RECAP: 9-1-1 Season 8 Episode 10 — “Voices”

Sometimes, the hype outperforms the payoff. In this case, Maddie’s kidnapping wraps up rather quickly with little character-defining fanfare. While Jennifer Love Hewitt delivers once again, 9-1-1 Season 8 Episode 10, titled “Voices,” can’t stick the landing after a fantastic buildup. What should have been a harrowing hour of Maddie going toe-to-toe with Abigail Spencer’s Detective Amber Braeburn ends up feeling rushed more than anything.

There’s been a criminal lack of Maddie and Chimney in 9-1-1 Season 8. The most focus they received in the first half of the season involved Maddie’s pregnancy announcement, a moment that deserved more weight behind it due to her postpartum depression in 9-1-1 Season 5. Especially considering 9-1-1 Season 8 Episode 10 partly hinges on Maddie’s past during the search for her whereabouts.

That search requires all hands on deck. Hen (Aisha Hinds) and Karen (Tracie Thoms) arrive to babysit Jee while Buck (Oliver Stark) and Eddie (Ryan Guzman) drive around town. Because Maddie didn’t tell anyone about the case she just had in which she seemingly told a caller to kill himself and he did, it takes a while for everyone to clock the reason for Maddie’s disappearance.

9-1-1 Season 8 Episode 10 usage of problematic tropes showcases lazy writing.

To be fair, the framing of their fear is done in good faith. Maddie’s not villainized for her past depression; instead, the worry is that she’s in the middle of a mental health crisis and needs help. Although Buck seems to be the only one wondering if something else is afoot—he mentions that last time Maddie told him where she was going and she dropped Jee off at the fire station—Detective Braeburn manipulates the rest into believing she really did take off again.

Abigail Spencer’s performance as the troubled homicide detective is haunting, but it comes at an unfortunate cost. Though her illness is not named, she does display multiple identities, one of those being the weeping 9-1-1 caller Maddie talked to.

While Amber’s backstory as a kidnapping victim when she was young might explain her sickness, 9-1-1 Season 8 Episode 10 doesn’t acknowledge it beyond Maddie’s plea to one of the identities to help her. Attaching a mental illness to villainous behavior is lazy work, made even more so by how little time or explanation Amber gives. Add in the quick and violent way she’s killed, and this mini-arc unfortunately runs the gamut of poorly thought-out implications.

It’s too bad, considering how good the setup was. Hewitt’s performance as the kidnapped Maddie is phenomenal. One of the best moments from the episode is when Chimney describes her declining health in 9-1-1 Season 5 over footage of Maddie freeing herself from her binds and looking for answers in Amber’s basement. A great representation of how far she’s come.

Despite the storyline issues, Jennifer Love Hewitt gives a great performance.

There just isn’t enough back-and-forth between Maddie and Amber. There’s more discussion about their circumstances and how that ties in with Maddie’s current life situation. The setup has a lot of parallels to 9-1-1 Lone Star, actually, including a moment where the audience and Maddie see Chimney ring the doorbell of the suspect’s house on a video camera, just like Carlos saw T.K. do the same thing.

In the 9-1-1 Lone Star episode, Carlos finds himself taken hostage after a couple of episodes of fighting with T.K., thus leading to Carlos having emotional breakthroughs about those fights while being held hostage and connecting with his kidnapper. For Carlos, establishing a relationship with the kidnapper allowed for a more interesting dynamic on screen. 9-1-1 Season 8 Episode 10 is missing that similar emotional through-line for Maddie, Chimney, and Amber.

Despite the surface-level premise of the entire situation, the basement scenes do go hard. Particularly when Amber slices Maddie’s throat, a true horror nod to Hewitt’s past final girl roles. It’s a gratuitous scene, as is Amber’s death. Perhaps not quite justified with the little we get between Maddie and Amber, but it’s thrilling, nonetheless. It all culminates in the hospital, where Chimney tells a bedridden-and-can-barely-talk Maddie that they’re having a boy.

Despite the arc taking up the episode, it still lacks payoff.

Since the harrowing choice Maddie made to tell a caller to commit suicide is brought to light again in 9-1-1 Season 8 Episode 10, to both Chimney and Athena (Angela Bassett), there might still be an emotional fallout there. Luckily, Maddie didn’t actually coerce anyone into killing themselves; Amber admits to it instead. But the fact that Maddie went that far is still out there, and still recorded on a 9-1-1 dispatch call.

This arc took up the majority of 9-1-1 Season 8 Episode 10, but there are lingering Buck and Eddie threads to take care of. After Buck decides to sublet Eddie’s house so he can move to Texas, Maddie’s disappearance sends Buck back over the edge again, staring his abandonment issues right in the face. As they’re driving around LA searching, Buck starts listing all the things that had been going well, until Tommy (Lou Ferrigno Jr) dumped him.

A Tommy mention this far past the breakup is a fun little tidbit, but so is how Buck talks about him. To Buck, Tommy breaking up with him is the start of when his life started to go wrong. Since that breakup, Buck has been on a baking binge, defined by Buck as his distraction from calling Tommy. Indeed, Buck hands a bag of cookies to Eddie as a departing gift, more evidence that he’s still baking and still wanting to call Tommy. This is a thread that’s been kept open for much longer than anyone thought it would be. Here’s hoping that thread acquires some more defining details.

Of course, we can’t forget Tommy and Buck.

As for Buck and Eddie, their goodbye is heartfelt and touching. Buck, while definitely still sad about his best friend leaving, displays more maturity about his departure here. Eddie got to fight back a bit in the last episode, but this time, it’s Buck’s turn. Because yeah! It does suck when your best friend leaves and seems to not really care that he’s leaving you behind.

Buck gets to voice that while they’re searching for Maddie, which leads to Eddie telling him that Buck does matter to him in their goodbye scene. Buck’s “I know” feels like a proper defining acknowledgement that he believes what Eddie tells him. They’re solid; they’re good. This is goodbye. Maybe for now. Maybe for longer. But the love is still there. However, the last lingering shot of Buck implies that there’s still more work to do with his abandonment issues.

The performances from Hewitt and Spencer were the defining parts of 9-1-1 Season 8 Episode 10, as was Kenneth Choi’s brief moments as Chimney as he wrestled through the fear and grief of Maddie’s disappearances. Otherwise, this episode had a promising buildup that didn’t quite capitalize on it.

9-1-1 airs new episodes every Thursday on ABC and Hulu.

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