'9-1-1' Fans Shook by Earthquake Emergency

9-1-1 season two began as only 9-1-1 could, sending its roster of first responders to the site of [...]

By Daniel S. Levine

9-1-1 season two began as only 9-1-1 could, sending its roster of first responders to the site of an earthquake. Fans at home were left breathless by the action and seeing their favorite characters rush headfirst into danger.

"7.1" saw the team of firefighters and police officers respond to emergencies set off by a 7.1 earthquake in Los Angeles. At the end of Sunday's season premiere, "Under Pressure," we saw the start of the earthquake.

For some fans, the earthquake scenes reignited personal fears of the natural disaster.


"I can not deal with this earthquake again...." one fan wrote.

One viewer wrote that the earthquake made her realize the advantages of living in Kansas.

Angela Bassett, who stars as LAPD Patrol Sergeant Athena Grant, told Entertainment Weekly that filming the earthquake was no easy task. The final product on the small screen made that obvious.

"We had two weekends of [filming] this big opening with the earthquake," Bassett, who also starred in Mission: Impossible - Fallout this summer, said. "It was draining. You try running up a freeway for a quarter-mile. I felt like Tom Cruise running across Paris."

Just before the end credits started Sunday night, Athena was seen driving on the highway when suddenly everything started shaking. She stopped her police cruiser at the edge of a giant crack. If she kept going, she would have driven to her death.

"The big earthquake hits at the end of the first night on Sunday, after football, and then we have really what is Part 1 of a giant, almost like '70s disaster movie, on Monday night — which then continues on the third night [next week]," showrunner Tim Minear teased in an interview with The Wrap. "There is a second part of the earthquake episode that's very different from the first part, that's maybe more intimate and more emotional, so we're really covering a lot of frontier with the first few episodes."

During the first season of 9-1-1, Minear and co-creator Ryan Murphy delivered outrageous emergencies every week. That continued in Sunday's episode. The team had to save the victims of a tour bus crash and were called to a pool party when a severed limb landed in the water. However, none of these emergencies could compare to the main one, in which a man got his head stuck in a microwave.

The earthquake is a bigger tone-setter for the early part of season two though. After dealing with the earthquake, the team will be met with ungrateful victims in an episode appropriately titled "Awful People."

"...Not everyone is going to be a wonderful victim who is worthy of saving. Often, people are just awful and ungrateful. And our responders have to deal with that, too. So I sort of wrote that as a theme. I love exploring the different parts of what that is," Minear explained.

New episodes of 9-1-1 air Mondays at 9 p.m ET on Fox.

Photo credit: Fox

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