9-1-1 showrunner Tim Minear knew he wanted to get Angela Bassett’s Athena on a plane — he just wasn’t sure how.
After deciding to pay homage to the 1970s disaster movie The Swarm with a “bee-nado” in the season 8 premiere of the ABC first responder drama, Minear was keen to keep the ’70s cinema celebration going and pivot to a storyline inspired by Airport ’75.
“I mean, 1975, Karen Black is a flight attendant having to land a jet after a collision with a light aircraft,” Minear tells Entertainment Weekly, summarizing the movie with a smile in his voice. “And I knew I wanted Athena on that plane. So the question really is, how do you tell both those [Swarm and Airport] stories, and have one story literally smash into the other story?”
The answer: Literally smash a plane into the “bee-nado” and then into another plane. But what gets Athena on the plane?
“We had talked in the writers’ room about, maybe she’s transporting a prisoner, or a witness, or something. And then somebody, I think it may have been Kristen Reidel, brought up Dennis, who Athena had a history with. And then it became very clear that there was a very interesting story to be told here, beyond the disaster movie that we were making,” Minear says of sending Athena on a mission to transport the man who shot her first fiancé, Emmett, decades ago and that she helped put behind bars in season 3. “She’s taking him to possible freedom. That’s a huge conflict for her — and that just felt like a story worth telling.”
“After spending so much of her life not knowing who did it, and then finally having some kind of resolution by putting him behind bars, the idea that she might have to return him back to the streets is a real struggle for her,” Minear continues. “But it’s an important struggle. I think Athena always thought that just capturing Emmett’s killer would free her, but in fact it has not. She’s still carrying around a lot of unresolved anger and grief over that. This is maybe a way for her to work through some of that, and find some measure of, if not forgiveness, grace.”
That’s all great, but what about the fact that she’s thousands of feet in the air with a giant hole in her plane?
“Well, there are injuries to be taken care of on the plane,” Minear says when asked to tease what’s to come in the next two episodes. “And there is a plane currently without a pilot, by the time we land into episode two. And it’s just a thrill ride of ‘How is Athena Grant going to keep everybody on this plane, and on the ground, and herself, safe? And how is she going to get home to the man that she loves? And from the ground, what can [Peter Krause’s] Bobby do to make sure that happens?'”
