[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for 9-1-1 Season 7 Episode 5 “You Don’t Know Me.”]
We knew that Maddie (Jennifer Love Hewitt) and Chimney’s (Kenneth Choi) wedding couldn’t happen as planned, but that doesn’t mean we thought we’d be going into a break with a major question about the whereabouts of half the couple!
But first, the latest 9-1-1 episode features some major moments in the firefighters’ personal lives. Buck (Oliver Stark) and Tommy (Lou Ferrigno Jr.) go on their first date, only to run into Eddie (Ryan Guzman) and Marisol (Edy Ganem) at the restaurant—and surprise, they’re moving in together! Buck lies that he and Tommy are going to pick up women after a movie, and after Eddie and Marisol walk away, Tommy cuts their evening short. He think Evan’s adorable but not ready. In talking to his sister Maddie about lying to Maddie, Buck lets it slip that he was on a date with a guy and it was with Tommy. (He also says that he hasn’t “leaned in the other direction” before and that checking out a hot guy’s ass is normal.) Maddie assures him he’ll tell Eddie in his own time, then wants to hear all about Tommy.
And she’s right — Buck doesn’t tell Eddie the first time he goes to but he does when his best friend’s over at his apartment avoiding going home (more about that in a bit). “This doesn’t change a thing between us, okay?” Eddie promises. When Buck admits he can’t stop thinking about Tommy, Eddie encourages him to call him and not to “walk away from something before you even know what it is.” Eddie hugs Buck before going home to deal with his own relationship issues.
Disney / Chris Willard
Then Buck meets Tommy for coffee and apologizes for their date. Tommy assures him that he cut their night short only because he didn’t want to pressure him. Buck tells him he’s ready for something and thinks that could be with Tommy, so he invites him to his sister’s wedding as his date. (For scoop on what’s coming up next for Buck and Tommy, read our interview with Lou Ferrigno Jr. here.)
Meanwhile, Eddie and Marisol moving in together doesn’t go as planned after he finds out she used to be a nun-in-training, which affects their sex life. Buck recommends he talk to Bobby (Peter Krause) as a practicing Catholic, and the captain notes that Eddie hasn’t talked about her in a way that made him think he’d consider cohabitating. He can commit to the military, the job, his son, Shannon, but when it comes to other things… And so Eddie ends up taking his own advice (“Don’t walk away from something before you even know what it is”) and admits to Marisol that he tends to move too fast, which never works out for him. “This time, I’d really like it if it did,” he says, and so they decide to start over and get to know each other, and she moves out. But why did Marisol have to be a nun-in-training to get to that result? Eddie could have still had concerns about moving in together and talked to Bobby as someone he respects who’s in a long-term relationship.
Plus, Hen (Aisha Hinds) and Karen (Tracie Thoms) find out they won’t be able to adopt a baby as planned (her grandmother changed her mind) but do welcome a nine-year-old girl, Mara, into their own. Her behavior—she doesn’t talk, she rips a stuffed animal in half, she watches them sleep, and she injures Denny—concerns them at first, then they find out she was the one to find her parents (who overdosed) dead. They’re making real progress when we last see them.
The episode then ends with a jump forward to Maddie and Chimney’s wedding day. Buck and Eddie come in, their clothes dirty, looking disheveled like they just had a Hangover-like night. (Hen and Maddie, on the other hand, waiting at the venue? Look amazing.) It was a themed party, Buck explains, and they’re Crockett and Tubbs (there’s some confusion about who’s who). When Maddie asks, “Where’s Chimney?” Buck tells her, “It’s complicated.”
We’re not at all surprised that the groom appears to be missing or at the very least elsewhere, given Maddie and Chimney’s entire relationship. After all, when TV Insider spoke with Kenneth Choi recently, he did warn us, “In typical Chimney-Maddie fashion, even such a joyous, happy, loving occasion will most likely be fraught with conflict, obstacles, and probably some trauma, too, because that’s just how they’re built. So I’m pretty sure things will not go as smoothly as either Chimney or Maddie would like.” (He said the same thing about the bachelor party.) On a trauma scale, he also put the wedding at an eight. “It’ll be a wedding that nobody would expect, or some people who follow Chimney and Maddie’s relationship course, they would say it makes absolute sense that this is the wedding,” he said, lamenting, “They just can’t catch a break.”
While multiple people do expect to be his best man, creating “more conflict for Chimney, which makes him probably spiral in his head,” Choi said, “Hen is his ride-or-die,” so a clear choice for best woman.
The good news? Maddie and Chimney’s relationship is strong in Season 7. “There will definitely be conflicts and obstacles, but yes, seeing as they are going to get married, they are absolutely in the best place that they have been since they met,” according to Choi.
That’s good, since his character’s about to go through some stuff “because of the wedding, because of the planning of it, because of the entire situation, and as an actor, they gave me a lot of stuff to work with and work through,” he said. “As Chimney works through certain curve balls that are thrown his way, it almost feels like kind of a throwback to ‘Chimney Begins’ because a lot of this episode focuses on Chimney and what he’s going through. And so as an actor, I’m getting all of these colors to play some that I’ve never played in the six seasons we’ve been on.”
While he couldn’t say much else, Choi did share, “There was one afternoon where it just happened to be Jennifer and I in these scenes and we were cracking up constantly. We just crack each other up all the time, and we have such a wonderful working relationship.”
Where do you think Chimney is? Let us know your theories for the wedding episode in the comments section, below.
9-1-1, Thursdays, 8/7c, ABC
