Yahoo Lifestyle How 9-1-1: Lone Star’s Natacha Karam Helped Pull Off That ‘Super Emotional’ Final-Season Surprise for Marjan
Surprise! 9-1-1: Lone Star kicked off its final three episodes on Monday with an impromptu wedding for Marjan and Joe, who exchanged vows in a beautiful ceremony attended by the entire 126 family. (Well, almost the entire family. But that’s another story.)
The eventful hour began with Marjan introducing Joe to her parents, and while they could see that Marjan and Joe are clearly in love, the couple’s lack of a plan left them feeling uneasy. In other words, blessing denied. Marjan was ready to throw in the towel and try again next year, but Joe stood his ground, telling Marjan that he would marry her tomorrow if he could. This lit a fire (or should we say Firefox?) under Marjan, who eventually won her parents over with a romantic appeal.
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Ending the episode with an engagement would have been enough, but as Natacha Karam reminds TVLine, “Come on, this is Lone Star. We always have to be larger than life. Usually it’s with big, scary things, but sometimes it’s with really lovely things like this.” So we jumped straight to Marjan and Joe’s wedding, a “rushed” ceremony that actually took several weeks of behind-the-scenes planning to pull off.
As with any wedding, this one was all about the dress, which Karam “had a lot to do with.” She spent weeks collaborating with the show’s costume department, exchanging screenshots and rough sketches between takes. Marjan’s fake wedding even had its own real Pinterest board at one point.
“Eileen Baker, our head of costumes, ended up helping me make a dress,” Karam says. “We took this concept of a jumpsuit with an overskirt that I had in my mind, and with the help of some very talented seamstresses, we made it come to life. … Lebanese people are known for having extravagant weddings, and with Marjan already being so over the top, I wanted to make sure that this wedding matched her level.”
Karam is also proud of the wedding’s cultural accuracy, down to the cake being cut with a sword. Although, “in terms of Lebanese weddings, that was actually a small sword,” she admits. “It’s usually quite large. But I loved that moment with Judd. He’s off to the side, experiencing everything he’s going through with Owen, and he’s just like, ‘Is that a sword?’ The audience is probably thinking the same thing!”
One of the episode’s most memorable moments came at the end of the night, after the guests went their separate ways, when Marjan and Joe were left alone for the first time as husband and wife.
“It was super emotional,” Karam says of filming the scene where Marjan removes her head covering. “There were a lot of different versions of that — some teary, some excited, some vulnerable. Ultimately, it was all about seeing and being seen for the first time in that way. It was important for that scene to feel delicate, vulnerable, safe and intimate.”
And lest you accuse Marjan of rushing into this marriage too quickly, a brief line of dialogue from Tommy revealed that Marjan supposedly purchased her dress online after dating Joe for a month.
“There had to be a way for the audience to understand why and how this came together so quickly,” Karam explains. “We had more drawn-out versions, paragraphs of them, but [co-showrunner Rashad Raisani] and the writers did what they do well, making it much more concise.”
In Karam’s mind, “now we know that she’s been clear as day about this man from the moment she met him. The audience can be all in for her, because they know she’s all in.”
What was your favorite moment from Marjan and Joe’s wedding? And what are your hopes for Lone Star’s remaining two episodes? Whatever’s on your mind, drop it in a comment below.
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