9-1-1: Lone Star‘s first responders are pros at bringing people back from the dead out in the field — but the Fox drama took that to the extreme on Monday’s episode.
Season 5, episode 11 began with Tommy (Gina Torres) learning that her tumors are growing in size, giving her possibly just days to live. As she processes that news, she calls her twin daughters, who are visiting their uncle Julius, but stops short of telling them of her new prognosis. Instead, she opens up to her husband, Charles (Derek Webster) — who died unexpectedly from an aneurysm at the end of season 2.
The return of Webster as a spirit of sorts was something co-showrunners Tim Minear and Rashad Raisani had long hoped to make happen as the show approached its end with next week’s series finale.
“I’ve always believed that Charles was the love of Tommy’s life,” Raisani says. “And I love [Pastor Trevor, played by D.B. Woodside,] but there was something so deep about the love that she had for Charles, and we lost him too quick. She never got a chance to have her goodbye with him, so we always were craving to give her that chance.”
Raisani says Charles’ return was a “North Star” for them as they planned the season, “and then it obviously merged with the cancer story in, I think, a fairly organic way.”
“I was happy, happy, happy to see him again,” Torres adds of working with Webster again. “I was not, however, happy under the circumstances of which I get to see him again. So that wasn’t the best. But yeah, I couldn’t imagine doing it with anyone else.”
After Tommy was diagnosed with cancer earlier this season, the entire 126 firehouse and some Austin police officers threatened to quit their jobs if the city didn’t find a way to fund her promising treatment — and the medic looked like she was headed toward remission until her new scans were revealed on Monday’s episode.
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“The theme of these last episodes is all about how our world feels cut short too soon and how unfair that feels,” Raisani explains. “Tommy started to experience what you might call a false sense of security about her cancer, because how effective the treatments were. But as when we talked to Stand Up to Cancer, who consulted on this story the whole way, it was clear there are never any guarantees. What we wanted to show is that, ‘Well, it sucks, but this thing happened and you were in the minority of possibility, but here it is, death is now staring you right in the face. I think we wanted her to have to pay the ultimate cost for the struggle.”
Does that seal Tommy’s fate? Well, there’s also that asteroid that hit Austin in the final moments of Monday’s episode and — as put by Rob Lowe, who stars as 126 captain Owen Strand — “This could be the event where maybe somebody on the team doesn’t make it. Everything is on the table.”
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“You’re going to see the Tommy that you know, the Tommy that you love, the Tommy that is the fighter, right to the end,” Torres teases of what’s to come for her character in the final chapter next week. “She doesn’t give up on herself or what she believes in — so we have that…. And you also have me probably looking worse than I ever have on camera,” she adds with a laugh.
