on with this woman? Like, seriously?

Bex: And then it just devolves to the “CPR, no, I wouldn’t bother.” Or my personal favorite was the, “if you were really going to jump, I doubt you would have been calling me.”

Alice: Yeah.

Bex: And just, oh my God.

Ellen: She also says at one point, “maybe you should have made better life choices.” It’s like,

Bex: [00:19:00] Yeah. She’s just, she is not this, you know, wonderful example of how a 9-1-1 dispatcher should be acting.

Alice: Like, I’m trying to, I’m trying to work out how bad Celine Dion is now, like.

Bex: No, see, I think this is, this is gonna come up later because I made a note about this. I think this was them subtly hinting that Josh is gay. Yeah, it was. Because every ref, like, he references Celine Dion, later on he’s gonna reference a Broadway show. So it’s just them coding him as queer from the outset.

Ellen: Yeah, okay. I can see that.

Bex: Gay men love Celine Dion.

Alice: Yeah. Except that oh my god, what’s her name? Yeah. Kristen is not great at subtlety.

Ellen: I’m getting that.

Bex: No, it’s the most stereotypical way. Oh, gay men love Celine Dion. So if we have a man reference Celine Dion, then he must be gay.

Alice: The last two episodes we had actually queer quoted Eddie, like very queer coded. It was very subtle. And then Kristen walks in and goes, [00:20:00] Broadway, guys, am I right?

Bex: Like, what? It reminds me of that episode of The Nanny, and the only reason I’m thinking about this is because I saw a clip of it on TikTok a while ago, which was an episode where there was a guy in the house, and Niles was absolutely amazed because Fran was not flirting with him. And Fran was going, “no, no, no, he’s gay,” and Niles was like, “how do you know?”

So she walks to the door, because I think he was a handyman or something, and she yells out the door. “Who played Blah Blah Blah on this Broadway show?” And the guy yells back the actor’s name, and Fran goes, “there you go, he’s gay.”

Alice: Yeah. So like, so basically, Kristen is however old the nanny is, and that’s her entire knowledge about queer people.

Bex: Queer men specifically. Yeah, specifically. Cause like, Hen’s not breaking out into show tunes this episode.

Bex: I’m surprised she doesn’t have a carabiner clipped to her uniform at some point.

Alice: Honestly. Wait, hang on, is, is is “Karma’s a bitch?” No, that was “creepy” that Hen hooked up with Ava, wasn’t it?

Ellen: No, that was “Karma”.

Bex: No, she hooked up with her in “Karma.”

Ellen: Oh, no, no, you’re right, it was the “Full Moon” episode. That was the reason.

Bex:  No, no, no, “Full Moon” Because Chim was then blaming the full moon for her behaviour. And she’s like, no, no, this was all me.

Alice: Yeah. I was just trying to work out if Kristen just assumed that all lesbians are cheaters, and all men, all gay men love showtunes.

Bex: Possibly. Who knows.

Okay, so let’s move on from Gloria. And we have LAPD Headquarters. And they changed the sets.

Alice: It’s much nicer.

Bex: It’s, it’s so much nicer. I don’t know if this is a demotion for Athena or a promotion because she’s now in this bullpen, [00:22:00] but the bullpen has floor to ceiling French doors looking out into trees, which I think was much nicer than her previous desk.

But Maddie is being led through the bullpen to Athena’s desk.

Alice: Yeah, apparently no one ever requested that. It’s Athena, but Maddy requested Athena.

Bex: Because they have someone in common.

Ellen: Oh yeah, she says her name used to be Maddy Buckley, and she is again, apparently. She sort of realizes, you know, you can see it too, she says it to herself, like, oh, I still, I am Maddy Buckley again now.

Bex: Yeah. Yeah, I mean, we noted a couple of episodes ago that she was introducing herself as Maddy Kendall. when she has left her husband, but now she’s finally sort of realizing that she doesn’t have to have Doug’s name anymore. She can go back to being Maddy Buckley. And Athena knows everything about Maddy.

[00:23:00] Like, she tells Maddie who she is and why she’s here before Maddie even opens her mouth. And Maddie’s trying to work out how Athena knows all of this. And she tells her that Bobby has been gossiping. Bobby’s told her everything. Buck’s told Bobby everything and Bobby has told Athena everything.

Alice: To be fair, Buck literally does tell Bobby everything.

We saw that in the last episode. Oh yeah. Do you think it’s weird that I still live in Abbey’s house? Yes. Buck. For fuck’s sake, how many times do I have to tell you?

Ellen: I wish there was like a scene that we didn’t get to see, I guess, of of Bobby just unloading everything on Athena. Like, “oh, you’ll never guess what, like, I, I can’t believe that you know, Buck and Eddie have only known each other a couple of weeks and he already took him to the hospital with him. Like, what do you, what do you think’s going on there?”

Alice: “Did you know, like, Buck’s already met Tia Pepa. Do you know how long it took me to meet Tia Pepper?” [00:24:00] Actually, that wouldn’t work because they met Bobby at the same time. But still, like, yeah, I can just imagine. Bobby’s like, “I haven’t even met your family yet. And Buck’s already met Tia Pepa. Like what the fuck?” And then Athena’s like, “honey, you don’t want to meet my family.”

Bex: No, he really doesn’t.

Ellen: I feel something coming in the future.

Bex: That’s for the future. But for now, we’re, we’re going to go for a ride along with Athena.

Ellen: Maddy notices that Athena doesn’t have a partner. And Athena says she’s a field sergeant. So she goes when or where she’s needed.

Bex: I don’t know that having a partner would stop her from doing that though.

Alice: Maybe last time she had a partner, they grabbed the steering wheel whenever she had to go places.

Ellen: I dunno, they probably just got sick of her trying to bully everyone into doing stuff.

Alice: [00:25:00] they probably got sick of the twi, the Twitter comments going, why has Athena not got a partner? And they were like, oh fuck sake. Let’s just throw it. Let’s just throw, give everyone a, everyone. There we go.

Bex: So and then we’re gonna get some really clunky cringey dialogue where Athena questions Maddie, saying that she notices that Maddie had said that her married name was Kendall, but she’s here in LA, have you come here to start over. And Maddie says, Oh, hang on. So it was

Ellen: yeah. How was it? How was it?

Bex: Yeah, it was, cause it’s, they’re talking like you know, field sergeant, I go where I want or where I’m needed.

Three, two, one. Was it bad? Just complete, there’s so many non sequiturs and starting conversations like halfway in the middle of them, which I think is one of Kristen’s signature writing styles. Yeah, she’s just not great at dialogue. [00:26:00] So she, Athena asks Maddie, was it bad? You said you were married, you’re obviously not in the marital home anymore, was it bad?

And Maddie says, yeah, it was

Ellen: Awful. Number three. Awful.

Alice: Awful.

Bex: Awful.

Alice: And I’m out of alcohol, but I did just ate a KitKat.

Bex: And I don’t even want to talk about the next bit of dialogue, but they basically, they’re just talking about Maddie and her, and her marriage and her getting out of her marriage and how Maddie’s strong for getting out.

Alice: And Athena wishes that every woman in the world was strong. Even though Athena took an entire season to finally divorce her gay husband. Yeah.

Bex: Thankfully they get distracted from their discussion because Athena gets a call over the radio for a 415 at Parkview Cemetery. And Maddie, being an Amoy Mon Dispatcher, she knows all the codes.

So she asks, Oh, there’s a disturbance. [00:27:00] What kind of disturbance would there be at a cemetery? And Athena says “It’s probably another military funeral protest.” So they head off to the funeral and I want to know what happened with this episode, because there is literally 10 whole seconds of this episode devoted to establishing shots of various parts of LA as a transition between this scene and the next scene.

So I want to know, did Kristen just run out of shit to write? And so they had to throw in extra scenes just to make time? Or did they

Alice: She ran out of terrible dialogue and was just like…

Bex: Did they shoot, like, a full 45 minutes worth of footage, got into the editing room, realized that three quarters of it was unusable, cut it out, and then went, shit, we still need to make time, let’s just throw some [00:28:00] random montages and b roll in to make it up.

Ellen: Does this happen elsewhere in the episode? I’m not, I can’t.

Bex: Yes, it does.

Ellen: Okay, okay. Yeah,

Bex: This episode is so montage heavy, and there’s so many Unnecessary trans, unnecessarily long transition scenes.

Alice: Honestly, my favorite part about this is you sitting there with a timer, like, and that’s ten. Ten seconds. (laughs)

Bex: I, no, I was, I was literally, I, I was watching on my laptop and I kept moving the mouse so I could watch the, the counter on the, the track to see how long it was. And so I could count because I’m going, this seems really long. And it was.

Alice: Yeah, it’s like, hey, this is in LA. Did you know that this is in LA? This is L. A. Can you, can you see L. A.?

Bex: But, I think what, what made it so incongruous was that it really had nothing to do with either the scene before or the scene after. We didn’t see like, Athena driving along a highway, [00:29:00] we didn’t see beautiful establishing shots of the cemetery, it was literally random shots of L.A.

Alice: Yeah, so they didn’t even like shoot, like, there was a little bit of the military funeral where they’re like, putting the flag over the coffin, but like, That, before, it was just random shots of LA.

Bex: It really does feel like they got into the editing suite, and the editors have gone, holy fuck, we’re like three minutes short.

Let’s just find some B roll, find some stock footage, to just plug the gaps. Yep. Which kind of makes sense when you start thinking about, like, how many storylines are in this episode.

Alice: All two of them? Yeah.

Bex: There aren’t that many of them. So this is a very thin on the ground episode.

Ellen: Hmm.

Alice: So we finally make it to the cemetery after all the filler shots.

Bex: To the the best protest chant in the world, they, they really, they really did some strong writing with this to come up with, [00:30:00] “two, four, six, eight, burn in hell will be your fate.”

Alice: Yeah, she’s great at writing.

Bex: This whole protest scene is terrible, I, they, honestly, they should have sent the intern down to an actual funeral to talk to extremist protesters to get a feel for how they would actually talk to people. Cause I really don’t think this, these guys were like three seconds away from “I’m rubber and you’re glue. What you say bounces off me and sticks to you.” That’s the level of their back and forth.

Ellen: So hang on, I was a bit confused as to why, like, this is probably just because I don’t know a lot about this kind of business that they, the church extremist groups go into, but this was a military funeral. Are they protesting because the person was gay?

Bex: Yeah, I’m going to say that the soldier was gay.

Ellen: Okay. [00:31:00] Cause there was no sort of indication of anything there, but they’re just shouting about going to hell and whatever. I’m like, it’s just a military.

Bex: There is a sign that says soldiers die for homo marriage.

Ellen: Yeah. Yeah.

Bex: But, I mean, this whole scene, it’s very ambiguous about what they’re protesting for, even when we do get this guy, when we get the main antagonist being racist and being a bigot. It’s all dog whistles. They never come out and overtly say, The soldier was queer. That’s why we’re protesting. This guy is racist. He’s gonna say racist things.

Alice: I was trying to work out if something happened in 2018 that, like, we, we just missed because obviously we’re Australian. So I was like, it was a don’t ask, don’t tell. But that was 2010 that it got repealed.

Ellen: I mean, this sort of thing goes on over there. I just wasn’t, I was confused at what… I was thinking like, was there something else to do with the military that we weren’t, you know, aware of, but they were, yeah, they had the gay marriage kind of signs up and everything. [00:32:00] I was just like, this is really confusing me. But anyway,

Alice: yeah, it was weird. Bad writing.

Ellen: I think that’s, yeah,

Bex: it’s bad writing. It’s the, we don’t actually want to have our actors say racist things so we’re just going to be ambiguous. And unfortunately in their ambiguity, things got lost in translation.

Ellen: It just makes the scene weak. Like, you know, it’s not, it doesn’t feel like the real thing that is going to happen because no one’s actually doing anything real.

Alice: But yeah, I think that the soldier was gay.

Ellen: Okay. That would make the most sense. Anyway Athena fights her way to the front sort of thing and she leaves Maddie in the car, I think.

Bex: Yeah. Maddie kind of rolls down the window and goes, “should I stay in the car?” And Athena’s like, “yeah, stay in the car.” So, you know, so much for going for a ride along and seeing what happens because she can’t see much from the car.

Ellen: [00:33:00] No. The, the people inside the cemetery who are trying to have a funeral here you know, beg with her to kind of disperse them. And she’s like, “well, I can’t really do anything because as long as they’re staying outside the cemetery, they have the freedom to do that.”

Alice: Yeah. They have the constitutionally protected right to stand there and be awful.

Bex: Which is why having a fucking Bill of Rights sometimes sucks. But that’s a discussion for another time. She promises the, the uncle of the deceased soldier that she will do what she can. And

Alice: Oh, the uncle, hang on, the uncle does say that it’s like terrible that it just, like the law just allows them to spill their filth.

Bex: Yeah.

Alice: Which was nice foreshadowing. Totally like,

Bex: Oh, okay. That was clever again, very hammer over the head, but okay.

Ellen: Well, obviously not enough because we didn’t think of it (laughs)

Alice: he [00:34:00] basically, I don’t know. He basically looked into the camera and was like, allows them to spill their filth. Get it. Get it. And it’s awful.

And they’re people. Yes. Anyway, yeah. So one of them in like a motorized scooter thing, tries to like, comes through, like, tries to come through the gate and Athena tells him to stay behind the fence and he goes, “Or what?” It’s like, Oh, she’s a cop, mate. What do you think? So she like threatens to arrest him and he spouts some racist shit.

And. Yeah, so he goes to go forward again, and then he just, like, starts, like, coughing and falls out of the scooter.

Bex: [00:35:00] Yeah. Athena, Athena tries to help him up, he slaps her hands away, tells her to get her hands off him. Although, you know that it wasn’t just… Like, you know that he was saying things in his head that weren’t coming out of his mouth, but they can’t air those kind of things, or they can’t have somebody say those things to Miss Angela Bassett’s face.

So they’re not gonna go.

Alice: Or she might actually punch him.

Ellen: Yeah, she may actually go ballistic on him, yeah.

Bex: So Athena calls for an RA unit, and here is the second filler. Eight whole seconds of fire engines driving. Eight seconds.

Alice: So that’s 18 seconds already of filler.

Bex: 18 seconds of just fucking filler.

Alice: So the 118 get there, Athena greets Bobby and says that, like, he, she thinks that Protester 1 has appendicitis. Like, what? What? What? What?

Ellen: Yeah, I thought that, like, he started coughing and fell over and he was holding his side. Probably appendicitis. It’s like

Alice: Yeah, like

Ellen: [00:36:00] What kind of a leap did you make to get there, Athena?

Alice: Go back to, like, intimidating shop owners, because like, you’re not very good at the medical stuff.

Bex: But she, she thinks she probably is, because she diagnosed that woman as having a stroke, like last season. Oh yeah. So she thinks, yeah, I got this. Like I’m right.

Alice: I’m the best at medical.

Bex: Yes. The protester is, does not have appendicitis, I mean he might have appendicitis, but that’s not the problem.

The problem is that he has a colostomy bag which has backed up.

Alice: No, no. So can we just talk about Bobby examining the patient? So instead, like we had eight seconds of filler of emergency vehicles driving, and then Bobby’s examination of the patient is literally him pulling up his shirt up? Like, why would you lift your shirt up straight away?

You first introduce yourself and go, “Hey, I’m just going to check you over” and then start feeling like the abdomen. You don’t just lift up the shirt and go, [00:37:00] “Oh, there’s a colonoscopy.” Like what? Yeah. We then go to the, the best, the best scene in the episode, which Bex is chomping at the bit to pull apart because she has been nonstop talking about this all week.

Bex: I just, unfortunately, unfortunately, before I started my rewatch of this episode one of, one of my favorite TikTok accounts, which I’ve mentioned on this podcast before, Fire Department Chronicles, who have a series where the first responder green screens himself into first responder TV shows and picks them apart, did this exact scene.

And. I did not realize how much 9-1-1 relies on its audience having no fucking clue about medical emergencies, or medicine in particular, because I watched this scene [00:38:00] in this episode so many times and did not realize how fundamentally wrong everything about this medical emergency is until this first responder pointed it out, at which point I came back to Alice and said I need you to ask your paramedic friend,

Alice: Kate!

Bex: To, to tell me, is this guy right? Is everything about this scene wrong? And apparently it is. So I will put a link to the Fight Department Chronicles videos video about this scene, and we can all learn that the colostomy bag is not going to be connected to the throat.

Alice: Well, not the airway. So yes. Yes, it could be backed up, but it’d have to be backed up for a long time because it would have to be backed up through the entire intestines that it’s connected to, and then through the stomach and then up.

So like he would have had a lot more than just falling off his mobility scooter way before this happened. [00:39:00] He also wouldn’t be coughing and then he wouldn’t be choking because it’s his stomach.

Bex: Yeah. So I think my comment when you reported back what Kate said was, so, oh, sorry, it’s the writers that are full of shit, not the patient. (laughs)

Yeah. And then we get, I mean, as if this paramedic hasn’t been awful as if this protester hasn’t been awful enough, we then, we’re going to double down on his awfulness, because Bobby tells the protester that the paramedics are going to ex, to attend to him, said paramedics are a black woman and a

Alice: Oh, apparently they’re going to intubate him as well, for some reason.

Bex: Well, yeah, cause like he’s choking. He obviously can’t breathe. But basically he doesn’t want to have Hen or Chim anywhere near him.

Alice: [00:40:00] He’s talking, he can clearly breathe. But yes, he does not want the black woman and the Asian man to touch him.

Bex: Yeah. And Bobby is not certified to prove to intubate somebody.

Alice: Yeah, so Bobby tells him that he can’t force the guy to accept care, and the protester points at Eddie,

Bex: which, I get why, for the point of this scene, he picks Eddie out of Buck, but if you are a white supremacist, basically if you’re a terrible person, and you see a brown man and the poster boy for the Aryan nation standing there, why are you picking the brown man?

Alice: Like, Buck’s standing there with his bright blue eyes, blinking.

Bex: Blonde hair, like he’s almost getting sunburned from being out in the sun for like five more minutes at how white he is.

Alice: [00:41:00] He’s blinking his little love hearts. Oh, no, actually, that’s probably why, because he’s been gazing at Eddie since they got there, and he’s just like, oh, well, yeah, no.

That makes sense, actually, never mind. (laughs)

Bex: So, the protester picks the brown man, and Bobby says, okay, Diaz. And the protester goes, hang on, Diaz, what kind of surname is that? And Eddie reveals, oh, my father is Mexican. Like, my mother’s Swedish, but my father’s Mexican and the protester’s like, mm, nope, sorry.

Alice: I love Eddie’s remark. “He goes, I can help you out with the Swedish half, but no one told me which half that is.”

Bex: And some frustration. Bobby says, “Do you want me to call you an all white paramedic team?” Being sarcastic as fuck, but this protester believes him and it’s like nodding his head going, yes, please put in a call for the all white paramedic team.

Yeah. Cause that’s totally a thing. It’s fine. Yeah.

Ellen: [00:42:00] I really hope that Kristen just pulled this out of her butt and didn’t actually make this up from like, like, you know, this isn’t like a real thing that happens, because, oh my god.

Bex: Well, see, the thing is, I think this kind of scene happens a lot in medical shows, because I remember watching, and I did not go back and check which episode, because there’s like 500 of them now, but there was a Grey’s Anatomy scene where a white supremacist came in and refused to let Dr. Bailey examine him because she was a black woman.

Alice: Oh, not only that…

Bex: And I’m sure Grey’s Anatomy is not the only show to have done this.

Alice: There’s one, I don’t know if it’s the same one that you’re thinking of, but there’s one where a guy has a full on swastika on his chest.

Bex: Yeah, I think that is that one because he starts off, he comes into the ER and Bailey is the one that is his surgeon. And he almost refuses to let her do the surgery. And like

Alice: George, who’s white, afterwards tells him that he might not have been so nice, but Bailey saved his life.

Bex: Yeah.

Alice: [00:43:00] Even though she had to cut through the swastika to do it.

Bex: Yeah. So it’s,

I think this is something that a lot of the shows do, they just do it on different levels.

Alice: It happens also in 9-1-1: Lone Star as well.

Bex: Yeah. Yeah. So. Tim then takes this scene and when he, when he writes for 9-1-1: Lone Star, he does a version of this scene, but he kind of flips it, where the woman is clearly a racist bigot, but rather than her refusing care, the crew of Lone Star are the ones offering reasons why she doesn’t want them to treat her.

So she’s like looking at the pretty white boy and he’s like, “mm, no ma’am, I am a homosexual.” And she’s like, oh, okay, no, I don’t want you to touch me. Okay, so Protester has gone through most of the 118 and decided that none of them are worthy to touch him. [00:44:00] But his condition, such as it is, has gotten to the point where Hen notes that he’s going to aspirate and then he does.

Ellen: Yeah, and he’s like basically choking out, like, brown stuff, and you’re like, would this really happen?

Bex: Chim’s line, he’s like, “he’s got actual diarrhea of the mouth.”

Ellen: Mm, yeah.

Bex: It’s just, ugh. Delightful. It’s not a good scene. No.

Even when I didn’t, even when I didn’t know that the medical stuff was bogus, it was still not a good scene.

Alice: No. Okay. Yeah, anyway, so the protester passes out, they treat him, throw him on a gurney, and load him into the ambulance.

Bex: Yes, because now that he’s unconscious, he can’t protest, and they can treat him.

Alice: Yeah, when they’re unconscious, it’s implied consent, which is funny.

Bex: Hmm. Only works for the medical field, though. Yeah. It doesn’t work anywhere else.

Alice: [00:45:00] Yeah. Please, like, only, only to save someone’s life, people. That’s right. But yeah, so Maddie’s got out of the car and she’s lurking and like, Buck bounces up to her and introduces her to Bobby. And Maddie says that he said, she said nothing but wonderful things about Bobby.

And Bobby goes, “well, don’t believe everything your little brother tells you.” And Maddie’s like, no, no, no, not from you. Not from him, from Athena. And then Bobby does his little heart eyes at Athena.

Ellen: Aw. He does a lot of heart eyes.

Bex: He’s so smitten. Maddie is very impressed with Athena. She says that. Athena never lets anything get to her, and Athena has joined the group by this stage, so she overhears the last part of that sentence, and she tells Maddy, she asks Maddy if she knows how many times on a given day somebody has got the opportunity to get to her.

[00:46:00] I’m assuming that that means that she has, they have a lot of opportunities. And if she started letting them get to her, she wouldn’t make it past breakfast.

Bex: Which reminds her, they should eat.

Ellen: Yeah, which reminds her that she’s hungry.

Bex: She’s just seen someone like have diarrhea of the mouth and has not put her off her appetite at all.

Yep. Maddie’s horrified. But Athena’s like, well, it’s lunchtime. Well, which again, if she’s a nurse, surely she must have experienced when you’re hungry, you’ve got to eat. If you’ve got the opportunity to eat, eat. Cause you don’t know when you’re going to get the next opportunity.

Ellen: Do we, do we have like several seconds of them driving through the streets to get to the destination?

Bex: No! It’s so stupid. They go, they go, Oh, it’s lunchtime. Let’s eat. Bam. Instantaneous transportation to the mall, to the outside mall where Athena is taking her to get food.

Alice: [00:47:00] And they start like midway through a conversation as well, which also happens like a fair bit in. But yeah, so they literally they step out of the car discussing Abby.

Ellen: Yeah, so you like her? Athena’s like, “sure. You don’t approve? Is it, is it the age difference?” And Maddie just says that she, that this is the longest her little brother has ever been in a relationship. I’m like, how do you know Maddie? You’ve been out of contact for several years. Like, what do you know about Buck’s relationships?

But anyway but I don’t, either way, Abby’s not there.

Alice: But, yeah, it’s the longest relationship Buck’s ever had, but Abby hasn’t been there for most of it.

Ellen: Yeah, she’s not there.

Bex: Which, that, I mean, that’s kind of insulting to Buck, a little bit. Like, the only way he can maintain a relationship is if the other person is not there.

So he can’t screw it up. Like, ouch. Yeah.

Alice: Very ouch.

Ellen: [00:48:00] Yeah, they’re about to go into this Chinese place, restaurant.

Bex: Vietnamese.

Ellen: Vietnamese?

Bex: I’m assuming. I’m assuming. Well, because later on we get the owner of the restaurant talking on the phone and the subtitle say Vietnamese. Okay. So I’m assuming it’s a Viet I mean, it could be he’s a Viet he is a Vietnamese man running a Chinese restaurant.

Ellen: It could be. I just thought that there was Chinese characters on the door.

Alice: So yeah, so the sign on the door says closed, but there’s like bowls of food on the tables.

Bex: Yeah, it’s very Roanoke. Looks like everybody from inside the restaurant has just disappeared.

Alice: Yeah.

Ellen: And so immediately Athena pulls a gun and starts like creeping around.

Bex: Yeah, she, she kind of, she kind of went to DEFCON 1 pretty quickly. Yeah. Yeah.

Ellen: [00:49:00] She goes through to the kitchen and there is, you know, food on the floor and then she sees that there’s blood on the floor. Something’s going on. Yeah.

Alice: So there’s an upside down wok. With oil splattered and a, like a big puddle of blood, which I believe may be a health code violation.

Bex: I’d say so, yeah. I think that’s the least of this guy’s worries at the

Ellen: Yeah, she finds him, the chef lying on the floor with a, a hole in his chest. Basically, he’s been shot.

Bex: With the wall phone on the floor next to him and we can hear the, like the, the off the hook beeping coming from the receiver. Cause Athena asked, she does, she like sweeps through the kitchen, make sure kind of that nobody’s there and asks the man if he can tell her what happened.

And he says, “Robber, shot.” So so once again, she calls for an RA unit. They tell her that it’s [00:50:00] 10 minutes out and she comes to the conclusion that this guy doesn’t have 10 minutes, but coincidentally, she has an ER nurse in her squad car.

Ellen: Yep. So Maddie comes in to the rescue.

Alice: Also very impressive that Athena picked the one restaurant that’s been robbed. Thank God they went to get lunch. (laughs)

Ellen: I’m surprised she didn’t like, you know, diagnose this man with like a muscle cramp or something.

Alice: “Maddie, I think he has appendicitis. Can you come look at him?”

Bex: I think that like the hole in the chest and like the, the entire soaked t shirt probably gave it away. I think even I could have diagnosed a gunshot wound from that one.

Ellen: You’d think so, wouldn’t you?

Alice: No, it was a, it was a stroke. (laughs)

Bex: Regardless, Maddie comes in and gets straight to work. She does do a little bit of like on the spot diagnosing, but I think [00:51:00] It’s correct, so I’m going to give her the benefit of the doubt.

Ellen: Yeah, she does, like, cut open his shirt and then look at a hole in his chest and go, “I think he’s been shot.”

Alice: “I think there’s a hole in his chest.”

Bex: He’s been shot and he’s got a sucking chest wound.

Ellen: Yeah, so she’s looking for something to seal it up with.

Bex: Yep.

Ellen: And she and Athena gets a piece of plastic wrap and then they tape it on him. Where do they get this medical, well they do have a first aid kit there, so I guess there must have been some tape in that.

Bex: Yeah, there’s a first aid kit on the wall, I think that was the first thing Maddie did was rip the first aid kit off the wall, so that she could get some supplies. But she’s not quick enough to seal off the, the wounds, so our, our poor victim She loses his pulse.

Alice: Well, she does tape it to his t shirt. So

Bex: yeah, I, I don’t understand. I don’t think that the occlusive dressing is quite as occlusive if you don’t actually like fully seal it to his skin.

Alice: Yeah.

Bex: But, but she, she starts to do compressions. Oh, and I’ve suddenly discovered who taught Buck how to do compressions.

Alice: Like she starts off. Okay. And then like, she’s doing the very typical, like. TV show compressions though, where they’re like bringing their whole body down because they can’t actually, and it’s just like, okay, calm down. [00:52:00] But then she like speeds up the pulse by like 200 percent and I’m pretty sure she taught Buck how to do compressions.

Bex: Yeah.

Alice: Because it’s…

Bex: Cause, nobody else on the show does compressions at that speed except for the Buckley siblings.

Alice: Yeah. Like just, just slow it down a little bit. Like Good Lord.

Bex: It works, however.

Alice: Apparently. She gets Athena to raise the patient’s legs. And the man suddenly wakes up.

Because. That’s also not how CPR works, but in TV shows it is, so.

Bex: Well apparently the elevating his legs and getting the blood flow back to his body is the trick to waking somebody up when they’ve fallen unconscious from blood loss.

Ellen: send like a jolt of blood to the brain.

Alice: Like the blood, the blood appeared back in his body.

And like blood transfusions. No, no, we just propped their leg up. [00:53:00] But anyway, so Maddie like reassures him and the man can’t work out how they’re here because they hung up and I think it’s like, who, who hung up and the man says that 9-1-1 hung up on him. And

Ellen: they’re horrified. They’re like sharing this look, going, What the fuck?

Bex: Yeah, well there was, it is a, it is, they make it a much bigger deal later on in the series that dispatchers are not allowed to be the one to end the call. The person on the other end has to end the call first. Right. So the fact that Gloria is hanging up on everybody left, right, and centre, and The dispatcher dealing with this gunshot victim hung up on him is, like, a major no no.

Ellen: [00:54:00] This is out of context, but that just totally reminded me of Four Letter Word (For Intercourse). (lots of laughter)

Alice: Literally, that’s what I wanted to say. I’ve been listening to Four Letter Word! And when Jimmy, you can’t hang up. Yeah, so Dean’s going to end the call and that’s all I can think.

Ellen: Ah, the brain rot is so real.

Alice: Shout out to Dusty for bringing this fic back into our lives because it’s now all we can think about. 9-1-1 operators, just the same as sex operators, just you heard it here first, folks. Thanks.

Bex: The girls are, get it, get it.

Alice: Did 9-1-1 operators get paid by the minute as well, or?

Bex: No! Oh my god.

Alice: Like, wait, wait, don’t hang up, you just started a new minute, let’s chat first. Oh dear. Anyway, yeah, so,

Bex: [00:55:00] Oh no, my brain is just going in all sorts of directions. 911 operators, Oh no, my brain is just going in all sorts of directions. Bark and Abby having phone sex, and Abby going, But dude, I do this all day. Why do we have to keep talking…

Alice: Oh no. (more laughing) No wonder Abby hasn’t called him since she left for Europe.

Ellen: Poor Abby. Okay. Okay.

Bex: Yep. All right. Where were we? Back to we, we just went to commercial, so it’s fine.

So when we come back, Maddie is filling Josh in on the situation and Josh is, does not believe her. He lists all of the possible reasons why the call could have terminated other than a dispatcher hanging up on someone. And this is where [00:56:00] we get the musical reference because he calls her “Nurse Nellie Forbush”, who is the nurse in South Pacific. I had to look it up. I had no idea.

Alice: You’re not a gay man?

Bex: Apparently not. I mean, good for me, like gender affirming. I’m apparently not a gay man, so that’s fine.

Alice: I do like, I like that Josh is like, “Oh, it was just spotty cell service.” But he was literally on a landline phone,

Bex: I don’t think Josh knows that. But he, he decides to humor Maddie and goes, okay, let’s look up the call because they do record all 9-1-1 calls. So let’s listen to the call and see what happens. And it’s not pretty. Because yeah, Gloria took this call.

Alice: [00:57:00] What a shock. I didn’t see that coming with the montage we had earlier.

Bex:

Alice:

Bex: No, no. So the restaurant owner, he has, his English is accented, but it’s still understandable. He says, “help, a robber, he shot me”. And Gloria pretends that she can’t understand him.

Alice: Like the guy even gives him gives her the location and the address, and Gloria’s just like, “eh, speak louder”. Like, the man’s been shot.

Bex: “Speak louder or I’m, or I’m hanging up.”

Alice: Yeah. Yeah. And like, there’s literally a bullet hole going through his lungs. He can’t speak much louder.

Bex: which he tells her, he says, “shot, bleeding, help now.” And then Gloria drops all pretense of not being able to understand him and says, yelling at me, won’t stop the bleeding.

Okay. I’m not the one who shot you. And he lapses into Vietnamese. And the [00:58:00] only reason I know that is because the caption then very helpfully says, “Speaking Vietnamese”. I have no idea what he actually said. And Gloria in Fuck You Bitch, and Gloria says, “Seriously, you’re switching to another language now?”

And then we get the click of her hanging up the call.

Ellen: And Josh is like, “That wasn’t a mistake. She meant to do that.”

Bex: And Maddie, just for the people in the audience who weren’t paying attention, says “Gloria hung up on him.” Like, yes, honey, we saw. We were there. We were there with you. We know. Like, we, we, yeah.

Which did get me wondering what would have happened if he’d had a decent 9-1-1 operator and he had lapsed into Vietnamese. So I did a little bit of Googling, and apparently I’m assuming triple-0 had to have the same kind of function, but 9-1-1 have something they call a language line. Where if you get a caller who is not speaking English, you can three way call in a translator.

Ellen: [00:59:00] Oh, that’s cool.

Bex: And they will help you by translating your questions and translating the answer from the caller for you.

So worst case scenario, Gloria could have hooked up the Language line to get someone who spoke Vietnamese to help her.

Alice: They have similar for deaf and hard of hearing. I know they do in Australia anyway.

Where the deaf or hard of hearing person will type and someone translates it to like a landline. Cause yeah, I’ve had it in retail where like we had a customer who would call up quite regularly to like, just ask if we had stuff in stock. And yeah, the, like, person would be like, “Oh, I’m just like translating for such and such.”

And then they’re like, just like “such and such is typing.” And then they’d type back my reply. But yeah, that’s really awesome. [01:00:00] Good little service.

Bex: Although I did note, I did a little bit of a Reddit dive and most people asking the question, If your grandmother can’t speak English, what happens is she needs to call 9-1-1? and most of the advice is teach your grandmother how to say “translator” and then the language that they need and have that be the first thing they say.

Because then that way the 9-1-1 dispatcher does not have to try and guess at what language they’re speaking.

Ellen: Yeah.

Bex: They can go straight to, “I need an interpreter for X language.”

Ellen: All right, we’re going to go have a picnic.

Bex: With an honest to god red and white check picnic blanket.

Ellen: Really? I didn’t notice that. So, Hen and Karen have like hooked up with Michael to, so that Denny and Harry can play together, which is kind of, it’s [01:01:00] very sweet. I didn’t realize that they were all such great mates. I guess Han and Athena work together a whole lot and go out for drinks and stuff separately after work and that.

So, I guess it makes sense that they would all be friendly together, you know?

Alice: Yeah, like Athena’s probably at work.

Bex: It kinda does, but I mean, Denny and Harry are not of similar ages.

Ellen: No, Denny’s a few years younger.

Bex: They don’t look like that they would be like the besties, they look like the kids that are being forced to play together while the adults talk.

Alice: Oh yeah, it’s probably, it’s like the, the younger cousin you’ve got that like, Yeah. Like, yeah, like, I’ll hang out with him, but I’m probably gonna make him do naughty things and then blame him later. (laughs)

Bex: But they’re playing with Paisley.

Ellen: Yeah, so Paisley’s still around at this point.

Bex: So they’ve got something to distract them.

Alice: Yeah, so Paisley’s the dog that Hen stole at the end of the earthquake, because it’s owner died.

Bex: Does it count as stealing if the, the, [01:02:00] the wicked bitch of the west is dead?

Alice: I mean, like, probably not, but it was just funny. Yeah, she rescued, yeah.

Bex: Yes, rescued. Adopted.

Alice: We, we’re still not sure if Paisley’s still allergic to gluten, but,

Ellen: maybe they don’t have sandwiches at the picnic. Anyway, they are playing together but Michael is already, we, we’re coming in the middle of the conversation again. Michael’s Yeah, I

Bex: hate it when they do this. It’s just, it’s so awkward.

Alice: Yeah, cause they like, catch us up. Like, they’re trying to make it natural, but they catch us up.

Ellen: They give the exposition as part of the sentence.

Alice: It’s like, you don’t like her? Abby? Like, no. We’ve just been talking about someone else for the last, like, 30 minutes. Like, what? Like, what?

Ellen: Well, he’s saying that he’s glad that Athena has found someone new, but apparently he has like a natural paternal quality to him.

Bex: [01:03:00] That’s because he was a father.

Ellen: I don’t know if Michael knows that, but you know, it’s okay to be insecure, Michael.

Bex: Which is the point of this whole scene. When he’s feeling insecure. About his fatherhood now that Bobby is in the picture.

Alice: Yeah. Harry seems to idolize Bobby a little bit, which is fair. He’s a new shiny toy.

Ellen: Harry did tell him that. It’s weird that you are an architect and Bobby’s a firefighter, so you are there when the buildings go up, but he’s there when it burns down to the ground. I’m like, wow, Harry. That’s rough, man.

Bex: . I mean, he’s not wrong. Yeah. But the point of this scene is to hammer home the idea that no matter what happens, Michael is May and Harry’s father, and they know it. Anything they get from Bobby is just extra, but Michael is their father.

Alice: [01:04:00] It’s kind of funny that they’re like, yeah, biology is important and biological fathers matter.

Bex: Ironic, isn’t it, huh? So the boys are playing with Paisley. They’re playing fetch. They, with their squeaky toy, they throw it. Paisley goes running after it. And then a woman steps in and picks Paisley up.

Ellen: Yeah, like the audacity.

Bex: And all we can see is her arms. And it is a white woman with crappy tattoos up and down her arms. That’s all we can see at this point.

Alice: Wait, it’s, it’s Oliver Stark?

Bex: I said woman.

Alice: My bad. (laughs)

Bex: (laughing) Don’t make fun of Oliver’s tattoos.

I mean, yeah, he’s got the patchwork style going rather than going for a full sleeve. I mean, he’s probably going to regret that choice at some point. Leave Oliver alone.

Alice: [01:05:00] But it’s been so long since I’ve seen him this episode.

Ellen: I know, he only has like two lines.

Bex: I know. So the boys run over to to this woman who is suddenly absconded with their dog.

Alice: The dog’s being stolen again. (laughs)

Harry looks a little bit concerned about this situation the actor who is playing Denny doesn’t have a line for a couple of seconds, so he’s not paying attention. He’s just been told, okay, you have to run over and meet, and this is your mark. So that’s literally all he does. He just runs over, hits his marks, and then just kind of stares off in the distance, stares at his feet, waiting for his turn to say his line. (laughing)

Child actors, you gotta love them. It does detract a little bit from the scene though, because he’s not really paying attention to the woman who has the dog. Yeah. Who is…? [01:06:00] It wouldn’t be an episode about awful people if we didn’t have Eva in it.

Alice: Yep. So yeah, it’s Hen’s ex who is also Denny’s mother. Well, biological.

Bex: Biological mother.

Alice: Egg donor? Egg donor.

Bex: No, because she literally birthed to Denny.

Alice: Yeah, yeah, but like then she wasn’t really in it, so like No. So it’s all she really did.

Bex: Pretty much, yeah. So she’s picked up Paisley as an excuse to talk to the boys and Denny is talking a mile a minute at her, is not fazed that this strange white woman is talking to him.

Harry’s a little bit more suspicious, and it’s kind of noted that they’re at a dog park, and she doesn’t appear to have a dog. So, you know, ten points to Michael and Athena for raising this child to be a little bit aware of his surroundings.

Alice: [01:07:00] I mean, yeah, Athena’s a cop, so she’s probably like teaching them to be observant.

Bex: Stranger danger. Speaking of observant, Karen, notices what’s going on. She’s sort of Hen and Michael are getting lunch ready. She looks over her shoulder, sees Eva, and jumps up and sprints for the dog park.

Alice: Hen, interestingly, sees what’s going on and starts running, but not for the boys, but to hold Karen back.

Bex: She’s running after Karen. I don’t know if Michael knows who Eva is, but he just sees Hen and Karen running and just, he follows along. And takes control of the boys, gets them out of the situation, doing that, like that, like, false sleep, false cheer thing that you do as a parent where you’re trying to, you know, Distract your kids, like, Oh, who wants food?

[01:08:00] Pay no attention to the crazy white woman. Let’s go have hot dogs.

Ellen: But Karen just sort of squares up to her, and

Bex: I love Karen

Ellen: and Eva’s like, excuse me? And yeah, Karen basically rips her a new one, like, “why are you here?” Like, yeah.

Bex: She’s so worried that Eva introduced herself to Denny as his mother.

So they obviously haven’t told Denny who his biological mother is. But no, she’s not there to talk to Denny. She just wanted to show Denny’s father. She wanted to introduce Denny’s father to Denny. Because apparently she lied when she said she had no idea who Denny’s father was.

Ellen: Yeah.

Bex: So there’s this

Ellen: You know, black man standing behind her, looking a bit nervous.

Bex: Yeah, I think he realized that shit’s gone down, that he had no idea what was happening. He looks awkward as fuck.

Ellen: [01:09:00] He’s in over his head, yeah. Not really sure what’s going on. But Eva just says, like Karen accuses her of lying, and Eva says, “Am I? We’ll find out.” And then she bounces.

Bex: It’s just another, another way for Eva to get back at Hen.

Alice: My notes the entire episode refer to Nathaniel as “sperm person”. (laughs)

Ellen: Well, it’s accurate, I guess.

Alice: So we go back to 9-1-1 headquarters.

Ellen: Yeah. Gloria’s in a room, like a closed off room a meeting room type thing with Sue, and Maddie comes in, but Josh kind of heads her off and says why don’t you go take a longer lunch? And Maddie sees what’s going on in the conference room and she’s like, is, “are they reprimanding her for hanging up?”

[01:10:00] And Josh is like, “no, they’re firing her. For the, the hundreds, maybe thousands of hang ups that she has done.”

Alice: Going back eight months and like, how has no one noticed and has no one complained?

Ellen: Yeah. It’s like, they’re obviously not keep, they’re not doing like a quality assurance on any of these calls really, are they?

Bex: Oh my God. Could you imagine you call 9-1-1 you’re like, if please stay on the line to answer a few quick questions.

Alice: How satisfied were you with your emergency today?

Ellen: It’s more listening to occasionally a few people’s calls just to make sure they’re actually doing a decent job at this.

Bex: I guess you would have to have somebody make a complaint.

Alice: That’s what I mean. Like eight months and no one’s made a complaint. Like,

Ellen: yeah, yeah. She’s been horrible to people for eight months and no one’s complained.

Bex: See, so Maddie is shocked that this has been going on for eight months and Josh kind of contemplatively says, you know, it kind of makes sense. She went a little bit squirrelly after the divorce. And Maddie, along with the rest of the audience, goes, [01:11:00] “wait, divorce? I thought her husband was dead.” And she, apparently, she only wishes he was dead.

Alice: So yeah, she, Gloria’s probably facing criminal charges. Cause there was a 9-1-1 dispatcher in Houston that got 18 months for interfering with emergency calls.

Bex: Which again is another ripped from the headlines story, however I hate to burst Josh’s bubble, but the dispatcher got 18 months probation. She only actually served 10 days in jail.

Alice: Yeah, like I guess she wasn’t a danger to society?

Bex: Well, she got reported because somebody died. She took a, the dispatcher in Houston took a call and she hung up on the caller and somebody died. And so The widow, the widower made a complaint, they tracked which [01:12:00] dispatcher it was, they went back over her history and realized that most of her calls were lasting about 45 seconds.

Alice: Yeah, that’s insane, like I can’t,

Bex: yeah. Because she just, she just could not be bothered dealing with people, so if she couldn’t handle the call, she’d just hang up and move on to the next one. For months. Wow. That’s crazy. Yeah.

Ellen: Well, anyway, Gloria gets let out, apparently, and she storms over to… I nearly called her Abby again. What is going on with that? Maddie.

Bex: She storms over to Maddie, which is why Josh wanted her out of there, so that she wouldn’t have to confront Gloria.

Alice: Yeah. And Josh just vanishes.

Bex: It’s so funny. You could almost see like the little you know, when the roadrunner disappears and there’s just that little bubble of air that’s left behind.

That was Josh. Cloud. That’s the word I was looking for. No, Gloria’s, [01:11:00]

Ellen: Gloria’s upset. She’s like, “I was nice to you. I showed you where we hide the good coffee pods and they want to put me in jail because of what you said.” And Maddie’s like, “no, you hung up on people on purpose.” And then Gloria actually says the title of the episode.

Bex: Ah! All right. Everybody take an extra long drink.

Alice: Okay. Hang on.

Ellen: But then she goes off on this rant that, how, like, people expect you to do something for them and they never ask, how are you doing, Gloria? And they, you give them everything you have and then they leave you for your sister. It’s like, oh, wait a second.

Bex: Suddenly she’s not about 9-1-1 calls anymore.

Ellen: So we find out accidentally what happened with her husband, maybe but she gets dragged away by the cops. [01:14:00] And Maddie’s a little bit shaken, but she’s, she’s okay.

Bex: I just, I love how ineffectual the LAPD officers are in this, because Gloria is threatening Maddie.

Like, she literally tells her, “Snitches get stitches”.

Alice: Yeah, and they’re just like, eh, whatever.

Bex: But the LAPD officers are just holding Gloria’s arms. Letting her finish her threat, and then as soon as she says that, they’re like, Okay, well, I think that’s it. Now we’re actually going to do our job and pull you into the elevator. Just try it. Just try and make it look like you are struggling to contain this woman.

Ellen: I mean, she’s like a, she looks like a grandma, but snitches get stitches. Funny line. All right, we’re gonna go to the Wilson house. I I think they’re walking in the front door, right? Well, Hen’s walking in the front door.

Bex: Hen and Denny are coming in.

Alice: With Paisley, don’t forget the dog.

Ellen: [01:15:00] They’ve got this really pretty like a leadlight or something in their front door that I noticed this time. Yeah. It looks really nice. I’m like, wow.

Bex: It’s a nice set. I do like the Wilson house. Yeah.

Ellen: Lots of wood, wooden paneling and warm kind of tones. I like it.

Alice: Yeah.

Ellen: Karen is on the phone trying to find out what. this means for them that they’ve found someone who claims to be the biological father.

Bex: Who’s someone who is the biological father? Apparently enough time has passed that Nathaniel has submitted DNA and I’m assuming that Karen and Hen have also submitted DNA for Denny and they’ve matched them and determined that Nathaniel is Denny’s biological father.

Ellen: Yeah, it’s funny because I, I don’t know, like, would they agree to doing that? I guess. Can you refuse to give DNA sample of your child? Like, you know,

Bex: I wonder if there was a court order.

Alice: Yeah.

Bex: [01:16:00] Or maybe there was a subpoena or there was some kind of Eva’s lawyers. Sought for a DNA sample to be submitted.

But the timeline in this episode is so whack. I don’t think enough time has passed for that to have happened.

Ellen: No, you’d think it would take a long time.

Bex: Yeah.

Ellen: Yeah, even if they’d have to go through all that red tape, and then to do the actual, get the results back from the DNA test must take a long time.

Bex: Yeah.

Ellen: So I don’t know. Anyway, in TV land, it comes back right away.

Bex: It comes back right away, which is, I mean, Eva is not wrong when she told Hen that biological fathers have rights. Then the lawyer has told Karen that the courts will balance the interest of the child in having contact with his [01:17:00] biological father against Eva and all of the shit that Eva has pulled.

Alice: Yeah. Like the thing is the courts aren’t gonna displace a child to give him to a stranger,

Bex: But they could also order that they, they could also order Hen and Karen to allow Nathaniel access to Danny. To Danny.

Alice: Oh yeah, for sure. But they’re not just gonna straight up take him away.

Ellen: Yeah, Hen’s worried that that’s what could happen. And they have, they did say in a previous episode that there was precedent for that.

Bex: Yeah. Hen and Karen have no biological ties to Denny. And I’m sure the courts were happy at that point because there was no biological family in place or that they could find for Denny to go to Hen, but now there is a biological family member.

Alice: If they’ve legally adopted him, which they have because The mother signed over all rights. So they’ve legally adopted him.

Bex: [01:18:00] Yes, but the question is, Nathaniel did not consent to the adoption. So he could contest the adoption and he could seek custody of his biological son. It’s about to get, it has the potential to get messy.

Ellen: What a mess. What a mess.

Bex: Yeah. And all because that awful woman wanted to hurt him. And ugh.

I just hate, I hate, I hate that we had just got Hen and Karen back in a stable relationship after the season one storyline with Eva all of a sudden we’ve just thrown them back into turmoil again. It’s like, they’re not allowed to be happy.

Ellen: Yeah. No. And for stupid reasons.

Bex: And for such stupid reasons.

Ellen: And Hen’s, apologizing again, like, she’s stupid, she’s sorry, and Karen’s just like, I don’t want to hear that, like, I know you’re sorry [01:19:00] but I’m having a really hard time with this. And it’s like Which

Bex: Which is valid. Yeah. Completely valid. Yeah. Unfortunately Denny overheard all of this, and sweet baby that he is. He thinks that Karen being mad is because he’s talked to the strange lady at the park. Because in his mind, this all happened after he started, after he talked to that lady. So he’s thinking that this is all his fault.

Ellen: Yeah, but Hen tells him that she’s not upset with him and she’s, and then he says the cutest thing, he goes, “Can you fix the bad thing like you fix people at work?” What a cutie pie.

Hen tells him that she’s gonna fix everything. Mom’s gonna fix everything.

Bex: Yeah. Not just yet though. We got to go back to Buck’s.

Ellen: Hey, we finally getting some more Buck.

Bex: [01:20:00] Yeah, like 10 seconds of him.

Ellen: Yeah, a couple of lines.

Bex: He is cooking again though. Something that’s not breakfast. So good for him.

Alice: Look at him learning things.

Bex: It looks like Maddie has come over for dinner, so Buck is cooking dinner for her while she rants about Gloria.

Ellen: Yeah, because apparently Gloria’s still sending her messages and like, trying to, you know, calling her all the time.

Bex: Yes. Maddie says that apparently in reporting Gloria, she violated some kind of 9-1-1 dispatcher code that she didn’t even know existed.

And she says that Gloria has been calling her and texting her until she had to shut her phone off. And I’m looking at her going, why didn’t you just block the number? Mm hmm. Yeah,

Alice: and why do you even have her number, and why does she have your number?

Bex: Yeah, because the next thing is, she’s obviously, she’s turned her phone back on, and the screen starts filling up with messages from Gloria, [01:21:00] which are marked as from Gloria, so she has entered Gloria into her contact list.

I’m assuming that Gloria, like, I don’t even know how Gloria got Maddie’s phone number,

Alice: Like, maybe when they were, like, being friendly at some point, they exchanged numbers.

Bex: But was there enough time between her giving Maddie a muffin and this to happen that they would exchange numbers? And I’m pretty sure

Alice: Well Gloria did show her where the good coffee pods were at some point, so

Bex: I don’t know.

Ellen: Yeah, they did exchange more than a few words.

Bex: It’s just, this part is nonsensical. Like, she should have blocked Gloria’s number from the get go. Okay. But I guess that doesn’t that doesn’t work for dramatic purposes. So we get text messages filling up Maddie’s screen saying, “Damn you Maddie, this isn’t over. Why are you, why are you ruining my life? This isn’t fair, I’m a good person.”

Alice: Are you though? Are you?

Ellen: But Maddie’s going to ignore her and hopefully she’ll go away. And she,

Alice: [01:22:00] Yeah, because she doesn’t want to smash another cell phone.

Ellen: Yeah, after she threw the last one at the wall a couple episodes ago. Yeah.

Bex: It deserved it. So now we’re gonna go back to Hen.

Ellen: Okay, so Hen’s gonna fix everything. By stalking Eva.

Bex: Pretty much, yeah.

Alice: As you do.

Ellen: So she followed Eva to Somewhere?

Bex: It’s a liquor store.

Ellen: Okay. Okay.

Bex: It’s a liquor store, and Eva is hanging around out the front, buying drugs.

Ellen: Right.

Alice: I missed that whole thing. Apparently, I just was not watching.

Ellen: No I didn’t see that part either. I must have tuned out by that point.

I’m like, I know, I knew she followed Eva home, but I wasn’t, I didn’t.

Bex: It was mostly happening in the background and it was kind of fuzzy, but [01:23:00] there was a split second, cause it was all focused on Hen in the foreground watching Eva through the mirror. But there was a second where they focused on Eva and she hands something to a guy in a car.

Who then hands her something and she’s sort of looking around furtively and slips it in her pocket and walks away, which is just like, you know, TV code for, TV shorthand for buying drugs.

Alice: Drug deal. Yeah.

Bex: Yeah. So then Eva starts walking home and that’s when Hen follows her back to her apartment.

Ellen: And then Hen’s phone rings and it’s Karen who apologizes to her, but you know, she says, “Why don’t you just come home?”

She says, “where are you?” And then. Hen was like, “I, I need to clear my head. I, all I feel is rage.” It’s like, Oh, dark Hen. But she’s sitting in the car and like, she’s just staring at like Eva’s door. The light’s just shining on her face and she’s like, looking really like she’s gearing herself up to do something bad.

Alice: [01:24:00] Yeah. So a couple of episodes ago, Hen mentioned that she wasn’t like, she promised that she wouldn’t lie to Karen again. Yeah. I did like that. Eva comes on the scene and she immediately starts lying again.

Bex: I mean from a certain point of view.

Ellen: She didn’t lie. She didn’t tell the entire truth.

Alice: She’s just out for a drive.

Bex: I, she, she is out. She did go for a drive, but then she parked and she watched, and then she drove a little bit more. And now she’s parked again. And she’s watching.

Alice: But yeah, That’s not just out for a drive.

Bex: No, it’s, it’s a very stretching of the truth.

Ellen: And she decides she’s gonna confront Eva now. So she goes up and starts banging on the door, yelling out that she knows Eva is there. But she,

Alice: and another part that Bex absolutely loves.

Bex: Oh, good Lord. So, Hen is knocking on the door, [01:25:00] telling Eva, open the damn door. And we hear a smashing noise, which I’m assuming in this episode is just going to be shorthand for the audience of something bad has happened off camera.

So it’s Hen,

Ellen: It’s very clear and. you know, sounds like it’s right there, smashing sound.

Bex: And it’s very, very specific, it’s very specifically glass breaking. Yes. So Hen takes this as, oh shit, I need to get in there. And it’s probably a good thing that she does get in there because Eva is OD’ing. She is on the ground with a needle still stuck in her arm and she’s aspirating on her own vomit.

However, there is no broken glass in that scene. Eva did not…

Alice: There was nothing broken!

Bex: There was nothing broken, Eva did not fall on anything, there’s no, like, smashed glasses that she was carrying, or she’s knocked something over. So they’ve literally just used the glass sound as something has happened off screen.

[01:26:00] The foley artist is just so confused, like, What, but, what, like, what is smashing? What is smashed? Cause that, like, they’re just like, we don’t care. Just smash something. We’ll use that sound. It’s fine.

Alice: They could have just used, like, a heavy, like, (hits desk) Like, you know, something falling. Yeah, falling to the ground.

Bex: I, like, I could, I could, I could forgive it once, but this is not the only time in this episode that they do it.

There is another, there is another scene where they have, oh, something happened off camera that’s bad, let’s have glass smashing, but no, actual glass was broken in the making of the scene.

Alice: I feel like it’s probably the same sound effect too.

Bex: You know what, it probably is. I don’t know, maybe it was when they were shooting it, they forgot to do something or whatever sound effect they had just didn’t work.

So in the editing suite, they’ve just grabbed a random sound from like their suite of sounds and just thrown it in. That’ll work. And just, well, there’s no actual glass in the scene. [01:27:00] I don’t care. I needed to have this tape in the hands of the studio, like five minutes ago. We’re going with glass.

Alice: It’s glass underscore smash dot w a v. They’re like, that’ll do. (laughs)

Bex: So, there is no glass broken, but it doesn’t matter because Eva is OD’ing. And then, you were making fun of me for counting the seconds of the transition scenes. I was counting the seconds of this next scene, because this scene went on too fucking long. So, for 30 whole seconds, we watch Hen struggle with the decision of whether to call 9-1-1 or not.

And So Like, I get it’s a difficult decision, does she do what is best for, like, her, like, morally, what is the morally right thing to do, call 9-1-1, save Eva’s life, [01:28:00] or does she do what is best for her and her family and let Eva die? But I think that we could have got that done in, like, 15 seconds.

Alice: You would think, but they’re running out of…

Bex: Well, like, 20 seconds, I’m starting to get antsy. 25 seconds, I’m going, come on, guys, we need to wrap this up. 30 seconds, I’m like, oh, you were struggling to get your time for this episode, weren’t you?

Alice: Yeah, like, they, they, they were like, shit, we have, like, nothing else to go on this episode.

Bex: So, Aisha, just ham it up. Just, just keep going, Aisha. No, no, it’s not too long, just keep going.

Ellen: Yeah, and all this time Eva’s lying there going (gagging noises). Like, come on (laughs)

Alice: Hen’s like doing diagrams on the window with a whiteboard marker. And then she like gets a cork board with string and starts, like, putting red lines

Bex: It’s that meme of, like, you’re looking confused off in the distance and all of the algebraic equations and scientific notations start floating around your head.

Alice: Oh yeah, that’s literally what’s happened, yeah.

Bex: [01:29:00] But Yeah. So for 30 seconds, Hen struggles with the decision and (laughs)

Alice: I just sent Bex the gif. Oh, yeah.

Bex: Alice is just spamming the chat with everything that I’m talking about, which is why I’m just seeing the notifications pop up on my screen as I’m talking. Eventually Hen does do the right thing and she does call 9-1-1. But it wakes four people up. far too fucking long to get to that point. She

Alice: literally, she gets out her phone.

Yes. And then she’s like, nah. And so she walks to the door and she’s like, and she walks back to Ava and watches her like, and looks at her phone again. And she’s like, yeah. And it’s like, just make up your fucking mind. Jesus Christ.

Meanwhile, Kristen’s there watching her watch like, no, we’ve got another, nah, keep it going, keep it going.

Bex: I’m sure that when they do scenes like this, that they shoot extra. with the idea that they will [01:30:00] cut it down in the editing suite.

Alice: Yeah, cause for reaction shots, yeah, they just left all of it in.

Bex: But yeah, they got to the editing suite and went, no, we’re going to need this entire scene.

Alice: Like this episode is 20 minutes long. We have to have Hen looking real mad for like

Bex: But then what, but then I don’t understand because then we go from Hen, we see her typing in 9-1-1 and then bam, immediately there are two paramedics administering naloxone. How did, why 30 seconds of deliberation and then almost instant paramedic?

Alice: And like, Hen’s a paramedic, she could literally like roll her into the recovery position and start something on her own. Like yes, she needs the thing to reverse overdoses, but like she could have done something. Instead, she’s like, eh.

Bex: I’m going to stand over here and just watch you choke on your own vomit while

Alice: Yeah, I’m going to angrily lean on the wall. I mean, it’s still better than Walter White who did just walk away, but still. Breaking Bad? [01:31:00] No, no one?

Bex: Yeah, I was wondering where you were going with it. I got that Walter White was breaking bad. I just have not seen it to get the reference.

Alice: Ah, yeah. He like… spoilers for Breaking Bad, but he totally kills someone who’s overdosing.

Bex: Ah, charming

Alice: by doing exactly that. Like walks in on them, overdosing and aspirating and it’s just like, yeah, that doesn’t seem like a me problem and turns around and walks out.

Yeah. He knows the person too. It’s not like a stranger, but he’s like, yeah, no, my life would be better without this person and just turns around and walks out.

Ellen: Would you count him as an awful person?

Alice: I would absolutely count him as an awful person.

Ellen: I get that impression. Hen saves awful people every day after Eva wakes up and says, “why did you save me?”

Alice: And then she looks at, Hen looks at the camera and goes, “I save awful people every day.”

Ellen: Oh, so there’s two times that they say the episode title.

Bex: [01:32:00] I must’ve just blocked it from my memory. That’s how, how much I hated this. You were very drunk at this point. (sings) You put the lime in the coconut and drink it up.

Alice: Yes, so Hen’s called the parole officer as well in this time?

Bex: Yes, because she is getting Hen out of her life because, yes drug use when you were put in prison for drug use is a big no no when you’re out on parole, so she’s just earned herself a one way ticket back behind bars.

Alice: Yeah, but like, so she called 9-1-1, and while she was waiting for 9-1-1, she’s like, gotta call the parole officer too!

Bex: Which, I mean, how does she know who’s, who Eva’s parole officer is?

Alice: Eva’s clearly got like the business card on the fridge and she’s like a parole officer in bold. And Hen like on the landline and then Gloria answered and hung up on her.

Bex: [01:33:00] Okay So we’re now going to, we do an establishing shot, rather extended establishing shot of a medical centre, which is I thought it was a hospital, turns out it’s an urgent care centre, where a nurse has called Athena because she put out a bolo, I’m guessing, for her robbery suspect. And a guy matching the description, which Athena has probably just said, young white guy with oil burns on his face, has shown up to the urgent care centre.

Ellen: He said he did it while he was grilling, but apparently the burn pattern’s all wrong. I don’t know what a burn pattern is, but I guess the arrangement of burns on the skin?

Bex: How do you, so, so, so this, this guy they must have stabilized the gunshot victim enough that he was able to tell Athena that he, the wok that we saw [01:34:00] earlier that had fallen on the floor had been full of hot oil and he had thrown it in the robber’s face.

So the guy has got burns on his face. How do you get burns on your face if you’re grilling?

Alice: Yeah. Right.

Ellen: Unless you fall into the grill.

Bex: I mean, like, did he lean over to check the steaks and slip and go face first onto the grill?

Alice: No, he wanted bacon in the morning. So he put the George Foreman grill at the end of his bed and turned it on and then he fell out of bed because he had a nightmare and burned his face on the grill. It’s not that hard to do. (laughing)

Ellen: Geez.

Alice: He then bubble wrapped it and went to urgent care. I did not just finish watching The Office again.

Bex: What?!

Alice: What?

Ellen: What happened on The Office that included a George Foreman grill?

Bex: Who did that on The Office? Was that Dwight?

Alice: No, it was Michael! Oh my god. He burnt his foot. He stepped out of bed [01:35:00] and stepped on the George Foreman grill. And then he bubble wraps it and tries to stick it in an MRI.

Ellen: Okay.

Alice: You guys just aren’t getting my references at all!

Bex: No, no, we’re getting them! We’re understanding them! We just haven’t seen them to be able to fully comprehend where you are going with your references.

Alice: How have you not seen The Office?

Bex: I’ve seen bits and pieces of it enough to know that that’s a very Michael Scott thing to do.

I just have not sat through the entire series.

Alice: I feel like we need to do a The Office re watch.

Bex: No, no, please no. Please no.

Alice: Anyway, yeah, so the wounds are more than a day old and he’s got a massive infection and keeps screaming. And so Athena goes, we’ll, we’ll see if we can’t give him something to take his mind off that.

But when they knock on the patient’s door and try and go in the room’s empty. And then Bex’s favorite sound effect.

Bex: [01:36:00] Then there’s glass breaking off camera. Which raises,

Alice: again, sounds like it’s right next to them,

Bex: which it’s not because Athena has to go down a hall and around a corner and through to an employee’s room, only room into like a storeroom where our victim has, I guess he was trying to find pain medication or drugs or something and has fallen down, maybe hit his head.

Again, there is nothing in that room that is glass that is broken.

Alice: Nothing. And like, why did he pass out?

Bex: I’m assuming he, he hit his head or maybe they’re like, he’s gone septic because they did say he had a massive infection. Maybe that’s finally… but I just, again, why are you using a glass sound effect when there is no broken glass?

I would also like to point out that this guy still has a gun waistband of his jeans and how the hell did they let him into urgent care with a weapon?

Alice: I’m always, I’m always going to urgent care with my gun tucked in my jeans.

Bex: [01:37:00] It’s just, it’s like they’ve assumed that the audience is so stupid that they need to have this guy with a gun in order to be able to identify him as the shooter.

Alice: Athena nudges him, like literally kicks him. Yeah. Takes the gun with a pen to like stop the fingerprints, I guess. And then I just, I have questions about this next part.

Bex: Yeah, it’s, she calls for an RA unit.

Alice: What’s an RA unit? A rapid… basically she’s calling for an ambulance because the guy’s unconscious.

Ellen: But they’re in a hospital.

Alice: They’re at an urgent, they’re at an urgent care center.

Bex: Yeah, I know. I, I think that it is procedure that any kind of emergency treatment needs to be done by first responders, even if they are, I, I do not remember which series I was watching, but there was something happened like within a hospital.

And they had to call 9-1-1 and get ambulance people to come in before the doctors in the hospital were allowed to do something with them.

Alice: [01:38:00] I’m so confused.

Bex: Yeah. Rescue ambulance. R.A. stands for rescue ambulance.

Alice: Right. So she called an ambulance to the urgent care center. Yes. Okay. Right.

Bex: If there’s anybody who works in the medical field in the US who’s listening and who can explain the insane process that requires for a rescue ambulance to be called to a hospital or an urgent care to pick up somebody who is having an emergency, a medical emergency, please let us know.

We would be fascinated to know why that is. I mean, I guess

Alice: like GP clinics call ambulances all the time for people. Yeah. But I don’t know. I thought an urgent clinic was like, was basically a hospital, but like, it’s just an emergency room.

Bex: No, I think urgent care is it’s nurses. They’re not, it’s not, it’s like the halfway between your GP and your doctor, your GP and your hospital.

[01:39:00] So they can do minor medical procedures. Like stitches and stuff. Yeah. But anything more than that. you would go to the hospital for?

Ellen: We have those in, around here now, they’re, I think they’re calling them satellite hospitals or something, where you can get stuff done, like you can go and get treated for some things.

Alice: Yeah, we just had two urgent care clinics open here.

Bex: We just had two urgent care open up down here, yeah. It’s just interesting. I was like, who’s that? It seems so stupid though, doesn’t it? That you would have to call an ambulance for someone who has collapsed in a medical facility. Why couldn’t they treat him, apparently?

Yeah. And I mean, misremembering what I’m saying that I remembered, but who knows? Doesn’t matter because that’s what happens in the episode. She calls for a rescue ambulance. She then calls Maddie to give Maddie the good news that they got him.

Ellen: [01:40:00] Yep. And Maddie thanks her for letting her ride shotgun with her.

And she’s pretty sure that wasn’t bile. It wasn’t bile in the bullets that she saw. Yeah. But now that now she has a moment of doubt, she can just say, what would Athena do?

Alice: Yep. Oh, they do say that the restaurant owner is out of the ICU and on the mend. So yeah, he was clearly well enough to

Bex: Give a description of the shooter.

But before Maddie can get back to work, her phone rings again. She does take a moment to look at the screen and I think Gloria must have wised up and is caught, had blocked her number or done something so that it doesn’t show up on Maddie’s phone because Maddie answers the damn phone. Only to discover that it’s Gloria calling her.

Ellen: Yeah. And she finally tells her, like, she says, [01:41:00] “What do you want from me?” Like, I’m not going to say that, “I’m not going to say sorry to you, because you’re an awful person.” She doesn’t say that, but that’s what she’s thinking. It’s nowhere near, like, She, like, hangs up on her, basically.

Bex: Yeah, Gloria tells her, “I tried to teach you something important,” and Maddy goes, “Oh, I know what I learned from you.”

Ding! Although it’s not quite as satisfying to just hit a button to hang up on people. You know, gone are the days where you could literally slam the phone down on someone.

Alice: Yeah, I do… Like, I miss my flip phone for that.

Ellen: Yeah, that’s still, like, satisfying. Yeah.

Alice: Yeah.

Ellen: Yep. But Gloria has a dastardly idea and she calls 9 1 1.

Yeah. Yep. And gets put through to Maddie. And amazingly, she, like, I don’t know if she asked for Maddie, but

Bex: She does, because Maddie goes, How the hell did you get through to me? And Gloria says that she pretended to be a [01:42:00] police officer and wanted to be put through to a specific dispatcher. She said, my dispatcher.

And Terry put her through.

Alice: Damn it, Terry.

Bex: Damn it, Terry.

Ellen: They need to fix their security after this. Damn it.

Bex: He’s probably thinking, but it was okay when I did it for Abby, why can’t I do it for Maddie?

Ellen: But Gloria is driving she’s sort of cackling evilly to herself as she does that. And she’s going off at Maddie about how she’s a lazy ingrate and blah, blah, blah. But she doesn’t see. Like, she’s driving down a narrow kind of alleyway

Bex: Yeah, it looks like she was on, like, the freeway and the traffic was bumper to bumper, and she got sick of sitting in traffic, so she sees an off ramp, well, she sees what she assumes is an off ramp, so she takes that, thinking that she’s, like, bypassing all the traffic. [01:43:00] She’s taking a shortcut. But she’s not looking where she’s going.

She’s looking at her phone while she is driving. And she does not see the cat that walks out in front of her.

Ellen: Well, she does see the cat and swerves out of the way. Yeah. Swerves out of the way and then runs into a couple of cars that are parked.

Bex: Which it does not, the amount of effort that goes into getting her out at the end.

It does not seem that what happens, which is basically just her being a pinball. It does not seem like the damage matches.

Ellen: And they’re cutting her out of her driver’s side door.

Bex: When all she did was side swipe.

Ellen: But she hit the other side of the car. Yeah!

Bex: Yeah, it just, it doesn’t Like the [01:44:00] Maybe, like, she side swipes one car and then kind of bounces off another one.

Maybe that would be enough if the trigger was sensitive enough to trigger the airbags. But I don’t see that the, the impact was hard enough to crumple the car in to the extent that it was.

Ellen: Maybe this is one of those situations where just don’t look too hard at it.

Bex: And it’s much, it’s much more dramatic if she’s trapped in the car and they have to cut her out and the airbags have gone off than if she just like got a little bit shaken up.

Ellen: Yeah. Well, in any case, the phone hasn’t, hasn’t ended the call. It’s still going. And Maddie is like, “Gloria, what happened?”

Alice: Yeah, it’s like bounced off into the footwell.

Bex: Yeah, and the airbags have gone off, and so Gloria has she’s got a, there’s a constant ringing that’s overplayed through this entire scene, which is meant to represent the ringing in Gloria’s ears.

So she’s got a little bit of tinnitus, she’s probably got a bit of a concussion from the airbags going off in her face as well, [01:45:00] and she’s rather dazed and confused.

Ellen: Yeah, she’s calling out, but she can’t hear.

Alice: Yeah.

Ellen: When Maddie’s like, I, I thought she, she had the phone on speaker, right? Like she was looking at it, shouting at it.

So it’s not like she can’t hear Maddie because the phone’s on the floor. It’s just the ringing.

Bex: I think, Maddie does mention, because at some point Sue comes over and Maddie mentions to Sue that I don’t think Gloria can hear me. And Sue says that the tinnitus from the explosion of the airbags is probably temporarily deafened Gloria.

So that’s why she can’t hear Maddie. But it’s, it’s, it’s kind of ironic in that she’s saying Gloria just keeps talking. She’s like, “I hope, I hope you don’t hang up. I mean, I would have hung up, but I hope you don’t.”

Ellen: [01:46:00] And she says, “I need to call someone, but I lost my phone.”

Bex: She’s so sad when she says that too.

Ellen: She’s so confused. Maddie works out where she is based on.

Bex: Which I don’t know how! Because, like, she starts with the cell towers. She pings the cell towers that Gloria’s call is coming from, but there are no reports in the area of any accidents that, so nobody’s seen anything, nobody’s called it in. So then she calls for air support to get a visual of the area where the cell tower is pinging.

And then that’s it. We don’t see her do any more work. We don’t hear her get any more reports unless Sue takes over that point. But all

Alice: my assumption was that air support saw it and called it in. Like it wouldn’t have to go through a dispatcher support would just be like, Oh, there’s a unit to this.

Bex: I don’t think that’s how it works.

I think air support should have reported back to Maddie [01:47:00] because how does air support know which firehouse is closest, which units are available? Because they’re air support, they can see it. No, I have no idea.

Ellen: No, Maddie’s always got to dispatch the things.

Bex: Yes, but she doesn’t. There is nothing between calling from air support and the 118 showing up. Because the 118 do show up in the end, magically.

Alice: Maybe she’s just texting Buck.

Bex: But she doesn’t know where to send Buck. I don’t know, they just completely forgot to finish that part of the story.

Alice: She’s like, hey Buck, can you ask Tommy, oh wait, no, we’re not in Season 7 yet.

Bex: They’re too focused on Gloria’s monologue.

Alice: It’s a stupid fucking monologue as well.

Bex: Where she’s trying, she’s trying to explain why she has been hanging up on people.

Alice: I just don’t care. Like we, it’s not like we’ve seen Gloria for multiple episodes. We’ve seen her for literally, like she appeared with a paleo muffin and now we’re supposed to care that her.

Bex: [01:48:00] That she listened to a traumatic call and that’s why she doesn’t listen. She doesn’t. Yeah.

Alice: And now she just hangs up rather than Being an adult. Yes. And

Bex: Relive the trauma.

Alice: doing her like therapy that’s included in the 9-1-1 dispatcher.

Bex: And we’re supposed to believe that this all happened because that morning she was already emotionally damaged because her husband had asked her for a divorce.

Ellen: Yeah. The only reason I cared about this scene or felt anything was because Maddie was crying.

Alice: Oh, always. Yeah. Feel bad for Maddie. Yes.

Ellen: Yes. But anyway, she eventually hears or sees the firies approaching.

Bex: Yes.

Ellen: And she says, Oh, you didn’t hang up. And Maddie’s like, no, I’m still here. I’m

Alice: still here. Cause Maddie’s a good fucking person.

Bex: Maddie’s not an awful person.

Ellen: That’s right.

Alice: Maddie also wasn’t stuck last week. Maddie just goes against the grain.

Ellen: [01:49:00] She was, she’s been stuck and now she’s free.

Bex: Now she’s free.

Ellen: So she’s just getting on with shit.

Alice: Yeah. That’s it. She’s the only one who is. Not stuck. Not an awful person. Nope. Look at Maddie go. Yeah. Anyway, yeah. So Gloria is free, apparently.

Bex: Not quite yet, but she is at least, the 118 are there and she is saved because Maddie didn’t hang up.

But first we have to go to Athena and Hen, and Athena has abused her police powers by doing a search on Nathaniel Green, for Hen. And found out that he is, for all intents and purposes, a good guy.

Alice: Yeah. Stable job. He’s a manager at Home Depot. He owns his own home, which a manager at Home Depot wouldn’t be able to afford a home.

Employee of the month three times. Like who gives a manager employee of the month? That’s just like

Bex: head office maybe?

Alice: But yeah good credit. And he counsels at risk kids on the weekends.

Bex: Yep. [01:50:00] And the only reason that he, the only sort of, blemish on his record is that he had a couple of DUIs, which only started because his wife died of ovarian cancer.

Yeah. So he fell into a bit of a black hole, had some DUIs, started going to rehab, and that’s where he met Eva.

Alice: Yeah. And we can’t really judge him for sleeping with Eva because Hen did the same thing.

Bex: Yeah, he was, he was in a bad place. She caught him when he was at a bad time.

Alice: He hit rock bottom.

Bex: He hit rock bottom and she was there.

Yeah. He probably would not have done that had he been sober and in his right mind. So we’re really stacking the deck for Nathaniel is a good guy. Yeah.

Alice: [01:51:00] So yeah, Athena says that Eva broke her parole hard, so she’s going back inside.

Bex: And Hen confesses to that 30 seconds that she took to consider whether or not to save Eva’s life, and asks Athena, does that make her an awful person?

Ellen: Oh my god

Alice: And we all took a drink.

Bex: I’m like, my liver is screaming at me right now. Or it would be if I were actually drinking every time someone said the word awful.

Ellen: But it doesn’t make her an awful person. It makes her a good human being. Because everything that she, despite everything that she put you through, you still saved her ungrateful ass. She’s, and Hen says, “yeah, but now this man can come and take my son.” And Athena’s like, “no, no one is going to take Denny away. All he wants is visitation.” So,

Bex: [01:52:00] He, the Athena says that Hen has to have faith that Nathaniel will take one look at her and Karen and the life that they have with Denny. And won’t try to take Denny away. Yeah and then the, the the dialogue just gets awful, and I have to give Angela Bassett credit for pulling this off because I don’t think anybody else could do it.

And she kind of goes, “Yeah, people can be awful.” And then the dialogue…

Ellen: Oh this is the bit where it turns into the voiceover. I was like, she’s saying all this to Hen? Like, this is,

Bex: yes!

Alice: You know how Maddie normally does the voiceover? Do you reckon they like, gave it to Maddie and Maddie’s like, now fuck that shit.

Bex: No, I honestly think this is intended to be Athena is telling all this to Hen.

But then they’ve gone, we’re going to also, we’ve got like three different storylines that we haven’t resolved. [01:53:00] So we’re just going to do a montage. Even though none of them happened chronologically at the same time, we’re just going to chuck them all in a montage. And deal with them at once and wrap them up with this.

So the actual, let’s go through the montage and then we’ll actually go through.

Alice: Because Athena’s talking to Hen, and then we have a montage of Hen…

Bex: Yeah, montage, like Athena and Hen are in the montage. So we’ll go through the scenes that are in the montage and then we’ll actually talk about what Athena actually says.

So the first scene we see is Eva in prison orange jumpsuit being loaded into the sheriff’s van, getting carted back to prison. Which is kind of, you could call that kind of present time. That’s something that’s happened recently. Then we’ve got. We go back to the urgent care center where Chim and Hen have responded to Athena’s call for an RA unit and they are [01:54:00] wheeling the shooter out of the urgent care center and Athena meets them and arrests him as they’re wheeling him out.

Ellen: So we jumped back in time.

Alice: And that’s got to be well

before, yeah, and that’s got to be before, like well before. Gloria’s car crash.

Bex: But then the next scene in the montage is the 118 extracting Gloria from the car.

Ellen: Yeah. I don’t know.

Bex: The only thing that I like about this is that I get two more members of the 118 to my roster because there is McAllister and Romero and Lewis attend the scene with Gloria. And then, so there’s that. Then we get

Ellen: And Athena says “Not everyone is awful. There’s good ones out there too.” And then we get like this full facial shot of Bobby.

Alice: [01:55:00] Like with neon arrows.

Bex: even when she’s not physically next to him, she’s still going to do heart eyes over Bobby.

Alice: Yep. She’s, and like, while she’s talking to him, because she can’t actually cut to a photo of him, she’s like holding up a framed photo of him. (laughs)

Bex: And she’s like, she’s lifted up her phone to show like her, her wallpaper, which is just Bobby,

Alice: which is no longer the children. It’s just Bobby.

Bex: Then, then we cut to 911 headquarters where Sue is checking in on Maddie as Maddie is leaving. Tells her that she did some good work and that she’s glad that she didn’t let the awful things that Gloria said get to her.

And then we get a call back to previously in the episode where Maddie says, “well, if I let, if I let everyone get to me, I wouldn’t make it past breakfast” [01:56:00] because that’s what Athena would do.

Yeah.

Alice: Yep. We then go to the Wilson household, which is obviously after all of this, because this is literally what they’re talking about.

Bex: Yeah, Hen, Hen is sitting in front of Athena as she’s saying this, yet we get Hen and Karen talking to Nathaniel. And the voiceover, like, we kind of have to mention what Athena’s saying because they do, they are putting the montage and lining it up directly with what Athena is saying, because Athena…

She says, “you will never know which kind of person someone is unless you give them a chance to show you.” Yeah. And then we have Nathaniel saying, “Denny has a good life here. I don’t want to harm that. You are his parents. You tell me what is best and I will follow your lead.” So Nathaniel is a good person.

Alice: Nathaniel’s like, I don’t want a fucking kid. What are you talking about?

Ellen: He got dragged into this too by the sound of it.

Bex: [01:57:00] Yeah. And Athena sums up by saying maybe they will surprise you in the best way.

Alice: And then we go to directly after the scene with Nathaniel. Okay. With Hen showing up at the firehouse.

Ellen: Yeah, it’s just, it’s messy.

Alice: Yeah.

Ellen: It’s so messy. Yeah, so they finally have a family dinner here where they all sitting at the table and eating together and no alarms go off that we, that we see.

Bex: And, and, and, and there are four other members of the 118 at the table.

Ellen: Are there?

Alice: Yes, they’re allowed to eat. Very exciting.

Bex: Because you’ve got You’ve got Eddie is at the end of the table closest to the camera.

Bobby’s at the head of the table, the other end. You’ve got the three Stooges, like, on one side. And then on the other side, I think you’ve got Taylor, because There’s a bald head there, so I’m just assuming anybody who is bald is Taylor, and then there’s a woman on the corner next to Eddie, so that’s either Castillo or Jackson.

Ellen: [01:58:00] Well, they must have a happy ending at the end of this episode because they’re feeding people who aren’t in the inner circle.

Bex: Yes!

Alice: They’re finally allowed to eat.

Bex: And then Athena finishes her voiceover by saying that “our lives are shaped not just by our experiences, but by relationships, who we love, who loves us, and the stronger those ties are, the less awful everything else seems.”

Unlike this episode, which is just awful. Which is just awful.

Ellen: Well, by my count there were 12 mentions of the word “awful” and three actual episode title mentions.

Bex: I think that’s a record. I think that’s more, that’s definitely more than “Karma’s a Bitch”.

Ellen: I don’t know. There was a lot of “Karma’s a Bitch”, but I don’t think it was 12.

Alice: [01:59:00] That must be where the extra, like, time that they had that they needed to fill with like, stock footage was because “karma’s a bitch”, takes longer to say than “awful people”.

Bex: Maybe. So if you enjoyed this episode, thank you for listening. Come back next week for episode six, cause we’re about to, I know we’ve already ripped it to shreds. We’re about to rip it even further.

Because I think we’ve had, I’m just going to do a quick Google cause I want to make sure that I’m correct when I say this, yes, this is the second episode that Kristen Riedel wrote, and already we are seeing a very strong pattern to her writing and the way she structures episodes, and I don’t like it.

Ellen: Do tell.

Bex: [02:00:00] I mean, it’s the, she’s as subtle as a sledgehammer, we saw that with “Karma?”, we saw that again with “Awful People”. She has a tendency to I’m going to say tenancy, I’m going to give her the benefit of the doubt and not say what I actually think, which is that she has an inability to write dialogue.

And so rather than trying to figure out how to naturally segue into a scene, she’s just going to dive straight in because then she doesn’t have to write the lead up. But it then just comes across as really clunky and forced and unnatural. And she does not. Like, I know I said this in the group chat but I will repeat it here.

There is a distinct lack of Buck and Eddie in this episode. And I understand that this is an ensemble show, and it is not the Buck and Eddie show, and there are other characters that need to have their limelight. Last week was very Buck and Eddie heavy, so therefore this week we needed to shine a little bit of a light on [2:01:00] Hen and on Maddie.

But, whereas with other episodes, other writers are able to balance all of the other characters and at least give them a little bit of screen time, make them appear that they are involved in the episode. Kristen can’t do that. She’s got blinkers. If she’s writing about Maddie, that’s all she can write about.

Alice: Like we saw with last week. Was very Chim heavy and he sat down with Bobby and had like a full thing with Bobby.

Bex: But last week was very light on Hen, but Hen was still there. She was still in the scene. She still had dialogue. She still felt like she was a part of that episode. Whereas, you can’t say that Bobby or Eddie or Buck felt like they were a part of this episode.

Ellen: Yeah, Eddie, the only thing Eddie said in the whole episode was that his father was from Mexico.

Bex: [2:02:00] And his mother was Swedish. That’s his entire, entire contribution to this episode. Like he was there in a couple of scenes, but non speaking.

Ellen: And Bobby was just all hard eyes. That was it. Yeah. Yeah, no dialogue.

Alice: Like, like last week we had that awesome scene before they got the ATM guy out.

Ellen: Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. They were

Alice: all With them all cutting back and forth and all chatting and it felt like a family and then we had this episode where it was like

Bex: I’m writing about, I’m doing one storyline about one character and that’s all I’m gonna write about.

Yeah. So that’s why she’s not my favorite of the writers because I’m not enjoying the way that she approaches the ensemble in that she does not handle the ensemble. She handles individual characters. This episode has never been a favorite. It’s been one that I have quite happily skipped, and now that I’ve watched it critically, [2:03:00] I understand why I don’t like it, because it’s so thin on the ground.

It’s such a short episode that’s been stretched to fill. Yeah.

Ellen: Yeah, I get it. Yeah. I probably won’t want to watch it again.

Alice: It’s not great.

Bex: And there’s no character development. Except for negative character development. Like, Maddie does not grow.

Ellen: No.

Bex: You could, you might disagree with me, but I do not feel like there is any growth in Maddie’s part from the beginning of the episode to the end of the episode.

Ellen: Well, she learned about what would Athena do. Which, I mean, isn’t always probably the best course?

Bex: No.

Alice: Don’t. Intimidate shopkeepers? Yep. Good. Got it.

Bex: Yep. And once again, we’re putting the Henren relationship in peril [2:04:00] because apparently that’s the only thing you can do when you have a married couple on the show with kids is just try to break down the relationship every week.

Yeah. Yeah. They’ve just, that one’s gone backwards, Maddie didn’t do anything, Athena didn’t grow, nobody else grew, it was just, we’re gonna write an episode around a theme, and that’s, it’s just on theme. We’re not gonna have any character development.

Alice: So you can Like, Chim had such a big episode last week, and then nothing this week.

Bex: Yeah, so this is one that you can skip, and you are not gonna miss anything.

Alice: No. Yeah. Like, we had a whole storyline about Gloria, who we’ve literally never seen before. And no one cares.

Bex: And we never really get a significant storyline with her again. No, she that’s it. Like, that’s That’s it. It was one and done.

Alice: That’s it. Yep. So, like, we could have had character development from other members of the 118, but instead we had this whole thing about Gloria, who no one cares about.

Bex: And that really long cold open with Lorraine the Porch Pirate.

Ellen: [02:05:00] Oh yeah, Porch Pirate. I forgot that was even in this episode.

Alice: Did the Gloria thing help with Maddie’s story? No. No. Absolutely not. The ride along helped a bit more with Maddie’s story.

Bex: Only to connect Maddie with Athena.

Alice: Yeah. And like we found out, like, Athena found out about Maddie’s situation and that was about it. And then they had a brief conversation about Maddie.

Bex: But even, even then, that was Like the audience, there was known information for the audience. We didn’t need to hear that again.

Alice: Like Abby didn’t grow. I mean, Maddie didn’t grow. Dammit, Ellen! Yeah, Maddie didn’t grow. She’s just like, ugh, thought about Athena. And then I can’t remember her talking about, like, Athena again. No. It’s not like she’s suddenly going to be like, What would Athena do?

Bex: Yeah. Yeah, I mean we had with Abby, and I did actually mean to say Abby that time, Abby connected with Athena and [02:06:00] then we saw their relationship develop over season one as they relied upon each other and used each other to solve storyline issues. But yeah, the whole Maddie and Athena friendship never develops kind of beyond this as far as I know.

I could be forgetting it, but I don’t think it becomes important again.

Alice: No. Yeah. It’s just like, I’m just, I just don’t care about Gloria and that we had so much Gloria and I just don’t care. Like, “Oh, my husband served me divorce papers. So then I started hanging up on people.” Like I don’t care. Get a grip.

Be an adult like the rest of us.

Bex: Yeah. I mean, It’s an interesting, it’s definitely, someone has seen this story and gone, let’s include that as a storyline in 9-1-1. But I think it would have been more interesting if, say, Josh was the one that started doing it. Like, they introduce Josh to us, we fall in love with Josh, we get over a couple of episodes, things start to not look right with Josh, [02:07:00] we get over a couple of episodes things start to look not right, and then we find out that he’s hanging up on people.

I think that would be a more emotionally satisfying arc than it

Alice: Except I would have been sad if it was Josh, because I like Josh. So like if Gloria had been introduced even like at the start of this season, so we had more than one episode with her, but she literally appears… like where was she during the earthquake?

Nowhere. Cause she didn’t exist.

Bex: It’s like, they tried to pull a David Wallace with her and it backfired on them completely. Because they didn’t even have the, the buildup of David Wallace.

Alice: And like David Wallace, like everyone, like, was a bit fanservice y, because some people know Like, I appreciated that it was David Wallace.

Bex: So maybe they should have cast a different actress that everyone would have had instant recognition and instantly Like, imagine if it was, like, Dolly Parton or something. was playing Gloria. If it’s like, Oh my God, it’s Dolly. Oh, fuck Dolly. What are you doing?

Alice: [02:08:00] Yeah. Like some actress who’s known for being really, really sweet and then turned it on their head.

Bex: Betty White. Can you imagine if they got Betty White in? Oh my God. That would have been amazing. Betty White telling someone, “Hmm, if you had really wanted to jump, you wouldn’t be calling me.”

Alice: Community did that like years ago though with Betty White. So.

Bex: Oh, I’m just randomly picking names. I’ve also never seen Community, so

Alice: Oh my god, you need to watch more TV shows!

Ellen: You should watch Community, It’s funny.

Alice: But yeah, that was back in, oh my god, what year was that in?

Ellen: Yeah, that was a long time ago. Yeah.

Bex: But you get the idea, right? If they’d picked a different actress, someone that the audience would instantly connected with, I think that storyline might have had a little bit more emotional resonance than Gloria.

Alice: Than just this random person? Yeah. I was like, what?

Bex: So that was “Awful People”, and that was awful, and I’m glad I never have to watch this episode again. I can continue to skip it every time I get to season two.

Ellen: All right, well, let us know what happens in, what happens in the next episode.

Alice: I’m so excited for next week.

Bex: The one that I tried to watch last week? Yeah.

Alice: Yeah, because you actually forgot that “Awful People” existed.

Bex: That I had to watch “Awful People”, yeah, and I skipped straight to episode six, which is called “Dosed”, and it is so much fun. The official summary says:

When the first responders race to the rescue of a crashed newscopter, they unwittingly become the subject of an eager reporter’s first on air assignment. Meanwhile, Bobby tries to deal with his daughter’s death as Athena prepares for May’s homecoming dance, and Maddie struggles to let go of her fear of the past.

Also, the team respond to emergencies at an eating contest, a bodybuilding competition, and a toddler pageant.

Ellen: Oh God.

Alice: There’s a lot in next episode, but

Ellen: It sounds like it

Alice: it’s so good.

Bex: But I mean, look at how many, so what have we got? [02:10:00] We’ve got Taylor and the Newscopter. We’ve got Being Dosed. We’ve got Athena with May’s Homecoming Dance.

We’ve got Maddie’s Storyline. We’ve got one, two, three emergency call outs, all in one episode. How many did we deal with today? Like in this episode, they had what, three? Three things going on.

Alice: I’m just going through like my brief notes, like my first watch notes and like, I’m so excited already.

Bex: Yeah. So there’s, there’s not going to be 30 seconds of watching a character navel gaze and struggle with a decision because there’s not going to be time in this episode.

Alice: We should, make note to count like how many random like stock footage shots we get next episode.

Bex: I honestly don’t think there’s going to be that many. They’ve got too much to deal with.

Alice: That’s what I mean, there’s simply not going to be any.

Bex: Yeah, it’s going to be interesting, like, moving forward to see how often they have to rely on stock footage filler in their episodes.

[02:11:00] But for anybody who has not seen episode 6 and would like to know what they’re getting themselves in for, we do have a helicopter accident. It’s not serious. The helicopter’s just on the ground when it should be up in the air. It’s fine. We have the consumption of insects. So if anybody’s got a bit of a squeamishness about that, watch out.

We’ve got some… How am I going to describe this? It’s not really suicidal ideation, but major character in peril, connected to the non consensual dosing of LSD. Alice, help me out. How do I explain that?

Alice: Yeah, I don’t know.

Bex: Yeah, just leave it at that.

Ellen: As an aside, there was definitely no movie theaters in this episode.

Bex: No, there is no movie theaters in this one. So maybe they cut some out. [02:12:00] Actually, that’s really interesting. Maybe when they initially did “Awful People”, maybe there was another storyline with a movie theater. And as they were doing the summaries for doing press releases, they included that in the press release.

And then by the time they got to the editing suite, maybe that footage was completely unusable. Maybe it ran so long that they had to pull it out, but then the episode ran short, so that’s why they needed to put the filler in. It’s just a mess.

Ellen: Yeah. Big mess.

Bex: Big mess.

Ellen: Okay. So if you agreed with us about this episode,

Bex: Or if you disagreed with us, we are quite willing to entertain any contrary opinions.

Ellen: I would love to hear if people actually loved this episode. Let us know. You can leave us a comment on our on the episode’s post on ThatWeeWooShow.com [02:13:00] or you can get in touch with us on social medias. You can email us at contact (at) thatweewooshow.com. And you can find all that information and transcripts on our website as well.

Thank you very much for listening this week, and we will see you for episode six, which is called “Dosed”. See you then.

Bex: Bye.

Alice: Bye.

[Ellen speaking over outro music: 9-1-1 is a fictional show, but many of the situations portrayed happen in the real world too. If any of the topics we’ve discussed in this episode have affected you, please know you’re not alone.

You can call or text numbers in your country for help. Just Google crisis support in your location to find out the number. If you enjoy our podcast, you can help us out by leaving us a review on Spotify or your preferred listening app. And by sharing our social media posts, find out more at thatweewooshow.com.]

[outro]

Alice: Also, I’m really sorry if you hear really weird noises. Fenix is dreaming behind me and he’s growling in his sleep.

Ellen: No, I haven’t heard anything yet.

Alice: I’m not sure how, like, I’m not sure if it’s going to pick up on the…

Ellen: Yeah, it might, yeah. I’ll be like, Oh, don’t worry, Alice is just hungry. She didn’t anything. (laughs)

Alice: No, I’m eating Kit Kats. I don’t know what you’re talking about.