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The end is near—and not just for this spinoff that remained on Fox after the LAPD-set mothership moved to ABC. In a plot inspired in part by a real-life meteor strike in Siberia, the Austin-based crew prepare as an asteroid barrels toward Texas.
“We had this very apocalyptic feeling, just finding out that our show was going to end in Season 5 instead of what we would’ve hoped,” admits showrunner Rashad Raisani, who learned of Lone Star‘s impending doom back in September. “So a big part of this season has been about pushing our characters to an existential threat–level crisis way earlier in life than they would’ve expected.”
Raisani credits show writers James Leffler and Molly Green with the Deep Impact-caliber idea. “They always have these great high-concept ideas that they’ve taken from real life and so they had been wanting for years to do an asteroid storyline, based on an incident that happened in Siberia when a meteor fell and it blew out windows for like 60 square miles…and we just thought, okay, well that feels like the right idea,” he continues. “Sometimes life just takes you where it hurts when you least want it to or expect it, so let’s do that on a grand scale!”
Thankfully, Leffler and Green had done their homework seasons earlier, looking at everything from timelines to the environmental fallout, post-impact. “They had all this research so that we could, as ridiculous as it sounds, really ground this in the reality of what happened in Russia in terms of how the thing hit the atmosphere and then what happened, how it broke apart,” offers Raisani, readily admitting the plot also has a popcorn aspect to it.
Kevin Estrada / FOX
“Even though it’s, of course, this sort of absurd billboard-level kind of thing that could happen, we wanted to ground it because again, the hope is — and I think when you watch the episodes, you will see — as crazy as it is, it all ends up coming back to a place of character and how these people go through this crucible.”
Some of them may not go through it well. The action kicks off in the January 27 episode, which features “a flash-forward at the beginning that just makes you go, ‘Oh, my God,’” Raisani previews. “Something really crazy and terrible is happening. As we roll it back, you start to go, ‘Wait a second, this asteroid… Oh God, I think I know what is going to happen because of the asteroid!’” Amid all of the chaos — “our last couple emergencies are motivated by what people do when they think the apocalypse is nigh” — Raisani reveals that the penultimate episode also includes “one of my favorite cases…we have [Seinfeld‘s] Wayne Knight making an appearance in probably the most Wayne Knight role since Newman!”
In the finale, though, there is little room for laughs. As more emergencies erupt due to the fast-approaching catastrophe, first-responders Tommy (Gina Torres), Judd (Jim Parrack), and Captain Owen (Rob Lowe) must either settle or put aside deeply personal matters to save the day along with the rest of Station 126. To wit: Tommy’s valiant fight against cancer, Judd’s ongoing efforts to remain sober, and Owen’s potential career shift. “If we’ve done our jobs, you’re watching these three characters, each carrying around what they believe is an existential burden, about to unburden themselves with each other,” sets up Raisani. “And just at that moment — if you remember what happened in Hawai’i a few years ago when there was that [false] missile detection alert — everybody’s phones go off.” And as 9-1-1 fans know, once that happens, it’s all hands on deck. “The telephone is central to our DNA and we did it that way so that everybody gets that alert, which is how it would really happen.”
What the alert informs our team is unclear, but Raisani will confirm that the asteroid’s trajectory has a very intentional end-point. “We looked at the real city of Austin and thought, ‘What’s the worst thing that could possibly happen and where’s the worst place that it could happen if something hit it?’ And so we started to build the episode around that and it meant putting our team in the most dangerous place they could be.”
Without spoiling anything, we do know that there will be blood. “This will be the most casualty-strewn rescue since the pilot, when the entire team except for Judd blew up [in a factory fire] and died,” warns Raisani. “We decided who should get hurt and who should get hurt the worst in a way to show the depths of both their own characters and the character of the people next to them.” Still, he adds, “I’m a big believer that the worst circumstances of life will bring out the best in people,” promising a massively heroic rescue by these everyday heroes.
“Our final sequence, which I believe may be the high watermark of our series, is literally every character working together and doing their own part toward the same singular goal… It’s all about one single moment.”
9-1-1: Lone Star, Series Finale, Monday, February 3, 8/7c, Fox
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