Historic Emmy wins and changes set the stage for a crazy race in 2025

SPOILER ALERT: This story contains spoilers for the Season 1 premiere of Fox’s “9-1-1: Lone Star.”.”

As we move forward, we’re thinking about all the good times we’ve had with 126 — and they’re not over yet. While Fox has confirmed that “9-1-1: Lone Star” will likely conclude with its fifth season, the end remains a ways away, as the “9-1-1” spinoff premiered its final season on Monday after more than a year off the air.

In the episode, titled “Each Sides, Now,” 126 begins its finale by dealing with a hijacked armored truck ahead of what will be a major three-episode train derailment emergency. Meanwhile, newly minted Texas Ranger Carlos (Rafael Silva) is learning the ropes while balancing his married life with T.K. (Ronen Rubinstein) with the young couple having been married for nearly a year following a time jump from their wedding at the end of Season 4. He’s also spent all that time trying to solve his father’s murder.

Owen (Rob Lowe) is appearing for Tommy (Gina Torres) to deal with his brother Robert’s death, while having to select an alternative for Judd (Jim Parrack), who left 126 during the time jump, and Marjan (Natacha Karam) and Paul (Brian Michael Smith) each vying for the open lieutenant spot. Following actress Sierra McClain’s departure from “9-1-1: Lone Star” prior to the final season, her character, Judd’s wife Grace, was written off as doing missionary work, and Judd’s son Wyatt (Jackson Tempo) took over Grace’s role as the show’s call center anchor.

Here to break down the premiere and plans for the remainder of the fifth and final season of “9-1-1: Lone Star,” including an “apocalyptic” series finale, with Selection is co-showrunner Rashad Raisani.

How did you decide to do the time jump going into the final season? Was it affected by the precise clock for “Lone Star” to return, since Season 4 ended in May 2023?

I feel like that was really the first question. It was 12 months in real life, and we just thought it would be unusual to pretend that this hole in time hadn’t actually happened in people’s lives. And I feel like the other factor that went into it was we just thought it could be a great way to move people’s lives forward in big ways, so we could hit people with new, big surprises. You’re kind of catching up with them. And one of the pleasures of the main episode is going, oh, wait, what’s Carlos doing these days? And has Owen gotten over all the issues that happened a long time ago? And where is Judd in his life? And has Wyatt been able to rehabilitate his damage to the extent that he’s able to? To be honest, it put us in a position, once we had a way that this could be the final season, that we could really put everybody on the runway to get to where we wanted them to be to hopefully end the series.

I used to be upset because we lost the newlywed Tarlos. How much will you continue to present from these early days of marriage?

I’d like to assume that the emotion that Carlos and T.Okay. are going to have is going to come from a deeper place now, as a result of their world having had some real pain in it — Carlos’ father being murdered — and that also creates a weight in their relationship. As much as I want it to always seem like the light, carefree, problem-free existence that they have, that they completely deserve, in the real world, life doesn’t work that way. Even if you’re in an extremely loving and devoted relationship, life still has a way of kicking you in the gut, and that can often take a toll on your relationship. But what I feel like makes their relationship so amazing is that it continues to grow stronger from these challenges and these pressures. And I hope that the emotion that you’ll feel watching these guys persevere through all the problems that they’ll face as a couple is much more amazing than watching them be completely chill and able to just enjoy each other’s company without any real real-world effort.

Carlos is featured in the premiere after his promotion to Texas Ranger, and the episode ends with the reveal that he’s been closely investigating his father’s murder in his spare time. What plans do you have for him this season outside of his relationship with TK?

For Carlos, this has been brewing and simmering for 12 months, this obsession, and it hasn’t gone away in any way. If anything, it just continues to metastasize, what he’s dealing with. And Carlos can’t just take his investigation and move forward with it every week, because that’s not how the real situation works. So he has to just sit with it until some questions start to open up for him that we’ll get to. But this obsession never goes away, and every scene he’s in, it’s there. This is the season where you see the person that Carlos is going to become. I hope it’s not for the last time, but as we say goodbye to him and TK and all these characters that I really like, you see who this man is going to become as the sun starts to set on this show. Having to search for his father’s killer, him becoming his own man as a Texas Ranger, as a husband, all of that was part of the recipe of what we wanted to do with him.

How early do you realize that this might be the best season for writing and taking photos?

Even before the strikes, the writing was on the wall for “9-1-1: Lone Star” due to Disney’s purchase of 20th TV (“9-1-1″/”Lone Star” studio), and the contract cycle for “9-1-1” resulted in a medium that allowed “9-1-1” to move more easily to ABC, and ours didn’t line up as well. So we knew it was going to be tough going through. I’m not a contract lawyer, so I can’t tell you all the details of why it would be tough, and how tough, but the writing was pretty clear on the wall that it would be exhausting for the show to make it past Season 5 due to the simple, practical numbers that these two corporations were dealing with.

That said, I have by no means given up on my hope that there might be some spark that this could work. So we knew going in that this was our reality. It was tough, but my feeling has always been, I need to end this series in a way that gives you an amazing sense of a journey and closure for these characters — but doesn’t necessarily mean that it can’t have a new life, if by some twist of fate, that were able to happen. But I wanted to, just in case, and assuming it was going to be our last one, I really wanted to give us that final episode to make people really feel like, OK, I’ve gotten to know these people, and I really feel like I’m leaving these people in a better place, where I’ve seen them grow.

Sierra McClain left The Present before Season 5, and you also had to figure out a way to write out her character Grace. Why did Sierra leave, and how did you figure out how you would write out Grace, leaving behind her job as a call center operator and her husband Judd and young daughter?

I was choosing to let Sierra talk about her side of the story, but I can just tell you my side of my experience with this, which is that Sierra is the soul of “Lone Star,” and she’s so central to what the show is, that I never had to consider doing the show without her. And for a minute, it seemed like it could work, and even two or three weeks before production, we thought there was an opportunity, and then it just didn’t turn out to be in the cards. So that forced us to pivot, and it was very difficult. I felt it was crucial to defend Grace’s character and Sierra McClain’s actress — I like them both. The problem was how do you explain her absence in a way that doesn’t involve just senselessly killing her off, which I think would have been just a travesty, or doing something like, she left Judd, divorced him, or something kind of gross like that, which I don’t think anyone would consider. So that would turn our problem into the right way to clarify it, or at least clarify it to the stage where we can move on from the present. And I’ll let the viewers decide whether we did, I feel like we did. We also did this missing storyline for our current Judd and I feel like that ended up resulting in a really impressive arc that carries us through our fifth full season, particularly for Judd. I’d like to assume that we at least found a small silver lining to this huge loss.

Is there any chance we’ll get a second back for the finale? It’s going to be really exhausting to see Judd’s story end without Grace there.

I agree. Unfortunately, we’ve already shot it. I held out hope until the last minute, I’ll put it that way. I really do assume that without seeing it on screen, how satisfying can anything be? But without that, I’m just immensely pleased with where the show is going. I just think the way the show ends is so profound that I feel like people are going to really feel like, wow, it couldn’t have turned out any other way.

What can you tease about the rest of the final season and how you chose to wrap up the collection?

Just teasing the season, obviously now we have this big practice derailment and the gas leak. But we’re also going to have a lot of fun this year. For me, the fun of this show was watching this fish out of water Rob Lowe, who started out born in Santa Monica and grew up in New York. He’s just urbane and has skincare products and haircare products and all that stuff. And I felt like seeing him go a little bit more cowboy this season would be a really fun thing. So now we have some emergencies that replicate that, more of the Old West, we do some crazy stuff with horses. Then we’re going to see some crazy Texas Ranger situations that might just be darker and more terrifying than anything we’ve done in years. And then by the end of the show and the final emergency, what I would say is that it’s apocalyptic, in every sense of the word. I feel like people are really going to be like, “Oh my God, I can’t believe they got so apocalyptic at the end.” We wanted to match the way we felt writing that final episode to watching it, so that it’s not just the end of the world for our characters and for us — the people who worked on the show that we were so happy with — it’s also the end of the world, presumably, for all the viewers as well.

So are we going to “The Final of Us” at the end?

Let’s say we’re going for “The Final of Us” with a little “Chernobyl.”

This interview has been edited and condensed.