Your Official ‘Station 19’ Recap: Season 7, Episode 5

Oh, come on. It’s Station 19’s swan song — you knew they weren’t going out without a visit to Seattle’s most recognizable landmark, the Space Needle. Well, perhaps “visit” is a bit misleading. Most people who visit the Space Needle don’t rappel down the side of it in order to save four trapped people during a power outage. Or do they? Maybe it’s part of some secret VIP tour or something. Very cool, if true.

Rappelling down the side of the Space Needle is, however, definitely where we find our first responders from Station 19 in “My Way,” which feels like a mirror image of last week’s gutting episode, “Trouble Man.” In the latter episode, Station 19 faced an onslaught of calls, each more difficult — on many levels — than the last, but most of the action happened off-screen; we were simply left with the aftermath. “My Way,” however, focuses almost exclusively on one call that we stay with for the majority of the episode. The Space Needle call is no less harrowing, though. And to top it all off, the firehouse remains completely out of whack following the previous shift. And if there’s ever a time you need to be a cohesive team, it’s probably when you’re tackling a disaster at a historic landmark.

The good news here is that (most of) the team end up in a much better place than where we left them in the previous episode. Let’s talk about it.
The world is watching — no big deal
Andy, Andy, Andy. She’s had a tough run as captain of 19 thus far, and with the tension still ratcheted up from the shift from hell — Travis and Ben still fighting about Ben’s back? It is legitimately painful — the last thing Andy feels like doing at the moment is having her official captain pinning ceremony. Holding back tears, she tells Maya that she thought she’d be better at this, that “in a single shift, [she] destroyed this team.” Maya tells Andy to stop throwing herself a pity party. Everyone needs a Get a Grip friend, and for Andy, that’s Maya, and we love that for them. But just as the ceremony is about to start, Station 19 is called to a fire at the little ol’ Space Needle. Oh, and when I say “is called to,” let us not forget that the newest dispatcher for the Seattle Fire Department has started his first shift, and that person is none other than Jack Gibson. Listen to those dulcet tones inform firefighters of the absolute horrific disasters that await them! Jack has landed on his feet!

Back to the action: The last call Andy ran incident command for did not turn out well, we know this, and now, as the lead at an accident that will surely be national news, it’s time for Andy to redeem herself. No pressure or anything. Guess what? She’s pretty incredible! It’s not an easy scene for obvious reasons, and she has to split her team up to cover both locating and putting out the fire and rescuing the four people trapped in the elevator. While most of the team are dealing with the elevator (more on that below), Ben and Robert are on fire duty. Things go downhill fast: The two of them wind up trapped by the fire, their hose runs out of water, and they are running out of oxygen. For a few minutes, it’s easy to believe the worst. The two men certainly do: Robert whips out the ring he’s been carrying around to propose to Natasha, and Ben tells Dispatcher Jack to take care of Pru and to pass along a message to Miranda. They think they’re going to die! This is really it!

But not on Andy’s watch. As if she doesn’t have enough to do running the show here, she tells Natasha that she knows there are fire-extinguisher spheres at the power substation nearby where a surge caused a fire and this big blackout. She runs over there to get the spheres — each sphere can douse a full room on fire — and then books it up the stairs of the Space Needle to get to her firefighters. Eventually, they get Ben and Robert oxygen and get them the hell out of that Space Needle. I’m no expert or anything, but I’d call that all a major win for Captain Andy Herrera.

Okay, well, at least the Greater Seattle Area is watching
Not everything ends on a positive note, though. The other major aspect of this call is the aforementioned elevator. Vic is still not herself, and when Natasha gives her the news that Crisis One is going to be cut from the department’s budget, she sinks even deeper into this dark hole that seems to be consuming her as of late. Still, she does rappel down the side of the Space Needle in order to open the doors to that stuck elevator. She is a professional!