'9-1-1' Officially Confirms Its Season 10 Buck Replacement

Now, 10 seasons in, one of the most rewarding parts of 9-1-1 has been Buck’s (Oliver Stark) character arc. Buck started out in the pilot episode as a probie with unearned confidence who had a disregard for the rules and a lack of impulse control. Through his personal relationships with the rest of the 118 and his experiences on the job, though, Buck grew into a self-assured firefighter who approaches his job with care.

9-1-1 is officially two episodes into Season 10, and already, the show has given another character the opportunity this season to step into the space that Buck occupied as a probie in Season 1. This season, 9-1-1 has been making clear parallels between Harry Grant (Elijah M. Cooper) now and Buck when he was a probie. In Episode 2, “Fire in the Hole,” Harry experiences his first loss on the job, marking a turning point for his character that will likely follow him the way that Buck’s first loss back in Season 1 did for him.

‘9-1-1’ Season 10 Is Taking Harry on a Similar Arc as Season 1 Buck

Harry grew up in a family of first responders, and his experience of joining the 118 was already directly influenced by the loss of Bobby (Peter Krause), so he came into the job with a healthy respect for it. That said, much of Harry’s experience at the 118 in Season 9 was about trying to convince Chimney (Kenneth Choi) to give him more to do. He was initially disappointed that he couldn’t just jump into the action, but he has since been determined to work his way up. In the Season 10 premiere, Harry pulled a classic Buck move by doing something very reckless on the job. Harry’s weight was keeping the 118 from being able to pull a victim out of the sinkhole, so he jumped off, putting himself in direct danger.

Your answers have pointed to one fictional hospital above all others. This is the ward your instincts, your temperament, and your particular brand of dysfunction were built for.

You are built for the most unsparing version of emergency medicine television has ever shown — one that puts you inside a single fifteen-hour shift and doesn’t let you look away.

• You need your work to be real, not romanticised — meaning over drama, honesty over aesthetics.
• You find purpose inside the work itself, not in the chaos surrounding it.
• You’ve made peace with the fact that this job takes from you constantly, and gives back in ways that are harder to name.
• Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center demands exactly that kind of person — and you would not want to be anywhere else.

You are the person who keeps the whole floor running — not the most brilliant in the room, but possibly the most essential.

• You show up, do the work, absorb the losses, and come back the next day without needing the job to be anything other than what it is.
• You care about patients as individual human beings, not as cases to solve or dramas to live through.
• You believe in the system even when it fails you — and you understand that emergency medicine is about holding the line just long enough.
• ER is television about endurance. You have it.

You came to medicine with your whole self — your ambition, your emotions, your relationships, your history — and you have never quite managed to leave any of it at the door.

• You feel things fully and form deep attachments to the people you work with.
• Your personal and professional lives are permanently, chaotically entangled — and that entanglement drives both your greatest disasters and your most remarkable saves.
• You understand that extraordinary medicine often happens at the intersection of clinical skill and profound human connection.
• It’s messy at Grey Sloan. You would not have it any other way.

You are drawn to the problem above everything else — the symptom that doesn’t fit, the diagnosis hiding underneath the obvious one.

• You’re not primarily motivated by the patient as a person — though you are capable of caring, even if you’d deny it.
• You work best when the stakes are highest and the standard answer is wrong.
• Princeton-Plainsboro exists to house one extraordinary, impossible mind — and everyone around that mind is there because they’re smart enough to keep up.
• The only way forward here is to think harder than everyone else in the room. That is exactly what you do.

You understand that medicine is tragic and absurd in almost equal measure — and that the only sane response is to hold both of those things at the same time.

• You are warm, self-aware, and funnier than most people in your field.
• You use humour to get through terrible moments — and at Sacred Heart, that’s not a flaw, it’s a survival strategy.
• You lean on the people around you and let them lean back. The laughter and the grief are genuinely inseparable here.
• Scrubs is a show about learning to become someone worthy of the job. You are still very much in the middle of that process — which is exactly right.

Everyone at the 118 has pulled a move like this at some point, but this was particularly risky, even though it ultimately worked. Still, 9-1-1 seems to be setting up an arc for Harry this season where he will determine the kind of firefighter that he wants to be. It’s a different arc than the ones that Eddie (Ryan Guzman) and Ravi (Anirudh Pisharody) went through as probies, but it perfectly mirrors Buck’s Season 1 arc. As Harry is slowly given more to do on the job, this naturally comes with finding balance when dealing with the dangers of the job, which comes into play when Harry loses his first person this week.

‘9-1-1’ Season 10, Episode 2 Is a Turning Point for Harry Like Season 2, Episode 2 Was for Buck

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In Part 2 of Season 10’s opening volcano emergency, Hen (Aisha Hinds) and Harry rush to the home of a woman whose smartwatch alerted 9-1-1 that she was hurt. The woman, Leona, was in her home when a large volcanic bomb went through the ceiling and landed on her abdomen. Leona has been a doctor for 16 years, and she quickly realizes that she isn’t going to live. Leona tells Hen to leave her behind and join the rest of the 118 at the site of the eruption. Harry is unwilling to accept that Leona is dying, but ultimately, he tells Hen to go while he stays back alone. After Hen leaves, Harry just sits with Leona and keeps her comfortable, while she reflects on the first time she lost a patient.

It’s a heartbreaking scene, as Leona tries to comfort Harry while she’s dying, because she knows what it’s like to be unable to save someone on the job. When Leona finally stops holding back her emotions, Harry cries with her before she dies. Every first responder on 9-1-1 has this defining moment in their career, where, for the first time on the job, they couldn’t save someone, but this is particularly reminiscent of Buck’s first loss on the job in Season 1, Episode 2, “Let Go.” On that call, the 118 responded to an emergency on a roller coaster where one cart wasn’t secured. One of the passengers (Caleb Castille) died, while the deceased’s friend, Devon (Sean Liang), was left holding on in midair. Buck tried to save Devon, but Devon let go and died, and this loss was a defining moment for Buck. Now, Leona’s death will follow Harry for the rest of his job, and this will be the turning point that defines his career.

9-1-1 airs Thursdays at 8:00 P.M. EST on ABC.