Season Five ends the only way Glee knows how: with everyone making enormous life decisions, several timelines that absolutely do not add up, and Rachel Berry apparently deciding that the Broadway dream she has spent five seasons screaming about was actually just a side quest. This is 5x20, "The Untitled Rachel Berry Project."

This episode, we break down:

📺 Rachel’s sudden pivot from Funny Girl to television, the fastest pilot development process in Hollywood history, and the growing suspicion that we’re no longer watching Rachel Berry so much as a story about Lea Michele.

🚌 Sam achieving his specific, measurable, achievable dream of being mostly naked on the side of a bus — while the episode also drops him into a genuinely ugly modeling-industry power dynamic and then barely gives us time to process it. Because it's Glee.

💔 Sam and Mercedes somehow becoming the most emotionally mature people on Glee, loving each other enough to admit that love doesn’t always make two lives compatible right now.

🐦 Blaine lies to Kurt, Kurt chooses to trust him anyway, and two horny pigeons give us one of the most inexplicable pieces of Klaine lore ever committed to television.

Plus: Mercedes takes America’s malls by storm, Mary Halloran writes approximately twelve television pilots in a week, and “Pompeii” plays us out as everyone scatters toward Season Six.

Thirteen episodes left. We can do this.

xoxo,
FotR

The full moon is out over Los Angeles, which apparently means everyone is legally permitted to lose their goddamn minds because what is happening here. 1x07 “Full Moon (Creepy AF)” gives us synchronized yoga labor, a face-eating maybe-zombie, a deeply enthusiastic tapeworm extraction, and Henrietta Wilson making a choice so bad we would personally like to revoke her full moon privileges.

This episode we break down:

🌕 Buck Buckley, noted scientist, explaining that the full moon makes gravity heavier because he read it on the internet and being absolutely delighted when the night keeps proving him right (kinda).

👶 Prenatal yoga descends into complete chaos as babies start arriving like somebody hit the emergency childbirth button, while Bobby unsuccessfully attempts to maintain control of literally anything.

☎️ Abby listens helplessly as a woman is murdered, refuses to accept the easy answer, and proceeds to out-detect an actual homicide detective.

🪱 Buck pulls a tapeworm out of a man’s ass with the delighted concentration of a child opening a Christmas present, giving us one of the clearest examples of why you simply cannot skip Season 1.

This episode is gross, horny, creepy, genuinely upsetting at times, and extremely funny. So, basically, 9-1-1 discovering exactly what kind of show it wants to be. The moon may not actually make people crazy, but it sure gives them something to blame on this show.

xoxo,
Fandom on the Rocks

Love is in the air in Los Angeles, which naturally means fake plane crashes, emergency tracheotomies, a man superglued back together (yeah, we know), and possibly the most cursed welcome-back cake in workplace history. 1x06 “Heartbreaker” is where 9-1-1 really starts feeling like 9-1-1: wildly sincere, deeply ridiculous, and absolutely determined to turn every possible expression of love into somebody’s emergency.

This episode we break down:

✈️ A proposal so catastrophically ill-conceived it literally gives someone broken heart syndrome. Friends, if your beloved fakes an aviation emergency before proposing, run.

🎂 Chimney returns to the 118, receives a horrifyingly accurate rebar-through-the-head cake, and gets called the heart of the firehouse even though we’ve barely gotten to know him yet. We’ll allow it. We know where this is going.

💘 Buck and Abby finally go on a real date, Buck is immediately defeated by complimentary bread and Abby performs an emergency tracheotomy. Could be...worse?

🔪 Athena spends Valentine’s Day working because going home means confronting what’s happening in her own marriage and somehow ends up tied to a chair while someone plans to harvest her heart for a DIY boyfriend upgrade. Yikes.

Plus: our ongoing campaign for 9-1-1 to make a bottle episode and why holiday episodes are an endangered television art form worth protecting.

Happy Valentine’s Day. Eat the bread carefully, y'all.

xoxo,

Fandom on the Rocks

This week, 9-1-1 asks whether we ever truly know the people closest to us and then immediately reveals enough secrets, lies, and catastrophic personal history to make everyone reconsider the question. 1x05 “Point of Origin” finally opens Bobby Nash’s ominous little black book, introduces us to the magnificent Karen Wilson, and sends Buck and Abby on a first date involving a missing mother, an electrified swimming pool, and an impressive amount of unresolved sexual tension.

This episode, we break down:

🏗️ An arranged marriage, a structurally unsound building, and the episode repeatedly asking whether anyone truly knows the person beside them.

📓 Bobby’s devastating origin story, his addiction and guilt, and the extremely complicated question of whether the 118 can trust him with their lives without knowing what happened to his first family.

🪐 The arrival of Karen Wilson: astrophysicist, devoted wife, and already the smartest person in every room.

🚩 Hen visiting Eva behind Karen’s back and beginning an impressive run of decisions everyone—including Hen—knows are terrible.

It’s an episode about shame, trust, secrecy, and whether the family you build can hold the worst thing you’ve ever done. Season 1 of 9-1-1 is a trip.

xoxo,
Fandom on the Rocks

Four episodes in, 9-1-1 crashes a passenger plane into the Pacific, sets the water on fire, traps people inside a sinking fuselage, and casually establishes the blueprint for every enormous disaster the show will throw at us later. But beneath all the spectacle, 1x04 "Worst Day Ever" really is an episode about the people who keep running into emergencies because not doing it just isn't an option. And it's about the moment three coworkers finally start becoming something that looks a lot like family.

This episode, we break down:

📓 Bobby’s deeply ominous little black book and Buck’s terminal inability to mind his own business

🚔 Athena fighting teenage bullies and airline capitalism through a series of choices that are emotionally satisfying and legally questionable

☎️ Abby’s gentlest day at dispatch and an NPC love story we will apparently be grieving forever

🛋️ Hen and Buck finding Bobby at rock bottom and the tiny, broken “Help” that transforms three coworkers into a family

This episode is grimy, emotionally brutal, and completely load-bearing for everything the 118 (and the show as a whole) will become.

Also: where were the life jackets?

xoxo,
Fandom on the Rocks

Content note: This episode includes discussion of suicide and attempted suicide.

In 1x03 “Next of Kin,” 9-1-1 takes its first big swing at found family and uses a piece of rebar through Chimney’s skull to get there. Meanwhile, Athena and Michael face the terrifying aftermath of May’s suicide attempt, Abby is forced to confront what caring for her mother can realistically look like, and a bouncy castle finally proves that children’s birthday parties are inherently hostile environments.

This episode, we’re talking:

🎈 A bouncy castle on the edge of a cliff, the Santa Ana winds, and several adults making choices their insurance company would not approve of

🔥 Athena reminding May that she is “special and bright and filled with holy fire” while the Grant family tries to survive an unimaginable crisis

🧠 Chimney lying about dinner, proposing to a woman who does not appear to like him, fighting with Bobby, and immediately meeting the narrative at highway speed

🏠 Abby’s complicated mix of love, duty, guilt, and martyrdom as her family considers memory care for her mother

This episode is emotionally ambitious, structurally uneven, and trying very hard to be load-bearing. But somewhere between Bobby declaring that Chimney’s family is “right here” after knowing these people for approximately three episodes and Buck offering the world’s least reassuring bedside pep talk, the 118 begins transforming into the deeply codependent little trauma family we came here to love.

xoxo,
Fandom on the Rocks

9-1-1 on the Rocks has survived its first shift, and unfortunately, Buck has already acquired significant workplace trauma.

This week on 9-1-1 on the Rocks, we’re covering 1x02, “Let Go,” an episode about all the ways people try to hold on when everything around them is falling apart. Buck learns that wanting to save someone doesn’t mean he can, Abby welcomes the relentlessly competent Carla Price into her home and immediately recruits her as a best friend and romantic adviser, and Athena tries to keep her family functioning while Michael’s revelation continues to crack it open.

Also on this episode:

• Buck’s first devastating loss on the job and why “I will not let you go” tells us almost everything we need to know about him.

• Season one’s startlingly dark discussions of suicide, grief, isolation, and the limits of what first responders can protect people from.

• Angela Bassett delivering a performance so raw it changes the temperature of the entire show.

It’s heavy. It’s messy. Carla is already running the place, and Buck Buckley has officially begun collecting trauma like it’s part of his LAFD benefits package.

xoxo,
Fandom on the Rocks

9-1-1 on the Rocks has officially entered the firehouse.

Welcome to the inaugural episode of the newest Fandom on the Rocks podcast. We’re kicking off our brand-new recap series of 9-1-1 with 1x01, “Pilot,” the episode that introduced us to our beloved 118. We dive in on Abby Clark, who is very clearly being positioned as the emotional entry point of the show, Athena Grant’s immediate Angela Bassett-ness, Bobby Nash’s ominous little black book, and Buck Buckley’s straight hair, terrible judgment, and desperate need to be loved by literally anyone with a pulse.

This is the beginning of our re-rewatch journey through the emergencies, trauma, found family, baffling narrative choices, questionable timelines, emotional devastation, and extremely pretty first responders that make 9-1-1 so dangerously rewatchable.

In our first episode, we’re talking:

• Abby as the original emotional center of the show

• Buck stealing a firetruck for sex reasons

• Bobby Nash being deeply, obviously, alarmingly Not Okay

• Athena Grant arriving fully formed and already done with everyone

• Babies in walls, snakes in apartments, suburban break-ins, and 9-1-1’s early commitment to chaos

• Retcons, Ryan Murphy-isms, and our commitment to judging canon because we love it

It’s messy. It’s intense. It’s weirdly good. And unfortunately, we’re in it now.

Welcome to 9-1-1 on the Rocks. Let’s overthink television together.

xoxo,
Fandom on the Rocks