Spoilers ahead!
9-1-1 has always flirted with the horror genre; there are plenty of moments in the first seasons that could be part of a Final Destination movie. With the show recently leaning toward a comedy direction, especially in this eighth season, Voices continues the trend that started with Sob Stories last week, delivering a thriller with some unexpected slasher moments.
After Maddie (Jennifer Love Hewitt) is kidnapped by Amber (Abigail Spencer,) Chimney (Kenneth Choi) and Athena (Angela Bassett) have to work together to figure out what happened. Considering that Maddie is pregnant with their second child and she went missing during her first postpartum, Chimney is worried that something similar might be happening again — especially with Amber doing anything in her power as a detective to give the impression that it was Maddie’s choice to leave. But Athena isn’t convinced, joining forces with Rick Romero (Danny Nucci) to discover if what happened to Maddie is connected to the Weepy Killer case. Meanwhile, Maddie is fighting for her life using her most powerful weapon, her communication abilities, to connect with Amber and escape.
“Voices” – 9-1-1. Pictured: Jennifer Love Hewitt as Maddie, Abigail Spencer as Amber. Photo: Christopher Willard/ABC © 2025 Disney. All rights reserved.
It’s always a pleasure for me when 9-1-1 goes crazy and delivers thrilling moments. As a horror fan, there’s so much here to be delighted with, especially considering that this show is giving us eighteen episodes a year — the whole episode is filmed and directed to keep the audience on the edge of their seats, biting nails of anxiety. The last ten minutes are especially insane; when Amber slashed Maddie's throat with a knife in true horror movie fashion, I gasped out loud, then jumped out of my seat speechless. Chimney just arrived at Amber’s home, Athena just discovered everything that Amber did, and all of this leads to a tense ending.
But (almost) everything’s fine in the end. Amber is killed by Athena, Maddie, and Chimney are alive, their unborn child (a boy!) is fine, but her voice, her most powerful weapon, the thing she uses the most to work and to connect with people (and to a certain point, to connect with us, the audience, too) is mostly gone by now, which means that at least for a while, Maddie might not be a dispatcher anymore. The episode also deals with Maddie's new pregnancy in a way that makes a callback to the first one; all this horror is supposed to be about Maddie dealing with her past and fighting once again to stay in the lives of the ones she loves. Meanwhile, Chimney is also dealing with what happened after Jee-Yun was born, tormented by the possibility of Maddie leaving them again but refusing to give up on her.
“Voices” – 9-1-1. Pictured: Kenneth Choi as Chimney, Abigail Spencer as Amber. Photo: Christopher Willard/ABC © 2025 Disney. All rights reserved.
A lot is happening here, and I think the episode suffers from it a bit. Amber was just introduced in the previous episode, which means that Voices serves both as her backstory (she has multiple personalities due to a kidnapping she suffered when she was a teenager, and apparently her mom didn’t give her enough love) and her final moments. Maybe that’s too much for the time given; it’s easy to connect with what Maddie and Chimney are going through because we’ve known them for years and we love and root for them, but it’s hard to connect with Amber — which is in no way Abigail Spencer’s fault, who delivers some powerful moments with what she’s given. Kenneth Choi and Jennifer Love Hewitt also deliver some amazing, riveting scenes, and I love that they both had some time to shine this season. After everything that happened to Maddie in this episode, I hope there’s more to come for Maddie and Chimney soon.
Finally, a huge (even if short in time) moment of Voices happens when Eddie (Ryan Guzman) leaves L.A. and says goodbye to Buck (Oliver Stark.) That one is huge because Buck and Eddie spend the whole episode with this tension between them; Buck is stressed because Maddie is missing but also because of everything changing in his life, including Eddie’s departure. And while Eddie drives them to places so maybe they can find her somewhere, this tension between them grows. In their final scene, not much is said, as there’s this feeling that both of them are keeping what they want to say under lock and key.
“Voices” – 9-1-1. Pictured: Ryan Guzman as Eddie, Oliver Stark as Buck. Photo: Christopher Willard/ABC © 2025 Disney. All rights reserved.
And while Buck is the one who seems more explicitly devastated by Eddie moving to Texas, it’s clear to me that Eddie is the one repressing things and trying to convince himself that everything is fine — not because he doesn’t want to stay, but because he can’t allow himself to let whatever he’s got going on with Buck keep him from making amends with his son. From “It’s not nothing” to “This thing between us has been messy and hard, but I hope you know, you do matter to me,” Eddie does anything in his power to tell Buck that he cares for him and for what he feels, even if he cannot let it get in his way back to Christopher (Gavin McHugh). I also loved Buck's nervous scratching and Eddie's anxious swinging arms during this scene, combined with the way Eddie looked back to Buck before getting in his car — so many nice, tender details added by Guzman and Stark to this whole thing going on between Eddie and Buck.
9-1-1 delivered Buddie storylines with explicitly romantic implications two episodes in a row — two episodes of them arguing like a married old couple followed by a goodbye hug on a rainy, cloudy afternoon, in a storyline that has some callbacks to the Abby one in the first season. If anything romantic related to Buddie was arguably subtext in earlier seasons, since season seven their relationship has leaned towards a big change, and all signs point to this change finally happening before this season ends.
All in all, Voices is a good, surprising episode, even when it tries to tell too many things in such a short time. It features some sort of Jee-Yun (Bailey Leung/Hailey Leung) team-up with Mara (Askyler Bell) to deliver important information about Maddie’s kidnapping to the adults, which means that Karen (Tracie Thoms) is also back to a small but heartwarming special appearance. And the way Hen (Aisha Hinds) and Chimney’s friendship was highlighted here was so beautiful; there’s a scene in which Chimney tells Hen that should go and be with her family, and she replies to him something along the way “I’m already with my family” and that was so cute and important. After this, we return next week with a Bobby (Peter Krause) focused episode directed by Aisha Hinds, and I’m excited about this one.
Now tell me how you feel about this episode! Feel free to leave a comment with your impressions and theories, and thanks for reading!
