Summary
The 126 stage an intervention for Owen in “A Little Help From My Friends”, while Grace also continues to struggle.
This recap of 9-1-1: Lone Star season 2, episode 10, “A Little Help From My Friends”, contains spoilers.
After last week’s episode jumped through time to better explore the endlessly winning relationship between Judd and Grace Ryder, “A Little Help From My Friends” — tell me you don’t immediately start singing the song and I’ll call you a liar — feels a bit like a return to the usual format. It consigns itself to the present day, widens its scope, and brings back the fun emergencies. But it’s also a continuation of several long-running plot strands – no pun intended – including the fallout from Grace’s accident and the news that she’s pregnant. Like “Saving Grace”, it’s powered by a wonderful sense of camaraderie and togetherness, and it’s such an upbeat, entirely uncynical hour of television that it’s difficult not to love.
The focus in 9-1-1: Lone Star season 2, episode 10 is particularly on Owen, though, always the stoic leader, whose life has undergone some drastic changes in a short space of time. He got back with his ex-wife, discovered she was pregnant to another man, and then had to see her leave just as he thought they’d reconciled. He only recently fought cancer. And now his son, T.K., is moving in with his boyfriend, Carlos, taking his beloved blender Marlon Blendo with him. With another cancer surgery on the horizon, and his dog, Buttercup, on the fritz, Owen is at a bit of a loss, playing Solitaire on his computer while pretending to be buried in paperwork, and sleeping in until the middle of the afternoon.
Owen looks like he might have a new companion in Mateo, whose dopey, aggravating housemates blow his home up. When Owen catches him snoozing in the firehouse gym, he invites him to come and stay with him, but after they both get blind drunk, Owen reveals that he has canceled his upcoming surgery, which Mateo promptly tells T.K. about. The next thing Owen knows, the entirety of the 126 is in his living room telling him he’s depressed.
He is, of course, but he can’t help but deny it. T.K., an addict himself, knows better than anyone what it feels like to have a little help from friends, how important it can be, and he can see right through Owen’s happy-go-lucky ruse. He’s best positioned to give his father a reality check, and when Buttercup is rushed to the vet with a suspected new tumor of his own, Owen finally takes the advice on board and decides to schedule his surgery immediately. Buttercup, thankfully, turns out to be fine. But it was the kick up the backside Owen needed.
Meanwhile in 9-1-1: Lone Star season 2, episode 10, Grace is still badly injured, and still pregnant, and dangerously determined not to let either of those things stop her from getting around on her own. This, of course, is largely the same arc that Owen travels throughout “A Little Help From My Friends”, just in a slightly different context. When Grace tries to go out and fetch her own ice cream, she ends up stranded in the back of her car with only that ice cream for company. It takes her six hours to finally pluck up the courage to tell Tommy that she needs help, but once she gets it, it’s a turning point. Tommy has been where she is; pregnant as a Black woman with the expectation of just carrying on as normal. Grace is only human, and she has people around her who love her deeply. The next time she wakes up in the night, she wakes Judd to help her. And he’s happy to do so.
