9-1-1 Season 6 Episode 14 Review: Performance Anxiety
9-1-1 Season 6 Episode 14, “Performance Anxiety,” brings back a beloved character.
Along with the return of Ravi Panikkar, Chimney has to face his aversion to being a leader, and Eddie has to face the status of his love life.
During both arcs, the show skillfully reminds the audience of their past traumas, causing them to shy away from what’s out there.
The topic of Chimney and leadership has been recurring on 9-1-1 since Season 2. It started when he filled in for Bobby and didn’t do the best job in the eyes of his coworkers. Since then, Chimney has always used it as an excuse to push leadership away.
On “Performance Anxiety,” Bobby forces Chimney to face this fear.
In doing this, Chimney is forced to call back to the loss of his brother, Kevin. Chimney holds onto so much guilt for what happened to Kevin, and even decades after, the series shows him healing from that.
Establishing the unknown grief timeline and how some things can still have so much effect is crucial.
There’s an ache in Chimney that never leaves from the loss of Kevin, and he’ll always be in Chimney’s heart, but Chimney is in a place where his memory lives out of love more than pain.
Despite this, there were still things holding him back. He fears that if he leads someone else, he might lose them.
After talking to Ravi, he admits that and takes the steps to push through. He’s allowing himself to get outside of that fear. A fear that was probably made worse by Eddie’s wife dying on a call they responded to while Chimney was Interim-Captain.
The loss hit Chimney hard during the episode, and knowing that Kevin’s death made him struggle to lead, her death could have reinforced that fear that he can’t do this.
Speaking of Eddie, his aunt, Pepa, pushes him into dating again. He spends the episode insisting that he’s not ready and will get out of it. But, as the episode progresses, he slowly shows more of his feelings.
Eddie and dating is another topic that the show has touched on for many seasons. However, it hasn’t been mentioned since Eddie broke up with Ana on 9-1-1, Season 5, Episode 3, “Desperate Measures.”
The topic seems to come from nowhere, but that’s the point. Eddie is stuck feeling afraid of getting out there and needs a kick from his aunt to escape the fear.
Earlier in the season, Eddie talks to an actress, Felisa, and tells her that after Christopher got stuck in the tsunami, “I knew the longer we stayed away from the water, the more the fear would grow.”
He’s talking about Christopher, but the rhetoric is being called back to now. Pepa says a similar line during “Performance Anxiety” when she’s relating her love life before she met her husband to Eddie’s now. The line is “I was set in my ways and the longer you’re alone, the easier it is.”
Eddie acknowledges on the episode that he doesn’t want his heart broken again. However, it all calls back to the fear of moving on.
He uses the excuse that he’s not ready and used it in the past when Ana was first reintroduced as a love interest. The ghost of Shannon looms over him, and it’s the focus of his fears. He lost Shannon twice in his mind, once when she asked for a divorce and a second time when she died.
He doesn’t want to go through that again, so he lives in fear and uses Christopher as a shield and an excuse. But, in the end, he admits that while he’s scared to get his heart broken again, he doesn’t want to be stuck in his ways either.
Hopefully, the future sees him seeking love on his own and making that choice for himself. Eddie needs a push but also needs to take the step because he wants to.
The return of fan-favorite Ravi is another thing that happens on this episode!
There are layers to the job that these characters do and a lot of the time, what they’re facing isn’t easy. Ravi’s absence is explained as he’s been hiding out at the academy because he did an off-duty rescue, and the situation surrounding it was devastating.
Ravi is forced to face that there are bad people in the world, and he still has to save them. It’s an important topic to touch on because it’s a real thing that firefighters in the world have to face.
9-1-1 has always been good about acknowledging the real struggles of the job. This is another instance of that.
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What did you think of this episode of 9-1-1? Share your thoughts in the comments below!
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9-1-1 airs Mondays at 8/9c on FOX.
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