It’s the mark of a high-quality television show when the characters are allowed to grow and evolve. When you’re watching a series in which all of the characters stay exactly the same, it can feel like the show is stagnant. Procedurals can sometimes fall into this trap, but ABC’s 9-1-1 is proving that they’re willing to take some risks when it comes to their characters’ development. Perhaps the biggest risk was their decision to kill off Captain Bobby Nash (Peter Krause) back in Season 8, permanently altering the shape of the core team. Now, with the procedural heading into its tenth season, 9-1-1 is allowing one other character to change in a major way.
Buck Agrees To Foster Theo in the Season 9 Finale of ‘9-1-1’
Although Evan “Buck” Buckley (Oliver Stark) has matured a bit since his irresponsible and reckless days as a probie for the 118 Firehouse, his character hasn’t really transformed over the seasons. He’s still getting into plenty of shenanigans, like suddenly becoming a math genius in Season 6 or accidentally dating a pair of siblings in Season 9. But over the last season, Buck has really stepped up in helping his crew grieve the loss of Bobby. He’s also tried to be healthier in his relationship with his BFF, Eddie Diaz (Ryan Guzman).
Collider Exclusive · TV Medicine Quiz Which Fictional Hospital Would You Work Best In? The Pitt · ER · Grey’s Anatomy · House · Scrubs
Five hospitals. Five completely different ways medicine goes sideways on television — brutal, chaotic, romantic, brilliant, and ridiculous. Only one of them is the ward your instincts were built for. Eight questions will figure out exactly where you belong.
🚨The Pitt
🏥ER
💉Grey’s
🔬House
🩺Scrubs
01
A critical patient comes through the door. What’s your first instinct? Medicine under pressure reveals who you actually are.
02
Why did you go into medicine in the first place? The honest answer says more about you than the one you’d give in an interview.
03
What do you actually want from the people you work with? Who you want beside you under pressure is who you are.
04
You lose a patient you fought hard to save. How do you carry it? Every doctor who’s worked a long shift has had to answer this question.
05
How would your colleagues describe the way you work? Your reputation on the floor is usually more accurate than your self-image.
06
How do you feel about hospital protocol and procedure? Every institution has rules. What you do with them is a choice.
07
What does this job cost you personally? Nobody works in medicine without paying a price. What’s yours?
08
At the end of a long shift, what keeps you coming back? The answer to this question is the most honest thing about you.
Your Assignment Has Been Made You Belong In…
Your answers have pointed to one fictional hospital above all others. This is the ward your instincts, your temperament, and your particular brand of dysfunction were built for.
Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center
The Pitt
You are built for the most unsparing version of emergency medicine television has ever shown — one that puts you inside a single fifteen-hour shift and doesn’t let you look away.
You need your work to be real, not romanticised — meaning over drama, honesty over aesthetics.
You find purpose inside the work itself, not in the chaos surrounding it.
You’ve made peace with the fact that this job takes from you constantly, and gives back in ways that are harder to name.
Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center demands exactly that kind of person — and you would not want to be anywhere else.
County General Hospital, Chicago
ER
You are the person who keeps the whole floor running — not the most brilliant in the room, but possibly the most essential.
You show up, do the work, absorb the losses, and come back the next day without needing the job to be anything other than what it is.
You care about patients as individual human beings, not as cases to solve or dramas to live through.
You believe in the system even when it fails you — and you understand that emergency medicine is about holding the line just long enough.
ER is television about endurance. You have it.
Grey Sloan Memorial Hospital, Seattle
Grey’s Anatomy
You came to medicine with your whole self — your ambition, your emotions, your relationships, your history — and you have never quite managed to leave any of it at the door.
You feel things fully and form deep attachments to the people you work with.
Your personal and professional lives are permanently, chaotically entangled — and that entanglement drives both your greatest disasters and your most remarkable saves.
You understand that extraordinary medicine often happens at the intersection of clinical skill and profound human connection.
It’s messy at Grey Sloan. You would not have it any other way.
Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital, NJ
House
You are drawn to the problem above everything else — the symptom that doesn’t fit, the diagnosis hiding underneath the obvious one.
You’re not primarily motivated by the patient as a person — though you are capable of caring, even if you’d deny it.
You work best when the stakes are highest and the standard answer is wrong.
Princeton-Plainsboro exists to house one extraordinary, impossible mind — and everyone around that mind is there because they’re smart enough to keep up.
The only way forward here is to think harder than everyone else in the room. That is exactly what you do.
Sacred Heart Hospital, California
Scrubs
You understand that medicine is tragic and absurd in almost equal measure — and that the only sane response is to hold both of those things at the same time.
You are warm, self-aware, and funnier than most people in your field.
You use humour to get through terrible moments — and at Sacred Heart, that’s not a flaw, it’s a survival strategy.
You lean on the people around you and let them lean back. The laughter and the grief are genuinely inseparable here.
Scrubs is a show about learning to become someone worthy of the job. You are still very much in the middle of that process — which is exactly right.
But Buck is given a chance to truly grow up when he learns that his friends, Connor (Colin McCalla) and Kameron (Chelsea Kane) have been killed in a car accident at the end of Season 9. Their young son, Theo (Lincoln and Theodore Sykes), is actually Buck’s biological son and has survived the crash. In the Season 9 finale, the whole crew is gathered together. Harry Grant (Elijah M. Cooper) makes a casual comment about how everyone at the party either has kids or is a kid themselves. This seems to result in a realization for Buck, who knows that he can no longer count himself as a kid anymore. He makes the decision to foster Theo, which will be a major developmet for Buck after nine seasons.
Buck’s Decision Marks an Exciting Change for ‘9-1-1’
There’s no way that fostering Theo won’t end up having a huge impact on Buck. This is the first time that Buck has entered into this type of long-term commitment, and it will be the beginning of his having to put someone else above himself. Buck has been pretty self-centered in the past, and this responsibility will force him to grow up in many important ways. In the past, we’ve seen Buck with his niece, Jee-Yun (Hailey and Bailey Leung), and Eddie’s son, Christopher (Gavin McHugh), so we know that he’s good with kids. But babysitting is massively different from being a child’s sole caretaker, especially one who is as wildly destructive and hyper as Theo seems to be. This change will be a significant one for the show, as we’ll likely get to see Buck with a whole new set of challenges, giving his character a much-needed revamp.
For Buck to evolve, his character needs to actually mature. We did see Buck struggle with addiction in Season 9, but this story arc felt a bit rushed. This left viewers wishing for an event that would impact Buck’s life in a meaningful way. It’s definitely time Buck grew up, especially because the show has made an effort to point out that he’s not getting any younger in previous episodes. Fostering Theo then becomes a natural progression in Buck’s life, which feels organic and exciting at the same time. This change also paves the way for 9-1-1 to switch some of its focus to Harry, who can be seen as the new probie, with dating and firehouse mishaps that are appropriate for his age. These types of character developments result in the show growing without the narratives feeling forced.
As we see Buck on his journey to foster Theo (and perhaps to even adopt him one day), 9-1-1 is setting up Season 10 to have some fresh storylines (without actually endangering anyone’s life for once). By allowing Buck to grow up and take on an important, selfless responsibility, 9-1-1 is heading into the future with a plot for Buck’s character that has the chance to be both compelling and moving to watch. That’s not to say that Buck won’t still have tons of obstacles, likely resulting in some humorous, light-hearted scenes, but his character is at least finally getting the chance to move beyond his immature, childish ways.
Bradley Buecker, David Grossman, Brenna Malloy, Gwyneth Horder-Payton, Jann Turner, Jennifer Lynch, Marita Grabiak, Sarah Boyd, John J. Gray, Barbara Brown, Robert M. Williams Jr., Kristen Reidel, Marcus Stokes, Tasha Smith, Millicent Shelton, Juan Carlos Coto, John Gray, Greg Sirota, Alonso Alvarez, James Wong, Kevin Hooks, Varda Bar-Kar, Shauna Duggins, Sharat Raju
