‘9-1-1: Nashville’ Midseason Finale Ends in Serious Cliffhanger

The first half of 9-1-1: Nashville’s debut season ended on a pretty serious cliffhanger.

In Thursday’s midseason finale, the Music City was hit with a surprise all too familiar to 9-1-1 fans.

The final minutes of the episode saw computers getting locked up and greeted with an eerie skull and crossbones. Phones were also getting locked up and sending message after message about natural disasters, such as wildfires and tornadoes, that weren’t really happening, as tornado sirens went off on a beautiful sunny day. After warning people, “Prepare to be boarded,” a six-hour timer was put on the computers along with the message, “Drill time is over. Deposit $10 million or Nashville gets bloody.”

Even though there wasn’t much time left of the episode when the hackers sent the city into chaos, it still did some damage. For instance, Jessica Capshaw’s Blythe was riding her horse at the time of the alerts, and when the tornado siren went off, her horse got spooked and she fell, landing on a barbed wire fence. The final shot is of a paddle-wheel steamboat seemingly heading into danger as a passenger yelled, “Oh, God, we’re all gonna die!” and everyone on board, wearing life jackets, huddling together. The boat is heading straight for the bridge pillar.

If the hacker storyline and numerous emergency alerts sound familiar, it’s because it is. 9-1-1 opened its fifth season with the same exact storyline, only fans will remember that, after the chaos that was created, including the blackout, the hackers were never caught. Nashville showrunner Rashad Raisani confirmed to TV Insider that the hackers are the same ones from 9-1-1.

“The origin of the hack is — one of the things that I always felt was 9-1-1, there was a hacker attack in Season 5, but we never caught the hackers,” Raisani explained. They just disappeared into the night, so it’s always kind of been in my craw a little bit, like, if you do something on that scale and get away with it, you’re going to do it again. Then I thought, well, now these people have had three years to raise their game, and they can make a lot more money if they force the issue. I always also regretted that we never had them attack Austin [on 9-1-1: Lone Star]. We ran out of episodes before we could do it. So, Nashville, we thought, OK, let’s have ’em do that.

“And then in terms of the actual attacks, my dad was a doctor, and his hospital was hacked, and they couldn’t do any medical procedures, they couldn’t access their medications, they couldn’t get the records,” he continued. “They just paralyzed the hospital for a month for a ransom. We just kept picturing, what if you had access to all of the traffic system, to the water filtration system, to the airport, to this, to that?”

“The amount of calamities that you could create intentionally is crazy, and unintentionally is even crazier, so, we let our imaginations run wild about if we could just wave a wand and shut something down, what would it be, and what would be the scariest thing to happen?” Raisani said. “And so hopefully, we come up with some disasters that you may not see coming and some that you might see coming because you’re like, well, that would be bad, and of course, we want to do it.”

9-1-1: Nashville is on hiatus until 2026, but the series will return on Thursday, Jan. 8 at 9 p.m. ET on ABC, so fans will just have to wait until then to see what happens. All episodes so far are streaming on Hulu.