Summary
“Difficult Conversations” continues to put characters over carnage in another thoughtful episode, this was including some pretty major decisions.
This 9-1-1: Lone Star season 2, episode 5 recap for the episode titled “Difficult Conversations” contains spoilers.
In many ways, “Difficult Conversations” was 9-1-1: Lone Star operating at its best. After last week’s episode pared down the calamities to focus on character drama, the latest outing continues that focus, but with the added benefit of effective emergencies that tied directly into the personal anxieties of several core characters.
Perhaps chief among them was Owen and Gwyn, as we predicted. Gwyn’s geriatric pregnancy is a mixed bag of news, and the doctor suggests rather unsubtly that she should terminate rather than risk her health and baby’s. It’s only later brought up that Owen and Gwyn are pretty young for their age, which is putting it mildly, but the conversation really comes down to the age-old issue of heart versus head. The logical thing to do is not take the risk, but some risks are worth taking, aren’t they? It takes an entire episode and an argument over where to get a late lunch for Owen and Gwyn to finally shout this realization at one another, but we got there in the end. Let’s hope they work on their communication a little before the baby arrives.
It was Tommy who helped Owen make his decision since she also had her children late and everything turned out okay for her. I’m thankful it gave Tommy some utility since she hasn’t really been given the opportunity to make her presence felt this season, and she’s toiling in a long shadow cast by Liv Tyler. There’s still some work to be done in making her feel like an integral part of the show, though.
One of the emergencies in “Difficult Conversations” also factored into Owen’s decision-making. This was the tragic one, a father and daughter trapped in a car wreck. Ultimately only one of them could be saved, and the father’s parting words expressing nothing but love for his child, protecting her even until the end by not allowing her to see his condition, sparked the same parental impulses in Owen. He had that with T.K., and he wanted it again. It’s a reasonable thing to hope for.
Speaking of hoping for things, my on-going desire for more Judd and Grace was accounted for in 9-1-1: Lone Star season 2, episode 6, and it was a complicated storyline that didn’t really reach a resolution. It started when Judd, called to a 9-1-1 call at a hotel, discovered his father-in-law having collapsed on top of a woman who was very much not his mother-in-law. After letting on to Benjamin, Grace’s father, that he knew what he was up to, Ben threw a spanner in the works by being dishonest to his wife and Grace, putting Judd in the awkward spot of having to either rat him out and potentially risk breaking his wife’s heart, or keeping an important secret from the woman he loves. It was a decision he grappled with throughout the entirety of “Difficult Conversations”.
In the end, though, Grace figured things out for herself, at least partly inspired by the week’s obligatory emergency call. And it was a tense one, with an abused woman using the ruse of pizza delivery to report that she was in danger. Grace was able to save the day once again, but in so doing she revealed to herself that sometimes it isn’t what people say, but what they don’t say. Judd had been acting cagey all episode, and since they know each other so well, it was suddenly obvious to her that he was hiding something. After looking up the 9-1-1 call from the hotel, she realized that her father had been with another woman.
But what Grace did with that information was surprising, since she did nothing – not yet anyway. She was all ready to confess the truth to her mother and then was unable to go through with it, but the weight of the secrecy is sure to weigh on her and Judd both. These two are easily the best characters in the show and it’s always good when they’ve got something meaty to do, so I fully expect this to crop up again sooner rather than later.
Amongst all this seriousness in 9-1-1: Lone Star season 2, episode 5, there was what at first glance seemed like a comedic subplot involving Mateo, but it spoke to a deeper issue, not to mention doubling as an important team-building exercise for the rest of the 126, who got comparatively little focus. So, Mateo got himself a tattoo of his own design on which he had unknowingly misspelled the word “angel”. Showing the design – a tribute to the firehouse, obviously – off to T.K. and Paul, both men realized the mistake but couldn’t bring themselves to tell Mateo, who was happy with his new ink. They passed the responsibility to Marjan, and she couldn’t tell him either, at least not until he was primed to post a picture of the tat on social media. To spare him the humiliation Marjan finally fessed up about the error, at which point it became obvious that the tattoo artists had deliberately made a fool of him. Since Mateo has historically struggled with his dyslexia anyway, this was quite a blow. Luckily, Marjan was able to do something about it. Whatever she did at the parlor got Mateo a complete touch-up, free of charge. I wish we’d have seen it.
