Warning: Spoilers for 9-1-1 season eight.
When it comes to the stages of grief, I don’t see the 9-1-1 fandom moving past anger over Peter Krause’s untimely exit any time soon.
During last night’s episode of 9-1-1, fans watched the Fire Fam—for lack of a better word—scurry to find a cure for a fast-moving, deadly strain of Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever that had infected firefighter Howard “Chimney” Han (Kenneth Choi) after a laboratory explosion. All the while, it was Captain Bobby Nash (Peter Krause) we really had to worry about.
After Bobby’s own wife, police sergeant Athen Grant (Angela Bassett), painstakingly tracked down a single dose of the antiviral concocted by a megalomaniac scientist seeking a fast pass to a Nobel Prize, we learned the fire captain knowingly kept his own exposure a secret to save Chim and convince the government to free the other two firefighters trapped with them.
In what appears to be his final moments of martyrdom, Bobby proceeds to traumatize his pseudo-son Evan “Buck” Buckley (Oliver Stark) by sealing himself back into the lab and removing his mask, revealing his oxygen line had been compromised during the explosion. He then says goodbye to his wife, telling her, “This isn’t how I wanted to leave you. I’m not choosing to leave you.” (I didn’t really hear the rest because I was crying and refuse to watch it again. Sue me.)
It turns out that quote might as well have come from Peter Krause, who did not—as one might assume—choose to leave the long-running procedural, therefore forcing the show’s creator to choose between a soft exit and killing off a beloved character. Though Krause “completely understood” the storyline (you can read his actual message to fans here), creator Tim Minear told TV Line the decision was purely creative.