‘9-1-1: Nashville’ Boss Reveals Blythe & Dixie Fight Fallout and Ryan Phillippe’s Case Details

Who needs Bee-nados and volcanos when you have hot-blooded Queen Bees beating on each other?

9-1-1: Nashville Season 1 ended on the first-responder franchise’s craziest cliffhanger so far…because it had nothing to do with wild weather or chaotic car crashes! Nope, the soapier 9-1-1 cut to black in the middle of a brawl between Blythe (Jessica Capshaw), the wife of fire captain Don Hart (Chris O’Donnell), and his bitter, country-singing ex, Dixie Bennings (LeAnn Rimes). Tired of the desperate Dixie trying to destroy her marriage and dropping diss tracks about her own past, the well-heeled Blythe headed over to Dixie’s crib to give as good as she’d been getting.

But right after revealing that she’d bought out Dixie’s recording contract, the crooner who raised Don’s secret son and fellow firefighter Blue (Hunter McVey) revealed that ol’ Donny boy had finally caved in to her sexting advances and was en route to knock boots with her. And that is when the elbows flew, straight into a fade-to-black we couldn’t believe. Had the show just committed catfightus interruptus?!

“I know!” laughs showrunner Rashad Raisani. “That wasn’t originally the plan, to be honest. But then when we were in the editing room, I was just like, ‘Oh, you know what’s kind of fun? If we don’t tell what happens at the end of it.’ And that gave us a nice springboard going into Season 2.”

Confirming that the new season picks up three weeks after the throwdown, he teases that “we have a very coy thing where we make you kind of wait for a minute to figure out what happened and then [there’s] a scene where we reveal kind of the new reality for these two ladies. You see what their ramifications for that fight were and how they are now kind of facing the consequences for it.”

Disney

And speaking of consequences, what about Don’s aborted rendezvous with Dixie? Even though he bailed on the hookup at the last minute, Blythe still saw that he was willing to cheat on her.

“[That’s] going to be pretty brutal,” promises Raisani. “He’s going to have to face it. It’s going to affect their marriage in a pretty deep way. It’s going to shake it because betrayal starts in the heart before it even has to become physical. So I think for him, he’s going to have to appreciate the kind of hurt that he caused. Even if it was a case of emotions running high and there were misunderstandings in the run-up to it, there are going to be some severe consequences to pay, and he will.”

Whatever that messiness is, they better clean it up fast because Don and Firehouse 113 are about to have company: Ryan Phillippe (Shooter) joins the cast as Detective Kelly, a New York transplant “who’s come to Nashville because things were very dark in New York,” Raisani explains. “He saw a lot of bad stuff. He saw this major case that got him a lot of accolades and was a hit podcast, but kind of ruined his life. And so he’s come to Nashville for a change of pace.”

Related

'9-1-1: Nashville' Trailer: Ryan Phillippe Investigates the Plagues

Of course, this is 9-1-1, so that plan goes up in smoke before he can even unpack. Raisani reveals that Kelly “ends up in the case of his life” after the introduction of “the most nefarious, mysterious criminal who starts to wreak havoc” for the entire town by replicating plagues from the Bible. “We’re going to bring in a villain into our show that will give us some of that same heft that those big set pieces that we traditionally get from hurricanes and floods and lava and whatever. We’re going to have an elusive kind of villain do some of these things.”

Maybe Dixie should write a song about this one!

9-1-1: Nashville, Season 2 Premiere, Thursday, October 15, 9/8c, ABC