About Last Night…9-1-1, GREY’S ANATOMY, THE PITT, and More

Let’s talk about Thursday night’s TV!

9-1-1: I wish I enjoyed this episode more. Once again it felt like a tonal mess with Maddie going through her really serious PTSD/losing her voice while Eddie was…a rideshare driver. (Also, my God, he was terrible at it.) I get this is a fictional show, but he moved to Texas to take care of his son and bought a house before he secured a job? In what world?! I’m glad Christopher came over in the end, but none of it felt earned; we could have seen an episode just focused on Eddie in Texas (and gotten glimpses of the other main characters via Facetime or whatever) if they wanted to quasi-resolve the Christopher stuff in an hour. Alas.

NEXT LEVEL CHEF: Okay, it’s very funny the judges struggled to do the platform grab. We’ll see if it makes a difference in how they react next week. But wow to Team Ramsay winning again. But, uh, yeah, Megan did go too far with her comments about Team Ramsay…they need to be taken down a peg? They were the smallest group! And then to be kind of awful about it to Gordon’s face? Yeah, she went too far. I doubt it will make a difference in the game, but it absolutely changed my view of her.

Absolutely wild that Bobby didn’t use his safety pin and wanted to stay on the show on his own merit. And it paid off! It’ll be interesting if he does use it at some point down the road.

GREY’S ANATOMY: First of all, it was incredible we got a new episode of the show on the 20th (!) anniversary of its debut. I don’t know how much was intentionally a homage to the pilot/early years, but certainly Simone getting her first solo surgery (an appendectomy!) made me think of the pilot. (Thankfully, she did not have a 007 experience.) And we got Joe’s! But, most importantly, we also got Meredith. Which, yes, Ellen Pompeo has been in a handful of episodes this season, but it certainly wasn’t guaranteed. It’s wild how far Meredith has come in the past 20 years, good and bad.

THE PITT: Noah. Freakin’. Wyle.

I’ve spent decades watching this man act, and it’s truly incredible that this may actually be the performance of his career already. (And he was already brilliant in ER and so much fun in things like LEVERAGE: REDEMPTION!) The ensemble around him is fantastic, too, but my God, Wyle’s performance in this hour was a marvel.

Robby had already had a Very Bad Day before this shooting occurred, and the fact that his quasi-stepson, Jake, was MIA as the team was dealing with a mass shooting at the music festival Jake was attending wasn’t helping his tension/stress. But when Jake arrived, injured, but with his girlfriend, Leah, who was shot in the chest…things just spiraled.

Wyle was mesmerizing as Robby shifted from being determined to save Leah’s life to absolute denial about how bad the situation was. We, as the audience, could tell how grim it was based on how the people around him were reacting, but this was a loss Robby just could not accept. Even when Abbot told him that refusing to accept Leah’s condition meant others who came into the ER and needed their help could die…it just was not something Robby could process immediately.

But the moment of the episode—and potentially the season—came when Robby had to tell Jake that Leah was dead. Taj Speights was also fantastic, as he managed to make Jake seem so young/childlike in that scene; it was so different than we had seen him before the festival, and even a drastic difference from his demeanor when he arrived at the ER post-shooting. And Jake questioning why they couldn’t save Leah was the final straw for Robby and he had an absolute breakdown. What made it even more painful to watch was Robby was hyperaware that he was about to lose it, and he frantically got Jake out of the room to A) protect the kid from even more pain and B) be able to actually collapse in peace. Wyle has been stunning this season in the unspoken moments (please see also his reaction shot in the ambulance scene when he realizes Collins had previously been pregnant with their kid), but my God. I know this will be a brutal Emmy race for Lead Actor, but if he’s not nominated I may lose my mind a little bit.

And it’s not exactly like the rest of the episode was a calming walk in the park, either. The doctors realizing a patient had an ankle holster and everyone ducking/covering their patients was so upsetting it made me want to throw up on their behalf. We saw dead bodies being identified and the relative quiet in that scene made the moment even more tragic and unsettling. This was a traumatic hour, man. (I keep thinking how for a handful of these people, this is their very first day/shift. How do you come back after this?!)

Which shows did you watch last night?

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