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[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for 9-1-1 Season 7 Episode 4 “Buck, Bothered and Bewildered.”]
If you asked us before 9-1-1 Season 7 began if the ABC first responder drama would take the relationship between Buck (Oliver Stark) and Eddie (Ryan Guzman), which remains strictly platonic, and actually go where some fans have wanted to see it go for some time now, the answer would have seemed simple. But now the question has to be asked.
Buck spends the 100th episode “bothered and bewildered,” to borrow its title, upon realizing Eddie’s spending all this free time with Tommy (Lou Ferrigno Jr.), the former 118er they just worked with to rescue Bobby (Peter Krause) and Athena (Angela Bassett). He seems hurt when Eddie talks about meeting someone and just clicking. He tries to get Eddie’s attention at work, then drags Chimney (Kenneth Choi) along to a weekly basketball game upon learning his best friend’s going with Tommy. And when Buck’s feelings carry over into the game, he hits Eddie, who ends up with a sprained ankle.
Then, the episode ends with Tommy stopping by to clear the air, and Buck telling him he’d been trying to get his attention. Tommy interrupts him with a kiss, and the two make plans before he heads out for a shift. (For insight into what showrunner Tim Minear calls “the bi Buck arc,” read here.)
The episode ends with Tommy telling Buck to call Eddie, but the best friends not having that conversation, and Buck’s feelings of jealousy not seemingly fully addressed. Why shape it the way it was? “I didn’t want to do this arc with Buck and just play him siloed off with another character who wasn’t one of the mains,” Minear explains to TV Insider. “It just felt to me that a more interesting way to get to the bi Buck arc, if you will, was to play it with Eddie, to kind of play Buck’s feeling jealous because he is trying to buddy up to this new guy, if you will, and then Eddie comes in and kind of steals him.”
He continues, “I just thought it’ll be an interesting way to tell the story if it feels like even to Buck that he’s feeling jealous that this guy is stealing his best friend, but the feelings underneath are a little bit more complicated and even Buck doesn’t quite understand what they are. It just felt like a more interesting way to get to that point by the end of the story is to play the dynamic between Buck and Eddie, not the dynamic between Buck and a character that we haven’t really come to know yet.”
Buck and Eddie’s conversation is coming in Episode 5, Minear promises. “It’s what you would expect. Buck and Eddie are best friends and because they’re best friends and because he has very deep feelings for his best friend, keeping something from him is painful, but it’s scary to completely turn over every card when you don’t even know what those cards are yourself. So I think we give it the screen time it needs in the next episode. The next episode really is about Buck feeling like he’s lying to his best friend and he can’t live with that.”
Adds Stark, “they’ll have some really in-depth conversations, but I don’t think that jealousy as such is something that even needs to be addressed because I don’t think jealousy is even necessarily the right word for what he experienced in this episode. I don’t think he was aware of what he was feeling. If it was jealousy, I don’t know if he knew who he was jealous of. He just knew that something was off and that he had feelings that were new to him, but I don’t think he was quite able to comprehend what exactly they were. And so I think they manifested themselves maybe as jealousy, but that’s not necessarily what the root cause of it was.”
The question has to be asked if this could be leading to a Buck and Eddie relationship or the possibility of that coming up.
“I don’t know. This is a story thread that will obviously continue for Buck,” Stark says. “We’re still working on Episode 6 as we speak right now.”
According to Minear, “Right now, Buck is exploring something about himself and he’s made a new friend. I can’t really even predict for myself exactly where the story might go in future episodes. Right now, Eddie’s with a woman. Eddie’s been married to a woman. Eddie has a child with a woman. Eddie also has very complicated feelings about, I think, his place in the world. I don’t know if they’re the same exact issues that Buck has, but we’ll be exploring some of that with Eddie coming up actually in the next episode as well.”
9-1-1, Thursdays, 8/7c, ABC
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