Welcome to That Weewoo Show: a podcast where Alice, Bex, and Ellen watch and discuss every episode of ABC’s TV show, 9-1-1.
In this episode we discuss episode 15 of the second season of 9-1-1, titled “Ocean’s 9-1-1”.
A going-away party for a bank manager turns into an emergency, and then a mystery, as the first responders are accused of pulling off a daring heist.
Content warnings for episode 2.15:
Claustrophobia, police interrogations, death of a patient, seizures.
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Episode Transcript
Maddie: [00:00:00] 9-1-1. What’s your emergency?
Bex: 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 past episodes and to have shared our social media posts. And who’ve rated us on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.
And this week, we’re going to give a special shout out to those of you who have subscribed to us on YouTube. Uh, don’t forget, we have a YouTube channel as well. So if you prefer to listen to your podcasts that way, go over and check us out. We are at ThatWeeWooShow.
Alice, what happened last week on 9-1-1?
Alice: So last week [00:01:00] on 9-1-1, LA was thrown into chaos as 9-1-1 went down. Maddie and Chimney worked to rebuild their relationship after the trauma caused by Doug, and Buck almost got injured after the ladder from the 118, uh, ladder truck broke from underneath him.
Bex: Yeah, that’s, what was it, chewing gum and spit?
Alice: Spit and chewing gum. That’s it.
Bex: Yeah. And paperclips. It all ran out.
Ellen: You forgot to mention Eddie’s new career as a Spider Man.
Alice: Yeah. And Eddie decided he is Spider Man now.
Bex: Smoke eating Spider Man with his magical turnout coat that can protect him from deluges of water.
Ellen: All right. Um, in this episode, we’re going to discuss episode 15 of season two, uh, which has the title “Oceans 9-1-1”. I almost called it Ocean’s nine-eleven.
Bex: Yeah, that’s a fair bit of a difference.
Ellen: A bit [00:02:00] of a different story. That’s not right, yeah. but no, this is 9-1-1, uh, Ocean’s 9-1-1, and it first aired on the 22nd of April, 2019.
And the official summary goes, A going away party for a bank manager turns into an emergency and then a mystery as the first responders are accused of pulling off a daring heist. And we have a few triggers for this episode, in case you are wondering. We have claustrophobia, where someone is actually stuck in a bank vault for a little bit.
We have cops being cops. I don’t know how to describe that. And. the death of a patient and people having seizures. So this episode was a lot of fun, actually, like the triggers aren’t, don’t seem to be very, like, quite as traumatic as previous, the previous few episodes.
Alice: I think they [00:03:00] realized we needed some lightheartedness after Doug.
Ellen: Yeah. Yeah. I loved it. Like the pace of this was, well, I was at the edge of my seat the whole time with this episode. It was great. I loved it.
Bex: It’s very fast paced. It went very quickly.
Ellen: It did, yeah. Who wrote this one? We’ve got
Bex: This was written by Andrew Myers, and this is his first episode that he’s written for 9-1-1.
But he does go on to become a regular writer of the series.
Ellen: Mm hmm. Right, so the beginning I’m trying to remember what other show I was Oh, it was I’ve been watching like a few episodes of X Files in a row the last couple of days, and then I started watching this and it was like, oh yeah, there’s this guy who’s retiring the bank and whatever, and I’m like, oh, something weird’s gonna happen to them, and I’m like, oh no, hang on, this is 9-1-1, he’s about to have some kind of a medical emergency, not like aliens abduct him or something.
Alice: This was like the most [00:04:00] boring party I’ve ever seen.
Ellen: I know, the guys, like there’s a bunch of employees there that are just all standing in a line completely silent while this bank manager guy cuts a cake and like says thank you.
Alice: Refuses to do a speech, yeah.
Bex: They’ve left the party until like the end of the day, so these people just want to go home.
Instead they’re being forced to stand there and watch this guy like saying no no I’m not going to give a speech and then proceed to give a speech.
Alice: Yeah. Yeah. But, like, they’re looking at their watches going, Yep, cool, it’s 4. 54 in the afternoon. Like, can I just go home?
Bex: Yes. Yeah. Because I don’t think they need to stay.
Obviously, the bank manager needs to stay, and Nina, who is some kind of lesser manager, they need to stay because they’re there to supervise the, um, delivery from the armoured guards? Like the couriers? I don’t [00:05:00] think the other employees need to be there. So yeah, I doubt they’re going to get paid for this party.
Ellen: No, their only payment is cake.
Bex: Yes, and it doesn’t even look like that good a cake.
Ellen: It doesn’t look like there’s any alcohol or anything there. It’s just
Bex: No, there’s like juice. It’s like juice and chips and big
Ellen: Sorry, you don’t need to have alcohol to have a party.
Alice: Like, my pre recording snack tonight was more exciting than this party.
Ellen: Anyway, his watch beeps and he looks at his off sider whose name is Nina, I think. And he says, it’s time. And then they leave. It’s like, Ooh, what’s happening?
Bex: Getting a delivery.
Ellen: So knowing that this was, um, I loved the way that this episode was constructed where we didn’t get any backstory at all.
We don’t know anything about what’s going on at all. We just see the events kind of one after another as they’re unfolding. And. We’re [00:06:00] left in the dark about a lot of things until much later. So, but we did, I did know going in that there was a heist involved and there was something going on with this bank vault.
So every person in this scene was a suspect. I’m like, is this woman in on it? Is it the manager guy? He gonna steal stuff? Like are these guys who were driving the van, are they the bad guys? Like it was really, um,
Alice: It was funny because, like, I binged, I just binged it on, like, Disney, and so I didn’t get the like, the names of the episodes, and so I’m watching this like, what is happening right now?
Yeah. Like, this whole episode, I’m like, what, what? What?
Ellen: Yeah, I mean, if you didn’t know.
Bex: So, Ellen, knowing that it’s called “Oceans 9-1-1”, which is obviously a reference to the Oceans 11 and the whole Oceans series, went into it expecting a bank robbery, whereas Alice, you’re just like, what the fuck is happening?
Alice: Like literally what is happening?
Bex: Where [00:07:00] is the 118?
Ellen: That would have been so confusing.
Alice: It was actually, like, it was great. And like my, cause I wrote, like, I write notes as I’m watching and the whole thing is just like full of like question marks. It’s like, what, who, what, why, what?
Ellen: All right. So a. An armored truck pulls up outside the door and Nina opens the security door because it’s after closing time. So she opens the door so these guys can come in. Sorry. One guy stays in the van and the other comes in with like a trolley full of bags basically.
Bex: Yeah.
Ellen: And so the manager guy, whose name is Prentiss,
Bex: Prentiss. Which confused me and I did not enjoy it because as far as I’m concerned, Prentiss is Emily Prentiss from Criminal Minds, so I did not like that this was Prentiss in this episode. [00:08:00]
Ellen: Yeah, so he’s looking very nervous, standing around near the vault, so you can tell that something’s up with him just because he looks, like, shifty.
Alice: Yeah, considering, so, like, he’s about to retire from however many years and he looks like he’s never done it before.
Ellen: Yeah. Yeah. And even like when one of his about to be ex employees comes up to him and, you know, says, good luck, enjoy your retirement, whatever. He’s just like, get startled by him. And it’s like, Oh, thanks.
Bye. Yeah. And he, the guy shakes his hand and then as soon as he leaves, Mr. Prentiss gets out this sanitizer and like squirts it on his hand and rubs it together.
Bex: It’s given germaphobe?
Alice: Literally, when I first watched it, I was like, germaphobe? Or is he, like, actually a racist?
Bex: Oh! Yeah. That’s interesting, because he only ever shakes hands with people of colour in this episode.
Yeah. [00:09:00] That is an interesting observation.
Alice: Because, again, like, I had no idea that there was going to be a heist, so I’m just like, what is wrong with this dude?
Bex: It’s not that he’s rich.
Ellen: Yeah, we find out later it’s not the case.
Bex: Yes, but that’s a really interesting observation to take away. That’s something I completely missed.
It’s because, uh, the armored guard comes in with the bags full of, I guess, I think we later find out it’s money, and wheels it into the vault while Mr Prentiss and Nina watch. And. He has obviously been doing this route for a while, so he knows the, he knows the bank manager, he knows Nina, he’s got a little bit of a flirtation going on with Nina, um, so he offers his hand to Prentiss before, um, before he goes.
So saying that it’s, you know, “It’s been good working with you.” And yet there is that little bit of hesitation where, um, Prentiss sort of looks at his hand [00:10:00] and considers maybe not shaking it for a second, and then he does shake the guy’s hand and then immediately reapplies the sanitizer.
Alice: Yeah, right? So I’m like, what is with this racist? Like
Bex: But then as the, the guard who, I believe his name is Billy, although we never find that out directly, he is walking back out of the vault, out of the bank towards the van. He suddenly starts choking and seizing and foaming at the mouth and falls to the ground. Yeah.
And Nina, uh, immediately, give this woman credit, she immediately calls for someone to call 9-1-1 and runs back to the bank vault to get Mr. Prentiss, but she finds him in the vault on the ground, seizing and choking and foaming at the mouth as well. And that is our cold open for this episode.
Alice: So a lot going on already. Yes.
Ellen: Yeah. So when, when we get [00:11:00] back, uh, the second guard who’s still in the truck is like, he, it felt like he was like asked the audience stand in for the first part of this episode because he’s just sitting there going, what the fuck is happening here?
He’s uh, waiting for the other guy to come back, but then these fire trucks turn up and he’s, he’s like. banging on the window because he, the window doesn’t roll down and he’s not allowed to get out of the truck while he’s parked there and he happens to catch Buck walking past and he’s like, “tell me what’s happening” and Buck’s like, “I don’t know, we just got here.”
Alice: Yeah, literally, like, uh.
Ellen: Uh, and then the guard guy says, “Yeah, I know that, I just, do you know what the call was for?” And he’s like, Buck says “Two people down at the bank,” and
Bex: this guy’s so funny.
Alice: It’s so funny He’s like down, like dead down? Injured down? Depressed [00:12:00] down? Yeah, no, they’re just sad. So they call 9-1-1 But Buck asks if the partner was exhibiting any kind of symptoms and Like “does he have any symptoms? Allergies or medical conditions?” and the guard that’s in the truck’s just like, “No, he eats better than I do.” And then like gets real close to like the little like hole that they’re talking out of and goes, “He’s pescatarian.” Buck’s like, “Okay.”
Ellen: Okay, bye. Chim’s checking out the guard, the guard inside and he says that his airway is clear.
His jaw’s not clenched. You know, he’s okay. Apart from the fact that he just passed out. Yeah. They, and Bobby and Hen, like Nina takes Bobby and Hen to the vault where Prentiss is. So, Hen takes a look at him, and Eddie turns up as well. And Bobby, they’re all at a loss, they’re like, I don’t know what’s wrong with these guys, like, there’s not, doesn’t seem to be anything obvious.
And Eddie mentions [00:13:00] that it could be a nerve agent.
Alice: Yeah, Eddie just casually is just like, “Yeah, it could be a nerve agent.”
Ellen: Like, they were very casual about this whole thing. Like, these people are seizing on the floor.
Alice: Bobby’s like, “You what?” And Eddie’s like, “Yeah, you know, like, you know, probably a nerve agent.”
We might just all be dying. It’s fine. And Bobby’s like, “Ah, yeah, okay, yeah, we’re getting out.”
Ellen: And so they make everyone step away. But then, uh, Hen goes back into, like, the vault starts to beep and the door starts to close, and
Bex: Think that’s on a timer, so the door can only be open for a certain amount of time.
And their time is, however long it took the 118 to get there, the timer is up, so the door is going to automatically close. Um, which, Hen realizes is not a good thing, because if that happens then Prentiss is going to be locked in the vault, and they kind of need him out of the vault so they can, you know, fix him.
So, she races in to drag Prentiss out. Eddie and Bobby notice that she’s going [00:14:00] and race after her. Um, unfortunately, Prentiss appears to panic when Hen goes to grab him and starts clawing at her face and she’s trying really hard to calm him down. She’s like, “no, no, no, I’m LAFD, I’m going to get you out of here.”
Um, But that’s taking too long. The door is closing, Eddie. Eddie bless him is trying to hold this door open with brute strength so that Hen has a chance to escape.
Alice: You can do it, eight pack, you can do it!
Ellen: He’s gonna get himself squished if he’s not careful.
Bex: Yeah, so, and it doesn’t work and Hen eventually has to decide is she going to try and get Prentiss out and risk being locked in the vault or is she going to make a break for it and she leaves the decision just that little bit too late and the door shuts on her, locking her into the vault.
Um, and even though Eddie is, and Bobby are both pulling at that door with all their might, they cannot get it open.
Alice: They need more than just [00:15:00] the eight pack. But yeah, so Hen seems fine. She’s like, “I’m here, I’m making myself comfortable.” And Bobby’s like, “no, no, not too comfortable. How do we open this?” And Nina just goes, “ah, we don’t. It’s on a time lock. It won’t open again until the start of business tomorrow.”
so apparently in case of an emergency there is a number for the vault company on Mr. Prentiss’s desk, um, so Bobby goes with Nina to go have a look.
Bex: So Prentiss has a screen in his office where he can see all of the live feeds of all of the cameras in the bank. And there is a live feed for a camera in the vault.
And he’s sort of keeping an eye on Hen while Nina is ransacking Mr. Prentiss’s desk, um, but then Hen stops responding.
Alice: He’s got a lot of stuff in his desk considering like he’s about, like, this is his last day.
Bex: And then it kind of looks like We kind of get a, a shot straight out of [00:16:00] a horror movie, like one of those found clues horror movies.
Alice: Oh seriously, it creeped me out! I was just like, what the fuck is happening?
Bex: Because Hen is standing with her back to the camera. Um, and we just see the walkie talkie that she’s been talking to Bobby through drop out of her hand and she kind of staggers around so that she’s looking at the camera, um, but she’s very unsteady on her feet because she is now foaming at the mouth and then she just drops to the ground and starts seizing.
Ellen: It’s giving, um, Doctor Who “Waters of Mars”. I don’t know if you guys have seen that, but
Bex: I don’t understand that reference.
Ellen: Okay, it’s the same kind of thing, but it’s like an alien kind of parasite.
Alice: Yeah, the only Doctor Who I’ve seen is the, like the, um, statues, like the angel statues.
Ellen: Oh, yeah, okay.
Bex: And they’re the ones that when you Either you don’t look at them or you look at them?
Ellen: When you’re not looking at them, they can move. Yeah. When [00:17:00] you look at them they’re stone.
Bex: Ah, so you’ve got to keep looking at them. Gotcha.
Alice: Yeah. It’s such a good episode.
Ellen: Yeah.
Alice: Oh, and I saw one where like, there’s like a face in like a sidewalk or something. I think, I don’t know. I watched a bit of the Tennant stuff, but, um, I can’t, can’t remember what it was.
It was like eight years ago now.
Ellen: Okay. Well. It’s my favorite so, you know, If you need recommendations for other scary ones to watch, let me know. Um, Waters of Mars is a particularly scary one as well, but it’s at the end of David Tennant’s, you know, tenure. Anyway, she’s basically passes out and starts foaming at the mouth as well, and they’re all, you know, horrified at this.
They’re like, how are we going to get them out of there? We need to do something. So, we’re back with the guard in the truck.
Alice: Bobby is seriously ready to, like, start, like, cutting into this vault. [00:18:00]
Ellen: Yeah.
Alice: Oh yeah. Like, he’s like, get my girl out, what the fuck.
Ellen: Yep. The guard’s on the phone with a supervisor of some sort, and he’s like, “The LAPD has shown up and now” like these other trucks start pulling up as he’s talking on the phone.
They look like very serious, kind of big black trucks and they’re all wearing hazmat gear. And Um, I didn’t notice this time whether they were properly, um, you know, sealed up and everything. But I hope so
Bex: I did look. The, um, the Hazardous Material Task Force have proper full suits, the 118 are still in those funny splash suits with the gap between them.
Ellen: Okay. Okay.
They, they’ve just got the dodgy equipment because they can’t afford any decent stuff.
Alice: Yeah. It’s chewing gum and spit, remember? Yeah. Yeah.
Ellen: Uh huh. when Bobby explains what’s happening. Um, two of them are trapped inside the vault, like two victims. [00:19:00] And then the third victim was here delivering some money and he was the first affected.
And this guy Bowman, who’s the, you know, the boss of the task force, it’s like, “Could be he was delivering more than money.” It’s like, Ooh, okay, detective. And the others, um, we’re fine. Like no one else has been affected yet. So. And Bowman is very, uh, on top of things. He’s like, starts giving out the orders, like, clear this space.
Everyone needs to be decontaminated. Environmental testing, bang, bang, bang. Let’s do this.
Bex: He wants to know what’s going on with the vault. So Bobby and Nina head, lead him toward the vault where Buck is trying to open it with the circular saw from the truck.
Alice: He’s doing his best. Like, his best isn’t great, but he is doing it.
Bex: That’s not gonna work.
Ellen: It’s a steel door.
Bex: Points for trying, but yeah, no. You are gonna, you are gonna wear the blade out of that saw [00:20:00] faster than you are actually be able to cut through the metal on that bolt.
Alice: Buck’s so cute in this episode, though. Like, he is doing his absolute best.
Ellen: He is very cute.
So, Bobby decides that they must be running out of air. So they need to drill a hole in the door and get some air in. Yes. Um, and so Eddie reminds him that the door has electricity going through it, so they can’t just drill through it. Which is very sensible of Eddie, well done.
Bex: I’m glad one of them’s thinking.
Eddie obviously had the brain cells for this episode.
Alice: That’s it. Like, okay, so Buck has one brain cell and it bounces around his head like the DVD screensaver. And that was all fine. But then Eddie joined the team and now they share the brain cell and it bounces like between each of them. And so yeah, Eddie had it today.
Ellen: Yeah. Yeah. Because Buck’s already been trying to cut the door with a saw. But Eddie [00:21:00] didn’t tell him. Anyway, so they decide they need to turn the power off, so they arrange that to happen.
Bex: And Chim cuts the power, and Eddie Where did they get that drill from? Because that is one massive drill that Eddie’s just pulled out of his back pocket.
Ellen: Oh, hang on. Before this, they Outside, again, the guy who’s in the truck, um, sees Buck coming back out of the building and like bangs on the window and starts asking him what’s happening. And Buck’s like, “I can’t hear you, I’ve got this thing on my head.” And the guy’s like, “what’s happening?” And Buck’s just like, gives him this big thumbs up and like heads back in.
And
Alice: he literally just goes, okay, and then just leaves and the guard’s like, well, that wasn’t helpful.
Because again, Buck does not have the brain cell today.
Ellen: Okay, so yeah, this drill is huge. I don’t know. I don’t know. They wouldn’t have had that in the truck, would they?
Bex: I don’t think that’s standard issue. No. [00:22:00] But apparently it’s working. So
Ellen: yeah. And Buck’s standing there next to him just looking on going, Oh yeah, work that drill, buddy.
Bex: Thinking about other things that Eddie can drill later on that night.
Ellen: Yes.
Bex: Um, but while that is happening, all of the, uh, bank employees are being led out of the bank and put through the decontamination process.
Alice: Did we mention right now, like, everything is dark, like the whole bank, everything inside is dark. There’s no cameras because they have to shut off all the power.
Bex: Yes. And that is important.
Alice: It is.
Bex: But they finally, the drill works its magic, they manage to get a hole in through the door so they can feed in the tube connected to the O2 canister so they can start pumping some air into the vault. So they put the power back on, and then Bobby decides that they’re going to crack the safe so that they can get Hen out.
[00:23:00] And the way he’s going to do that is by pimping Michael out.
Alice: I love this interaction so much. Because like, it was last episode, wasn’t it, where they had their like, little fight?
Bex: Yes, but then they made up over pie and ice cream, so they’re besties now.
Alice: Yeah, they’re besties again, yeah.
Bex: Yeah. Because yes, Bobby decides to call Michael.
Uh, because Michael being an architect, Bobby thinks that he would have some, uh, specialist knowledge or information about bank vaults, about how they get installed.
Ellen: Because all architects are experts on bank design.
Bex: It’s a reach. I mean, it happens to be a reach that pays off, because while, uh, Michael doesn’t have any specific knowledge, And doesn’t have access to the blueprints for the Pacific Federal Bank.
Um, another person in his office that does have access to those kind of blueprints, happens to like [00:24:00] Michael. And he says that with a very specific emphasis. “He likes me.” And Bobby, without even missing a beat, goes, “Like him back.” Yeah, literally like, I need you to do whatever you need to do to get those blueprints.
Ellen: I need you to take one for the team, Michael.
And now the guard who’s still in the truck has seen his workmate being wheeled out of the bank by the paramedics, and he’s like, “I think Billy’s dead. They just put him in an ambulance, I don’t know, they’re putting people in the showers. No, I didn’t say plague.” He’s like, “oh, there could be, couldn’t it? It could be a plague.” And he starts having a bit of a panic..
Alice: Yeah, this is when I was like, isn’t this, isn’t this 2019? Like, this is the, the year before the plague.
Ellen: Yes. Yeah, he’s having a bit of a panic attack. But the money’s fine. “Don’t worry, sir, the money’s fine.” All right, Michael has done his work.
Bex: Yes, although now he has to go to a Sondheim [00:25:00] concert with the guy from the office.
But the, um, The results of pimping Michael out is that, uh, the office building wasn’t always an office building. And when it was converted into a bank in 73, they built the bank vault into the existing building. So the back wall of the vault is just the back wall of the building.
Ellen: I don’t know if they’re actually expecting anyone to have a heist where they drill through the wall of the bank.
Bex: Yeah, I will admit I did not look up on the logistics of how you securely create bank vaults and whether you would have
Ellen: No, you would get put on a list if you do that.
Alice: Yeah.
And they’ll break your, they’ll ruin your nicely folded clothes. Yes. Anyway, so they, they go to the South wall. [00:26:00] And, Bobby says that they’re going to start drilling in a couple different spots, which will create a crumple zone.
Bex: I have no idea what that means, but everyone on the 118 seems to, so, you know, let’s just go with that.
Alice: Um, and then Bobby has an idea, but they’ve got to soften it up first. And Chim’s like, “Soften up a foot of concrete?” but Buck’s like, yeah, but it beats three layers of tempered steel.
Bex: Yeah, it does.
Ellen: Buck’s fired up, he’s ready to do this.
Alice: Oh, Buck’s so ready to break into a bank vault, and like, can you blame him?
Ellen: He’s got this massive, like, sledgehammer. He’s just, he’s like carrying it over his shoulder like a, you know, like a
Alice: He’s finally allowed to sledgehammer into something! Like, it’s like in the pilot where he goes to, like, bash in the wall, and they’re like, no, there’s a baby behind it. And he’s like, fine.
Bex: And remember the last time they bashed in a wall, Bobby was the one swinging the sledgehammer.
Alice: Yeah, like, Buck finally gets to do it. He’s very excited.
Ellen: He looks like a character from Overwatch or something. He’s got like this Like the massive [00:27:00] mallet? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But anyway, they start drilling into the wall. Um, I don’t know, I don’t think they’re using the same giant drill as they were in the bank vault.
Bex: No, I think this is just a regular concrete drill.
Ellen: Yeah.
Bex: Which still begs the question of where they got the drill that they drilled through the door with. But I’m not going to think about that too hard.
Alice: It’s, it’s just, it’s, it’s Eddie’s from home.
Ellen: Yeah, let’s not wonder.
Alice: Anyway, so the. Meanwhile, like we flashed back to the hospital a couple of times and the, um, ambulances arrived.
They put the patients into isolation. And Billy’s still seizing and struggling to breathe. So Nina’s there as well. Cause she obviously had like firsthand contact with them and she watches them like racing down the corridor. I’m like, how scary would that be? Cause next minute. Like, she’s watching and we hear them go, “Crash unit needed in [00:28:00] the ER.”
Ellen: Yeah, they all go running.
Alice: Because Billy’s on the table and coding. And like, if you’d just been next to the guy who’s just dying, like, that’d be terrifying.
Bex: Yep. Be sitting there wondering, when is it your turn? When are you gonna start exhibiting symptoms?
Alice: But Bobby finishes the drilling, um, they start smashing at the wall with hammers, And then somehow they get
Ellen: Buck is having a great time ,
Bex: and then somehow they get a Halligan tool and they’ve like wedged it really, really securely into one of the drill holes. Um, and then they’re tying some kind of rope around it
Ellen: and they’re trying to pull it, pull the wall apart with the winch that’s connected to the truck.
Bex: I’m surprised that the Halligan tool was that secure in the drill hole. I was fully expecting that they were going to use the winch and start pulling and that tool would just come flying out at like high speeds.[00:29:00]
Or that it would be okay but the rope would snap or something.
Ellen: Yeah, I don’t know if they drilled all the way through and they had some kind of a hook on the end of it so they could actually wedge it, you know, hook it onto the other side of the wall. In any case, they’re trying to pull
Bex: It’s like, I’m not angry about it, I’m just curious as to what exactly they’re doing and how it works and whether it’s, like, would that actually work?
Could you do that? Could you drill a hole and then shove your Halligan tool in and it would stay there and be secure enough that you could then use a truck to pull it out and it would take the concrete with you? If you’ve ever broken into a bank by, um,
Ellen: By drilling through a foot of concrete.
Bex: By drilling through concrete and shoving a Halligan tool in and then pulling the concrete out with a fire truck, let us know how did that work for you? Um, but while this is, while this is all happening, [00:30:00] um, Chim is sent back into the bank to keep an eye on the cameras to watch, uh, Prentiss and Hen, because I guess if they’re gonna be yanking at the wall, they want to make sure that it’s not going to adversely affect or, adversely affect or injure, um, Mr. Prentiss and Hen, and back in the hospital, uh, time of death is called for Billy. He has succumbed to whatever it is that has happened to him.
Ellen: So Bobby gets a phone call where he, they let him know that Billy has died. And they, like Eddie says “Do they know what it was?” and Bobby’s like, “No, but no one else is showing symptoms.”
So, and then Buck goes, “screw this.” And he just gets back, gets, opens the truck door and gets into the truck. And I’m like, is he gonna drive the truck into the wall?
Alice: I absolutely thought he was gonna [00:31:00] drive into the wall.
Bex: I hundred percent thought that he was gonna drive the truck into the wall too.
Ellen: Yeah. And I’m like, what are you doing Buck? And then, but he, because the winch is on the front of the truck, he just reverses with the truck. Like, I don’t know if this would work either, because I’m, if the, if the thing is just wedged in there. Surely it would just come flying out, like you can’t,
no matter how much you drill it, you can’t put, like concrete walls are reinforced with rebar, like they have steel inside them, right? You
Alice: can’t
No Chim’s there, the rebar got scared off, it’s fine.
Bex: See, that’s just why I’m wondering how, how does that work, that he could have wedged that tool in, and like that tool is just, it’s just a straight piece of metal with the, like the little hooky things at one end. Um, so there’s no sort of protuberances that they could use to like wedge it in, so how is it in there strong enough that a full on truck can pull at it and it stays [00:32:00] there and the concrete gives before the Halligan tool comes out?
How does that work?
Ellen: They must have just drilled enough holes that it destabilised the whole thing. Yeah, it was the crumpled zone. Which is a worry to be honest. The structural integrity of the building itself doesn’t seem to be very good. Anyway, it works. Who cares? Let’s not think about it too hard.
Bex: And again, the thing is, I’m not angry at this. I’m just confused. It looked cool, I guess, but I was just like, why? But I love the fact that it does work. That they pull, and there is now a hole, and they can see into the bank vault. Unfortunately, they, um, That was completely unnecessary because just as they make that hole, the company that owns the bank vault or manages the bank vault security has managed to remotely access it and unlock the door for them.
Alice: Yeah, immediately, like, as they’re looking through. And so, like, all the team that are outside, um, they’re, like, looking through the [00:33:00] hole and Chim just walks in and he’s like, “Hey guys.” And Buck’s like, Seriously?
Ellen: So, once again, the 118 have caused mayhem and destruction, and,
Bex: yes,
Ellen: it wasn’t necessary.
Bex: It wasn’t necessary.
If they’d just, if Buck had just waited those few minutes.
Ellen: Anyway, Chim goes to check on Hen, and she sort of comes to and looks at him, and she’s okay. Like, she seems alright. She’s not foaming at the mouth anymore, which is good.
Bex: Mm hmm.
Ellen: As Chim sort of goes to check on the other guy, um, the others are just standing there looking through the hole.
Bex: Why are they, why aren’t they rushing around to come back into the bank so that they can, like, get Hen and Prentiss out?
Why are they just hanging out, letting Chim do all the work
Alice: Chim’s got it, it’s fine.
Ellen: They’re admiring their handiwork. So they put Hen into an ambulance and, [00:34:00] like, she’s saying, like, “Someone call Karen!” And Bobby says it’s already been taken care of, so. But, aChd Tim’s not sure what’s happening. He’s like, “she’s not symptomatic anymore, and the bank manager guy was fine as well. What’s happening?”
Bex: And Bowman has said that all of the tests that they did in the bank and on the people, they’ve all come back negative. So it wasn’t, it wasn’t a nerve agent, but they still have no idea what it is and why. Billy, the delivery guy, and Prentiss and Hen suddenly went down.
Ellen: Oh yeah, and as they leave and go to get back in the trucks, Buck says at least this guy was finally able to get out as he, like, bangs on the side of the armoured van.
So the guy who was in there is gone. And when Yeah, so yeah, the guy But I thought that he’d, like, passed out or something because he
Alice: So did I! I was seriously like, did he pass out? Like, like, did he also die? [00:35:00] Yeah. Um, but no, he’s just gone.
Bex: I have to confess that the first, um, time that I watched this episode, I Didn’t think that this guy could, for some reason, I didn’t think that this guy could get out of the van at all.
Like when he tells Buck, I can’t get out of the van. I thought he meant that he literally was unable to get out of the van.
Alice: So did I! And that’s why I was like, I think he died, like
Bex: Ugh. So, like, for part of my mystery, part of the episode for me was the mystery was like, wait, how did that guy get out of the van?
Alice: Literally!
Bex: I didn’t, I didn’t realize that it was, no, like, protocol says that I can’t leave the van unattended.
Ellen: Yeah, but why did he then, like, maybe they made him get out to get decontaminated or something.
Bex: Well, we find out later why he got out. Um, I just didn’t think he physically could get out.
Alice: Yeah, like, I assumed that, like, it was fully locked down and he wasn’t allowed to, like, he couldn’t physically leave.
I thought, right, like, [00:36:00] he just wasn’t allowed to get out,
Bex: but no, it was like protocol dictates that he, because he still had, um, stuff in the back and he couldn’t leave it. So anyway, that was, that was me being very confused the first time I watched this episode.
Alice: No, I was exactly the same. I was just like, I think he died. Like what?
Bex: How did he get out? Is he, like, is he passed out? Is he dead? Is there, like, is there another layer of this that we’ve missed? Well, there, there is, but that’s not it.
Ellen: There, there are a lot of like, now and then there are red herrings where they’re like making someone look like they’re doing something, but they’re not actually doing it.
So the mystery part of it is really good. But, um, they go back to the station, to the 118 station.
Alice: Yeah, so Hen’s rescued, what’s his name? Prentiss? Mm hmm. Um, he’s rescued, and so they’re, yeah, back [00:37:00] to the station. And Buck jumps out and goes, “So that might have been the weirdest day I’ve had since joining the LAFD, and we’ve had a few.”
And Eddie’s like, “Seriously, it was like a bank robbery with no robbers.” And as he says that, there’s sirens and cops just like pull in and tell them to step away from the vehicle.
Ellen: Yeah. They’re all like, can I help you? Like, what’s going on? And the officers move towards the truck and they open up the compartments that are inside of the truck and pull out bags.
Um, and then they open them. And dump out a load of cash in slow motion.
Bex: I feel like this is very dramatic, but I was looking at that going, dude, you just contaminated the crime scene.
Alice: Yeah. Right. Like, why are you dumping it out? Like,
Ellen: yeah, that was, that was just for dramatics.
And they’re all just looking at each other going, what the hell? [00:38:00]
Bex: Chim’s mouth has just dropped open in shock. Buck is looking at Bobby in absolute confusion. Like, where, when did we pick up money? Has that always been in the truck?
Alice: Like, do we usually leave it in there? Is that in case we need lunch?
Bex: And Bobby’s face is just, you know, stoic Bobby.
Just Bobby being Bobby.
Alice: Bobby, whose default state, uh, state is just the, um, the man standing emote.
Ellen: The emoji, yeah.
Alice: Yep. It’s literally just Bobby.
Ellen: Yep.
Alice: Um, but yeah, now we get a really cool, like, I really like this part. So we get the interrogation scenes.
Bex: But it’s almost simultaneous interrogation scenes, even though it’s always Mercer and Wash, who are the two detectives from, um, robbery, [00:39:00] doing the interrogations.
Um, every time we sort of cut to the other side of the interrogation table, it’s someone different. And it’s just cutting backwards and forwards, different people answering different questions. It’s very well done, and it keeps the pace of the episode going, because I can imagine that if they were just going to show us like eight or nine different interrogations, it could get quite boring, but this, they go through rapid fire.
Alice: Yeah, it’s so fast and it’s so good. Um, so Wash is the man? Yes. Yeah, cool. So Mercer is, Tom Haverford’s, ex wife from Parks and Rec and when I was first watching it, I was just like, how do I know her? And then I’m like, oh my god, it’s Tom’s ex wife.
Ellen: I’m usually like that with Supernatural. Yeah. Like, I’m sure I’ve seen this person before and then I look it up and I’m like, oh.
Alice: Just like, is she in Supernatural? No, she’s in Parks and Rec. But yeah, good for her because she plays a, I think she’s a surgeon on Parks and Rec. Oh. So, [00:40:00] look at her. having like ludicrous careers. Um, I don’t think that’s the right word. I’m very tired. Lucrative? That’s it. Thank you. So close. So close. I’m like, it starts with an L and there’s some letters in there.
Ellen: Don’t worry. It’s okay. Apparently there were, there was 300, 000 dollars in there. Yes. And Hen just can’t believe that they’re even having this conversation. She’s like, “Why would I have any idea of how it got there? I was unconscious in a vault.”
Alice: Yeah, they’re like, you were at the bank when it was stolen. And it’s like, if by at the bank, you mean I was unconscious and locked away in a vault.
Yeah. Um, but then she mentions that she wasn’t alone. And then we cut to, uh, Prentiss, who they’re also interviewing.
Ellen: He’s feeling some after effects from whatever the thing was that was making him seize. Which is apparently just burping. He looks like he’s about [00:41:00] to throw up. But he doesn’t. He doesn’t, like, he doesn’t, he’s like, do you know what, do you have any idea what happened?
Like, he doesn’t seem to know anything. And then they’ve, they’ve pulled Maddie in.
Bex: Yeah, so they’ve dragged in everybody that is tangentially connected to this call. Um, and some of, and they have motives for pretty much the whole situation. three quarters of them, the rest of them they are just grasping at straws with.
Um, but for the Buckley siblings, um, they, they think they have a good case because they find it very suspicious that Maddie took the original 9-1-1 call and then happened to dispatch the 118. Like, and Maddie’s just like, that, that happens more than you, more than you know. That’s, that’s normal around here.
Alice: Maddie’s like, that’s literally the only engine I’m actually allowed to dispatch. Uh, I have one button on my computer and it says 118. I’m not sure why, that’s just [00:42:00] how it was set up. I don’t know.
Bex: It’s only when CAD goes down that she can start dispatching other, other units. Because yes, she can do it manually there. Um, but they do find it suspicious because Somehow, got copies of the text messages from both Maddie and Buck’s phones, and while after Maddie dispatched the 118, she sent a message to Buck saying, Our money problems are over, and they’ve gone “Right, so you have arranged for this bank robbery, and you’re letting your brother know.”
Alice: And Buck’s like, if you were robbing a bank, like, why would you text about it? Um, but no, uh, Maddie’s landlord finally agreed to let her out of her lease and refund her security deposit. Um, apparently he’d been a bit of a dick about it, um, but yeah, so apparently Maddie is moving out.
Bex: Well, she hasn’t really been there that long, has she?
Alice: No. But also, like, she got kidnapped [00:43:00] from it. So like.
Bex: Yeah, but I don’t, I don’t know what, um, tenancy agreements are like in the US, but I don’t think there’s a clause in there that says that you can break your lease if you get abducted out of your rented apartment.
Alice: I mean, we can, um, break them here for domestic violence reasons.
Bex: Yeah, but isn’t that if you’re renting with the partner who is abusive, like Doug wasn’t anywhere near, that’s a completely different tangent. Anyway, we won’t even, we won’t bother going down that one. So that’s their angle with the Buckleys, that they’re having money problems, and Maddy has colluded with Buck to rob this bank.
Alice: And we get a flashback of, um, Buck getting into his Jeep like, with Maddie, and Buck’s got this giant carry bag and, like, they’re just chatting about the landlord and Maddie’s just like, “yeah, but, like, what’s all that?” And apparently he’s got decorations for Chimney’s welcome back party.
Bex: [00:44:00] Cause Chimney, we’ve completely forgotten this is Chimney’s, Chimney is back after his, uh, convalescence.
Ellen: Yeah, so it must be at least a few months after. Surely it would take longer than a week to get over being stabbed. Well he was already We don’t know how long it’s been.
Alice: He was already off for quite a while. Oh. In the last episode, because Maddie had been off for like six weeks, hadn’t she?
Ellen: Yeah, I mean he was getting up and moving around.
It hurt him to jump up in the air, but he was um, You know, being a firefighter is a very physical job, like. Yeah, so like Maddie, you’d want to be back in good shape.
Bex: I don’t think it can be that long after the last episode, because they wouldn’t allow the 118 to be down a ladder truck that long. And they’ve got a ladder truck back in this episode, so Time is being wibbly wobbly, time doesn’t actually have that much of importance to this episode.[00:45:00]
But anyway, Chimney’s back.
Ellen: Yeah, and he says that, um, Buck says that Chim said he didn’t want anyone to make a big deal out of it, but Hen is insisting,
Alice: apparently. And Maddie says that she really hopes he has a great first day back, and Buck’s like, do you want me to tell him that? And Maddie goes, no. So they’re still taking a break from each other.
Bex: So that’s what’s going on with the Buckleys. Um, Mercer and Wash think that, um, Bobby, they, they don’t quite have a grip on why Bobby did it, but they’re pretty sure that he conspired with Michael to steal the blueprints for the bank, probably in order to help whichever other member of the team was pulling the heist.
Michael, who has also been dragged in for an interrogation, corrects them and says, No, it wasn’t stolen. I slept my way to get those.[00:46:00]
And then we cut to Athena, who they have also dragged in, not because she had anything to do with the heist necessarily, but because she, you know, that’s her fiancé who have been implicated in it. Um, and they have laid their cards out on the table for her, explained to her what they think is going on.
She’s looking at them like they’re a pair of idiots and then just starts laughing at them.
Alice: I love Athena in this episode. She just goes, you think, you think they did what now?
Bex: I’m pretty sure that scene was just part of, you know, the Angela Bassett quota for the episode. But it’s such a good scene that I’m not mad about it.
Alice: It’s so good. Like. She’s like, they, this entire firehouse has two brain cells that they share between them, the four of them. Um, and Michael doesn’t even like Bobby, so I don’t know why she
Ellen: But, and Michael says people request building plans all the time, architects, contractors, and Wash goes, “Terrorists.” [00:47:00]
Bex: Which then brings Eddie, Eddie into the situation. He’s like, “No, I never said terrorists.” And Mercer says, ” You were the first one to suggest it. And everyone figured that you knew what you were talking about because you’re from the military.”
Alice: Um, and Eddie says it was part of his training, how to spot it, how to respond. And then we go to Bobby, who says, “We had to improvise.” And Mercer asks if they improvise a lot, and Bobby goes, “It’s part of the job, see the problem, solve the problem.”
Ellen: To be fair, they do improvise. They do get a lot of weird ass cases.
Alice: They do get a lot of weird ass cases.
Bex: Michael chimes in and says that he was, like, everything that he did, he was just trying to help a friend and was just sort of in disbelief, like, your ex wife’s new boyfriend is your friend? [00:48:00] Like, two. Um, and Michael says, “no, Hen is my friend. I was trying to help Hen, but yes, you know, Bobby’s a friend too. Everyone at the 118 is my friend.”
And then we cut back to Eddie who goes, “yeah, I don’t actually know him.”
Alice: Yeah, he literally is so serious. “I don’t really know him.” Oh,
Ellen: I loved him in the last couple of episodes ago.
Bex: Yes, he bought you coffee. Remember, Eddie?
Alice: Poor Michael thought that Eddie and him had something and Eddie’s just like, yeah, I don’t really know him.
Bex: Eddie’s just going to throw him straight under the bus.
Alice: So then we go to Hen, who goes, someone said I seem stressed, who? Who said I seem stressed?
Bex: Which is kind of a clunky transition, but okay. Um, but apparently it was Buck.
And Buck is like, no. But Buck said cranky. Yeah.
Ellen: Which is better in what way? Like, that’s not any better.
Bex: But then we get a flashback to earlier that morning and we get to see that yeah, she was kind of snapping [00:49:00] at Buck.
Alice: I love this flashback so much.
Ellen: It’s great, this flashback. So they’re hanging up, Buck and Eddie are hanging up a banner for Chim’s party and it says “Chimney 2 Death 0.”
Who came up with this idea? I mean, in fairness it is a lot better than the cake with the rebar, like his head with the rebar.
Bex: Oh no, that’s a classic. Nothing will top the uh, the fondant head with the liquorice rebar.
Alice: Um, but yeah, Buck’s holding his, like, his side of the banner way too low. Um, and Hen literally says, that’s way too low.
And Buck’s still just yapping. He’s like, you know, “Chimney says he didn’t want us to make a big deal out of it. Maybe we should respect the guy’s wishes.” And then he just raises it up like, like as high as he can go. And Eddie [00:50:00] just looks so annoyed. He’s just like, we’ve got shit to do. Like, can you just focus your fucking energy right now.
But then Hen says, “you know what we’re not gonna do? Respect wishes. Yeah. Yep. We’re hanging a banner, we’re having cake, and we’re gonna show him how much we love him. Lower.” Yeah. Cranky. Cranky.
Um, but meanwhile, while Hen’s supervising Dumb and Dumber straightening up a banner, Um, Bobby’s talking with Marty, who we met last episode. Uh, he seems to be like a maintenance man with the trucks. After the ladder truck broke, they needed to sort that.
Ellen: So he’s, he’s just brought them a new, he’s just fixed the ladder, right?
He didn’t, there’s not a new truck. It’s just,
Alice: I think they took the truck away and just put a new.
Bex: They put a new ladder rig on top of [00:51:00] it. They just replaced the ladder rig. Yeah
And everyone and Bobby is is very appreciative and He sees the party being set up and asks if they need a hand we get a little bit of exposition about Marty where Hen says, “I’d ask you to help blow up the balloons like, I know you can blow them up but you’re probably not going to be able to tie them.”
And Marty goes, “Oh you mean because of the arthritis?” And holds up his hands and wiggles his fingers and says, “Oh that’s not going to be a problem um, because I took my crazy sister’s advice and I went to see her acupuncture guy.” And everyone’s like, “You went to get acupuncture? That’s alternative medicine?”
He’s like, you know, “No, the acupuncture didn’t work. But he then recommended me to a witch doctor, and you wouldn’t believe what he put me on, and apparently that has worked and has fixed the arthritis in his hands.”
Alice: Yeah, so the, [00:52:00] this whole, um, like, conversation’s very friendly. So like, clearly they’ve all known Marty for a while, because, you know, they’re shocked that he went alternative medicine, they know he’s got the arthritis.
So yeah, there’s clearly a lot of, um, familiarity with Marty, um, but then Athena walks in carrying a cake and the cake is literally just a plain white cake and Buck’s like, “But last time there was a liquorice rebar, like,” and Hen goes, “Yeah, but this time he only got stabbed.” I’m like, wow, she really was cranky.
Ellen: Well, you could have put a knife in it, or some blood or, you know, some red icing.
Bex: I think the, the kicker to that is it’s, it’s a sheet cake that is obviously intended to have some kind of decoration or writing on the top of it. And Athena hasn’t even bothered to get it decorated. It’s literally just a plain white sheet cake.
Yeah. Uh, but the reason that Mercer and [00:53:00] Wash have been focusing so hard on Hen and possibly, perhaps one of the reasons that Hen is so cranky in this scene is that, um, they ha the Wilson household has money problems because Karen has apparently lost her job.
Ellen: I didn’t realize she was like a, you know, engineer or whatever.
Bex: She’s a rocket scientist, literally.
Ellen: Yeah, she was working at JPL. Apparently they’re sick of Mars. Yeah, they don’t want to go to Mars anymore.
Bex: So the funding for all of her projects are drying up, um, which is a problem because they just replaced the roof on their house. They have Denny’s daycare. They, they kind of needed that money. Hen and Karen are not the only ones that have money issues because of kids. Eddie also has quite a few kid related expenses, so that make also makes him a suspect for [00:54:00] why he would be stealing 300, 000 dollars.
Um, because he is, he’s just put Christopher into surfing lessons that are 150 an hour. Like, dude.
Ellen: When he was saying this, I thought that he was talking about his own surfing lessons. I’m like, ooh, Eddie’s having surfing lessons.
Bex: I don’t think Eddie would spend 150 on himself, though.
Ellen: Well, obviously not. But he’s only just moved to LA, you know. Like, he’s not used to the beach.
Alice: Maybe he got excited.
Ellen: Maybe he needs surfing lessons.
Bex: No, but we get a scene where, um, Shannon is also very shocked that Christopher is having surfing lessons, and she kind of lists all of the expenses, the Christopher related expenses. So, you know, he’s got the surfing lessons, but he’s also, his private school is very expensive, all of his physical [00:55:00] therapy is expensive, after school programs, Carla, you know, that, that all adds up, and there’s only so many shifts that Eddie can take, to cover all of those costs.
But he does tell Shannon not to worry. Because, you know, he’s going to rob a bank to pay for it all.
Alice: Clearly. Um, but yeah, Shannon says every time they talk about money, he tells her not to worry. And she’s like, “Guess what? I worry.” And he’s like, “Well, don’t.” Yep. Um,
Bex: and when Mercer points out that The $300,000 would solve a lot of problems.
Eddie goes, “I’m a firefighter and a father. I don’t have time to plan a robbery as well,” which I feel you. Yes, .
Ellen: I feel that , there is no way that I could plan a robbery and carry that .
Bex: No, but you know who did have time to plan a robbery?
Alice: You’d sit down to plan a robbery and you kid would be like, mom, I’m hungry.
And it’s like the fucks sake I give up. Yeah. Yes. , [00:56:00]
Bex: yes. Um, but Chimney had plenty of time to plan a robbery. Because he just had six weeks at home Marie Kondo-ing his entire apartment.
Ellen: He did.
Alice: Um, they even say like, “You know, with what you do for a living you must have been climbing the walls.” And Chim goes, “More like redecorating them.”
Ellen: Yeah, he had a lot of time on his hands to think, to plan. And he’s like, “who did, who did I plot with?” And they’re all, like, they go through all of them and they all said, “Like no, none of the others would have done this. Like it wasn’t me and it wasn’t any of them.”
Bex: We’re going to turn attention to Bobby, who is adamant that no one on his team would do it, but um, whatever investigation that Mercer and Wash, or sort of preliminary investigation that Mercer and Wash have done on Bobby, um, they have questions.
They’re, they obviously haven’t got a lot of information on him and that makes him very suspicious to them. They, they [00:57:00] question, um, whether he knows the members of the 118 as well as he thinks he does because they don’t know him very well. Which, and, no, they, I think they know, they would know Bobby better than Mercer and Wash think that they do.
Because they know about Bobby. They know everything about Bobby. Um, it’s just these guys who don’t.
Ellen: Yeah.
Bex: And Buck is adamant that he trusts Bobby. Um, so if Bobby says that they have to get into the vault, then yeah, they have to get into that vault.
Ellen: Yeah, and they ask Hen why she ran back in there knowing that there was what they suspect was nerve agent. “Why would you do that?” And Hen goes, “Because it’s my job.” And then we get into an interesting development where She, where they start saying, maybe you were providing a distraction so someone else [00:58:00] can do a different kind of job.
And then they, then it’s, it’s revealed to everybody that, you know, the armored car driver was involved and the money that had been stolen actually came out of the car, the van, not the actual bank.
Bex: So it wasn’t a bank robbery, it was an armoured van robbery, because we get photos of someone in the yellow splash suits that the 118 were all wearing, climbing into the back of the armoured van.
Ellen: Yeah, so at this point we’re all solving the mystery, because it doesn’t seem like they have any idea of what’s going on.
Bex: No. And then they drag the driver of the armoured van in to interrogate him. He’s like, I don’t know what happened, I just did what the firefighter said. He said that I was in danger and I had to get decontaminated.
Ellen: Yeah, so okay, so that makes more sense now, because at the end I was like, how did he get the other [00:59:00] guy away so he could steal the money? And then I’m like, okay, he had to go get contaminated so the other person could steal the money.
Alice: I mean, like, to be fair, at this point, like, he thought that the other guy had died.
And then, yes. Eventually, he did die, but, so like, he would have been terrified.
Bex: He was full on freaking out, having a panic attack. Yeah,
Alice: like, no one had told him what was going on, Buck just gave him a
thumbs up, like.
Bex: So yeah, so when another guy who was dressed exactly the same as Buck comes up and says, um, we need, you need to get out and be decontaminated, I can imagine that he would, yes, just go along with that.
Alice: Yeah, like, fuck it, no job’s worth dying.
Bex: Exactly. So they, uh, we go back to Hen and, yeah, they’ve kind of changed their tune with Hen a little bit. They don’t think that she was the one who robbed, who took the money, but [01:00:00] she was colluding with one of the others, she was the distraction that allowed somebody else to get into the van and take the money.
And they flat out ask her, “Who is your partner?” And then this is where we get, uh, a flip through everybody that they’ve just interrogated. All of them just staring blank face at the camera. Um, except for Buck, who just looks up at them and goes, “I’m so confused, can you start over?”
Alice: I love that scene so much. Like, I just want to replay that in my everyday life regularly.
Ellen: And like, as they, after they flip between everybody and they’re all just like, “Wait, the money came from the truck?” I’m like, Buck is everyone. I am confused.
Bex: This scene and the scene at the end, Buck is very much the audience substitute.
Alice: Yeah, absolutely.
Bex: Because every time, every time that they’re explaining shit to Buck, it’s stuff that they [01:01:00] need to explain to the audience.
Which, Buck seems to be that person a lot, I’m thinking of all those episodes where he just asks the, like, the leading, like, he has one line which is a leading question, which then allows someone to explain the scene. But it seems to work in this episode because it is so confusing that I do want, I do believe that he just has no clue what is going on.
Especially since Eddie’s got the brain cell in this episode.
Ellen: Yeah, I think, on purpose, the interrogation is meant to be confusing so that you give away, you know, what happened. If you’re the guilty one, if you don’t know what’s going on.
Alice: Yeah, they like aim to trip people up.
Ellen: Yeah. You’ll give away something you weren’t gonna…
Bex: I would like to point out at this point that every single one of those people except possibly Athena who just laughed at the um, the detectives.
Every single other person was a fucking idiot for talking. The [01:02:00] only thing every single one of them should have been saying was lawyer. Uh, yeah. The LAFD should have had the department lawyer down there, um, representing all of them, not letting any of them talk to the police. Um, kids out there, if you’re listening, if police ever ask you any kind of questions, the only thing you should say to them is “lawyer”.
Do not talk to police without representative. I don’t care if you have no, um, idea what is going on. I don’t care if you are as innocent as a newborn baby. Do not talk to the police unless you have legal representation. Here endeth the PSA. Good PSA though. It would have made a very boring episode, though, if it was just like the nine of them just going lawyer, lawyer, lawyer, we, I understand.
Ellen: Or if they’d be asking questions and they’d be just like the lawyer answering, going don’t tell him anything.
Bex: Don’t answer that. Don’t answer that. So look, I get for, [01:03:00] um, and I, I do love that scene. I think that it’s very well done, but it’s one of those things like in reality, don’t talk.
Ellen: All right. So later, uh, Athena and Hen, who are now off duty. Although I guess they were before if they weren’t, if they were getting interrogated by the police. Um, they head back to the bank so that Hen can try and remember what happened and, um, help to clear her name. So they, I mean, it’s, it’s close, the bank’s closed and, but Nina actually comes to the door and when they knock on it.
Bex: Let’s
them in?
Alice: Yeah, it just lets them into a crime scene, but it’s fine.
Ellen: Oh, you’re the firefighter who went back into the vault. How are you doing?
Alice: Um, Come on in. Please ignore the police tape.
Ellen: It’s okay, come in, come in. It’s fine.
Bex: She does tell them that the bank is going to be closed for about a [01:04:00] week because Captain Nash went a little Hulk smash on the wall.
Ellen: Yeah.
Bex: And this is where, Athena and Hen find out that, uh, Mr. Prentiss was retiring. That the day of the, the robbery, um, was his last day in the office. And here we find out that he’s been We were talking before about how he seemed really nervous about the whole vault thing. Um, but he’s been at this bank for 26 years.
Yeah. So that does make his behavior especially, um Suspicious.
Alice: But apparently he’s had a phobia this entire time of getting locked in the vault.
Bex: Nope. See, this I also don’t understand. I don’t, I kinda understand why they referenced it, but it doesn’t really make sense because he’s had the phobia for like four months.
He had the phobia ever since he heard about that kid in Florida, which happens in November of the previous year. So for [01:05:00] like 25 and a bit years, he’s fine, and it’s just in the last four months he develops a phobia. Unless this was some kind of story that he started seeding, um,
Ellen: Yeah, getting ready for the heist.
Bex: Which I think a better story would have been like this sudden germaphobe. Yeah. Like suddenly he’s just putting hand sanitizer on anywhere, getting used to people seeing him put hand sanitizer on his hands, because then it wouldn’t have been at all suspicious when he’s standing at the vault shaking people’s hands and then slathering his hand with hand sanitizer.
Alice: Yeah.
Bex: But that’s okay. But we did need that reference to the important for later on. And that is, uh, that’s another one of these sort of ripped from the headline stories, but not quite. So I’m going to leave this for a second and come back to it a bit later, and explain to you about the kid in Florida.
Alice: Okay. [01:06:00] So yeah, so Hen, uh, wants to take a look in the vault, and Nina just lets her in.
Bex: I don’t understand why Nina lets them in, because they have a crew in the bank vault, moving all of the security deposit boxes out.
Alice: Like, Hen is actively being like investigated for bank robbery. And they’re just like, yeah, just let Hen be.
Bex: Being investigated for a collusion to, you know, rob the armoured van. Um, the only thing I can think of is that Nina doesn’t know this, but even then, why would you let a civilian, and she’s never seen Athena before. So it’s, you know, two civilians just being let into the bank vault. While they are opening all of these, um, security deposit boxes, which we later find out have some serious shit in them.
Alice: But, um, Anyway, so, Hen starts roleplaying with Athena and like Doing what she Think
Bex: it’s a little reenactment. Yeah.
Alice: Um And finally, [01:07:00] like the whole episode, I’ve been like, it’s the hand sanitizer. It’s the hand sanitizer. For fuck’s sake. It’s the hand sanitizer. Where the fuck is the hand sanitizer?
And then finally, Hen kneels down and finds the bottle of hand sanitizer. And I’m like, fine, for fuck’s sake. I do like the episodes. I must say that the 118, um, solve like crime that the detectives just did not bother to solve.
Bex: It’s not very good for, you know, the LAPD though, if, you know, the head of, the head of robbery missed sweeping through the bank vault in like a crucial piece of evidence.
Ellen: Yeah she’s like, “I can’t believe we missed this.” It’s like, I can’t believe you missed it either. It was right there.
Alice: Literally. It’s right there. Like, did you not even look? Um, there’s an episode of Lone Star as well that does it where like TK, who’s literally just a paramedic, um, solves like this, like, serial killing killer.
Bex: Oh my god.
Alice: And the [01:08:00] cops are just like, la la la la la la la. TK’s just like, guys, like, he’s right, what are you doing? He’s right there. Like, what the fuck are you doing? And I’m just like, yeah. It’s better than, like, the Copraganda storylines. Yep.
Bex: Yeah, this is, it’s almost like, uh, reverse coproganda because it’s like the cops are so incompetent that firefighters are having to sell their products.
Alice: Yeah, they’re too busy finding, like, working out this really weird convoluted thing that Buck can’t even follow.
Bex: Uh, Wash does kind of cover his butt going, you know, “Did we miss it? Or did Hen plant it when she went back into the vault?”
Alice: Yeah, literally immediately, like, oh yeah, yeah, you must have planted it.
And Athena’s just like, “Check the tape. Like, there’s literally security. uh, security cameras.” But yeah, so Hen remembers that he, like the bank manager, touched her face and so Hen’s completely convinced that it’s the hand sanitizer.
Bex: And it sounds like Wash had completely dismissed the bank manager from his list of suspects. Yeah, like [01:09:00] you’re saying the bank manager was in on it?
Alice: Like, yes, that’s what she’s saying. Yeah, and Athena’s like, “Did you know it was his last day?” And he’s like, “Yeah, he put in for retirement just before Christmas.” Like, yep. Did, did you not like look into that more?
Bex: Yeah. Athena says “He put in for retirement right after he saw this,” and she brandishes a, a News 8 article, which I didn’t realize that they did print media.
I thought they were just like TV news. But apparently they have.
Alice: Taylor Kelly is very, um, very talented.
Bex: Taylor’s branching out? Yeah. Um, so the article says, “Rescue Workers Drill Vault to Rescue Child”. Um, so they’ve conflated two bank vault rescues for this one. Um, so in November of 2018, there was a kid in Florida who got himself stuck in a bank vault.
He and his friend were, uh, exploring an abandoned building, which [01:10:00] happened to be an old bank, and there was a bank, there was a vault still on the premises, and one of the kids went in and started pressing buttons, like, oh, I wonder what this button does. Um, apparently that button shut the door. And thankfully his mate was still on the outside, and he called 9-1-1.
Um, but. They didn’t drill a hole to get that kid out. They just managed to get in contact with an old employee of the bank who still happened to remember the combination. So they just opened the vault that way.
Alice: Thank God, because seriously, I take a week off work and I forget my password.
Bex: I’m very impressed that the, the, um, the employee remembered.
I don’t know how long the bank had been out of commission. Um, but the whole drilling to get the kid out might have been a reference to a 2003 incident where a woman, her toddler, got locked in the bank vault. So she picked her kid up, her two year old, she picked her two year old up from daycare, um, brought her back to the bank so she could obviously [01:11:00] finish closing up the bank for the day and she, part of her duties was dumping in the vault.
So she went into the vault and was unaware that her kid had followed her in. So she closed up the vault and only then realized that her daughter was in the bank vault.
Alice: Oh my god, wouldn’t you just
Bex: And to make it worse, something happened and the power then went out in the building, which reset the vault lock and it was not going to open again.
It was like a factory reset on it. It was 12 hours before they reopened. could open it up again electronically. Um, and so they did drill her out. They got a drill from a diamond mining company. It was like this massive bore drill and they did drill a hole through the side of the vault wall, um, a hole big enough that they could convince the two year old to crawl out.
Ellen: Oh my god. Yeah. Trauma for everyone.
Bex: She was, um, she was in there for five hours But by the [01:12:00] time they kind of got a camera in there to check on her, um, she’d gone to sleep. She’d stripped, she’d stripped off, because like it was probably like five or six, because they picked her up after school, so after daycare, and it was the end of the day, so the kid was tired, she was overheating, um, so she just stripped off because she was hot and then went to sleep.
Alice: Yeah, fair. Yeah, I’ve been there kid, I’ve been there.
Bex: Yeah, so those are the two stories that they’ve kind of put together, um, Wow. For this storyline. So there you go, that’s your, um, that’s your fact check for this episode.
Ellen: Real life, real life 9-1-1 fact check.
Bex: Back into 9-1-1 land, um, while Wash is trying to grapple with this new information, um, Nina catches his attention in the background because she is suddenly sounding very upset and demanding that everybody in the vault check. the room and check every single safety deposit box again because [01:13:00] six million dollars worth of diamonds is suddenly missing.
The vault, the bank, the security deposit box that should contain diamonds now contains the recycling.
Alice: I think it’s literally just like an empty water bottle.
Bex: Yeah. Uh, so our heist has suddenly got a little bit more complicated because it’s not just the 300, 000 anymore, it’s 300, 000 and 6, 000, 000 worth of diamonds.
Alice: Yeah, and like 6, 000, 000 worth of diamonds seems a little bit more serious.
Bex: I would say so, yeah. Hmm. If you’ve got boxes that have got six million dollars worth of diamonds in them, why are you letting two civilians just into the bank and wander around?
Alice: Oh my god, that too, honestly.
Bex: And also, why is the hole in the back of the vault, which is, you know, open to the street, just got police tape across it?
Alice: Like, why haven’t you tried to secure that a little bit more? It’s secure, there’s police tape, it’s fine.
Ellen: Doesn’t it have, like, a [01:14:00] board over it? Like, it’s not concrete, but it’s like
Bex: Yeah, why haven’t they drilled a steel plate over it or something? Or is the security tape, um, is the police tape made out of the same material as Eddie’s turnout coat?
You know, it’s completely insatiable.
Ellen: Yeah, it’s invulnerable.
Alice: Yeah. I’m just going to give them the benefit of the doubt and say that they’ve got, like, security posted 24 7 outside their
Bex: Yeah. Oh. Yeah, I just have questions.
Ellen: Especially when they’ve got six million dollars worth of diamonds just sitting around in there. Anyway, they go to visit Prentiss.
Bex: To Prentiss, because he is the only other person who would have had access to the bank vaults.
Ellen: Yep, bang on the door. Um, Hen and Athena are also there for some reason.
Alice: Yeah, for some reason.
Ellen: I don’t know why they came along, but
Alice: It’s like when Buck goes to the hospital with Eddie every time, Hen and Athena are just like, oh, cool, we’ll come too.
Ellen: Yeah, like Mercer and they’re, they’re like, okay, we’re going to go and visit this guy and Hen and then we’re going, standing behind them, listening in, going, we’re coming too. [01:15:00]
Bex: Same! They’re just tagged along.
Ellen: Yeah.
Bex: I can imagine them like running out into the street and jumping into a cab and like, follow the police car!
Ellen: But when they, they try the door and it’s actually unlocked. And when they open it they both kind of recoil a little bit and one of them says, “Oh, I hate this case,” um, because he’s dead on the ground.
Alice: He’s, he’s very dead. Um, his passport and plane tickets in hand and he’s, he’s dead.
Bex: Yep. So it’s clearly he was on his way out of the country, and so Mert Wash immediately pivots again.
Um, and his new theory is that. Uh, Prentiss had an accomplice who has killed him and taken the diamonds, and he demands that Hen tell him where the diamonds are.
Alice: Yeah, and Hen’s just standing there like, “What?”
Bex: So first, [01:16:00] she stole the money, secondly, she was the distraction so someone else could steal the money, um, and now she was the accomplice to, he’s forgotten about the money, he doesn’t care about the money anymore, it’s the diamonds that was the real
Alice: And like, not only has she like, killed him and taken the stone, like, been his accomplice, then killed him and taken the stones.
She’s then followed them to the house, like, and then like, hey, like, maybe we should check this guy.
Bex: They say that, like, serial killers, one of the pathologies of a serial killer is that they like to insert themself back into the investigation because it, like, fulfills some sort of narcissistic desire, so maybe he thinks that that’s what she’s done.
Alice: Yeah, she was just sick of the interrogation room, so she’s just like, let’s go on a field trip!
Bex: So the discovery that the diamonds are missing and the Prentiss is dead triggers, um, a massive wave of search warrants.
Alice: This is also great. [01:17:00]
Bex: This is good. So we start with Athena, who is, it must be the next day, possibly a day after, but it’s And she’s trying to hurry the kids out of the house, telling them that Mrs. Anderson, whoever that is, is waiting to pick them up. And the kids are confused because they thought that, uh, their dad was coming to get them. And Athena’s like, “No, no, no, your dad is going to be busy. We both have a very busy day planned.” Um, And
Alice: I love this, Harry’s like, “Dad didn’t say anything,” and Athena’s like, “It’s a surprise.”
Bex: And at this point, they’re back up, they’re up at the top of the stairs. Athena is trying to shove them out of the house. And as she opens the door, uh, Mercer jumps because she and a whole sort of battalion fleet of, uh, LAPD officers are waiting outside about to issue, um, Athena with a search warrant.
So she shoes the kids out.
Alice: Yeah. Harry’s like, yeah. Harry’s like, “Who [01:18:00] are they?” And Athena goes, “Friends from work. Off you go.”
Bex: So she takes the warrant, um, leads everyone inside. She’s like, “There’s coffee on the table. Um, the coffee in the kitchen, help yourself.” And Mercer’s like, “Oh, you were expecting us.”
And Athena’s like, “I know the drill. I assume you’re hitting everyone at once,” and Merce is like, “oh, are they gonna be expecting us too?” And Athena sort of sits down in the living room and she’s like, “No, no, no, you think I would spoil your surprise? Not my party.” Which we then get, one after the other after the other, we see search wants being issued on the rest of the 118.
Alice: And the music that they’ve got going is great as well.
Bex: Yes.
Alice: Um, it’s, what is it, “Scenario”?
Bex: “Scenario” featuring Busta Rhymes.
Alice: Yep. Um, but yeah, it’s just great. And like, they’re, so the LAPD are issuing search warrants to everyone.
Bex: Including the [01:19:00] station house. Like they go and they absolutely ransack the station house.
Alice: Yeah, they’re like pulling helmets out and everything.
Bex: Which, you gotta feel sorry for the B Shift.
Alice: I think I even had a note, and I’m like, who are these firefighters?
Bex: Because we see Bobby. Bobby is at home. Because they, um, they’re searching his apartment while he watches. So, somebody else is in charge of the station house.
Can you imagine that they’re just sitting there going, What the fuck did the A shift do?
Alice: What do you mean the A shift stole six million dollars in diamonds and didn’t share them? Like what the fuck did they do now?
Ellen: Yeah, they’ve stashed them somewhere in the, in the station house, like, can we help you search?
Bex: Yeah, I can just imagine that there are, there are members of the B shift going like, if we help you find them, do we get a cut off from like, their reward?
Alice: Um, so, yeah, so Bobby’s at home and like, the LAPD are literally going through his fridge and he just sits there and he’s like, really? The condiments?[01:20:00]
Bex: They hit, uh, Michael’s office as well, um, and they confiscate his laptop. And he starts freaking out, saying, you know, “My entire life is on that laptop,” and I’m just looking at him going, hope, I really hope that you backed everything up to the cloud. Because you’re not getting that back anytime soon.
Alice: Um, they’re also at, at Chimney’s house.
Bex: Oh, poor Chimney.
Alice: They’re going through his dresser and tossing all his clothes onto the ground. And he’s like, “Do you know how long it took me to get those color coded?” And like, last episode we literally saw him folding his shirts the entire episode. So like, he’s like organizing with Tommy to drop the waterbombing plane while still folding and Marie Kondo ing his clothes.
Bex: They were folded so neatly too, there were these perfect little packets and now they’re just all over the floor.
Alice: Poor Chim.
Bex: And they are also tossing Buck’s Jeep. So he’s sort of sitting on the, on the [01:21:00] footpath just watching them toss, literally toss everything out of his jeep onto like the nature strip.
Alice: Um, they’re also tossing everything in the apartment and Maddie’s like, “Yep, so much for the security deposit,” and pulls out her phone. And Buck’s like, calling a lawyer?
Bex: And I’m like, what do you mean calling a lawyer now? Why didn’t you call a lawyer earlier?
Alice: Yeah. And no, Maddie’s not even calling a lawyer, she’s calling an Uber because she’s still gonna go to work today.
Ellen: Aww. They must have let her off. Poor Maddie. She’s not a suspect anymore so she’s allowed to go back to work.
Alice: She’s just like, fuck this shit.
Bex: I’m surprised they didn’t issue a search warrant for like, the Seymour Centre. Thinking that Maddie’s brought everything to like, dispatch.
Alice: Maddie put all the diamonds in her drawer, yeah.
Haha. I feel so hard for Maddie right now because there’s been like the entire pandemic I still had to work so it’s just like, oh, the world’s ending. It’s okay. I’ve still got to go to work. [01:22:00]
Ellen: No, I was more thinking that she’s had cops turn up at her door again, like without any warning, like, hasn’t she had enough of that? That must be bringing a few things back. Poor thing.
Alice: But yeah, so after the montage of everyone’s houses getting tossed. We’re at, um, we go back to Athena’s place.
Bex: Hen’s come over for a bitch session.
Alice: Athena’s place is very clean, mind you. Um, so yeah, she’s just like, “Yeah, let them do their dance. You know, it’s, it’s not easy, but you’ve just got to let the wheels of justice do their thing.”
And Hen’s not happy about it. And she says “It’s the business of turning over every rock to look under it. I’ve got some rocks that I’d rather not have anyone peeking under. Um, just promise me, Athena, I will not end up in a 6×9 with Eva fighting over the top bunk.” And yeah, like, I can understand why Hen’s worried, because she does not want to [01:23:00] end up in jail with her ex.
Bex: There’s an interesting line where, when Athena is telling Hen to just to let the cops do their job, where Hen says, “Cops doing their job, like the, the wheels of justice sometimes have a way of crushing people like me.” And obviously referencing to the fact that she’s a black woman.
But Athena, another black woman, um, just says, “Oh, you know, come on. You can’t think that,” the implication, like, you can’t think that the police would treat you badly because of who you are. And that’s an interesting sentiment. Coming from another black woman.
Ellen: Yeah. Who is also a cop.
Bex: Yeah.
Ellen: Yeah. She should know better than anyone. Yeah. How it works sometimes.
Bex: Yes. You would think that perhaps she would be more on hen’s side rather than on the cop’s side.[01:24:00]
Alice: It’s um, a little bit of foreshadowing.
Bex: It… As I’m talking about this, I’m thinking, yeah, this is the first time that we’ve seen this sort of sentiment from Athena, but it’s not gonna be the last time. Nope. So put a pin in that, because Michael’s got back. Yeah, he wants, he wants to steal Harry’s computer because the cops took his.
Um, and And I love that he does that, that really, that very typical male thing where he stands in the middle of the room, doesn’t even try to look for it and goes, “Do you know where it is?”
Alice: Yeah, where is it?
Bex: Like, do you want to try looking for it? But it doesn’t matter that he doesn’t look for it because it’s, Athena knows exactly where it is. It’s down in the same lockup as Michael’s computer. Um, because it got confiscated. during the search.
Alice: I laughed so hard at this line though. Michael’s like, “They took his too? The hell? What are they thinking? He’s robbing banks and playing Minecraft?” I’m pretty sure the first time I watched this was [01:25:00] while Ellen was literally playing Minecraft because I have a note here that’s like, just at Ellen.
Ellen: I mean, to be fair, to rob a bank in Minecraft, you just chop the wall down and stuff.
Alice: Yeah, it’s literally what they did.
Bex: So there you go. The uh, the 10 year old is the mastermind of this bank robbery.
Alice: Damn it, Harry.
Bex: But no, Athena says that, uh, “Perhaps he’s a father like son because, you know, didn’t you spend the better part of your day helping my fiancé break into that bank vault?”
Alice: And, I mean, Harry did just light a fire the last episode, so. Ooh.
Ellen: He’s on a path of crime.
Bex: Look, Michael wanted Harry to be more like him.
Um, he, he does say that, you know, whatever he did, he was just trying to save Hen who was sitting there and goes, you know, “thank you for that, by the way.” And Michael’s like, “Yeah, you got it.” And Hen goes, [01:26:00] “I, I think. Thank you.” Yeah. Yeah. Uh, but Hen’s phone starts to vibrate, so she takes that call.
And Michael also comments on the fact that Athena’s house looks very tidy. Um, and he asks whether she cleaned up after the place got tossed. Um, and Athena’s just like, “no, the police were very careful when they searched my place.” Um, and Michael sort of laughs at her and goes, “No, you mean they were terrified of you. They were just scared to make a mess.”
Ellen: And Hen comes back in and says that they got the tox report back and you’ll never believe what they found in it. And Athena goes.
Bex: Scorpion Venom.
Ellen: And Hen’s like, well, I feel robbed. How did you know that?
Alice: Um, but it was in the hand sanitizer that they found in the vault, which I was yelling at the screen the entire episode, but [01:27:00] yeah, it was in the hand sanitizer.
Bex: Yeah.
Alice: Uh, and Michael’s like, “what’s that supposed to mean?” And Athena goes, “I have no idea.” But Hen, like, she looks like. all her Christmases have come. She’s just like, I, I know what’s going on here.
Bex: Yes. She has solved this mystery. So when we come back from commercial, we are back at the 118. Um, and Marty is walking in. He looks a little bit nervous.
Ellen: This is so funny because Hen doesn’t allow the police to have their day. Um, that the, the 118 have to get theirs before they let the cops do their part. So they’re all coming in and confronting Marty. And they were like, we know how, you know how we operate all our procedures.
And Buck’s like, maybe you could show us some tricks. And they’re very menacing. Like, Oh, yeah.
Alice: [01:28:00] So like, he just sort of walks, and like, Eddie just like, peeks out from the truck. Like, Bob, Buck walks up from behind the truck. Bobby, like, basically appears from under the truck.
Bex: He circles around back and kind of boxes him in.
Um, and we, we get a little bit of a hint, because Ken very pointedly asks Marty how his hands are, and whether that alternative medicine is still working on his arthritis. And Marty kind of looks from Eddie, to Bobby, to Buck, to Chim, and then just drops his tools and bolts. But he doesn’t get far because as soon as he starts running, Mercer and Wash appear at the gates, or at the giant doors, um, and tell him, and catch him and tell him that he is under arrest.
Alice: Yeah, for bank robbery and murder. And like, he doesn’t even deny it, except he goes, [01:29:00] “Murder? Who’d I kill?”
Bex: So they are pinning the death of Billy, the courier driver, on Marty because the, um, the scorpion venom that was in the hand sanitizer, he had a severe allergic reaction to it. So, it’s gonna be like manslaughter. And in case any of us are confused as to what exactly is going on, Mercer’s got us, she had to google this as well.
Um, so, the scorpion venom, uh, or the iberiotoxin, um, blocks the potassium channels that allows arthritis to spread through the bones. I did not google this. I have no idea if she’s talking shit or not. Sounds pretty good. Did anybody look it up?
Ellen: Nope, it just, it’s not there. It sounds a little bit like that kind of natural medicine, bro science type, like, I don’t know if it’s real, but that’s the kind of language they use to describe how [01:30:00] things work.
Yeah. Um, you know, obviously it’s doing something because it was working on his arthritis. Yeah. And yeah, causing an actual, you know, dangerous reaction in other people. But, um, he said an overdose of it mimics the symptoms of a nerve agent. So he could create just enough chaos to impersonate a firefighter and get the armored car driver away from the truck so he could steal all of the money.
Bex: So they’re in the interrogation room at this point and Athena is in the little observation room through the two way mirror watching this. And she asks, is that the guy? And we discovered that Sam, the other armored car guy is, the driver, is in the observation room with her. And they are trying to get him to I. D. Marty as the, the guy who got him out of the van and he says, “Oh, I don’t know.”
So, [01:31:00] Athena just like bangs on the glass and Marty jumps and whirls around so he’s looking straight on and Sam’s like, “Oh yeah, that’s the guy.” I’m still very impressed because we later see that Marty had like the O2 mask on.
And the hood kind of pulled up. Um, I’m very impressed that Sam was able to positively ID him through all of that.
Alice: Yeah, seriously, at this point in the show, I still don’t know what Bobby looks like, so like
Bex: So then we, um, we get to later that evening, I guess, we’re at the station house. They’re having lunch.
Or dinner. They’re having some kind of family meal. I have no idea what time it is. Time is, makes no sense in this show. Um,
Alice: it’s a time and they’re having a meal.
Bex: And Buck asks, “let’s see if I get this right.” And he tries to [01:32:00] repeat back the story that he has been told. And the other members of the 118 explain to him, therefore explaining to the audience, what exactly happened.
Alice: Yeah, so Buck says “The fake nerve agent attack was a distraction for the armored car robbery, which was a distraction for the diamond heist. Crime is hard!”
Ellen: That’s why you’re a firefighter, baby.
Alice: Yeah, this is why he just swings hammers at walls, it’s fine. He’s doing such a good job about it too.
Ellen: I would see a show about him and Buck and him and Eddie solving crimes together.
It might take a really long time for each crime to get solved, but you know, they’d get there in the end.
Bex: I’m thinking, are you thinking, [01:33:00] Like, I have a scene in mind, if you, I don’t know if you’re thinking the same one, Alice.
Alice: I feel like this is just Bananas in Pajamas. Are you thinking what I’m thinking, B1?
Bex: I think I am, B2. I don’t know, it’s either Bananas in Pajamas or Pinky and the Brain. It’s like, “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” “I think so, Brain. But how do we get the sponge up the tube?”
Alice: Are you thinking of the gate? That is definitely.
Bex: Yes, I’m thinking of the gate.
Alice: Yes, yeah, absolutely the gate.
Ellen: Okay, I’ll look forward to getting to that whenever that is.
Bex: Okay, so back to this crime. So apparently, Marty and Prentiss were brothers in law. Ex brothers in law. Ex brothers in law. And for some reason, they decided to hatch a plan where Franklin was the inside man in the bank, his job was to create the medical emergency, the kind of emergency that would trigger what Hen calls the Big Bird Protocol.
Um, and Marty knows exactly what kind of emergency would do [01:34:00] that.
Alice: So yeah, so then we get the flashback to, Sam, the armored car driver. Being told by Marty, who’s in the yellow splash suit, that he’s in danger. and needs to get out, and so Marty got the driver to leave the truck, emptied all his pockets, and while the driver gets clean, Marty gets rich.
Which is again where we were all just like, I thought he couldn’t leave the truck. So he could have left the entire time.
Bex: He could have, um, so
Ellen: But he wasn’t supposed to.
Bex: The next question was then, if Marty’s going to get the money, how is he going to get that out of the scene? You can’t just walk it off the scene.
He needs mules. And so we see Marty taking the bags of money out of the armored car and walking them over to the truck and loading them into the compartment and then walking away from the scene and like dumping the splash suit into one of the bins. [01:35:00]
Alice: Yeah. So Bobby says it’s not a bad plan. Uh, it’s crazy, but it could have worked.
Ellen: Yeah, I was thinking at the same, at, you know, previous to this as well. I’m like, this is a really cool plan. Like, if it hadn’t been for Hen going back into the, the vault, like they may even got away with it.
Bex: I don’t think it was Hen that was the problem because, because I think Prentiss still would have got away with the diamonds and Marty would have still got away with the money.
The, uh, The kicker is that Marty went back to try and get the money, but the police had already come to get it because Prentiss had called in an anonymous tip about the robbery from the hospital bed.
Ellen: But he hadn’t counted on the double cross.
Alice: Yeah, it’s the double cross.
Bex: And I do like that with this scene, um, as the 118 are talking and they’re doing flashbacks, Um, sometimes the flashbacks are just straight flashbacks of what happened. But then sometimes they kind of break the fourth wall.
[01:36:00] So, in this bit, like, Buck’s asking, how did the police know to come into the 118? How did they know where to find the money? And Chim says that there was one variable that Marty didn’t count on. And when he says the double cross, it’s actually Prentiss in the bank vault turning to look at the camera and saying, with Chim’s voice over the top, “The double cross.”
Alice: Yeah, it’s great.
Bex: And we get this multiple times through this scene where characters break the fourth wall to look at the camera to, um, to interrupt the story.
Ellen: So he knew where the diamonds were, which vault they were in. In fact, he could steal them with his eyes closed so that when the power went out he could find them.
Bex: And we see him practicing counting to which bank vault he needs to get to, opening it with his eyes closed. The key carrying it over to the table so that he could, um, open it up and get the diamonds out all with his eyes closed to mimic being in the dark.
Ellen: Yeah, so he told Marty the best day [01:37:00] was going to be his last day. Um, and then he made sure he collapsed inside the vault so that the door would shut and he would, the power would have to be turned off so that then he could get the diamonds in the dark. And the unexpected complication was the fact that Hen was in there as well.
Bex: Yeah, I love this part as well. Yeah, so Hen, we get the flashback to Hen racing into the vault to pull Prentiss out of the way, but then she looks up at the camera and she says, like, “Me, I’m the complication.” And then we get the dog’s barking intro into, “Been Caught Stealing” by Jane’s Addiction. Yeah.
Which just works. It’s so effective.
Alice: It’s so good. It’s so good. This episode is just done so well. So yeah, he was supposed to be in there alone, but um, Hen running in to save his sorry ass was a complication. So he had to take Hen out too. So he like had to wipe the stuff on her [01:38:00] face, and then as soon as the, like, blackout happened and the cameras couldn’t see, he swiped six million in stones and waited to be saved.
And he had the stones, all he needed was a clean getaway. And so then they show him in the hospital bed calling the LAPD about the armored car robbery.
Bex: He’s distracting the LAPD, sending them after the 118 so that they will leave him alone. Hen says that when the police are investigating them, he could flee the country.
He just He didn’t get out fast enough because Marty knew that he had been double crossed and so he goes to confront Franklin. So we get a flashback to Marty going to Franklin’s house and yelling at him, you know, you double crossed me. He grabs hold of Prentiss around the throat and starts choking him and then he, um, drops Prentiss on the ground, which is where we found him before.
And so Buck [01:39:00] asks, “So Marty killed Franklin?” Um, Marty, back in the flashback, looks up at the camera and goes, “What?” And then we cut to the interrogation room and he’s like, “I didn’t kill nobody.” Mercer’s like, “The guard?” “Other than him. Like, I didn’t mean to kill him.”
Alice: Yeah, so that was supposed to be non lethal. Um, they didn’t know he was allergic.
Bex: But he definitely didn’t kill Franklin. Which is Prentiss. And to even, uh, to, you know, complicate things even more, Marty didn’t know about the diamond part of the heist.
Alice: Yeah, Wash specifically says, “Just make this easier on yourself, just tell us where are the diamonds.”
And Marty just goes, “Diamonds? What diamonds? There are diamonds?”
Bex: So Marty obviously just thought that they were stealing the money out of the van. Yeah. He didn’t realise that there was another play going on. Yeah. Um, and the cops believe him. [01:40:00] Like the, like, there’s like, “he admitted to everything. Why wouldn’t he just admit to the diamonds too, unless he is actually telling us the truth?”
Ellen: They don’t know where the diamonds are.
Bex: I know where the diamonds are.
Ellen: Yeah, as soon as they, they showed the flash, during the flashback of him opening the diamonds box and pulling one out and kind of looking at it. I’m like he’s gonna eat that
Yeah, and Sure enough They go to the morgue where someone is doing an autopsy on him and looking at his stomach contents And they they show just enough of this autopsy scene for it to be gross but you don’t actually see anything too disgusting. So he had a In his stomach he had corn.
Bex: Why is there always corn?
Ellen: There’s always corn. Some sort of grain, possibly quinoa, and some kind of foreign mass, and she pulls it out, and it’s this freaking diamond. [01:41:00] And she just starts pulling all these diamonds out of him.
Bex: But as she’s pulling them out, we’re watching Prentiss swallow them down like they’re like horse pills. So he swallows them, she pulls it out.
Alice: Yeah, he swallows one, she pulls one out and puts it on a tray. He swallows one, she pulls it out and puts it on a tray.
Ellen: I mean, cut diamonds are, like, really sharp. Isn’t that gonna slice your insides up?
Bex: I am really surprised that he didn’t, like, start coughing up blood and, like, hemorrhaging from his esophagus and his stomach being sliced up by these diamonds.
Alice: It’s fine, don’t think about it too hard.
Ellen: Or at least put them in something before swallowing it down.
Bex: No, I’m not mad about it, I’m just going, I’m really surprised that the diamond, all of those diamonds made it down into his stomach and like, I don’t know what killed him.
Ellen: Yeah, he was structurally fine.
Alice: Yeah. Yeah, so apparently what they put on the death certificate was “acute intestinal blockage”, because I, I did actually think the same as you Bex, I was like, well clearly he’s hemorrhaged on the inside.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But no, [01:42:00] it was just an intestinal blockage.
Bex: I don’t think that that would necessarily kill you that quickly though, because that’s very, very fast.
Alice: It does, it’s funny because like, watching it again, when he’s burping in the interrogation room. Yeah. Like clearly he’s got like, Six million dollars worth of
Bex: diamonds in his stomach.
Alice: Yeah. Ugh. Um. But yeah, Athena says that they rejected her suggestion of what should go on the death certificate, which was greed. Just “Cause of death: Greed”.
Bex: I think that’s more accurate. So this conversation is at Bobby’s apartment. She and Bobby are having dinner, um, talking about, I’m guessing it’s dinner because it’s nighttime, and
Ellen: shift workers have meals at weird times.
Bex: Yeah, they’re sitting at a table eating. We have no idea what time it is because time is wibbly wobbly. Um, but, and it has to be at Bobby’s apartment because Bobby [01:43:00] is about to get a visitor which is Chief Alonzo, who is like head of the the LAFD. And he has come to tell Bobby that they are standing him down as of further notice because In investigating Bobby for the bank heist, the LAPD uncovered his past in Minnesota, and of course they passed that on to the LAFD, and the LAFD have discovered that Bobby lied to them when he took the job as captain of the 118, and they are not happy with that, so they have questions that they need answered.
Ellen: But Athena wants to know, like, why you need to give a reason for this. You can’t just stand him down and not tell him anything.
Bex: But Bobby already knows, like, as soon as [01:44:00] Alonso said, um, that we have questions.
Ellen: We have questions.
Bex: He’s like, ah, shit, here we go. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And then, so the episode kind of ends on a dun dun dun note.
Ellen: Yeah.
Alice: Yeah, like, I, I love how the whole time we’re just like, Oh, it’s this. Okay. It’s actually this. Okay. It’s actually this. Okay. It’s actually this. Okay. Shit. Now Bobby’s being stood down.
Bex: It segues nicely into the next episode.
Alice: It really does.
Bex: Because the next episode is “Bobby Begins Again.” So we get a little bit of Bobby’s, the next episode is how Bobby gets to L. A. and how he becomes the captain of the 118. Because we know from the previous kind of Bobby Begins that he, And I can’t remember off the top of my head whether he [01:45:00] asked or whether his captain from the station that he was at at Minnesota or the, the head of the, the Minnesota fire department told Bobby that they were going to seal his records.
That they could get him a job anywhere else in the country and no one would know what happened in Minnesota.
Ellen: Maybe that’s something that happens in this coming up episode.
Bex: It was in “Point of Origin”, I think. Or have I,
Alice: I think you’ve, yeah, I don’t think it has happened yet. Yeah.
Bex: Okay, so this is, this is the, the um, the perils of having seen all of them, it’s, it’s all merged in my brain.
Ellen: Yeah, I think because in the previous, um, episode about Bobby, he’s just telling it all to Hot Priest. I don’t think we get all that detail.
Alice: No, we just see him, like, he just blames himself for killing his family.
Ellen: It’s just after it happens, he then, it goes back and he’s like, this is all my fault.
Bex: Okay, then I apologize for spoiling that, um, that little, that [01:46:00] little part.
Ellen: It’s, it’s not important to the story. It’s important.
Bex: I don’t think it, I don’t think it’s really important.
Alice: But yeah, I love this episode.
Ellen: Yeah. It was a lot of fun.
Bex: I do have, I do have thoughts on this episode.
Ellen: Tell us all of your thoughts.
Bex: No, like, before I get, before I, I launch into this, they’re not bad thoughts.
They, they in no way kind of affect my enjoyment of this episode. Um, I still really like this one. Um, but I think the fact that they, like, there’s two things that kind of annoy me a little bit about this episode. The fact that it’s called Oceans 9-1-1. I kind of expected it to be. the 118 pulling off a heist?
Because in the Ocean’s movies, it’s Danny Ocean.
Alice: I think that’s okay though, like you’re supposed to think that they’re pulling off a heist and it’s not actually there.
Bex: Yeah, but I kind of want them to pull off a heist. Like, I want to see [01:47:00] them doing the heist. I want this, it’s, I mean, it says it in the summary, it starts off as a heist and it turns into a mystery.
But I kind of wanted it just to be more of a heist. Um, but that’s okay, that’s fine. That’s just, you know, my expectations being slightly off. Um, I’m happy to go with a mystery. That’s fine. I enjoy, like, crimes and mysteries and whodunits. But I don’t particularly think that this was a, for me, from my, my very, very qualified opinion about storytelling, um, I don’t think it was a particularly well constructed mystery.
because I like mysteries that you can solve backwards and forwards, like a math equation. You know, like when you’re trying to solve a math equation, you go, fine, you solve for x, and then you should be able to plug your answer back into the equation and it still works. So when I’m watching a TV show or a movie [01:48:00] or reading a mystery, I think that you as the audience should be able to solve the mystery as it’s going.
So the storyteller should be putting enough hints and clues and breadcrumbs into the story that when you get to that point where Hen in this one, for instance, is going, I know who did it, you as the audience member, if you’ve been paying close enough attention, should be able to say, yes, I also know who did it.
Um, and if you didn’t get it the second time and the third time that you, um, watch it or read it, you start to pick up on the little clues. Yeah. You can kind of reverse engineer and go, Oh, okay, this scene and this little bit of dialogue and this little bit of exposition equals this person being the mastermind.
But there is no matter how many times you watch this episode, there is no way that you can pick from what we are given in the episode that it’s Prentiss and Marty.
Alice: Oh, God, no. Like, I think their aim was not [01:49:00] that kind of mis I think their aim was just to be absolutely ridiculous.
Because we’ve just had, like, some really serious episodes, and we’re about to have some more really serious episodes, so they were like, yeah, let’s just go batshit crazy on this one.
Bex: I know, but like that whole scene at the end where they’re explaining it to Buck, they had to have that, because there is no way that you would understand what was going on in the episode unless they sat down and explained it to you. And I, I kind of would have liked there to be, like, we can pick a little bit more that I could be involved.
I think it’s because I couldn’t be involved. Like, I had to sit back and I had to passively take in the story. I couldn’t be actively trying to solve the mystery along with the 118. And like I said, that is a 100 percent me thing, that’s the way I like my mysteries. I am not saying that I am smart enough to solve any of them, but I like to think that I have been given enough information that I could if I tried hard enough, but no matter how hard I tried, I would not be able to do this [01:50:00] one.
Ellen: He did, he did give the information about the, stuff that he was taking for his hands.
Bex: Yes, but until Hen told us, there was no way we would have been able to
Ellen: How would you connect that with the hand sanitizer? And,
Bex: and there is no way, there’s nothing in the episode or the previous episode that told us that he and Prentiss knew each other.
Yeah. Oh god, yeah, no. But we needed somebody to tell us that. So, like, I still really enjoy this episode. I still think it’s fun. I do like the way that the, some of the scenes are constructed and some of the techniques that they use. I just really would have liked to have been a little bit more of an actor.
Participant in the story rather than just sitting back and being forced to wait for them to explain it to me like I’m five Maybe it’s just because they’re insulting my intelligence a little bit.
Alice: Like it is network TV as well, so.
Bex: Yeah, but you will note that I was nowhere near as angry when I was nitpicking this episode as I was some other episodes.
I did really enjoy this one. It is fun. [01:51:00] Um, I did enjoy watching it. Again, it’s definitely one that I look forward to and I will, you know, happily watch on repeat.
Ellen: I’ll definitely watch future episodes by this writer too. He’s very witty writing. I quite liked the banter and whatever in it. Good ensemble writing, too.
Alice: Mm, definitely. That’s another thing.
Ellen: Although they didn’t have that much, like, scenes together. It was mostly just one of them talking to the police.
Bex: But everyone was there. Like, we even got Chris.
Ellen: They were all there, and they were all part of it.
Bex: Like, he literally said two words, but at least he was there.
Ellen: Maddie got most of the week off because she had a big one last time. Oh, no, hang on, that was two weeks ago. She was in the last last episode quite a lot, too.
Bex: Yes, she was pretty much running the, uh, running things at Dispatch last week. So that’s, that, that’s me. I’m gonna put my soapbox away now. But those are my thoughts on this episode.
Ellen: No, well, thank you for pointing that out because you’re right. Um, if you [01:52:00] are, like, a mystery has to have just the right balance of giving things away and keeping things behind the curtain. Otherwise, it’s too obvious, or you’re like me and you just don’t pick up on any of the clues until the very end when someone explains it to you.
I’m Buck in this episode.
Alice: I just like switching my brain off sometimes and like after four hours of sleep I was very happy to just switch my brain off and watch this one and be like, oh, that’s right. It’s ridiculous. I love it.
Bex: But things, like a good mystery is both. If you switch, if you want to just sit back and switch your brain off, then you can because someone will explain it to you all at the end.
Alice: I’m just trying to remember, because I haven’t seen the, the Oceans movies, but like, I remember watching
Bex: But see, the difference with the Oceans movie is it’s not trying to solve the crime, we are watching them do the heist.
Alice: Oh, true, yeah. So, like, because I, yeah, haven’t seen them, but I’ve, I really like the um, Now You See Me movies.
Bex: Yeah.
Alice: And they, as [01:53:00] far as I remember, like, it’s been a while since I watched them, but I’m pretty sure it’s the same sort of thing, where like It’s just batshit crazy, and then at the end they’re just like, Ha ha! This is how we did it all! Yes. Yeah. Um, so I think that’s why I liked it so much, because I like the ones that you’re just watching, and you’re just like, I have no fucking idea what’s going on right now.
Bex: I keep thinking of like, Knives Out, where you can just switch your brain off, and watch it, and enjoy it, but there is still enough in Knives Out that if you are paying attention, you would be able to guess who the killer was. before Daniel Craig tells you.
Ellen: I still need to watch that movie. It looks like a lot of fun.
Bex: It’s good. The second one, not so much, although the second one, it is fun just for the Hugh Grant cameo. Um, watch it for Daniel Craig’s ridiculous accent.
Alice: Yeah. Yeah. That’s what I heard basically. But yeah, it’s great. It’s ridiculous. And then it ends very [01:54:00] ominously. It does. And in we go for the last three episodes of season two.
Ellen: Oh yeah. Here’s your reminder, um, to write down all of your thoughts about season two. I know that it’s a lot more episodes in this season to think about, but maybe we can give some prompts, like tell us which episode was your favorite, your least favorite, that kind of thing.
Bex: I’d be interested to, um, compare some of our answers from the season one wrap up.
To the answers for season two by for instance in the season one wrap up We um, one of the questions that we got asked was like which was your favorite character? So I’m interested to see if anybody’s answers changed from season one to season two
Ellen: Yeah, geez it’s a hard one.
Alice: Ellen’s like yes there was no Eddie in season two.
Bex: I already know my answer. My answer has already changed. So
Ellen: Yeah, I don’t even remember what I said. I’m gonna have to go back and listen to our season one wrap up, just so I remember [01:55:00] what we said. , or don’t
Bex: just answer the question. Then I will tell you, uh, whether your answer has changed or not.
Ellen: Okay. I’m gonna have to do some homework before we record this one, but yes.
Let us know you, you can actually record a voice message if you want to and send that to us, or, DM us on any of our social medias. Send us email. Please mark that it is a season two wrap up feedback so that I don’t read it and get spoiled accidentally. I mean, I promise I will watch the last three episodes fairly quickly so that I don’t get spoiled for the last few.
But, um, yeah, we’ll need to know, we’ll need to get all that feedback in, in the next couple of weeks so that we can record that one.
Alice: I’m really, really excited to start season three as well. So I’m just like, these next, like, three to four weeks need to hurry up.
Ellen: Oh, we will say next week we’re going to talk about, um, episode 16, which is called Bobby Begins [01:56:00] Again.
And it, it is, contains, like, I’m just reading the triggers here because I haven’t actually watched it yet, but it’s got a flashback to the apartment fire, um, that, that, you know, Bobby lost his family in. Um, we have more alcohol abuse and alcoholic character who relapses. I’m guessing that’s Bobby. We have, um, actual animal abuse in this one, which is cockfighting. Interesting.
Bex: References to, inferences of, I don’t think we actually see the cockfighting.
Ellen: Okay. Uh, we have suicidal ideation and also an extreme allergic reaction. Yeah. Please tell us what you thought about this heist episode though. Did you enjoy the mystery? Did you think it was a bit heavy handed like Bex did before she got on her soapbox?
Alice: Have you been involved in a heist?
Ellen: Have you ever drilled into a bank vault? Let us know how that works. [01:57:00] Um, we, yeah, get in touch with us with, in all the usual ways, email, like, through all of our social media, we are That Weewoo Show in just about everything. Um, our website, thatweewooshow. com also has all of the transcripts of our episode and lists all the ways that you can follow and subscribe to the podcast.
So thank you so much for listening this week. And we will talk to you next time about episode 16. “Bobby Begins Again”. See you then.
Bex: Bye.
Alice: Bye.
Ellen (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. [01:58:00] com.
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