9-1-1 Recap: Amber Alert

Multiple personalities! Can you believe we made it 116 episodes into 9-1-1 before a major story line that hinges on dissociative identity disorder? I feel so naïve for not immediately clocking what was going on when Detective Braeburn kidnapped Maddie at the end of last week’s episode. But the reveal is high camp, and the subsequent hour makes “Voices” a thrilling conclusion to this two-parter. Here’s hoping the back half of season eight continues to exceed expectations; I’m ready to forget my disappointment over the not-so-buzzworthy bee-nado.

Maddie is the first to discover the truth about Amber — I think we can refer to Braeburn by her first name since Maddie does so repeatedly to form a personal connection — and her unusual condition. When our favorite 911 dispatcher (sorry, Josh) wakes up, she is chained up in a basement. Her captor is Amber, or at least some version of Amber: The detective is in the midst of a heated argument with herself. There’s a mean Amber and a nice Amber, and only the former wanted to kidnap anyone. But while Maddie can’t quite make sense of the multiple personalities, she does get some answers about the Bullock case, namely that Amber was indeed behind everything, including the 911 calls. Amber was hoping she’d be able to convince Maddie the whole thing was a hoax, but when Maddie showed up at her office with evidence, Amber had no choice but to pin it all on Bullock. And though Bullock’s faked suicide should have tied things up nicely, Amber is worried Maddie might have figured out something was off — like, I don’t know, the extremely fake voice on the 911 calls — and alerted Athena. She didn’t, but Amber’s not feeling particularly trustworthy, and really, who can blame her?

Back at Maddie’s home, Chimney returns from Eddie’s going-away dinner with some very delicious-sounding leftovers when he realizes his wife is missing. His friends arrive to help, but Chim is a mess. Given that Maddie once ran away in the midst of overwhelming postpartum depression, it’s only natural to assume she might be responsible for her own disappearance. But as Hen points out, if Maddie is having a mental-health crisis, they need to find and help her. Chimney files a missing-person report, and wouldn’t you know it: Everyone’s favorite bloodhound detective, Amber Braeburn, is on hand to help! Abigail Spencer does some really impressive work in this episode, and the way she plays the scene where she plies Chimney for information is particularly good — you can believe he doesn’t know that she’s evil, but it’s right there beneath the surface. And she does get some helpful intel, like that Maddie is pregnant and that she was previously suicidal. Athena, meanwhile, isn’t quite able to sniff out the rat right in front of them, though she knows that something is up. The timing of Maddie’s disappearance is certainly suspect, even if Bullock couldn’t have been responsible. So what if he had an accomplice?

But Maddie isn’t waiting for rescue. She’s trying desperately to escape and honestly making pretty good progress before her kidnapper shows up again. Unfortunately, Amber has no time to waste and a pretty plausible explanation for Maddie showing up dead. She readies the fentanyl needle — surely this would come up in an autopsy, along with Maddie’s other injuries, but I’m not the criminal mastermind, so let me shut up — and is about to strike when Maddie begs to write a goodbye letter to Jee-Yun. Amber thinks a suicide note could be helpful for both of them, so she acquiesces. Reading Maddie’s words unlocks the softer side of the serial killer, however, and the nice voice comes out again. His name is Peter, and he’s really very upset about this whole thing. At the same time, he’s not thrilled about the way Maddie tried to talk him into killing himself when he called 911. (It’s unclear to me how much of the Bullock plot was Amber’s careful planning and how much was her mental illness, but logic is overrated.) Maddie begs for another chance to help him, and Peter (or maybe we’re back to Amber) agrees. Jennifer Love Hewitt continues to give her all in these scenes, which goes a long way toward balancing the inherent silliness of this story line.

Don’t worry, Athena is also Athena-ing. She meets up with Detective Romero to review the Bullock autopsy. The pathologist pretty instantly confirms that Bullock only appears to have killed himself — his finger was on the trigger of the gun, but there was also a near-lethal amount of chloroform in his system. (Amber must buy that stuff in bulk.) The two detectives decide to see if Jayna can tell them anything about a possible accomplice. From her hospital bed, she says she doesn’t remember anything and then casually reveals that Bullock was arguing with an adult woman at some point during Jayna’s captivity. (With all due respect to her trauma, how did this not come up beforehand?) Athena and Romero naturally assume the woman is Isabelle, Bullock’s ex, but she’s got an alibi that checks out. They’re at a dead end, so Athena suggests they look for other weepy 911 calls with victims who match Jayna’s profile. And they’ll need to act fast because, in addition to Maddie being missing, Amber has just gone ahead and kidnapped Jayna again. Sorry, Jayna.

There’s one call in particular that could be of real use — a victim who escaped her captor. Because she was underage at the time, her name is redacted. Athena and Romero head over to dispatch, where Josh helpfully provides the audio from the 25-year-old call. The girl shares that she escaped a man who chloroformed and kidnapped her. Her name, of course, is Amber Braeburn. Athena instantly figures it out: Amber murdered those other girls and kidnapped Jayna, using Bullock as a patsy. (Can I say that personally, I’m still confused? Traumatic events can induce dissociative identity disorder, but at what point did Amber’s bifurcated personality turn her into a monster? And who is Peter, exactly? None of this is ever explained, so feel free to theorize wildly, I guess.) Before Athena and Romero head over to Amber’s, Josh reveals that Chimney is already on his way there. After Mara told Chim that Jee-Yun heard a crying voice in their home the night Maddie disappeared, he realized Maddie didn’t leave on her own. And he’s not going to wait for Amber to pick up her phone to share this important update.

Amber is too busy to be fielding calls. She takes Jayna down to the basement to offer Maddie a chance to successfully intervene, but I’ll be honest, I don’t think Amber’s giving Maddie a fair shot. In fact, she’s about to kill Jayna and give Maddie even more trauma to process when Chimney rings the doorbell. Amber chloroforms Jayna again (she really loves that stuff) and prepares to head upstairs. Maddie — who had secretly gotten out of her restraints and then been stymied by the locked basement door — uses the moment to strike, attacking Amber from behind. It’s a valiant effort, though sadly not a successful one. Amber is mostly annoyed by the interruption, and she casually slits Maddie’s throat with her knife. The moment is so sudden and shocking that I made an actual noise not dissimilar to Maddie’s as she realizes she’s bleeding out.

Amber is pretty calm and collected talking to Chimney upstairs — and frankly, so is Chim when Athena calls him and tells him that Amber is the kidnapper. But Amber is savvy enough to know that Athena must be on to her at this point, so she points a gun at Chimney. Just then, a still heavily bleeding Maddie shows up to knock Amber out with a hammer. Kudos to this show for going full slasher-movie climax here. However, those of us who have watched the Scream movies (also featuring a voice changer) know the killer never stays down for long. While Chimney puts pressure on Maddie’s throat, Amber rises behind him, prepared to fire a kill shot. At that exact moment, Athena shows up and shoots Amber dead. Again, this is really a lot of carnage, even by 9-1-1 standards.

Maddie survives, of course, as does her unborn child. I don’t think I could have taken any more trauma. But “Voices” still ends on a somber note. Eddie is leaving — for real this time. Buck has helped him pack up the U-Haul, and now all that’s left is a drawn-out goodbye. I’m not going to say this scene is designed to antagonize shippers; I’ll simply let Eddie do the talking. “I know this whole thing between us has been messy and hard,” he tells Buck. “I hope you know you do matter to me.” They take a long beat looking at each other before they embrace — to hug, obviously. (Once again, the subtext is there if you want it and not there if you don’t; my only point is that the writers are not unaware.) Eddie says he and Christopher are only a call away before he drives off with Buck’s freshly baked chocolate-chip protein cookies. Buck is clearly devastated, and, well, so am I.

Call Log

• Okay, yes, I’m back to believing that Eddie is not gone for good. Who knows what horrors await him and Christopher in El Paso that send them running back to Los Angeles?

• Abigail Spencer really did do a fantastic job making Amber Braeburn a compelling character. But am I the only one who wanted a little more there in terms of the denouement? As I said above, I still have a lot of questions about her heel turn, and I was kind of expecting a Psycho-style exposition dump at the end.

• I’m glad that Amber (or, I guess, Peter) mentioned how long it takes someone to bleed out when they have their throat slit in last week’s episode. That made me much more hopeful about Maddie’s survival. Still a very shocking moment, though!

• Speaking of Maddie and her survival skills, I could not figure out how she used a soda can to get out of her shackles, but I would take any class she offered.

• Do we think anyone ate the leftover steak frites and chocolate tart from Eddie’s going-away dinner? Is it still in the fridge? I really can’t stop thinking about this.