Why '9-1-1' brought back Eddie's wife Shannon Diaz

Warning: This article contains spoilers 9-1-1 Season 7, Episode 1, “Abandoned Ships”.

when 9-1-1 Co-creator and director Tim Minear promised some returning faces in Season 7 of the first responder drama, but a dead husband may not have been what fans were thinking.

But in the second half of Thursday's first episode, Shannon Diaz (Devin Kelly) — Eddie's (Ryan Guzman) estranged wife, who died from injuries sustained in a car accident in the penultimate episode of Season 2 — appears as her son Christopher (Gavin ). McHugh is reading a letter she wrote him years ago.

Minyar says Entertainment Weekly He enjoyed the opportunity to bring guest star Kelly back to the show (something that had not happened since the Eddie Flashback episode midway through Season 3), but he also felt it was an opportunity to show Christopher's evolution over the past four seasons.

“As I was going back into the season and seeing how much Christopher had grown, it occurred to me that in the early days of Christopher's story, he was very young. At one point he asks Santa Claus to bring his mother back,” Menear tells EW. “So he was very naive and not blaming him.” Shannon on anything. He just wanted to see his mother again. Now, I feel like he's at an age where not only has he realized that she left of her own volition, but now it's time for him to wrestle with this question of why she left.

“I always stand by my characters, so I wanted to justify Shannon,” Kelly says of why she was excited to return. “Giving the audience this little nugget that people may not have seen before made me feel a little vindicated.

“The last I saw Gavin was right before the pandemic, and he's grown up so much,” she adds of her reunion with her on-screen son. “At the risk of sounding like a very stereotypical mum, he's just come into his own. It was so lovely to go back to that mode and say: 'Wow, the time has flown by.'” “He's so funny and sweet. We reconnected immediately. Ryan was on set that day too, so we had a very nice family reunion. “I was taking pictures, and it was nice to reconnect with Gavin's birth mother because I haven't spoken to her in a while.”

Shannon's return also allowed Minear to explore Christopher's grief: “Sometimes we feel abandoned when people we love die. So I think he feels doubly abandoned, and I think he's mixing those two things up. He's still dealing with his mother's death, but now he's come to An age where he understands the losses he has incurred.

Menear felt it was especially important to explore this with the action-adventure series moving from Fox to ABC for the new season.

“It's a question of joining a new network, starting a new season after being off the air for so long: ‘What are the important things that define these characters?’ And for me, that not only defined where Christopher was at, but it allowed me to step forward in a bold way where I felt… , “Oh, this is going to be a fun little story about Christopher being a gamer and having a lot of girls.” At stake, when really what it's about is he's going to take on the trauma that he had as a kid, and is that going to be something that manifests as he gets older, and what is His relationship with women?

The co-creator says he chose to highlight this story in the premiere because it also provided insight into Eddie and his best friend Buck (Oliver Stark).

“That also defines Eddie, because Christopher defines Eddie, and protecting his son and raising him and making sure his son is okay and safe and healthy and happy is what really defines Eddie,” he says. 'And of course Buck feels a familial duty to these two men. He feels like a second uncle or father to Christopher,' she thought [it was] A great way to reveal the dynamics of that trinity.

But don't worry, as Eddie's smile as he sees Christopher flip Shannon's photo back upright on his desk indicates, we're not in Eddie's tough season.

“I think we're going to see Eddie smile a lot,” Guzman told EW about his character in Season 7. “We'll see Eddie less crying and madness and less drama and trauma that Eddie went through. We'll see more of him around the corner and showing his funny side.”

But will we see Shannon appear more as the series continues?

“Maybe Shannon can go to rest in peace, or maybe she can come back for another trial,” Kelly says. “We don't know, but I'm ready for all of it.”

9-1-1 It airs Thursdays at 8pm ET/PT on ABC.

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