9-1-1 fans ‘should worry’ Ryan Guzman’s Eddie is actually moving to Texas, says showrunner
9-1-1 fans have come to expect their favorite first responders will always be around, come hell or high water (though maybe not lava rocks). But showrunner and executive producer Tim Minear says viewers “should worry” that Ryan Guzman’s Eddie is actually moving to Texas and leaving the 118.
“Eddie has put a down payment on a house. He’s moving there to fix it up and reconnect with his son,” Minear tells Entertainment Weekly. “So depending on how that goes…. I mean, we’re sort of cheering for him to repair things with his kid, but it is sad to see him go.”
Thursday’s season 8 winter premiere saw Buck (Oliver Stark) grappling with the news just about as well as Eddie superfans probably are. Though not all of them may have a puppy to temporarily adopt to heal the pain.
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“Look, Buck is a puppy himself,” Minear says of having the firefighter cling to his new pet as he works through his feelings of abandonment. “Buck looks at this dog and he’s like, ‘You adorable thing, somebody just left you. Somebody just walked away from you. You’ve been abandoned.’ He’s projecting just slightly on the dog.”
“Buck is trying to be a grownup and to be unselfish at the beginning of this episode, and it devolves pretty quickly,” Minear continues. “I don’t think he wants to be a brat about it, but he feels wounded. I think, actually, he probably knows better, but it’s almost like an excuse to throw himself on the ground and have a little tantrum.”
The rest of the 118 takes it a little better.
“Look, all of those characters have kids, so they’re all immediately going to understand,” Minear says of Chimney (Kenneth Choi), Hen (Aisha Hinds), and Bobby (Peter Krause). “They’re not going to have the same kind of hurt feelings that Buck does. I think that Buck is just sad and panicking a little bit. Even Eddie references it at the end: It’s like, ‘If I know I’m going to get separated from you, maybe I should get mad at you so that then it will hurt less.'”
