9-1-1: Lone Star Boss Breaks Down the Season 5 Premiere Disaster and the 126's Future

[Warning: This story contains spoilers for 9-1-1: Lone Star Season 5 Episode 1, "Both Sides, Now." Read at your own risk!]

It's the beginning of the end for 9-1-1: Lone Star. More than 16 months after airing its Season 4 finale, the Fox procedural drama is finally back for one last dance, beginning with an epic, three-episode train derailment that will release a toxic cloud of chlorine gas over Austin, Texas. As they work to save civilians — and, in some cases, themselves — from imminent danger, the past and present members of the 126 will soon have to wrestle with their own mortality in the 12-episode fifth and final season.

Below, co-showrunner Rashad Raisani opens up to TV Guide about how the show dealt with the unexpected departure of Sierra McClain (who played beloved 9-1-1 dispatcher Grace Ryder) between seasons, the challenges that lie ahead for each of the remaining characters, and whether there is any truth in rumors of a "Tarlos" spinoff.

Owen (Rob Lowe) is still struggling with the guilt of being an accomplice in his late half-brother Robert's (Chad Lowe) assisted suicide at the end of last season — a fact that Tommy (Gina Torres) is not privy to when she brings him to her grief group. How will Owen continue to navigate this inner turmoil going forward?

Rashad Raisani: We really wanted that journey to have a real effect on him and not just [be] a one-off for the finale. What you'll see with Owen is that there is a lot of psychological pain — one, in terms of the grief of losing his brother, but two, there's also this sense of guilt. In the first couple episodes, it's a little bit subconscious, and he's trying to push it down, and we're going to do this really fun story in a few episodes [after] Episode 3. We're going to really start to explore and dredge up the full depths of what really happened that night and how it's affected Owen, and he's going to have to come to grips with it. That's a big part that's lingering over the first half of this season.

At work, Owen needs to make a choice between Paul (Brian Michael Smith) and Marjan (Natacha Karam) to fill Judd's (Jim Parrack) vacant lieutenant position. Paul and Marjan, as best friends, seem to be having fun with this idea of competing with each other for a promotion, but something's — and someone's — gotta give at some point. How will that affect their friendship?

Raisani: In the first episode, there's the veil falling away that they think that this [battle for lieutenant] won't affect their friendship. In the second episode, we show the darkest part of them realizing that, where they're actually becoming more overt rivals and how it's starting to curdle their friendship. The point of the third episode is … we take things to the most heightened place. We get to what's really important. We put all these people under extreme peril, and in that extreme peril — both for themselves and for the people they're trying to save — we reveal just who these people are. We were going to put that friendship to the test in these first three episodes, and we were going to end up realizing that this friendship is stronger than even the two of them realized in a really profound way.

Sierra McClain chose not to return for the fifth season of Lone Star, and we quickly learn in the premiere that, after seeing some orphans at her and Judd's local church, Grace felt compelled to carry out some missionary work and has left Judd alone with their young daughter. Can you expand on what Grace is doing right now and how you arrived at that conclusion for the character?

Raisani: Grace is on a Mercy Ship. I think it just so happens that its port of call in [episode] 501, when Judd's trying to reach her, is in the Solomon Islands. But there are these real Mercy Ships that help dig clean wells and help with cleft palate surgery. There's surgeons, ministers, nurses and all kinds of first responders on these boats. They're just trying to go to forgotten places of the world where they don't have access to hospitals — or even electricity, the internet, water, you name it. They show up at these places and are trying to relieve suffering where they are, so that's what she's doing for our story.

When Sierra's ability to be on the show went into jeopardy, it was to my great dismay. I love Sierra. I think she's a central building block of this series, because it's her voice. She's the 9-1-1 dispatcher on a show called 9-1-1: Lone Star, so she's the dead center of the show and she's really the soul of the show. So it was always going to be brutal; the idea of losing her seemed unthinkable, to be honest.

That made me say, "OK, well, we need to respect Sierra McClain, the actor. We need to respect Grace, the character. So we're not doing something cheap like killing her between seasons." We wanted to honor her, and I wanted to protect the character and also make the actor feel like she was being valued and respected, even if we weren't able to get her on the show. I was always hoping that maybe some miracle could happen and she could walk back through the door, and I wanted to make sure that she could just show up.

I think in doing that, it ended up creating this beautiful storyline for Judd where all of the angst that we were feeling about wanting her back and all of that yearning we had for her — we just said, "Let's give it all to Judd. Let's make that his story this year." He's feeling like, "What do I do? The woman that I love had a calling and she followed it, which is a beautiful thing and I admire that. But now, I have pain because she's gone." And then, that can curdle as well and start to go to a darker place.

It just started to open up these new avenues for storytelling with Judd, with his son Wyatt [played by Jackson Pace, who is now the new 9-1-1 dispatcher]. We had always intended that Wyatt, in Season 5, would come along and become more of an acolyte to Grace, just to give her another character to relate to in the call center. Obviously, when she stepped out, we had to accelerate that. But I think it ended up yielding some beautiful results — both for Wyatt and some of our emergencies that we do downstream that you haven't seen yet, and also for Judd. I think it gave him a real emotional bedrock that he was missing with Grace gone. He had this son that he could deal with and touch base with, and I think it expanded his character.

More on 9-1-1: Lone Star:

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• Fox's fall TV schedule and premiere dates

How will Grace's absence affect Judd this season?

Raisani: We established in the episode where Grace and Judd meet, "Saving Grace," that Judd was lost when Grace found him. And the truth is, he is lost without Grace — and he always has been. Spiritually, emotionally, she is his moral center. So we wanted to play the price of [losing her]. Judd's story is happening before it's even obvious to the audience. We start to incrementally tease what's happening starting in Episode 4, in terms of the Grace of it all, and it comes to a crescendo in the back part of our season. So the fuse is already lit, so to speak.

With Wyatt officially completing his physical therapy and going to work in the call center, Judd is forced to wrestle with his future employment prospects. He wants to go into trucking to help support his family, but not-so-secretly still really wants to be a firefighter. Why is he having such a difficult time swallowing his pride and asking for his old job back?

Raisani: There's a part of Judd that doesn't want to be that guy who just shows up and takes his job back from people that he knows have had to go on without him for a year. He doesn't want to impose on Owen, knowing that it would probably inconvenience him. [That's] particularly [true] when he finds out, "Hey, your successor is in the process of being named. Do you really want to be that guy who just shows up and says, 'Actually, I want it back'?"

I think that there is some pride, but also there's some dignity to Judd that he doesn't want to do that to his friends. He also feels, maybe mistakenly, that they don't need him. And when you have been gone for a year from a firehouse, you start over. So that just seems like such a non-starter — to start over at the bottom like a recruit. It just is an impossibility in his mind, at least when we first meet him.

You and co-showrunner Tim Minear originally wanted Carlos (Rafael L. Silva) to become an APD detective, but you've now chosen to make him a Texas Ranger — which, it must be said, is an interesting choice, given that Carlos had been so insistent in the past on not wanting to follow in his father's footsteps. How would you respond to the criticism that being a Ranger goes against what Carlos initially set out to do?

Raisani: I think the Texas Rangers became an embodiment of Gabriel Reyes, Carlos' father. What I mean by that is … Carlos had grown up with a perception of his father, which is: "My dad is homophobic, or certainly uncomfortable with who I am. He made me feel shut out. He made me feel unloved, unvalued." Carlos' arc in Season 4 with his father was to realize, "My dad is a more complex and beautiful man than I realized, and even though it took him a minute to get there, he did get there, and we became ultimately best friends. I love and revere my father, and just in time for me to realize that, he gets killed and taken away."

I would encourage people to go back and look at that Texas Ranger episode [in Season 4] where Carlos talked about the massacre [where] the Rangers killed all those innocent people in the early 20th century. What [Carlos'] mother teaches him in that [episode] is, "Look, the Rangers, like any organization that's older than 20 years, have some blood on their hands, but they've also done a lot of good. And nobody represents the good that they have done like your father." She talks about how the diversity of the Rangers has increased, which is real. They went from being all-white to now 33% or 40% [people] of color and women. "Your father embodied that change, and now you can take that legacy and take it to the future."

To me, Carlos' arc was to realize Rangers are not just inherently evil. "Yes, they have a bad history, but just like my father who I had a bad history with, they're more complex than I was giving them credit for. And rather than just spit them out and reject them, I can be the change in that organization." So that's what Carlos is going to do, and that's the symbolic relationship that he has with the Rangers.

But in a purely plot relationship, there's no better way to solve [the mystery of] "Who killed my dad?" than to be inside that organization, because Carlos believes — and I think rightly so — that some of the cases that his father worked on may end up having something to say about who killed him. So that's what I would say to people who maybe have some doubts about that.

Carlos bumps heads with Ranger Sam Campbell (Parker Young) on a big case in the premiere, but they seem to have formed a new partnership by the end of the hour. How would you describe the evolution of their relationship this season?

Raisani: I feel like they're two brothers vying for daddy's love. The dad is the chief, the older brother is Campbell, and Carlos is this pipsqueak young brother who just got to the front of the line and now he's a Ranger. And in Campbell's mind, some of it is because, "OK, this is some nepo baby stuff. Your dad was a legend, and you just get to waltz to the front of the line." We built this little family of brothers and a father, so the first episode is really about Carlos and Campbell in a foot race with each other. And then what they realize by the end of [the premiere] is, "Boy, we're a lot more effective when we work together. And in fact, we make a pretty amazing partnership."

Moving forward into the season, we get to play just how complementary these two pieces are together. One of the things I personally love about the Rangers, which we can't do from simple 9-1-1 calls, is they can go into some much more complex, deeper investigations against much darker bad guys and much more real-world problems that are happening in Texas — cartels and with drug smuggling and stuff like that. So we'll do some cases that I think people can't believe are real. But we'd never had the opportunity [to do those stories in the past], because we didn't have that vehicle to get into these stories like we do now that Carlos is a Texas Ranger who gets to investigate the darkest, most dangerous crimes that are happening in Texas.

Carlos' investigation into Gabriel's death will certainly drive a wedge between him and T.K. (Ronen Rubinstein) this season. How has Carlos and T.K.'s relationship evolved now that they've been married for almost a year?

Raisani: What I wanted to show with their relationship this season is that people can love each other with everything they've got — and everybody has challenges in their relationship. To love someone completely doesn't mean you're not going to fight all the time, and yet you can use [that conflict] to make the relationship deeper and more meaningful. We didn't want it to be happily ever after. For me, in real life, the wedding is the beginning of the story — not the end — and there are so many more deeper stories you can tell once people have that level of commitment towards each other.

We really wanted to put some pressure on that relationship. For T.K. especially, it's like, "You love Carlos. You want him to get that closure, that peace, that can come from finding out his dad's killer." But also, T.K. is a former addict who knows he's seeing signs of addiction, and Carlos is addicted to this thing, and it's clouding over and suffocating other elements of their future together because Carlos is so focused on what happened in the past. T.K., because he loves Carlos, will be patient and graceful about it, but at some point, he's going to have to put his foot down — and it's going to be very uncomfortable when he does.

T.K.'s stepfather Enzo and half-brother Jonah will also be making an appearance this season. How will their arrival shake up T.K.'s life (and Carlos' and Owen's lives by extension)?

Raisani: I think what Jonah represents is what I was talking about earlier about T.K. and Carlos: One of them is obsessed with the future; one of them is obsessed with the past. The past is Gabriel's murder, the future is this little boy. T.K. has a strong love for his little brother, so I guess what I can tell you is … Enzo's chief job in this show is he's a disruptor. He's an entrepreneur, a tech guy, a Wall Street guy who has made a lot of money, and he's a disruptor on a personal level as well, so he'll force Owen to have to confront some things about what kind of father he was to T.K. I think it leads to a beautiful story for Owen and T.K. as well.

Tommy wants to take the next step in her relationship with Trevor (D.B. Woodside), but she runs into a bit of a roadblock. These are two adults who have gone through the painful process of having to start over as single parents, so what could possibly be standing in their way of happiness now?

Raisani: Trevor is actually in a unique position of being a divorced preacher from Kansas. So as we looked for ways to tell interesting stories, we said, "What would be something that could give them real trouble, [where] you wouldn't hate Tommy or Trevor, that just feels like a relatable, really difficult, thorny issue for them to deal with?" Trevor has an ex-wife who allowed her child to come to Texas, which was a very gracious thing to do, but in a very reasonable request, in my opinion, she wants to know whomever Trevor plans to put in [their] kid's life, especially if he's cohabitating with another woman, but also with two other teenagers. That just felt like a very ripe and real thing to have to make them go through, and I think it takes some rather unexpected and hilarious turns. But at the end of it, it will show just who these people are and what their value systems are.

Lastly, Ronen recently said at a fan convention that a Tarlos spinoff is not only coming but has been in the works for years. How realistic is the possibility of a spinoff? Are Ronen's comments unfounded?

Raisani: Some friends of mine called me [when Ronen said that] and said essentially what you just told me. I think what I would say is … there is nothing officially set up. Frankly, I've tried to load the deck up this year to set the table for the possibility of [a spinoff], because me as a storyteller, and I think a lot of our audience, and Tim as well, we love this couple, and we think particularly with Carlos as a Texas Ranger, the opportunity is there to give him a launching point. That said, there's nothing that I'm aware of that has been other than [speculation]. Everybody's aware of the interest in this project, so it's not like people would be shocked and say, "Oh, what?" But there's no paperwork; there's no wet ink on this project.

9-1-1: Lone Star airs Mondays at 8/7c on Fox. Episodes are available to stream the next day on Fox Now or Hulu.