‘9-1-1: Nashville’ Boss Explains Ongoing Hack Crisis, Blythe’s Strength & Big Dixie Episode

[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for 9-1-1: Nashville Season 1 Episode 7 “You’ve Been Boarded.”]

Blythe Hart (Jessica Capshaw) is a badass. If the 9-1-1: Nashville midseason premiere on Thursday, January 8, leaves you with nothing else, it should be that.

The consequences of the hack continue in Nashville, with Blythe, after getting wrapped up in barbed wire when a tornado alarm spooked her horse, trying to make her way to help after said horse runs and her phone being smashed, only to collapse and be found by Don (Chris O’Donnell) in time for him to transfuse her with his own blood; the 113 stopping the steamboat from crashing into a bridge and helping out several city officials whose medical devices are hacked; and Cammie (Kimberly Williams-Paisley) forced to take a polygraph by the FBI’s Turner (Coby Bell) once it becomes clear that someone inside the dispatch center is involved. She’s cleared, but also makes another discovery, that someone is involved who knows who voted to pay the ransom and who didn’t; those who voted against were the ones targeted in the device hack.

The crisis continues in the January 15 episode. Below, showrunner Rashad Raisani explains why it’s not over yet, the drama still to come with Dixie (LeAnn Rimes), and much more.

The hack is not resolved by the end of this episode. Why did you want to stretch it into a third episode? Because it lasted that long on 9-1-1 before they went dormant onscreen until here. So, will it be resolved next week? Is this another three-episode arc?

Rashad Raisani: It will be resolved next week. And part of the reason we wanted to do it in multiple parts is we wanted to milk each — this hacker has a strategy about what they’re doing, and each one has a different phase and a different level of spectacle, but also a different level of character stakes and urgency. And so in the final hour, I guess I should say, it hit the peak level of urgency, of crisis, both for the city, but also for our characters. And it’s going to start to dovetail a lot with some character arcs that we’ve been doing for the first six episodes or seven episodes, really, that we start to hit our first endpoints about where these characters are as we launch into the second half of the season.

At what point did you know that you wanted to have someone on the inside involved and link it to the vote about paying the ransom?

We knew that pretty early because I think that was one of the things that in 9-1-1, when the original hack happened, that made it a little bit difficult; at a certain point, it just felt like an idea out there. So the idea to have the monster in the house was very attractive. And so we knew that we were going to do that before we even started this whole runner. We wanted to play the thriller and also the mystery of who it is and why, and all those things. And also it allows our characters to be, the stakes for those call center people and for the first responders, it goes way up knowing that it could be somebody that they’re dealing with, any of them. So I think we knew pretty early we wanted to do that, especially because it would help us in our final hour to have a bad guy to deal with.

Kimberly’s so great in this episode. Now, Cammie’s suspicious of everyone around her. But she’s also going to be continuing to field calls. So, how is she going to handle everything in the next episode?

That’s part of the challenge we wanted to give her is that she’s got to do both, that she’s got to be juggling this mental headspace that she can’t really even tell any of her coworkers because they might be the person, and at the same time, there are still going to be crises that come in where she’s got to be fully focused as a dispatcher. And I think you’re going to see really what Kim can do as Cammie in the next episode, both in this thriller investigation, but also as a hero and also emotionally, she’s going through hell herself, in that this call center that was built in honor that she really built in honor of her deceased husband has now been sort of the epicenter of this great evil, and that’s really tough for her to go through. That’s what the finale of this runner is going to really deal with.

I liked her looking in the phone book and then just being like, “Can you ask a friend for the cross street?”

It’s very Kim, which I just love. I love how honest she plays everything, and she’s so genuine. She’s just like that in real life, just the most down-to-earth. Even though I think she was originally from New York, she’s lived in Nashville for many years, and she feels very Southern to me when I deal with her.

Should she be trusting Turner though?

Well, that’s a question. That is a very good question. No, is the answer. She shouldn’t, nor should she trust anyone else around her at the moment.

You’ve really put Blythe through it. You’d told me that you’d be showing how tough she is, and you really do in this episode. We also really see the love between her and Don, as well as just how important she is to both him and Edward (Tim Matheson) that they call a ceasefire. How much are we going to see of her recovery and that continued strength going forward?

We’re going to see a lot, particularly the next episode is going to be another, the back half of that where you’ll also see how Blythe recovers, which is that the second she can even sit upright, she’s going to start to try and help people again because we’ll just say that the hack is going to bring things close to home for everybody. And so the next episode is called “All Hands” because it really does call on all the people, all the citizens, all the first responders, everybody’s going to have to help to get through this crisis. And so Blythe and her dad, we’ll really go deep on their relationship and see different sides of both of them, but we’ll see that even when she’s still in recovery and suffering, Blythe finds a way to try and help other people.

Don and Edward have called that ceasefire, but it feels temporary. Nothing’s been said that suggests Edward’s changing his mind about Blue. So what are their interactions like in the immediate future, especially away from Blythe? Because it’s one thing to act nice in front of her, but then once they’re alone… We saw what happened when it was like, let’s put on a happy face in front of the city officials, and that didn’t happen.

They have a lot of issues with each other, but I think that the crisis as it pushes forward is going to — it’s not going to correct it, it’s not going to undo all these years, but it’s going to force them both to focus on what’s really important and to see if they end up on the same side of what’s really important. And I think that was really important when I said about the third hour of the crisis, it becomes more personal for everybody. And we wanted to dovetail that feud between them and sort of how this is going to all resolve together. And so it will.

But what does that mean for after the crisis is over? Then you’re looking back at day-to-day life and it would be so easy for them to slip back into what it was like before.

To be honest, they’re never going to like each other, but maybe this experience will at least get them to glimpse the other person’s humanity. And I think that was what we were going for, but we don’t really want them to love each other. I mean, it’s fun to watch them beat each other up.

There was Ryan’s (Michael Provost) response to his grandfather with that handshake in the hospital room. Might that be enough to change Edward’s mind or at least get him thinking about his conditions? Has he connected the two and been like, oh, maybe this is related to what I want with Blue (Hunter McVey)?

Yeah, I think you’re putting your finger on it. Edward’s going to have a big arc in the next episode, and a lot of it is about family. And we’ll learn things about Edward and Blythe’s family, their history, and Blythe’s mother, and all these things that are going to come out because of where they are. And I won’t spoil it, but that’s a big part of what’s going to hit him pretty hard in the next episode.

I feel like Ryan’s feelings about Blue are going to be more significant to Edward than anyone’s, right?

Yeah. And also to hear from Blythe, that he’s never really given her a chance to actually talk as a human being, but he had such a volcanic reaction. They haven’t had any real time to talk about it with any kind of intimacy. And so him being there for her recovery, which is where he ends at the end of Episode 7, he’s with her in her hospital room. And so it’s going to force them to spend some downtime together, which they haven’t done in a while. And so that’s going to lead to some conversations.

What about Edward and Blue’s interactions?

That’s coming. That won’t happen yet, but it’s coming. We’re not going to get that far with him, but we’re very excited for it.

Even with this ongoing situation, as Ryan points out, Don has yet to speak to Blue about the Edward situation. And it’s a nice excuse, I feel like, for Don, that he doesn’t have to do that right now. He’s hoping for Edward to give. It doesn’t really necessarily seem like that might happen. But does Don have time with everything going on to wonder if he should still be reading Blue in because of the previous issue with secrets?

Don would like to, I think, push it out of his mind and just do the work. But I think that in Episode 8, there’s going to be a moment where he just can’t help but look in Blue’s eyes and just he feels compelled to talk about it and let him know that this is coming. And so even in the midst of all this crisis, Don just can’t — at a certain point, he has to tell Blue. He just feels too bad that he tried to solve it previously and kept it from him. But Blue’s aware that Don’s keeping something from him at this point. So he’s going to force Don to tell him, “Hey, what’s going on? I can tell something’s going on.” So they’ll have that conversation in Episode 8.

We start seeing those little sparks between Blue and Taylor (Hailey Kilgore). What else is coming up with them?

Oh, a lot. A lot. You correctly looked at sparks, and from the day that they showed up on set together, they had such great chemistry, and they have such wonderful energies, in my opinion, that mesh so well together. She’s got this feistiness, and she’s whip smart and a bit of a smartass, and he’s just so sweet and innocent, and they just are a delightful pairing. So it was very difficult to resist having them start to brush against each other.

What’s been going on with Dixie during all of this?

When we left her, she has these polyps that are getting worse. And so she’s been kind of lying in wait a little bit just because the nature of the hacker episodes, it doesn’t really lend itself to Dixie’s kind of drama, but she has a huge — her biggest episode of the series so far comes immediately after these hacks, and she’s wonderful. LeAnn is terrific and she’s doing the most vintage Dixie kind of stuff, but we’ll get into, she started this whole thing in part because she needs the surgery and she needs her voice back, and we still haven’t really gotten to hear LeAnn sing. So Episode 9 will give you all those things.

What can you say about the next Dixie and Blythe conversation? Jessica and LeAnn in scenes together are amazing.

Yeah. They are the heart and soul in many ways of our drama. As we’re doing the finale today, we went into prep on the finale. And looking back at the whole season, they have been the prime movers of everything that got — everyone else has caught up in that war between them in a funny way. Their drama is going to drive the middle of the season, starting in that episode I mentioned, Episode 9, where Blythe … Dixie is very clever, the way she wheedles into people’s lives, and she’s a classic narcissistic manipulator, and the only person who can really see it sometimes is Blythe. And even Blythe she’s not even sure of herself about Dixie’s intentions. But then Dixie’s very human, also, so she can be very sweet and innocent. The problem is you never know which she is. And so that chess match between them, like I said, Episode 9 is where it really starts to pick up again, and then it takes us pretty much to the end of the season.

We’ve talked about that there’s an origin episode coming for Dixie and Don. And like I mentioned, you really see how much love there is between Don and Blythe in this episode. And you’ve talked about Dixie’s feelings for Don. But where’s Don when it comes to Dixie?

Well, he has a lot of feelings that maybe he is not ready to acknowledge. And we’ll see in Episode 11, that origin story, and you’ll see just the chemistry that they had and the history that they have and the reasons why her pull over him is so strong and vice versa. And ultimately, that is going to be what this season, at the end of the day, it’s going to come down to a choice. And so we’re going to see a lot of reasons why she has this pull over him, and it’s going to get pretty intense.

9-1-1: Nashville, Thursdays, 9/8c, ABC