How ‘911’ Finale Set Up Show’s Future After Loss of Bobby Nash

[This story contains spoilers from “Seismic Shifts,” the season eight finale of 911.]

Is Howard “Chimney” Han (Kenneth Choi) about to succeed the late Bobby Nash (Peter Krause) as the next captain of the LAFD’s Station 118?

That seems to be the question on everyone’s lips in the season eight finale of 911, the buzzy ABC procedural drama which wrapped up its most heart-wrenching season to date on Thursday. Ever since Bobby died after being injured in a biolab explosion and contracting a lethal strain of CCHF in the episode “Lab Rats,” the surviving members of the 118 — as well as Bobby’s widow, Sgt. Athena Grant-Nash (Angela Bassett) — have been reeling from losing the seemingly unshakeable center of their personal and professional lives.

While continuing to respond to outlandish calls from Los Angeles residents, each character has been attempting to process Bobby’s death in their own way, leading to some expected tension and friction between the once-tight-knit group. Athena, in particular, has been holding an understandable grudge against Chimney, who Bobby chose to save over himself in the lab, but the two are forced to work together amidst a mass casualty event.

In the finale, an explosion triggers the structural collapse of a downtown high-rise apartment building in Los Angeles, leaving hundreds of inhabitants trapped under the rubble. Athena, who was responding to a disturbance call at the apartment building, narrowly missed being trapped under the debris herself at the end of the penultimate episode. She jumps into action to save Graham a.k.a. the infamous grocery store “cart cop” (Sam Roach) and Donnie (Adam Hagenbuch), who were arguing with each other in the basement-level laundry room at the time of the explosion. After learning that Athena was tending to a couple of victims inside the building, Chimney volunteered to assist her, despite the fractured nature of their personal relationship.

Meanwhile, Eddie (Ryan Guzman), the former member of the 118 who had returned to Los Angeles for Bobby’s funeral, was planning to return to El Paso, where he was set to begin his training with the local fire department the following morning. At an impromptu barbecue with his former team, Eddie received his firefighter helmet and turnout gear as a touching going-away present. While packing his bags, Eddie and his teenage son Christopher (Gavin McHugh) see the wreckage of the building collapse on the local news.

Eddie comes strolling onto the scene like a runway model in his LAFD gear, ready to assist his former team by any means necessary. Taking a page out of Bobby’s book, Eddie reaches the top floor of the building across the street from the apartment complex and cleverly fires a line gun to create a kind of zipline between the two buildings. Eddie’s quick thinking allows Buck (Oliver Stark), Ravi (Anirudh Pisharody) and an elderly man named Flint to zip line to safety, just as the floor of the apartment building begins to fall out from under their feet. Eddie, Buck and Ravi then join Hen and another firefighter to break down a wall of debris to get to Athena and Chimney, who were trapped in the basement with Graham and Donnie.

But as the firefighters begin to remove the debris that trapped both victims, they discover that Graham has been bleeding internally since the building collapse. Graham confesses that he essentially sacrificed himself to help save Donnie — a not-so-subtle parallel to Bobby sacrificing himself to save Chimney in “Lab Rats” — but Chimney refuses to let Graham meet the same fate.

Thanks to some brilliant paramedic work (and sheer luck), Chimney is able to revive Graham, who is immediately sent to the hospital for surgery. After Athena says that he was single-handedly responsible for keeping Graham alive, Chimney humbly insists that it was a team effort. “You know, that used to make [Bobby] crazy,” Athena tells Chimney in an emotional heart-to-heart conversation outside the collapsed building. “He always said you never gave yourself enough credit, but he knew that you were a smart, talented, capable paramedic — and a great leader. He’d be so proud of you. So proud of you.”

Earlier that day, at Eddie’s going-away barbecue, Buck revealed that he had applied to transfer out of the 118 because “it’s just a number now” without Bobby. Hen (Aisha Hinds) explained that she did not want to be captain because she thought it would be another obligation added to her plate as a wife and mother. And with their interim captain Gerrard (Brian Thompson) leaving the station again to serve as a consultant on the firefighter-show-set-within-a-show Hotshots, there was no clear favorite to succeed Bobby.

Chimney takes Athena’s words to heart, stepping into that much-needed leadership role back at the fire station (at least, temporarily). Chimney stops the rest of his team dead in their tracks before any of them can get changed, and he snatches Eddie’s phone out of his hands when Eddie says he is looking for another flight back to El Paso in the morning.

“Nobody’s transferring out, and nobody’s staying in Texas,” Chimney says in an impassioned, captain-like speech, referring to Buck and Eddie, respectively, after Gerrard says goodbye. “This is our firehouse. This is the 118. And it’s not just a number — it’s us. And you’re right, Buck. Things are never gonna be the same again because Cap is gone. But leaving won’t change that. It won’t make you feel any less sad. It just means that you’ll be sad all alone.

“Bobby died so that I could live, and it has screwed me up in ways that I cannot fully express, but the truth is … he would have done that for any one of us. You see, he knew that just coming into work every day, there’s a chance that one or more of us would not make it home, and his job above everything else was to make sure that we did. And we’re all standing here right now because of him,” he continues. “This team, we are his legacy. So we can miss him, and we can mourn him, and we can even curse his name, but we are not going to disrespect him by throwing away what he built right here. So you hang up your turnouts, you hit the showers, you go home and you get some rest, ’cause we are all going to see each other on our next shift right here, together. Understood?”

In a flash-forward at the end of the finale, Athena is preparing to sell the dream house that she and Bobby had been planning to live in and grow old in together, presumably because the house no longer feels like a home anymore without Bobby in it.

As Athena makes her way to the hospital to meet a new member of her extended family, the episode offers a brief glimpse into the personal lives of Bobby’s beloved crew:

It remains to be seen whether 911 will be able to recover from the loss of its beloved patriarch — particularly with the launch of a new Nashville-set spinoff starring Chris O’Donnell and Jessica Capshaw this fall — but the show would certainly be wise to lean further into the found family dynamic that has remained its lifeblood for the better part of the last decade.

All eight seasons of 911 are now streaming on Hulu. Season nine will premiere this fall on ABC.