Spoilers ahead for the Season 5 premiere of 9-1-1: Lone Star, called "Both Sides, Now."
The first episode of 9-1-1: Lone Star's final season has finally aired in the 2024 TV schedule, and while there were some surprises and seeds planted for some Tarlos adversity, fans already knew one thing was coming: Judd without Grace. Actress Sierra McClain's departure was announced months before Season 5 started, and the question was how Lone Star could write out a character so dedicated to her family, her job, and her faith without killing her off. Well, "Both Sides, Now" provided the answer, and co-showrunner/EP Rashad Raisani spoke candidly about it with CinemaBlend.
According to the Season 5 premiere, Grace felt a calling to join a mercy trip to help children in need, and the calling was so strong that she decided to leave Judd and Charlie behind in Austin to do it. Judd said that he loved Grace more than ever for how much she wanted to help others, but it also seemed pretty clear that the former firefighter was feeling lonely and adrift in his much quieter house. The time jump of a year did help to sell that Grace would suddenly be gone from the end of one season to the start of the next. (Season 4 is available streaming with a Hulu subscription.)
When I spoke with co-showrunner Rashad Raisani ahead of 9-1-1: Lone Star Season 5, I asked if it was challenging to come up with a reason why Grace would be MIA from her life, friends, and family in Austin. He responded:
Oh yes, because we know who Grace is, and the idea that she would ever leave them is tough to swallow and hard to buy, frankly. So as we were examining our options for how to cope with this, the knee jerk reaction, which never was seriously considered, to be honest, was to have her die some off screen death. A lot of shows have done that in the past, when things don't work with an actor, but we just felt like that would be such an F-you to our audience and to ourselves, because we love Grace. We just were never going to consider that. We also would never believe that she would leave Judd or leave her baby, or something like that.
Killing Grace off between seasons would be an easy way to write out Sierra McClain, but I'm sure I'm not the only Lone Star fan who is very relieved that Rashad Raisani and Co. didn't take the easy way out. Yet there was the problem of explaining why the devoted mother, devoted wife, and devoted dispatcher would be gone. The EP continued:
I talked a lot to Jim Parrack as we were figuring it out, because the answer to that question was going to have such an impact on his life more than anybody else's, because it would determine the emotion he was playing in every single scene this season. Between the two of us, we started to think, 'Well, the only calling higher than her family and higher than Charlie and her job is God and her faith.' We just said that's the only thing that we can believe would ever possibly get her to do something drastic and leave, and so that's where we put all our chips, because it was the only place we could sleep at night thinking that we could possibly believe she would go to.
Fortunately, Grace's faith was very well established in earlier seasons of 9-1-1: Lone Star, so there was a way to explain why she was gone without disrespecting her character or her relationship with her family. Jim Parrack, who of course has been playing Judd from the very beginning of Lone Star, seemingly was key to figuring out the details of what will be a major storyline for his character.
And Judd seemed very supportive of his wife's decision throughout the Season 5 premiere, but will his feelings about her absence change over the course of the season when he has to deal with weight on his shoulders without her? I asked Rashad Raisani just that, and the EP replied:
That's a fantastic question, and part of what Judd has to grapple with is that he loves his wife so much he can't even admit to himself that he might have some feelings of abandonment or anger or frustration or or dejection. It's giving him a lot of feelings that are going to accumulate, and you can start to see it leaking out as early as Episode 4 in little scenes.
Well, Judd may be as loving a husband as anybody can find on network TV, but even he has a limit of what he can grapple with! Those feelings may not be too apparent until a bit later in the season, but Raisani previewed:
We play it kind of low key in the background for some episodes, but it will explode to the surface. He does have to acknowledge how painful this has been to him, and it's going to lead to some behaviors that he's not proud of, that are going to put him into his greatest moment of crisis of the show since everybody died in the pilot from his team. So it definitely will burst open downstream.
It likely won't be pretty with it does "burst open" this season, but I'm looking forward to see Jim Parrack's performance of whatever goes down. Rashad Raisani has confirmed one storyline that has already changed because of Sierra McClain's absence: how Wyatt became a 9-1-1 operator. He shared:
We had planned to spend five or six episodes this season with Grace sort of tutoring him and being his mentor, and him being her protege, but with her departing the series, we decided to use our time jump to our advantage and just say, 'Hey, Grace trained him in that year off screen and then she went on her calling.' And so that way, we were able to put him in the chair in a way that we'd always planned to. We just ended up accelerating that process.
See how Judd will continue to cope without with wife in Austin with new episodes of 9-1-1: Lone Star on Mondays at 8 p.m. ET on Fox, ahead of freshman series Rescue: HI-Surf. He's looking to get back to work, but doesn't really have the option of retaking his place as Owen's lieutenant. Will he spend the rest of the final season as a trucker? Only time will tell, and I for one am looking forward to finding out.
