Warning: spoilers ahead for the Season 7 premiere of 9-1-1 on ABC, called "Abandon 'Ships."
9-1-1 has officially arrived on ABC after spending the first six seasons on Fox, and the debut episode in the 2024 TV schedule wasted no time in setting Bobby (Peter Krause) and Athena (Angela Bassett) up for disaster. They thought they'd left the crises behind them in L.A. when they left for their long-awaited honeymoon cruise, only for them to stumble onto an emergency that will quite literally turn them upside down. "Abandon 'Ships" ended on a cliffhanger for the duo, and Krause opened up about what was particularly scary about filming the Season 7 premiere.
While the promos for Season 7 went heavy on shots of mayhem on the cruise ship and the ship itself capsizing, the majority of "Abandon 'Ships" for Bobby and Athena was more of a romcom than a thriller. She wasn't sure what she and her husband really had to talk about without their chaotic work, and her solution was to avoid alone time with him, to the point that he thought she was grasping at straws when she began to suspect that one of their fellow passengers killed his wife.
Eventually, they discovered that something sketchy truly was happening, and the episode ended with pirates boarding the ship with a tropical storm heading toward their position. All signs point towards disaster that could rival the scale of the tsunami from a few seasons ago. After Peter Krause spoke about spending days soaking wet for the three-part cruise disaster, he shared what it was like to work with Angela Bassett on the cruise to start Season 7:
We had a great time. We didn't know we were going to be dancing with each other in a ballroom. That was added rather at the last minute, so we had to learn. I think it was foxtrot. I'm not sure, but some quick steps. And I think that was probably the most terrified I was during the filming of this sequence of three episodes, getting that dance down so it would look good. And we filmed that the same day that we filmed a scene where we discovered that Norman and Lola Peterson are aboard our ship. And that was a fun scene to play with Angela. That was a little bit more of the rom com stuff when they sit at our table and we discover that they're on the cruise with us.
It's safe to say that the stakes are going to get a whole lot higher and the cruise is about to get a whole lot more dangerous for Bobby and Athena as Season 7 continues, but foxtrotting with Angela Bassett was what had Peter Krause "most terrified" while filming! I would say that it paid off, and fans got to see some glitz and glamor for the couple before everything started to fall apart.
After nearly 100 episodes of 9-1-1, the actor has done plenty of more harrowing stunts, so is it harder for him to learn elaborate stuntwork or the dance? I asked Krause that very question, and he shared:
For me, it was quickly learning the dance steps for the dance scene. I'm more comfortable slipping on a harness or moving through a bunch of water.
The stuntwork is safe for Peter Krause on set as an actor, so it's not hard to understand why dancing would present a scary new challenge for him. Bobby handled himself just fine and Athena was enjoying herself, so the two actors clearly managed to figure out the steps despite their time crunch.
The episode ended with the pirates boarding the cruise ship, so 9-1-1 hasn't revealed Bobby and Athena in the capsized ship just yet aside from a quick flash-forward early on. That quick scene was enough to confirm that the show hasn't lost its touch with water stunts since the tsunami arc for Oliver Stark as Buck. Krause shared what it was like for him and Angela Bassett to be the ones in the watery stunts this time around:
It was new for Angela. For me, I'd done it in the tsunami episodes, but also the plane crash episode. I've been living in a wetsuit for a few times on this show. Fortunately, this time around, the water was warmer. Certainly warmer than it was in the plane crash. Those episodes were really tough to film. Much colder weather. We were outside, we weren't enclosed, less control. In terms of the waterworks, this was easier, even though we were in much more cramped spaces for the ship sets. That made it difficult. There wasn't a lot of space to move. There was frequent difficulty during the shoot just in terms of space because we're going down these narrow corridors aboard the ship and things like that. So tight quarters made it difficult.
All things considered, the three-part premiere event seems to be channeling The Poseidon Adventure more than anything else that 9-1-1 has done before, although the classic Gene Hackman film didn't exactly include international pirates searching for Bitcoin. Fans will get to see a lot more of the ship in the coming episodes, and Peter Krause previewed how the show actually recreated the cruise ship disaster without an actual cruise:
We were never on a cruise ship but we were in multiple ship locations. There was a battleship, we used part of that. There was a part of a large ship that we used, and then some set pieces that we needed in terms of when we were being submerged, when the water was rising, when the ship was flipping over.
All signs point toward a situation that has to get a lot worse before it can get better, although the promo for the second episode of Season 7 – called "Rock the Boat" – proves that Bobby and Athena's friends back on dry land will start to figure out that something's wrong. Check out the preview now:
See what's next for Bobby and Athena now that 9-1-1 has arrived on ABC with new episodes on Thursdays at 8 p.m. ET. You can also revisit earlier seasons of the hit show streaming with a Hulu subscription. 9-1-1 opens a big night of action for the network, followed by Grey's Anatomy at 9 p.m. and Station 19 at 10 p.m.
