‘9-1-1’ & ‘Lone Star’ Return With Maddie in Labor and Judd and Grace Fighting for Their Lives (VIDEO)

Meredith Jacobs March 30, 2021, 4:15 pm

911 Season 4 Episode 9 Maddie Chimney Labor Birth — Fox

When Fox’s first responder dramas, 9-1-1 and its spinoff Lone Star, return on Monday, April 19, their own are at the center of life and death situations.

First, beginning at 8/7c, 9-1-1‘s 118 race to save lives after a driver, who’d been drinking (as Angela Bassett‘s Athena discovers on scene), causes a deadly pile-up by going the wrong way on the freeway. And they won’t be enough; Captain Bobby Nash (Peter Krause) calls in for more units. But, the logline warns, they’ll be “shocked to discover who one of the injured is.”

'9-1-1' & 'Lone Star' in 2021: The 7 Most Romantic Moments So Far (VIDEO)

Also in the spring premiere, “Blindsided,” Maddie (Jennifer Love Hewitt) goes into labor, and as showrunner (for both shows) Tim Minear told TV Insider, it “certainly won’t be conventional. That’s not how we roll on 9-1-1.”

Speaking of children, Hen (Aisha Hinds) and Karen (Tracie Thoms) must say goodbye when their foster daughter Nia returns to her mother.

“They’ve become very attached to that little girl,” Minear said. “It’s going to rock their world in a pretty significant way, but Hen and Karen understand the risks of being foster parents and it’s not going to dim their resolve to continue doing that sort of thing.”

Then at 9/8c, the action heads to Austin and the immediate aftermath of firefighter Judd (Jim Parrack) and dispatcher Grace’s (Sierra McClain) car accident. The 126 gathers at the hospital, where Captain Owen Strand (Rob Lowe) grimly tells the others they were in the water “too long.” What worries us the most is the shot of Grace on a vent.

But hey, at least we’re finally getting flashbacks, both to an earlier childhood trauma of Judd’s and to how he and Grace met and fell in love, as glimpsed in the trailer below. And as Minear shared, paramedic captain Tommy Vega (Gina Torres), who introduced the two, will be in those flashbacks.