Summary
“Everyone and Their Brother” digs into the theme of family as Paul’s mother and sister arrive out of the blue, and T.K. has to grapple with the idea of becoming a big brother.
This recap of 9-1-1: Lone Star season 2, episode 6, “Everyone and Their Brother”, contains spoilers.
You really can’t tell what this show is going to come up with next, so when “Everyone and Their Brother” opened with Grace’s obligatory 9-1-1 call and we saw it was being made by a conjoined twin whose brother was choking to death on peanut butter, it barely even registered as a surprise. The brothers were, for want of a better word, a little distant, but their bond was strong enough – sorry, I’ll stop now – to crawl over to the vacuum cleaner and dislodge the problem. Bet that sucked!
After a while it became evident why 9-1-1: Lone Star season 2, episode 6 opened with this, since it was one of the only emergencies in the episode, and certainly the wackiest. Most of the runtime was instead devoted to the notion of family and the complicated relationships they consist of, mostly highlighted through T.K., who was rather stunned to hear that his middle-aged mother and father are having a baby, and the perennially underused Paul, whose mom Cynthia (Cleo King) and sister Naomi (Regina Hoyles) drop into town on their way to the South Pole. Sort of, anyway.
This switch in focus is welcome, since we’ve had a lot of Owen and Gwyneth and Grace and Judd in recent episodes, though Judd almost manages to steal the show in this one in a little chat he has with T.K. about his fears of not being the baby of the family anymore. As we know, historically T.K. has not handled his problems and anxieties responsibly, but now he’s in recovery, his way of dealing with things leads him into the path of a Tommy subplot. She’s trying to hire a new paramedic to replace the poor soul who got killed by a lava bomb, and when T.K.’s application lands on her desk, she takes it straight to Owen. A classic father-son heart-to-heart later and T.K. seems to have a new career path, especially since the other qualified candidate turned out to be a coward ill-fitting for the 126’s “cowboy” way of doing things.
The focus of 9-1-1: Lone Star season 2, episode 6, though, is Paul. Credit should go to the writers for several things, but chief among them making his mother and sister immediately feel like a real family, despite the fact that audiences have never met them before. It’s also something of a novelty that the family member who has complicated feelings about Paul’s transition isn’t his parent, but his younger sister, who grew up idolizing her big sister until she was nine and had to grapple with the fact that her sister was her brother now. “She left, and you came back, and it felt like you killed her.” Yikes.
This is an upsetting moment for Paul, obviously, but an important one for the show, which has never made a particularly big deal of Paul being transgender but has also by extension never used him to address some of the common issues that blight the transgender community. This atypical subplot was really welcome, had an interesting perspective, and gave both sides of the equation attention and respect. As it turns out, Naomi has been suffering for years with multiple sclerosis, which Paul didn’t know about. Her snide comment asking him how it feels for his world to suddenly come crashing down is, fortunately, not how we leave things, and the reality of the situation allows truths to be shared on both sides and healing to begin. And that’s always a welcome outcome.
