9-1-1: Lone Star Showrunner Reveals the Shocking Character He Almost Killed Off in the Series Finale

[Warning: This story contains spoilers for 9-1-1: Lone Star Season 5 Episode 12, "Homecoming." Read at your own risk!]

After five seasons, the first responders of 9-1-1: Lone Star have answered their final request for help — at least onscreen.

In the series finale of Fox's Austin-set procedural drama, the firefighters and paramedics of the 126 braced for the impact of an asteroid and then sprang into action to try to prevent a nuclear explosion inside a research lab at a local university. In a final act of bravery, with the rest of his team severely injured in a smaller explosion and trying to keep each other from bleeding out, Capt. Owen Strand (Rob Lowe) — who else did you really think it was going to be? — is able to hit the "scram" button inside the power plant in the nick of time, preventing an extinction-level event in the state of Texas (and presumably other parts of the world).

Below, co-showrunner Rashad Raisani breaks down all of the endings for the main characters in the Lone Star finale (including the character he seriously considered killing off), offers a tease of what he would have liked to have explored in a sixth season — and teases which characters, if any, could end up reappearing in other iterations of the 9-1-1 universe.

More:

• 9-1-1: Lone Star's Rafael Silva on Carlos and T.K.'s final moments from the series finale
• Everything you need to watch in February

Was there ever any doubt in your mind that all of the characters would survive the asteroid and subsequent threat of nuclear disaster? Did you ever consider killing at least one of the characters off?

Rashad Raisani: We definitely considered killing Owen off, to be honest. What it really came down to for me was that because the show was getting cut off too early — in my opinion anyway — and it was such a bummer anyway that the show was ending that I thought, "Well, it just seems like adding insult to injury to kill somebody on the way out and close the door in the audience's face, when it felt like it was sad enough that we were ending." So, yeah, I definitely looked long and hard at just having him be dead at the end, but at the end of the day, I was like, "What's the point of just bumming people out and saying, 'That's a wrap'?" I didn't want to end that way.

Did you make these decisions about where the characters would end up after it was confirmed that this would be the end of the show? If you had somehow been picked up for another season at Fox or rescued by another network, how would you have undone the most significant endings — Owen becoming Fire Chief in New York, Judd (Jim Parrack) becoming the 126 captain — to accommodate another season?

Raisani: Yeah, at that point it felt like what we were committing to [this ending]. If we were lucky enough to get another season, if some reprieve had come through, we'd just have to find a way to live with it and to own the space. It's like when you kill characters off, you have to take it really seriously and you have to live [with those decisions]. When we killed Tommy's husband [Charles, played by Derek Webster] in Season 2, it was like we're making a series-long decision. Even though we're killing him right now, we have to live with the consequences of that for the rest of the series.

So I think that by the time we actually sent Owen to New York, unfortunately, I had made peace with the fact that this was probably it, and it felt like that was the right move. If he had lived and if we had been fortunate enough to get Grace back in Season 6, I was like, "We'll figure out something. I don't know what it'll be, but we'll make [the call] that [him moving to New York] actually had to happen, and then we had to pay a price for that decision." Just like when Judd quit his job at the end of Season 4, it was like, he can't just go right back to being the same thing he was before. He's got to pay a price, and that price was that he had to be the probie for the whole season. So I definitely thought about it a lot, like, what if we do get that reprieve? And I was like, "Well, you know what? F*** it. We've got to do the right ending, in case we don't get that reprieve, and just live with what our ending is."

Let's talk about all of the flash-forwards. It's a full-circle moment for Owen to go back to New York City to become the next Chief of the NYFD. Did you always know that he was going to go back home at the end of the series, or was that a decision that was made later in the season?

Raisani: Well, there were two things. As we were coming into this season — knowing that it felt like the writing was on the wall that this very well might be the last one — I was looking at the pilot of the show and just looking, "Where did we start all of these people?" And some themes started to emerge, and they weren't necessarily intentional over the course of the series, but the biggest one that came out of it was that at the beginning of this show, Owen was sick — he had cancer. T.K. [Ronen Rubinstein] was sick — he had just had an O.D., he was very much in the grips of his addiction. And the 126, the firehouse, had just been blown up, and everybody except Judd had died. Judd had PTSD. So everybody was afflicted with something.

I was thinking, "Well, we made this whole show, really, and this last season, about healing. So what happens when all of the reasons why they came and all the people they came for — if they're all healed, what does that mean for Owen, for T.K., for the firehouse, for Judd, etc?" So then I thought, "Well, once they're healed, they need to find a new purpose." They need to go and continue to do good. That's what these people do. So that's where I started to think, "Well, I think Owen needs to go home, because he brought his son here." It was a bit, I don't want to say infantilizing, but he was treating T.K. like a kid. He was his kid. "I'm going to yank you out of New York and raise you and put you under my roof." But T.K. has grown into a man over the course of this [show]; he really is his own man. And I think once I was like, "T.K doesn't really need Owen anymore," that's where it started.

But I didn't want to kill [Owen], and I was like, "Well, then Owen should go back to his life, what it was before he made this drastic decision to save his son, and now Owen can go do his own destiny without his son, because his son doesn't need him anymore in that way." So I think that was the beginning of the psychology about, how are we going to take all these people [to the next chapter]? And then during the writers' strike, I watched the [1956 John Wayne] movie The Searchers, and we totally ripped off the final shot of The Searchers. Just the emotionality of the door of your experience is closing, but that character goes on — it brought me to tears when I watched it, and I just was like, "Oh, we've got to use that."

T.K. and Carlos (Rafael L. Silva) were able to adopt the former's half-brother, Jonah, after T.K. decided to quit his job at the 126 to become Jonah's stay-at-home guardian. Just from a logical standpoint, it makes sense for T.K. to be the one to give something up and quit his job because he was the one who insisted on the adoption in the first place. How did you arrive at that decision yourselves, and why did you decide to include that little happy glimpse of them as a family?

Raisani: Yeah, I think you said it — it's a snippet of what would've been. As you said, this was T.K.'s brother, and this was T.K.'s struggle to get this kid, to become a father. Going back to Season 4, Carlos was like, "I don't think I'm [ever] going to get there." T.K. really desperately wanted to be a dad, but he gave it up until his brother needed him. And even in Episode 9 of this season, T.K. is saying, "Look, I don't want it to come to this, but if it comes between my husband and my little brother who's going to be cast to the wolves, I'm going to pick my brother." So we had already put in there the level of sacrifice T.K. was willing to make, and I think to make it as beautiful as possible and make him as courageous as possible, we needed him to be as sacrificial as possible to show what kind of person T.K. was. So that was the decision about having T.K. stay home to take care of his brother — at least for this period of the kid's life.

And then in terms of giving them that moment, I wish we could have had more time. I wish we could have had a lot more time to show, but I wanted one encapsulation of a scene to show you what their life is like — and what it will be like. It's a place of joy, because these two guys have had to suffer so much to get to where they end this show. And it's a bummer that it has to end there because it would be great to see them continue to live like that.

Gina Torres told me that you had assured her from the start of Tommy's cancer storyline, which Sierra McClain had actually pitched in Season 4, that you were going to take the character to the brink — and then pull her back. A lot of the viewers, prior to watching the series finale, still believe Tommy died on her couch in Episode 11. The idea of her cancer pseudo-progressing feels improbable to me, but how did you settle on a resolution for that character? And why did you decide to bring Charles back as a kind of spirit guiding Tommy in what viewers believed were the final moments of her life?

Raisani: Part of the whole point of Tommy having that premature — if you want to call it — death in Episode 11 was to show that that's how it is in cancer; that you think you're on a certain path, and at every moment it's so fraught [that] it can be taken from you. I would say that the pseudo-progression that we based it on is all real, because when I talked to Stand Up to Cancer [who consulted on this storyline], I was like, "Let's say her cancer treatment is actually going well, but we want it to present and actually be in a bad moment — and possibly lethal. What would it be?" And they were like, "Well, if the tumors are swelling because of the treatment, and if it's on a vital organ, you could drop dead. Even when your cancer treatment is going well, it [can] unfortunately kill you." So that uncertainty and unfairness of how that feels is what I wanted to do with Tommy. And I also wanted to give her a heroic entrance into the finale, and hopefully have as much emotion packed into that as possible.

Tim and I love Charles, and killing him in Season 2 was brutal. But I think it led to some of the most magnificent performances we ever had on the show, and really defined [Tommy] in a way. Her resilience, her deep love for her kids and all that went on a new level. So we always were craving some kind of emotional [closure] because she never got a chance to say goodbye, right? She comes home, he's dead — and that's life again. It's unfair. It's abrupt. So there was always this craving to give Gina that closure with that actor and with that character. And then whether it's a ghost or a hallucination brought on by chemo and stress and a brain bleed — all of those things are possible. They're whatever you want to make of them, but it allowed her to, I think, be able to say goodbye and take some comfort from his death, even as she goes on in her life.

Let's talk about the state of the firehouse after Owen leaves — Judd is now the new captain, Marjan (Natacha Karam) is expecting her first child, Paul (Brian Michael Smith) is acting as a kind of mentor to a young, nonbinary, aspiring firefighter named Jax, and Mateo (Julian Works) won't be deported and ends up with Nancy (Brianna Baker). Talk to me about how you settled on their endings.

Raisani: So for Judd, I think the plan was always from day one on the show to grow him into this job. So the "what?" was always the same, but the "how?" went under some revolutions, because of course we lost Sierra McClain and Grace. That was a huge crushing blow to take before we started production this season. And so we did I think the only thing we could, which was, "Well, we've got to just make of it what we can, and let's try and turn this into fuel for Judd's character." For me, everyone is deeply flawed as a human being, but I think the best leaders are willing to confront their demons as weak and vulnerable as it makes them and be humbled by them, and then emerge, hopefully, a stronger and more humble person with compassion, warmth, wisdom. That all comes from failing and from suffering. I thought that was the best crucible to put Judd through — to end him on that stage so that you really feel like it has been both his season, but also his series journey to end up there and that he earned it. So that always felt right to me.

Mateo is a character who I think, going back to the first season, has always been defined by things he was hiding, things he was ashamed of — that he really shouldn't have been ashamed of, in my opinion. The fact that he had dyslexia, the fact that he had his DACA status, the fact that he felt like he screwed up as a kid and ruined his cousin's life and let him take the fall, he has all this shame that I think unhealthily he's been holding onto. So we really wanted to do a story that really forced Mateo to decide, "Am I going to let this shame and this fear define me as scary as the consequences could be? Or am I going to cast off these chains, and come what may?" And that's what he ends up doing. So that's why in his final speech, he names the things that his character has been afflicted by over the series and says, "F*** it. Whatever happens now, I'm good. I'm done living in fear." I wish we'd had more Mateo episodes to be honest, but we didn't have enough time or enough episodes.

With Marjan, I always felt like I wanted to end Marjan looking as antithetical as she showed up at the firehouse. She's always had a hardness about her and was an adrenaline junkie, which is very guarded, very strong. So I wanted to show her being just as strong, if not even stronger, because of her willingness to be vulnerable and emotional and trusting in front of this found family that she has. I thought there's no better way to visualize that transformation than to see her comfortable with her own pregnancy at the end. And again, [there are] more things that I wish we had had more time to do. I would've loved to see her become a pregnant firefighter and play that pregnancy going forward. So that was about her journey to learn to be vulnerable in front of other people, which was a big thing for her.

For Paul, it was similar in that he was very guarded when he came [to Austin]. He didn't really trust a lot of people, partly because of his trans experience and the fear that he had growing up that way. The first half of the season, I really wanted to show Paul's growth into becoming more of a leader himself. But Brian called me and said, "Hey, look, in the pilot, there's this story that [Owen] gives where he says, 'Maybe there's a kid out there like you. You should come to Austin, because for all we know, there's a kid right now suffering who feels unseen, unheard, unvalued, and maybe seeing you as a firefighter could make an impact on them.'" And Brian was like, "I would love to do this before the show ends." And I just thought, well, that's the best way to end your character, to pass along your legacy to someone else who's going to take that wisdom and courage that you had and pay it forward. And if we'd had more time, we would've had Jax become the probie of the firehouse and played that going forward.

I love Nancy and Mateo as a couple. I always wanted them to be together and to stay together, but I also didn't want Nancy to compromise on her feelings about marriage and to compromise on one of her convictions and settle or sacrifice that for Mateo. So I think what was great is that you see that while Nancy is not willing to sacrifice that conviction, she is willing to be in the courtroom with Mateo to continue their relationship. Even if he got deported, she was there for him. So I think they both earned in each other the respect and the love that hopefully they'll be together. That's their happily ever after.

I just spoke with Rafael Silva, and he told me that he would be open to returning to the 9-1-1 universe to play Carlos again — but it would have to be the right story to tell. You, Tim Minear and Ryan Murphy are now working on the next installment of the 9-1-1 universe. What is the likelihood of these characters popping up again somewhere in this universe? How open is the door for these actors to come back in a guest-role capacity?

Raisani: I'd say it's high without being imminent. A part of the reason why I wanted to leave everybody alive was because I would love to [bring them back]. Let's say we do something in New York — well, Owen's up there. Let's say we come back to Texas — well, Judd is the captain. Let's say there's a Texas Ranger thing happening in West Texas — well, Carlos could be there. For Tommy, maybe she moves to Kansas [to be with Trevor, played by D.B. Woodside]. I wanted as much nexus of possibility [as possible]. I love writing for all of these people and I love working with them. I thought they were all just magnificent collaborators. So I would love in any way shamelessly to have them come to L.A. for the 118 or to the new city, or the new city come to them, whatever. I don't care. I would love to see them again.

9-1-1: Lone Star episodes are available to stream on Hulu.