9-1-1: Lone Star Series Finale – Where Characters Could Appear Next, Whose Fate Was In Limbo & Why A Game-Changing Line About Grace Was Cut Explained By Showrunner

Warning: Contains SPOILERS for the series finale of 9-1-1: Lone Star.

After an exhilarating five-year run on FOX, 9-1-1: Lone Star has officially come to an end. Season 5, episode 12, titled, “Homecoming” sees the city face a nuclear disaster in the aftermath of an asteroid crash. The series finale keeps viewers on their toes with multiple characters’ lives hanging in the balance. Although Tommy’s cancer has seemingly worsened, she joins the 126 in a last-ditch effort to save Austin. The team is badly injured in an explosion at Travis State’s nuclear research facility, but Owen hits the scram button and prevents a reactor meltdown.

Captain Strand collapses from his injuries, and he appears unresponsive when found by first responders. The episode immediately jumps five months into the future, providing insight into the main characters’ lives after the near-disaster. TK quit the firehouse to become a stay-at-home dad, Tommy is in remission, Mateo’s citizenship has been fast-tracked, and Judd is the new captain of the 126. Owen is suspiciously absent, and all signs point to him having died five months prior. However, in the episode’s final moments, TK is seen on a video call with his father, who is now the New York City fire chief.

ScreenRant interviews co-showrunner and executive producer Rashad Raisani about alternative plotlines, the team’s ending, and if Lone Star characters could appear throughout the 9-1-1 universe.

9-1-1: Lone Star Debated Killing Owen In The Series Finale

“The only one that we came close on was Owen, because it did feel to me like that could have been a worthy ending for him.”

ScreenRant: Just to confirm, when you wrote the season 5 finale, you had said you weren’t positive it would be the series finale.

Rashad Raisani: That’s correct. It was not positive. To be honest, I kept burning a candle of hope, you know what I mean? Because we shot that episode before we even premiered. So I always was hoping in the interim, that maybe something could happen that could give us a chance, but it never really materialized. So my goal was to write it in such a way that it gave a feeling of hope and closure, but at the same time, if by some miracle, we could have gotten another season, we could have finagled some way to keep the show going.

That ties into my next question. There were no major deaths, but there were several close calls. If you had known that the show was ending for certain, was there a character who wouldn’t have survived?

Rashad Raisani: I didn’t want to end the show giving the audience a punch in the gut to say, “And by the way, Tommy’s dead, or TK’s dead, or Owen’s dead.” So the only one that we came close on was Owen, because it did feel to me like that could have been a worthy ending for him. But then I just also felt like a more hopeful full-circle feeling was a better way to leave our audience, particularly because we had been cut off so short.

That was part of also why I didn’t want to kill anybody, because I had the sense, “The show’s already ending too early. It already feels like a death of sorts. Why compound it when the audience is already going to lose all these characters?” So I wanted the audience just to feel like, “Okay, all of these people are ending in a better place than they started the series,” and in their imagination, or in their fanfiction, they can live on.

On the flip side of that, what would’ve been the plan if you did get renewed? Would Owen have ended up back in Austin?

Rashad Raisani: I think we would’ve probably played Owen in both places. New York would’ve given us a new pool of stories and cases and environment, but because he would be the dad, and kind of the grandfather to Jonah, we would’ve had an emotional reason to bring it back. And I think that we were also cooking up some stories in Austin that may have necessitated Owen coming back in a professional capacity down the road without taking Judd out of the captaincy.

I think that would’ve been a really interesting dynamic to play with Judd being more in a superior position to Owen. So we hadn’t gotten too formal about breaking how we were going to do it, but I just felt confident that, because TK is still there, Jonah and Carlos are still there—one of the other little things I had really thought about was Owen had proven adept at being an arson investigator on his own in season 2, and it in fact, caught Austin’s lead arson investigator up in arson.

And so there could have been an interesting job there for Owen to get back down to Austin and kind of have a different role in the show. So we were playing with lots of different ideas, but I just felt like, as long as everybody’s alive and still loves each other, we could have found a way. And there was also the Sierra McClain question about Grace. And I think that had we come back, and hopefully, we would’ve been able to get her to come back, I don’t know if we would’ve, but we would’ve probably given it a more final resolution had we had another year. So all those things were in play.

The 9-1-1: Lone Star Series Finale Cut A Line About Grace’s Homecoming

“It just felt like a tease to the audience to say, ‘Oh, you just missed her. She would’ve been here if you’d been here 20 minutes later.'”

Judd is captain of the 126. I’m curious if that was the plan from the pilot, because it’s very full-circle with Judd being the last surviving member of the original team.

Rashad Raisani: Yep. It really was. And as we looked at how to end the series, even prematurely, we did go back and look a lot at the pilot. There’s a lot of sickness in the pilot. Owen has cancer, TK has an overdose and is afflicted by addiction. The 126 firehouse is blown apart with only one surviving member, Judd, who has PTSD. And so I think that the arc of this series, and especially this season, has been one of healing.

And so that by the end, and Judd really went through it this season with Grace being gone and alcoholism and going through that brutal process and having to confront those demons, he merged from that crucible, a healed, but also very humbled man. And I think that was key to me for the best kind of leadership that’s been humbled, that understands that all human beings, including themselves, are flawed and can own it, and then treats other people with compassion and humility.

But to answer your question more directly, it was always the plan to have Judd take it over. But the plan was totally different than we expected because we always thought Grace would be by his side throughout that whole journey. And so we didn’t know exactly how we were going to play it, but certainly, she would’ve been a much bigger part on screen, and he probably wouldn’t have gone to the depths of hell that he did because she would’ve been there to keep that from happening. We ended in the same place, but we took a totally different route to get there.

Grace obviously wasn’t at the ceremony, so what’s the current state of their relationship? Is she coming home soon?

Rashad Raisani: We actually had a line in there that I cut from the final cut of the show, which was that she was going to be back next month because that’s what I always wanted. That she’s coming back seriously, but it just felt like a tease to the audience to say, “Oh, you just missed her. She would’ve been here if you’d been here 20 minutes later.”

And so I cut that, but I definitely felt that. It was like she’s always there, and I think Jim Parrack and Judd, they have such love for Grace and Sierra. It’s hard to draw the line because the feelings are so strong. So there was, to me, never any question that they would be together. The sad thing for me was we didn’t get a chance to put them together on screen.

Personally, I’m so happy you didn’t kill Grace off.

Rashad Raisani: There was a lot of pressure, and I think we took a lot of stick, and I think it was inevitable because you lose a heart and soul character on the show. The lady who literally answers the phone on a show about 9-1-1 operators. There’s no way, I think, to emerge from that without taking some damage.

But I had gotten some suggestions and pressure to kill her off so that it could just be simple, but I just thought that that wasn’t the right way to do it. It just didn’t ever seem right to me, to Grace, to Sierra, to Jim, to Judd, to the show. So that was what we went with. We wanted to honor her even when she wasn’t there.

Raisani Always Wanted Tommy To Say Goodbye To Charles In 9-1-1: Lone Star

“We were always desperate to find a way to allow her to have some closure with him.”

Tommy’s storyline was powerful, especially in the latter half of this season. I think you mentioned that Sierra McClain actually came up with her storyline.

Rashad Raisani: That’s right. She pitched it to me. I met with all the actors before the season started and just wanted to talk about where they were, and their emotional lives, and their personal lives, and what they wanted to do onscreen, and what they would want to dig into. She said, “The thing I can’t stop thinking about is we have this incredible powerhouse of an actor in Gina Torres, and I just would love to see her get deeper and go to a really intense place with her.”

She’d mentioned breast cancer and how that had come up in her life through some other contact. And so yeah, that is where that originated. And we had also had this relationship going back to the pilot of the show, because Owen had lung cancer, with the Stand Up to Cancer organization, who had been our partners forever.

And so I also thought, “Well, this is a great way to honor that organization and to have them help us close the show in the same way they helped us open it with another tremendous actor. Rob Lowe for the front half of the show, and then Gina to end the show, and to really do a lot of outreach about breast cancer awareness, about screening, about recovery, about therapy, all these things that her character goes through.

It also allowed Charles to come back at the end.

Rashad Raisani: Which is something that we always wanted to do. Tim Minear and I had talked about that. Even when we lost him, Tommy never got a chance to say goodbye to him. I think that was a wound that just never went away. And so we were always desperate to find a way to allow her to have some closure with him. And so that was just a beautiful opportunity by having her go through this cancer story.

Raisani Pictures TK Returning To First-Responder Work In The Future

“I think we leave him right where he’s meant to be, which is with his brother, and knowing that he loved being a paramedic.”

TK quit the firehouse to be a stay-at-home dad and has no regrets. Did Owen leaving play into his decision at all?

Rashad Raisani: TK has wanted to be a dad for a long time. And in fact, we played a storyline in season 4 where Carlos just said, “Look, I’m not going to be a dad. I’m not ready.” And so Carlos’ arc was ramping up to be able to be a dad and to be ready. And then TK’s arc is about, “What is the thing that means the most to you in this world?” And so TK had to make what was, for him, the ultimate sacrifice for what he loved the most, and it was his little brother.

And being a dad to his brother was more important than anything. Now, I picture that down the road, when Jonah gets older, and he’s back in school, TK will get back out to helping people and saving lives. But I think we leave him right where he’s meant to be, which is with his brother, and knowing that he loved being a paramedic. But that just shows to me how much more he loves being a dad, that he was willing to give it up.

TK and Carlos aren’t the only new parents. Marjan is happily married and having a baby. What drew you to that ending for her?

Rashad Raisani: One of the things that I’ve talked to Natacha about from the beginning, and honestly, I wish we had more episodes that we could have just played this more because we only had 12 episodes in season 5. We didn’t get to explore as much. When we meet Marjan, she’s unquestionably always been strong and tough and rugged and an adrenaline junkie, but she was also incredibly guarded and tight and restrained and kept people at arm’s length.

And so I always had this image of her, the last image of her of the show, was this happily pregnant mom who is now just as strong, but is, in some ways more strong, because she’s comfortable with her vulnerability in front of people. She’s learning to trust, to let her guard down with this family that she’s formed, and I think it’s going to make her a better firefighter. That she’s going to continue to be a firefighter after.

I wish we could have played that storyline more in season 6 of seeing a pregnant firefighter and what that experience is like and what it’s like to be a new mom and be a firefighter. I think that would’ve been a really interesting juxtaposition against TK being a stay-at-home dad and Marjan being a working mom. It would’ve been fun to play that stuff.

What about Mateo and Nancy’s storyline? What did you want to accomplish by having Mateo face deportation in the final episode?

Rashad Raisani: For me, it was about bringing Mateo’s character to the full actualization of his character arc. And what I mean by that is that when you first meet Mateo in season 1, and 2 and 3, really, he’s got all of this shame that I feel like is misplaced shame. He feels embarrassed that he’s dyslexic and tries to hide it. He feels ashamed and scared about his DACA status, which, of course, is no fault of his own. He made a mistake as a kid.

He burned down this school and let his cousin take the blame for it. And then his cousin died really due to his own actions, but Mateo blames himself, and he’s harbored all this guilt, and he’s just always been in hiding. And so we really wanted to give him a story that would sort of dramatize how he’s grown over the course of this series.

It ended up being kind of a timely story, which again, we shot this eight months ago, but to have his DACA status come up, it seemed like the best venue to show, how at the end of the day, Mateo stands up, and just owns who he is. He doesn’t compromise. He stands on principle. He doesn’t ask Nancy to compromise her values to get married when she didn’t want to. He’s just going to be his own person and then let the chips fall where they may. And so that’s how I wanted to leave Mateo—that he grew up.

Raisani Hopes Lone Star Characters Will Still Appear Throughout The 9-1-1 Universe

“That was also part of why we wanted to keep everybody alive.”

There is a new 9-1-1 spinoff in the works. 9 -1-1 is on ABC, which obviously complicates things network-wise. Do you think it’s possible we could see these characters again somehow in this universe?

Rashad Raisani: I do. I really do. And that was also part of why we wanted to keep everybody alive, because we wanted to be able to, whether it’s the 118 in LA going to Texas for some reason, and they can run into Captain Ryder, or there’s some emergency in California and Texas sends back-up, or in our new city if there’s some overlap, but we just wanted the possibility. We just love all these actors and these characters. So I think absolutely. I really hope that we’re doing it sooner rather than later.

With that being said, do you have any updates on the new 9-1-1 spinoff?

Rashad Raisani: I am not at liberty to release them, but I think, I hope, it all will come to light very soon. It’s not in my hands to announce that, but I think it’s on the brink. That’s my sense.

Enjoy ScreenRant’s primetime coverage? Click below to sign up for my weekly Network TV newsletter (make sure to check “Network TV” in your preferences) and get the inside scoop from actors and showrunners on your favorite series.

Sign Up Now

About 9-1-1: Lone Star Season 5

Created By Ryan Murphy, Brad Falchuk, And Tim Minear

In the fifth season of 9-1-1: Lone Star, Captains Strand and Vega, along with the 126 team, race into action when in a multi-episodic opening storyline, a catastrophic train derailment endangers several lives including some of their own. With Judd resigning from the 126 to take care of his recently handicapped son Wyatt (Jackson Pace), Owen must find a new lieutenant to replace Judd and has a difficult decision ahead of him when both Marjan and Paul apply for the promotion.

Tommy is ready to take the next step in her relationship, but she finds the road to happiness is filled with obstacles. On his 30th birthday, T.K. gets a surprise visit from someone from his past that could change his and Carlos’ lives forever. Now officially husband and husband, T.K. and Carlos’ marriage is put to the test when Carlos becomes obsessed with solving his father’s murder.

9-1-1: Lone Star is currently available to stream on Hulu.