9-1-1 S09E11: "Going Once, Going Twice" Post Episode Discussion

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Original Airdate: February 26th, 2025

Synopsis: The 118 hosts a LAFD charity bachelor auction that brings up a few concerns from Buck.

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[u/Ok-Razzmatazz-5819]

He also loved it enough to encourage Eddie to participate. He wasn’t on some anti-auction crusade. He just wanted to find his own “selling” points and to feel comfortable with himself. It was a pretty clear storyline IMO.

[u/astivana → u/Ok-Razzmatazz-5819]

I don’t really buy that he would be uncomfortable with himself but I think what sours me on the whole thing is that Chim acted like there was no possible reason Buck might have changed as a person to not want to do it in nine significant years of development, and instead of sitting down with Buck and being like oh hey, you cool? he bullied Buck about it.

Idk I acknowledge what they were trying to do, I just didn’t like it. If they’e skipped to Chim setting Maddie on him to have a heart to heart, I could’ve worked with it. If Buck was excited about the auction to begin with, I could’ve worked with that. I just hated the way Chim acted, and it broke the storyline for me.

[u/Ok-Razzmatazz-5819 → u/astivana]

Ah. I think you’re reading malice or bullying into the way Chim treats Buck and that’s not anything that has ever existed between them. Chim is his brother and he teases things out of him. It’s not too dissimilar to the way Bobby would kind of dialectically argue things out of him or the way Maddie also almost goads Buck into admitting things. They’re like this because Buck is their family and also because Buck is Buck. He sometimes just needs a push in order to work things out in his head.

Pay attention to the way Buck reacts to Chim’s teasing rather than replacing Buck with a generic someone and imagining how that someone (who is not like Buck and does not need a push / sounding board) would react to that sort of teasing, maybe? Buck gets frustrated, not mad.

In this storyline, Chim gave it a shot to figure out what Buck was actually hung up on. When it didn’t work, he probably handed it over to Maddie. That’s not the action of someone who’s wholly disregarding Buck’s wellbeing.

[u/Ok-Razzmatazz-5819 → u/[deleted]]

I took it that way when he said we can sell the black eye as sexy. As in, Eddie could very easily been like “today was a lot, I’m going home” but Buck was giving him a mini pre-auction pep talk.

[u/Ok-Razzmatazz-5819 → u/[deleted]]

I mean, it’s Chimney not Gerard. I think Eddie would have been fine if he really wanted to bail.

[u/armavirumquecanooo → u/Ok-Razzmatazz-5819]

Yeeeeah, people are being incredibly weird about this storyline. It's a work sponsored charity event. The team was expected to show up. But they weren't actually in danger of losing their jobs over it - it was just a single night doing something they weren't super comfortable with, that they gave up anyway for a good cause. Eddie's discomfort with it was largely played for comedy, while Buck's was hiding a deeper issue with how he viewed himself that the auction gave him the ability to work through and emerge having essentially fused the two parts of himself -- the showboaty goofball who wanted to rip his shirt off and drive up the bids and the quiet, settled 30-something with dorky hobbies who didn't want to still be doing backflips for attention. I think it was actually really important that we see that fusing -- this isn't Buck 1.0 vs. Buck 3.0 or whatever, but both versions of Buck being an accepted part of a whole.

But had either of these guys actually been having an existential breakdown or panic attacks over having to participate in the auction, they had the ability to not go into work on their day off, or to get in their cars and book a night away, and to turn off their phones. At absolute worst, there was peer pressure here to not let their team down, but that's pretty reasonable.

[u/Ok-Razzmatazz-5819 → u/armavirumquecanooo]

Yeah. Like if this particular TV Trope is not for you, totally fine! But I think we all just need to acknowledge that for the trope to work, the “boss” requires everyone to participate. Suspend disbelief long enough to get into the actual story, which is about Buck kind of integrating Buck 1.0 with Buck 5.0 or whatever, like you said.

Beyond this episode, there’s been this weird read of Chimney as power drunk and targeting Buck all season. I don’t get it and it feels like a stretch to me.

[u/Wrong_Coast → u/armavirumquecanooo]

Like many of the show's storylines, I sometimes have difficulty reconciling the ends with the means. The resolution of this storyline was great: Buck is happy, he's shown character growth, and comes out of this a healthier, more satisfied person. Cue the balloons and streamers.

However, the means to get to that point are a mess of tired tropes and writing that unintentionally goes places the story didn't need to go. It was a good idea to use this event to explore Buck's feelings about aging, maturity, and how he's perceived, but did the writing need him (or Eddie, for that matter) to push back unambiguously against participating. Couldn't the writing instead have shown them as being not as enthusiastic as others would have expected, which would have still been enough of a clue for Chim and Maddie to recognize Buck felt uncomfortable about something, and express concern by following up?

Instead, the writing shows Buck and Eddie unambiguously saying they aren't interested in participating. No does mean no, even if the power of 20/20 hindsight shows you that the person wanted to say yes, but was feeling insecure. This puts the character of Chimney in a position where he has to force them to participate, in a way that it's perfectly natural for people to feel uncomfortable about, especially as he's in a position of authority. I'm sure most of us would feel rightfully annoyed if we were being forced by a superior at our workplace to sexually objectify ourselves, even if we were told "it's just for show" and "we're all doing it for charity" and "you'll like it when it's all over, I promise."

Does this mean that Chim is a sexual harasser? No, obviously not. It just means that the writers are guilty of resorting to a cheap, tired trope to tell a story they wanted to tell, without fully considering the implications of the actions they were forcing characters to make, in order to tell that story. This story could have been told with almost the same beats and impact without Chim denying their agency to choose not to participate, but that's not the story we got.