Inside 9-1-1: Lone Star Premiere’s Surprising Split — Have We Seen the Last of [Spoiler]?

Andy Swift
·2-min read

Romance will not be on the agenda for Owen Strand in the final season of 9-1-1: Lone Star.

Monday’s premiere found Rob Lowe’s character attending grief therapy, where he casually mentioned that he and Kendra (Michaela McManus) are no longer in a relationship, one of several reasons he now feels like he’s living in a haze.

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Minus Owen accidentally crushing Kendra’s husband’s frozen chest while performing CPR, things seemed to be going fairly well for the couple when we last saw them at T.K. and Carlos’ wedding in the Season 4 finale. So, what happened? According to showrunner Rashad Raisani, there are two reasons — one on-camera and one off.

Let’s start with the on-camera reason: “What we wanted to say when we meet Owen at the top of this episode is that there’s clearly something going on,” Raisani explains to TVLine. “We’re saying that he’s living in this fog. He’s frozen.” Owen’s personal crisis will play out over the final season’s first five or six episodes, Raisani says, clarifying that “there is something going on with Owen that has been stifling and suffocating a lot of joy in his life.”

If that’s not enough of a roadmap for you, Raisani teases that the season’s third episode “gives us the first hint of what’s going on,” adding that “Owen is going to have to engage with and go to the dark place before he can get unburdened by it.”

The second reason for Owen and Kendra’s unceremonious split is that there simply wasn’t enough room in the show’s shortened final season. “We just didn’t have enough real estate in these first episodes to get somebody of Michaela’s caliber,” Raisani says. “We wouldn’t ask her to come in just for some one-off thing, because that was not where the direction of the narrative wanted to go in these first episodes.”

Elsewhere in the 9-1-1: Lone Star premiere, Owen found himself in the difficult position of having to choose between Paul and Marjan to replace Judd at the firehouse; Carlos — now a Texas Ranger — struggled to earn the respect of his new partner Campbell (Parker Young), all the while still obsessing over his father’s recent murder; and Judd explained that Grace left town to care for orphans on a Mercy Ship.

How do you feel about Owen and Kendra’s off-camera breakup? Were you hoping that this relationship would work out, following his string of failed romances? Grade the premiere below, then drop a comment with all of your thoughts.

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