[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for 9-1-1 Season 5, Episode 10 “Wrapped in Red.”]
The members of the 118 aren’t exactly feeling very merry as the 9-1-1 fall finale begins … and just as they seem to be doing a bit better, one of them drops a bombshell about his future with them.
To Eddie’s (Ryan Guzman) surprise, his son Christopher (Gavin McHugh) keeps criticizing all his Christmas decorating. The only explanation he offers is that he wants everything to be perfect. But then Christopher has a nightmare about his mom (who died in Season 2). Though it could just be an isolated incident, Eddie admits to Buck (Oliver Stark) that it doesn’t feel like one. Holidays were always Christopher and his mother’s thing, and Eddie worries he’s not doing it right.
Then Christopher reveals just why he’s putting so much pressure on this Christmas: “You’re going to be dead next year,” he tells his father. Eddie, too, has been reminded of his mortality, after being held hostage at gunpoint recently, he admits to Carla (Cocoa Brown). His job is important, he knows, but it’s also important that his kid feels safe when he closes his eyes at night.
And so at the end of the episode, as everyone gathers to celebrate Christmas, Buck and Hen (Aisha Hinds) are concerned when they see Eddie with Bobby (Peter Krause). Then Eddie takes them and Ravi (Anirudh Pisharody) aside. Christopher is “worried about me, about the risk I take while I’m at work,” he tells them. It’s “too much” for a 10-year-old to think about, so “I have to make a change. I’m leaving the 118.”
Jack Zeman / FOX
So is Guzman leaving the Fox drama? TV Insider has confirmed that he’s not going anywhere, but we’ll have to wait to see what Eddie’s decision to leave the 118 means for him going forward on the show when it returns in the spring.
Elsewhere in the episode, Buck shares with Hen that he’s feeling a bit down because he’s missing his MIA family members. His sister Maddie (Jennifer Love Hewitt) left, thinking she wasn’t safe around her daughter, and Chimney (Kenneth Choi) followed to try to track her down. Sadly, we don’t get an update on them before the hiatus.
Buck also worries about a gift for Taylor (Megan West), since it’s his first Christmas with a girlfriend. He quickly rules out following in Bobby’s footsteps and getting her an engagement ring like the captain did Athena (Angela Bassett) for their first Christmas together. “Don’t overthink it,” Hen recommends. “Just get her something sweet, something she could use or she wouldn’t necessarily buy for herself. Get her something that lets her know that you know her really well.”
Buck considers a portable generator and concert tickets before finally settling on his gift: a bracelet with an emergency distress beacon. It’s not a tracker, he assures her, but when she presses it, they’ll come to her rescue. And he loves the sweater she picked out for him, without even seeing it, so at least that part of his personal life is looking up.
With that, 9-1-1 is on hiatus until the spring. In the meantime, its spinoff, Lone Star, returns for Season 3 and takes over its time slot beginning on January 3.
9-1-1, Returns, Spring 2022, Fox
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