‘9-1-1: Nashville’ Cliffhanger Could Kill off Major Characters (and It’s Only Episode 1)

9-1-1: Nashville kept fans on the edge of their seats with the premiere, and there might already be some major character deaths coming.

Thursday’s series premiere of the 9-1-1 spinoff ended on a pretty big cliffhanger.

As the 113 respond to a call at a Kane Brown concert that saw the stage collapsing because of the high winds, a tornado makes its way to the outdoor venue. While it seemed like they got everyone safely inside, a worker is discovered to be caught in the rafters since he was working on fireworks during the show. Don (Chris O’Donnell) and his sons, Ryan (Michael Provost) and Blue (Hunter McVey), stick around to try to help him down, despite a tornado right on their tails, and that’s where the episode ends.

Considering the importance of all three characters, they won’t be killed off, but that doesn’t mean that it won’t keep fans on the edge of their seats waiting for a week, wanting to know what happens next. If anything, this tornado could greatly impact the three of them moving forward, and knowing how tense things are already following that family bombshell, perhaps the tornado might be a good thing. For the most part, at least.

As for ending the first episode mid-tornado with Don, Ryan, and Blue right in the middle, showrunner Rashad Raisani explained the reasoning with TV Insider. “Part of it was we really wanted to do something that would be very, very exciting and let people just have a very clear picture of what they could expect and what kind of emergencies they could expect in the first couple episodes,” he said. “But then there also was sort of the metaphor of what we were doing, which was that Blue comes into Don’s life, and Dixie also into, not just Don’s life, but also Blythe and Ryan, all of the Hart family, these Bennings are going to come in like a tornado. And so we kind of started to work with that analogy, and it sort of just went from there.”

Even though the characters dying is unlikely, there is still no telling what will happen. Already, 9-1-1: Nashville has been entertaining, and it will only continue in the new episode, airing Thursday at 9 p.m. ET on ABC, following 9-1-1, and streaming the next day on Hulu.