Depictions of disasters in the film space have been around for as long as film has been around, from forest fires to floods to train crashes and more, and with it all there has been one throughline theme: disasters almost always wipe away “deviant” culture and replace it with the “normal” culture of the time. A lot has been written about this theme in the space of movies, but nowhere near as much in the TV show space, which is a shame, because there have been a lot of great disaster-based TV shows over the decades. ABC’s 911 (formally airing on FOX for the first six seasons), especially stands out due to its continued pattern of opening its seasons not just with typical first responder fair like other similar shows, but with large scale disasters both natural and manmade. But there is one other thing that makes 911 standout among the others: it is unabashedly and unapologetically queer, even in the face of disaster, something that is painfully absent in mainstream disaster films, yet so very present here in this show. Now, in the mid-season break of season eight, 911 is on the precipice of pushing that even farther by potentially establishing a new couple that is, strangely, a topic of hot debate among some critics.
A recent TVFanatic Article, written by Lisa Babick in December 2024, argues that fans are reading too much into the queer themes between the fan favorite non-canon pairing of Evan “Buck” Buckley and Edmundo “Eddie” Diaz (Babick 2024). Babick claims that fans are pushing their readings of these two characters as a potential future couple too far, that fans are ruining a “rare” friendship unlike what we see in most media these days, even wishing that we could go back to “…TV’s golden age — the ’70s and ’80s — when friendships were the heart of many shows.” (Babick 2024). She pulls out Starsky and Hutch as an example of a, supposedly, purely platonic bromance that she claims isn’t “bogged down” by potential romantic tension (Babick 2024). Two seconds on Archive of Our Own, one of the most popular websites for posting transformative fan content known as fanfiction[1], would’ve shown her that she’s completely wrong, though. As of this writing, the Starsky & Hutch fandom on Ao3 has 5,958 works, 2,823 of which are about the two of them as a couple (Starsky & Hutch 2024). If you’ve been in fandom for any length of time, you know that just about every conceivable character combination will get put together romantically at some point (and a fair few inconceivable ones too). Viewing Buck and Eddie this way is just another step in a long, long fandom tradition, and not at all out of the norm.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I do think romance can be very overdone in a lot of modern media. As an asexual, aromatic person, I very often find myself rolling my eyes at the romances that get shoehorned in just about everywhere. I would love to see more strong friendships that don’t end up romantic on TV, but to make the claim, as Babick does, that these strong friendships are constantly replaced with queer relationships—especially between two male characters—is so easily proven false it makes you wonder what she’s been watching. Let’s name just a few strong friendships that stayed strong friendships, from more recent media than the 70s and 80s: Doc and Dolls in Wynonna Earp remain close friends throughout the show until Dolls’s death (and they started out as clear enemies), Spock and Kirk in both the older and newer adaptions, Sherlock and Watson in Sherlock, Booth and Sweets in Bones, and dozens upon dozens more. But if you try to name strong friendships between two men that did become canon romantic relationships, the list is all but non-existent since, despite Babick’s claims, it just doesn’t happen. Because, here’s the thing, fandom has no bearing on what happens in a show. They are separate entities. Friendships between male characters are everywhere in various canons and, without fail, those canon friendships will be viewed by fans as potential romantic relationships in their own speculations. Such is the nature of fandom, but that’s not really what this essay is about. No, it’s about why Buck and Eddie becoming a canon couple would not be some condemnable faux pas of destroying a longstanding friendship, it would be a mold shattering example of disaster media establishing a queer couple instead of destroying it, and it would be perfectly in line with the way this show has treated relationships from its literal first seconds.
Disaster media doesn’t just have a habit of ignoring and erasing queer relationships, it gleefully wipes away any sort of deviant relationship behavior in favor of establishing (or, just as frequently, reestablishing) a heterosexual relationship between a white man and a white woman, with each of them taking on very gendered roles of who is the protector and who is the protected, and usually defaulting towards the characters’ first relationships, rather than any post-divorce relationships. Anything outside these norms is punished or erased. Dante’s Peak opens with a promiscuous young couple getting cooked alive by the awakening volcano while swimming in the nude, and ends with the two main, white, characters of Harry and Rachel getting together, along with her two kids (and the dog, for that nice typical .5 on top of the two human kids) (Donaldson 1997). Twister follows the Hallmark Movie formula by breaking up the post-almost-divorce couple of Bill and Melissa in favor of Bill and Jo, the “natural” couple that hasn’t gone through an icky little divorce that would upset the status-quo of staying with your first partner despite everything (Bont 1996). Volcano kills off the lesbian coded Rachel almost immediately to make room for Amy and Mike to get together, she even encourages Amy to view him as a potential partner just before her demise (Jackson 1997). Independence Day kills off both queer coded characters, Fierstein and Wilder, preventing them from being present in the climactic celebration of the whole world (minus the queers, of course) coming together to celebrate defeating the alien threat (Emmerich, Independence Day 1996).
This theme isn’t just relegated to the 90s era disaster movies either. Look at just about any disaster movie and you will find some form of this theme. 2012, released in 2009, goes so far as to kill off the step-father character so that the original couple can get be reestablished, returned to a state “…before betrayal, conflict and divorce.” (Emmerich, 2012 2009) (Kakoudaki 2011). It is present even in one of the oldest American disaster epics, Deluge, which released in 1933 and featured a massive earthquake striking and devastating both coasts of the United States. In the film, the main character of Martin is separated from his wife, Helen, and their two kids. As he fights to survive, he starts a new relationship with a woman named Claire, a young sports star (rather than a respectable housewife) who he defends against and rescues from another man, only to soon after discover that his wife and children are, in fact, alive. Claire, for a time, tries to fight for her relationship with Martin, going through several confrontations with Helen over it, until eventually Claire decides to move on and the original, “normal” relationship is reestablished (Feist 1933). As Scott McKinnon states in his paper on the subject, “Conforming to monogamous, ‘traditional’ and gender normative heterosexuality is generally the only way to survive…” (McKinnon 2017).
So what’s so different about 911, about the potential for Buck and Eddie to become a canon couple? We already have queer characters in 911, a plethora of them, and there’s plenty of queer characters scattered through other first responder shows like Station 19, Sirens, Fire Country, and 911’s own spinoff show, 911 Lonestar. The difference lies in two things: the natural disaster focus of the season openers for 911, and the fact that Buck and Eddie both start the show as firmly straight characters, and stay that way for the majority of the show’s run so far. But there’s a third difference we need to discuss first: from the very start, this show came out swinging for relationships outside the traditional norm. In the very first episode it breaks up two prototypical heterosexual relationships: Abby and Tommy (their breakup being established in the literal first seconds of the show), and Athena and Michael. Athena and Michael’s relationship is failing due to Michael’s sexuality, as he has now come out as a gay man, and the show goes on to affirm this choice in a multitude of ways. Michael and Athena both end up in loving, non-traditional relationships, Michael with another man and Athena in an interracial relationship with Bobby who himself has lost his first “traditional” and “acceptable” relationship.[2] Not only has Bobby lost that first normative relationship, he lost it to a disaster, namely a massive fire in their apartment complex. Rather than a disaster bringing him into or back to a normative relationship, it brought him to a second, interracial marriage, something unheard of in the wider scope of disaster media. Much later on, we learn that Abby and Tommy’s relationship broke up in exactly the same way as Athena and Michael’s (though prior to them getting married): Tommy was gay and just trying to make it work with a woman anyway. Tommy being gay, and ending his normative, heterosexual relationship over it, then makes room for the establishing of another queer relationship when Tommy and Buck start dating in season seven, which brings us right back around to Buck and Eddie as a potential future queer couple.
Buck starts out as a firmly straight character, with no canon hint of any interest in men. In the first episode his interest in women goes so far as to cost him his job due to repeatedly stealing a firetruck to go have sex with various women, including one he meets during an emergency. From there he traverses a myriad of relationships with women, including Tommy’s ex, Abby, his first serious relationship, but one by one they all fail. Buck is constantly shown to be struggling with feeling left behind and unloved after his relationships fail, even after he gives them his all. It isn’t until Tommy kisses him in season seven that we get any on-screen conformation that Buck might be interested in more than women, and even then he’s shown to be struggling with what that might mean for him after his relationship with Tommy ends in the first half of season eight. The thing about Tommy and Buck’s relationship, though, is that not only is it a queer relationship, it is a queer relationship that is started during a disaster. Their first real meeting happens because Tommy helps Buck and the other members of the 118 fly out to rescue Bobby and Athena from their cruise ship sinking in a clear recreation of one of the most famous disaster movies, The Poseidon Adventure. Even though they don’t officially start dating until awhile later, Buck explicitly states that the way Tommy handled that rescue is one of the things that made him first take notice of Tommy. The disaster brought them together.
Then we’ve got Eddie, who is about as typically Americana as you can get, but he’s failing at it, and the associated normative heterosexual relationship, pretty hard. He’s a former soldier with medals on his chest, but he’s not the stoic, unaffected hero, he’s got PTSD so bad he at one point breaks down to the point of destroying his room and scaring the hell out of his young son. He’s married to his high school girlfriend, but they’re estranged right up until she dies and he fails so hard at getting over her, he cheats on a later girlfriend with a doppelganger of said dead wife. He’s a father with a kid who he gives his all, but struggles to do right by whether it’s leaving him behind to go to war or dating the doppelganger of his dead mother and causing him to run away to live with his grandparents.
Buck and Eddie both fail at typical heterosexual relationships time and time again. They even fail at heterosexual relationships established by disasters and emergencies. Buck meets his first girlfriend after Abby, Ali, when he and Eddie rescue her from the massive earthquake that starts off the second season of the show, which is also when Eddie is introduced as a character. Eddie even helps Buck establish this heterosexual relationship by playing a crucial role in Ali’s rescue. Later in the show, Eddie starts a relationship with a woman named Marisol after meeting her on a call, but this relationship is the one that ends with Marisol discovering Eddie cheating on her with Kim, a woman who is a ringer for his dead wife. Eddie’s attempts to reestablish his first normative relationship with a copy of his wife are what, in the end, doom this new one.
But then we’ve got Buck and Eddie’s relationship with one another. They are two characters who start out straight, who have multiple normative and heterosexual relationships, but also establish a growing intimacy with one another the as the show goes on. Buck and Eddie are thrown into a natural disaster basically immediately upon meeting in the first episodes of season two when a massive earthquake rocks the city. From there, it’s just disaster after disaster for them, both big and small, and each one serves to add a new layer to their relationship that goes beyond typical friendships. We see Eddie trying to cheer Buck up after a serious injury prevents him from working as a firefighter for an extended period of time by having Buck watch his son, Christopher, only for it to end in disaster when Buck and Christopher are trapped in a tsunami that forces them to fight to survive. Rather than push Buck and Eddie apart like Buck expects due to feeling like he failed to keep Christopher safe, it brings them closer together, Eddie explicitly stating that there is no one he trusts with his son more than Buck. Later on, when Eddie nearly dies in a well collapse (during which Buck throws himself on the ground and tries to dig Eddie out by hand while screaming his name), Eddie realizes how dangerous his job is in terms of being a single father and has his will adjusted to name Buck as Christopher’s legal guardian, something we learn later after another emergency results in Eddie getting shot and saved—successfully this time (as compared to his fruitless digging at the mud)—by Buck. When Buck is struck by lightning, we see Eddie in the position of screaming Buck’s name and doing something frantic and fruitless to try and save him, specifically trying to haul his deadweight back up onto the extended ladder of the ladder truck by only a single rope, something he fails to do. He then goes on to smuggle Christopher in to see Buck while he’s in a coma after the lightning strike, despite the hospital rules about no kids being allowed in that ward.
Have you spotted it yet, the other crucial factor in Buck and Eddie’s relationship? Christopher. Christopher has been a central part of their story right from the start, with Eddie worrying about him during that first earthquake and Buck assuring him that Chris is fine (and then driving Eddie to pick Chris up from school after they are done working). He’s at the center of the tsunami plot, the center of Eddie’s motivation to survive being trapped in the well and the actions he takes after it to name Buck as Christopher’s guardian, and when Eddie is shot Buck’s first reaction after getting Eddie to the hospital—and while still covered in Eddie’s blood—is that he has to get to Christopher and take care of him while Eddie can’t. Eddie, meanwhile, turns to Buck over and over again for help with Christopher, from babysitting to intervening when he and Christopher aren’t getting along. Christopher is just as invested in his relationship with Buck, going so far as to run away to his apartment at one point, and to call Buck for help during Eddie’s PTSD induced breakdown in which he destroys his bedroom. All of these moments are canon, no fandom speculative interpretation involved.
Were the show to take the leap and start a romantic relationship between Buck and Eddie, the fact that they are firefighters would add another layer of relative uniqueness. Big screen disaster media has gone through a lot of cycles over the decades, with the 1990s seeing the campiest cycle, but even in the 90s the depictions of queer characters weren’t favorable, and the queer characters never got to be the heroes. Ken Feil expertly examines this issue in his book, Dying for a Laugh: Disaster Movies and the Camp Imagination, stating:
"When 1990s disaster movies incorporate queerness, they associate it with disaster. ‘Queer’ characters tend to die, prove ineffectual in the resolution of the disaster, or … turn straight prior to the conclusion. In every case, it is easy to interpret the construction of queerness in opposition to heroism, and heroism remains entrenched in the connotations of heterosexual romance and family values. In these respects, the queer camp of the 1990s disaster movies falls all too easily into the topical right-wing arguments linking homosexuality with Armageddon and the ‘end-times.’ … At best, these 1990s disaster films appear to be defending the masculine vigor of their heroes through campy depictions of queers.” (Feil 2005, xxiv)
From the 90s, we get chucked into a much different cycle for disaster movies, the post-9/11 cycle where campy romps that poke fun at themselves and at American institutions are seen as taboo. The only acceptable disaster movies must be patriotic to their core, an American flag on every door and strong-jawed heroes chasing down the (frequently POC and/or queer coded) bad guys, like The Sum of All Fears, which comes out very shortly after 9/11. It is gauche to revel in destruction, to enjoy seeing Manhattan crumble or Los Angeles sink…for about three years, anyway. When Manhattan again gets destroyed in The Day After Tomorrow, several years after 9/11, many critics and viewers call it cathartic, a return to normalcy in entertainment (Feil 2005). Since then, there hasn’t really been a defined cycle of disaster movies, just a scattering of them throughout the years. But the patriotic theme, the heavy focus on traditional institutions like the military and the government as infallible (or at least, only so fallible as to be easily fixed by the typically white male hero), has stuck around, even if it isn’t as dominate.
Which brings us around, once again, to Buck and Eddie, and the chance of a romantic relationship between them being something unique. While there have been a decent amount of queer characters in small screen disaster shows, including on 911, Buck and Eddie would help round out that group even more during a time when the United States is in political turmoil egged on by an abundance of overzealous, conservative patriotism. Eddie, while he is Mexican American and not the typical White American overly patriotic action disaster movies like to uphold, is a veteran, a man who fought in the very wars that 9/11 spawned. He’s been the hero, he’s got the medals, he’s fought the bad guys and won, and it broke him, broke his relationship with his wife and, in many ways, with his son. Buck, meanwhile, spent his late teens and early twenties wandering aimlessly around the world until he finally found a home in firefighting, a system not incredibly dissimilar to the military. He’s also been the hero, got the medals, and fought the bad guys and won. He may not have been broken by it in quite the same way as Eddie has, but that doesn’t mean he’s come away unscathed, his abandonment issues are more than enough proof of that. If 911 does make Buck and Eddie a couple, it can take that patriotic theme that 9/11 spawned in disaster media and turn it on its head not just because it is a queer relationship, but because it is a queer relationship between two men that are the very definition of typical action heroes.
So where does that leave us? Well, it leaves us with a show that has leaned into atypical relationships—both queer and otherwise—right from the start, and two men who have failed time and time again at normative heterosexual relationships, even ones established by disasters and emergencies, while at the same time building a strong bond with one another, a bond that includes a child at the center of it all. Could that bond stay platonic? Sure. But I’d argue that, if it doesn’t, 911 will have the chance to do something brand new in the disaster genre, something that will allow the show to stand in the history books: take two men who started out as typically straight characters, who stayed that way for an extended period of time, and use a disaster to bring them together in a queer relationship, rather than pull them apart and place them back in normative, heterosexual relationships.
Will Buck and Eddie go canon? I don’t know. But, at the end of the day, even if they don’t, we’ll always have the fanfiction.
[1] Fanfiction is a term describing written works of fiction using characters from already established media put into non-canonical scenarios, frequently featuring relationships not seen in the original media. For example, a story where Han Solo owns a flower shop next door to a tattoo shop owned by Lando Calrissian, and they strike up a romance. These stories are shared for free among fans.
[2] This is not to say that Bobby’s relationship with Athena is unacceptable or abnormal, merely that it is undoubtedly outside the traditional conservative norm for a variety of reasons, especially when it comes to disaster media specifically.
References
Babick, Lisa. 2024. From Buddies to Buddie: Why TV Keeps Turning Friendships Into Love Stories. December 2. https://www.tvfanatic.com/buddies-to-buddie-911-tv-turns-friends-to-lovers/.
1996. Twister. Directed by Jan de Bont.
1997. Dante's Peak. Directed by Roger Donaldson.
2009. 2012. Directed by Roland Emmerich.
1996. Independence Day. Directed by Roland Emmerich.
Feil, Ken. 2005. Dying for a laugh: disaster movies and the camp imagination. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press.
1933. Deluge. Directed by Felix E. Feist.
1997. Volcano. Directed by Mick Jackson.
Kakoudaki, Despina. 2011. "Representing Politics in Disaster Films." International Journal of Media & Cultural Politics 349-356.
McKinnon, Scott. 2017. "Straight disasters: the (hetero)sexual geographies of Hollywood disaster movies." GeoJournal 503-515.
2024. Starsky & Hutch. December 8. https://archiveofourown.org/tags/Starsky%20*a*%20Hutch/works.
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