9-1-1's Boss Talks About the Un-Bee-Lievable Season 8 Premiere, Especially Eddie's Mustache

[Warning: This story contains spoilers for 9-1-1, Season 8 Episode 1, "Buzzkill." Read at your own risk!]

For 9-1-1's first season on ABC (and seventh overall), the executive producers of the series decided to pay homage to The Poseidon Adventure, Irwin Allen's 1972 classic disaster film about the survivors of a capsized ocean liner. But when they went back to the drawing board for the eighth season of the hit procedural drama, 9-1-1 co-creators Tim Minear and Ryan Murphy wanted to up the ante by combining two more '70s disaster films: The Swarm and Airport 1975.

Yes, you read that right. On a show that has cycled through pretty much every natural disaster, 9-1-1 has now introduced the terrifying prospect of not only being stung and killed by killer bees, but also, in the case of protagonist Athena Grant-Nash (Angela Bassett), being stuck on a plane that collides with another aircraft.

Thursday's season premiere finds Athena being forced to transport Dennis Jenkins, the man who killed her fiancé decades ago and whom she brought to justice in Season 3, back to Los Angeles on that ill-fated plane. Meanwhile, the rest of the 118 are all left to deal with a new normal at work. Following the rash resignation of Capt. Bobby Nash (Peter Krause), who is now forced to take a job as a consultant for a Hollywood firefighter show, Vincent Gerrard (Brian Thompson), the demanding and bigoted former captain of the 118, has officially taken back control of the fire station, where all the remaining firefighters except for Buck (Oliver Stark) seem to be falling into line.

On a quick break from writing the new season, Minear — the mastermind behind the 9-1-1 universe — opened up about how Athena's brush with the past will affect her going forward, why he decided to bring back Gerrard at the end of last season, and the reason for Eddie's (Ryan Guzman) new look this season. (Following Fox's cancellation of 9-1-1: Lone Star, which just premiered its fifth and final season, Minear declined to comment about the rumors of another 9-1-1 spinoff in the works.)

What goals did you have in mind for the overall arcs of the characters this season?
Tim Minear: For me, what I really wanted to do was get the band back together because [at the end of] the short season, people are kind of pulled apart a little bit. Obviously, Bobby goes off on his little quest, and then Gerrard comes in at the end. So, my goal for the first movement of this season was to create a situation where everybody got to work together and then kind of redoubled their efforts to put the house back in order. Because I really feel like, while the audience likes to see all these big disasters and the conflicts, at the end of the day, you want to see the band back together, and you want to see them responding to calls. You want to see their personal lives, but you want to put them back into some kind of workable workplace situation where you have these variety of calls. Some make you cry, some make you laugh, some frighten you. So that's my goal for the first movement of the season.

In the premiere, Athena has to come face-to-face again with her late fiancé Emmett's killer, Dennis, who has negotiated an early release under mysterious circumstances. But now Athena and Dennis' plane ends up on a collision course with another plane swarmed by bees. Why did you decide to go with this storyline, and how will the reintroduction of Emmett's killer affect Athena going forward?
Minear: "Athena Begins" is one of the great episodes of the series, written by Kristen Reidel, and I think Athena had such a cathartic episode where she, after 30 years, finally found Emmett's killer and had to think about Emmett again. I think she felt like, though it was grim in some ways to find this guy who'd been living a pretty good life after what had happened and delivering him to prison, I think her sense of justice required it, and she felt like that was a burden she had carried for so long. She's finally solved that case, and now she's escorting this [same] guy who has negotiated a deal for early release. So it's a real conflict for her, and she's going to have to learn how to balance the idea of redemption and forgiveness with justice, and how do you do that? So that really is the central conflict for Athena.

What I will say is that when I went into the season — and this is just from a practical nuts and bolts perspective — I wanted to do Airport '75, which is not a great movie, but it's certainly better than The Swarm. Ryan Murphy and I discussed it, and we decided maybe a mashup of The Swarm and Airport '75 would be fun, so the question is, how do you mash those two things up? And what I decided to do was have literally the B-plot — the bzzz-plot — collide with Athena's story, so the bee story actually does kick off the next disaster, which is the plane disaster.

So I put those two things together, and then just as a writer, you're asking yourself the question: Why is Athena on that plane? How do I get her on that plane? And what's the most interesting story that can happen on that plane beyond just the disaster? I don't recall who pitched it — it may have been Kristen — but we maybe wanted her escorting a prisoner or something. And then what you do is, you go to your canon and you see if there's anything that exists in the universe that might be the right fit for that. The Dennis character just felt like, "Well, that has deep resonance for her." And then a story grew out of it, and I think it's pretty great. 

Bobby, meanwhile, has taken a job as a consultant on a firefighter drama called Hotshots — it's the show within the show — and he doesn't seem to be enjoying the Hollywood of it all. How much longer can we expect him to be stuck in that new environment?
Minear: Well, he's not going to be completely divorced from those other characters in terms of screen time. If you remember back in Season 2 when we did the mini-arc where Bobby was suspended for a minute, those people just kept ending up on his doorstep. They were kind of lost without him — [so] expect to see something like that. But Bobby's stuck where he is for now. And yeah, as you said, Bobby is the last person to ever go Hollywood. He's just unimpressed by any of it. And by the way, the more unimpressed he is, the more impressed the star [of Hotshots] becomes with him.

Besides the obvious tension that his return to the 118 would create within the firehouse, why did you decide to bring Gerrard back?
Minear: That's a good question. It's because last year, as we were on this accelerated schedule, it was post-strike, we only had 10 episodes to tell some kind of a story, and I was trying to reboot a few things last year. And by the time I got to the end, it was never an assurance that it was going to be Gerrard — I had a Gerrard story up my sleeve — but I did want to tell the story of Bobby's trauma and him coming to grips with his trauma and finally deciding it's more important to live his purpose than to wallow in his self-pity. And that's the story that we told. And by the end of that story, what I didn't want to do was just say, "Everything's fine now, and there's no price to pay for the choices that he had made in the course of those episodes." I didn't want [Bobby] to just be like, "Oh, I woke up out of my coma. I'm all fine. I'm just going back to work." He needed to walk back into his world, and because of what he went through, there had to be a price and some ramifications. So that's why [I brought back] Gerrard at the end of last season, but then once I did that, I had to figure out, "Okay, well, you still can't just snap your fingers and make it all better in the first episode." So there's going to be a process for Bobby to regain his place in the world. 

One of the biggest talking points of this new season has been about Eddie's mustache. What was your reaction when Ryan first approached you about keeping his facial hair like that?
Minear: Ryan didn't approach me about it. So, over the hiatus, Ryan, as he often does, grew his hair out and grew his facial hair out. So we were getting ready to come back and he got cleaned up, and the mustache was the last thing [he hadn't shaved]. It was Kenny Choi who sent me a picture of Ryan with the mustache. He's like, "Please, please, please let him keep the mustache." And I was like, "Well, he kind of looks like a '70s porn star." So I thought about it, and I thought it was kind of fun and funny. So I said, "OK, fine." And plus, it was kind of funny because Gerrard has his kind of iconic mustache, so it's kind of like, "Well, what is that about, if Eddie still has this mustache?"

So I let Ryan come back with the mustache, and then it turned into a story in a weird way — not a big story, you know what I mean? We don't do "Eddie's 'stache Begins" or something like that, but there is an actual character reason that is kind of alluded to later in the early part of the season. So it's not just a meaningless thing, as it turns out. I mean, it's funny how these things happen, right? It's not like I started at the end point. Kenny Choi thought it was fun. It's really hard for me to say no to Kenny. So I said yes, and then it just turned into something which I think is going to be amazing. Ryan just shot maybe my favorite scene that he's ever done for the show — and it's going to be in Episode 6. I can't wait for you to see it. 

How would you describe Eddie's trajectory this season?
Minear: It's what you would expect. He's self-punishing. He's missing his kid. He has to contend with some of the bad choices he made last season. And now that Christopher is away for at least a while, he's got to look in the mirror. He's got to examine himself. He's got to figure out really where he is, and that's his task. 

Buck and Tommy are not only still dating, but they're also still hanging out with Eddie — they even tried to help Eddie surprise Christopher on a video call for Christopher's birthday. What do you have in store for Buck and Tommy's relationship going forward?
Minear: I'm sort of playing the honeymoon period, and it is a honeymoon period in a lot of ways for Buck because not only is this somebody he really likes and they have some chemistry together, it's the first time he's been with a man. So it's exciting and new in the [same] way that you have a crush when you're 16. It's that feeling, right? It's just great. So that's where Buck and Tommy are, at the beginning of this season.

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Is there anything you can say about how you're planning to develop that relationship beyond that initial honeymoon period?
Minear: I'm not telling you. [Laughs.]

Maddie and Chimney have taken over fostering Mara from Karen and Hen, while the latter deal with a local councilwoman who is not only out for revenge for the death of her son but is also now running for mayor.
Minear: Something that we've been doing, I think, pretty successfully is really showing the bond that those two households have. Obviously, Hen and Chimney are best friends, and now that everyone's married and they all have kids, we've been just playing a lot of extended family stuff between those two households that I don't really think we did for the first six seasons. So now that Maddie and Chimney are hosting Mara and keeping her safe, they become even closer... and the battle to get Mara back into the Wilson household escalates. 

Are you planning to bring back any characters this season? May? Ravi?
Minear: Every year, when a story is right for one of these recurring characters, we'll see if they're available, and we'll bring them back. You probably know that last year, originally, I was going to bring back Lucy to pilot the chopper, and then when she didn't become available to be my pilot because she got a [TV] pilot [the new Fox drama Rescue: HI-Surf], I just went through the catalog in my head of canonical characters that I could bring back, and that's when I brought back Tommy, and I knew I was going to go down a particular road with Buck, and then those two things just kind of matched up. So you'll see, probably, all the [recurring] characters that you've come to love. Not in every episode, but I'm working on a thing right now where one of the characters you just mentioned, hopefully, will make an appearance.

9-1-1 airs Thursdays at 8/7c on ABC. Episodes stream the next day on Hulu.