Editor’s Note: The following contains spoilers for 9-1-1 Season 9, Episode 17.
9-1-1 Season 9 has been deeply impacted by Bobby Nash’s (Peter Krause) death last season, so quite a bit of the storylines have been about everyone’s lingering grief. There have been a few separately meaningful storylines, like Hen’s (Aisha Hinds) autoimmune disease diagnosis, and Buck’s (Oliver Stark) struggle with opioid addiction. Unfortunately, though, these storylines have been rushed through quite a bit in favor of big emergencies.
Buck’s trauma from his abduction as well as his subsequent addiction, were really interesting storylines, so it was disappointing to see 9-1-1 blow past them so quickly. As of the penultimate episode of Season 9, though, 9-1-1 is setting up an especially compelling new storyline for Buck. 9-1-1‘s latest episode, “I Got You Babe,” sees the return of Buck’s friend, Connor (Colin McCalla), his wife, Kameron (Chelsea Kane), and their son, whom Buck biologically fathered, Theo. With their return comes an interesting storyline for Buck, made all the more extreme by their sudden deaths, which seem to be leading to Buck parenting Theo.
‘9-1-1’ Has the Perfect Opportunity to Finally Give Buck an ADHD Diagnosis Storyline
All the way back in Season 6, Buck’s old friend, Connor, reached out to ask him to be his sperm donor. Buck agreed very quickly, but he started to have conflicted feelings about it, particularly when he wound up being the one to deliver the baby. Now, four years later in the timeline of the show, Buck reunites with Connor, Kameron, and Theo after helping Theo on a call. Theo is a very impulsive kid who is full of energy, and this often gets him into trouble and even into danger. After bumping into Buck again, Connor and Kameron express their concerns about Theo, and suggest that Buck has an undiagnosed condition that he never knew to share with them. This scene felt like a clear setup for a storyline where Buck would be diagnosed with ADHD, which would be the perfect next step in his character arc.
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.
9-1-1 revealed in Season 4’s “Buck Begins” that Buck was always acting out and getting injured as a kid to get his parents’ attention after they neglected him in the wake of his brother, Daniel’s, death. The fact that Theo is the same way, though, shows that this is not just from Buck’s upbringing. Buck is prone to impulsivity, and he learns better by actually doing; some others often dismiss him without picking up on his natural intelligence and skill. Some of Buck’s other actions throughout the last nine seasons could also be attributed to potential ADHD symptoms.The introduction of Theo is the perfect way to give Buck a late-in-life ADHD diagnosis, which would be a really rare and meaningful representation. The episode throws Buck for another loop, though, when Connor and Kameron are both killed in a car accident.
‘9-1-1’ Seems to Be Setting Up a Parenting Storyline for Buck in Season 10
Buck tells Eddie (Ryan Guzman) in this week’s episode that he cut off contact with Connor and Kameron right after Theo was born, because he knew how easy it would be for him to get attached to Theo. After Connor and Kameron’s deaths, foster care is now being arranged for Theo, but Buck could very likely end up adopting him. Buck is already attached to Theo, who has been shown to struggle with a lot of the same issues that Buck did as a kid. Even Theo’s parents couldn’t understand him and were frustrated with his behavior, so now that he’s in foster care, it will be very hard for Theo to find people who will accept him. Buck already does, though, and he was able to get through to Theo within just one day of knowing him.
After seeing Buck suffer so much this season from his grief, his abduction, and then his addiction, it would be a lovely change of pace to see him adopt Theo. Theo would not be the first child that Buck raised, either — he’s been a great role model for Christopher (Gavin McHugh) and has been looking after him to the point of co-parenting with Eddie since Season 2. We’ve seen in these scenes that he’s already proven that he’s capable of being an excellent and fiercely loving parent. Through parenting Theo, Buck would be able to take on a new version of a role that he already does well, as well as come to better understand the struggles that he and Theo have both dealt with. This storyline opens up some exciting possibilities for Buck next season, and it feels like the perfect shakeup for his character.
