Nerding Day: Beenado🌭

About three months ago I kicked in the doors of the Hotdog office and announced to the room. “I will be covering the Beenado. Nobody else even looks at the Beenado. IT’S MINE.” Usually, contested articles are decided by Kumite, but weirdly, no one fought me for 9-1-1’s three-episode season 8 premiere event. Weird, but ok.

If you’re unaware of the show 9-1-1, you, like me a mere matter of months ago, are in the minority. The season eight premiere was heavily promoted by the network. They had billboards all over Chicago that I assumed were an elaborate bit. The show was created by Ryan Murphy as sort of a Law & Order meets ER with a pinch of MacGyver. The main characters include a 911 operator, played by Jenniffer Love Hewitt, LAPD police officer Athena Grant, played by Angela Bassett, and a whole squadron of firefighters, including Peter Krause and Lou Ferrigno Jr.

Ryan Murphy won a couple of Emmys, and people forgot that he is a deeply unserious man. I don’t mean that as an insult. I think if you asked the man who wrote an episode of Glee called "Grilled Cheesus" to frame a discussion about grief and religion, he would agree that he’s just a little clown like the rest of us. Here are some medical emergencies that the cast of 9-1-1 and its spin-off 9-1-1 Lone Star have rescued people from: woman with harmonica stuck in mouth, man sucked up into the brushes at car wash, woman strangled by snake, woman strangled by octopus, woman stalked by tiger, man who swallowed live frog, baby rescued from pipe after being flushed down toilet, and man in a porta potty sucked up by storm and dropped into lake.

All of these emergencies are played dead seriously. There’s a human life involved in this objectively hilarious porta potty accident, you guys. A man just wanted to have diarrhea at a fair like an American, and now he’s drowning in the dunk tank. It’s not funny!

I think the gimmick with 9-1-1 is to try and draw people in with a big goofy promise like “explosion at the bull semen factory” (a real premise for 9-1-1 Lone Star) and then get you to stick around for some pretty intense drama. When the season 8 premiere trailer dropped, and it was just a 15 second clip of a woman screaming the word bees, I thought I knew what to expect. It was bees.

Episode one was, in fact, wall-to-wall bee hijinks. We begin with a man flying a small aircraft who explains to the air traffic control operator that he’s just sold his ad agency after 30 years, and the plane is his reward! He’s also kind of a dick. I’m sure things will end well for him; oh no, he hit a swarm of bees with his plane. The bees come in through the vents and sting him, causing him to swerve up and into another, larger airplane. That’s right; two planes and beenado have collided before the title card. We are one minute and thirty seconds into the show.

We cut to some scenes that recap important information from previous seasons. It’s pretty clear that the network intended to bring in new viewers with the Beenado. They don’t want this show to die after a mere eight seasons. This could be their Grey’s Anatomy. It’s eight years young. LAPD police officer Athena Grant looks right into the camera and says, “Dennis Jenkins murdered my fiance, and he got away with it for 30 years until I brought him to justice, and now he has made some kind of deal with the federal government?” Really giving us her entire previous seven-season arc in one sentence.

Athena Grant escorting her former fiance’s killer to trial is weirdly the main plotline of the Beenado story arc, and it is disappointingly beeless. It feels like Angela Bassett has a line item in her contract about never saying the word bee. She is a smart woman. Where was I? Ah, yes, the bees.

The youngest member of the cast is forced to deliver the title line, “It’s a bee-nado,” and he does it without an ounce of joy. A truly criminal line reading. He might as well be saying, “It’s my dentist, Larry Bee-nado.” No one in the cast was even one tenth as psyched for the bees as I was.

We’ll come back to that plane crash from the intro later. First, we have to rewind to the initial bee release. A truck transporting 22 million bees…somewhere? A bee farm? Has overturned on the highway. The bees are free and they’re pissed off about it.

The truck driver is spectacularly killed by bees immediately. They surround the car of a young mother with her daughter who happens to be allergic to bees. Since we saw the opening scene, we know bees can come in through the vents, and they do. After the girl gets stung, her mom is able to use an EpiPen to stop the allergic reaction, but then she reveals that she, too, is allergic to bees and has also been stung. Jenniffer Love Hewitt does her best to face-react to this. It doesn’t go well.

LAFD Truck 118 responds to the initial 911 call and finds a second driver in the truck unconscious and covered in stings. They try to revive him, but there’s something obstructing his airway. Can you guess what it is?

A) Bees

B) Bees!

C) BeeeeEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEES!!!

It’s bees. His throat is stuffed with living bees. The firefighters suction the bees out with a vacuum, and when he regains consciousness, the truck driver says, “Why do I taste honey?” Everyone has a fun little chuckle at this poor man's near death experience while the remaining 21,000,981 bees happily try to claw their way inside the firetruck.

The remaining fire fighters manage to calm the bees by redirecting smoke from the burning truck over the car. They get the mother and daughter out of the car and to safety, but there’s still the small issue of the remaining swarm of pissed off bees that flies away. Now you might be asking yourself: couldn’t people simply go inside to avoid the bees? Yes. After the initial accident the game of the show is finding reasons that people absolutely cannot avoid a swarm of bees.

We cut to a rich woman and her assistant planning a launch party for her new perfume, T by Tori. The assistant assures her that everything is ready for the launch party tomorrow, except what is that they're standing in front of? It’s a flower wall. The Jaws theme begins to play in my mind. The camera pans up over the flower wall to the top of a nearby tent, absolutely covered in bees. This rich woman is bee food.

The next day, the bees swarm the perfume launch. The perfume contains floral scents that attract the bees, but also banana which apparently makes them angry. Luckily, most of the party guests simply take cover indoors and are fine, but the assistant, the only person actually wearing the perfume, jumps into the pool and ends up having to stay underwater using a hose to breathe, so vicious is the bees' hatred of her.

The firefighters put their fastest runner in a beekeeping suit, cover him in the perfume, and have him sprint past the pool to attract the bees. He leads the bees to a tent where a professional beekeeper can vacuum them into a little container. It’s wild how something so scary can be continuously defeated by a vacuum cleaner.

The beekeeper says there are 1-2 hundred thousand bees captured by his vacuuming powers, which the fire chief points out leaves 14.8 million killer bees still free in Los Angeles. This is terrible news. Whatever will happen to the rest of the swarm? How will humanity defeat them? That must be why there are two more full episodes in this three part bee story arc, right? WRONG. The bees are GONE NOW. You won’t see another bee for the rest of the damn show. There are so few bees in the remaining two whole episodes that Tim Minear, the co-producer and showrunner of 9-1-1 had to make a public statement about the lack of bees:

Basically, 9/11 made it so that 9-1-1 couldn’t do the plane crash episode they wanted to open with. Remember that plane crash at the beginning of the episode? Athena Grant ends up landing the plane successfully, forgiving her fiance’s murderer, and putting a whole bunch of pedophiles in jail, and that’s nice and everything, but you know what it’s not? Relevant to a friggin bee-nado. If you tell me I’m going to get three full episodes of bee-nado, and then you give me a bunch of plane crash stuff, instead, I’m as pissed off as all 14.8 million unaccounted-for bees in the bee-nado. This is not what I tuned in for.

So, the bee-nado was a friggin lie. The bee-nado lied to me, and then it made me a liar because I told you I would write about three episodes of Beenado, and I was only given one episode of content. On behalf of the liars at ABC, I would like to apologize to you. Is this why no one would Kumite me for this? Did they all know?

Maybe they shut the whole thing down because it would simply bee too awesome. They had to cancel 9-1-1 Lone Star after the explosion at the bull semen factory because there’s simply nowhere else to go from there. It’s possible that 9-1-1 couldn’t recover from a full bee-nado, so they simply had to give the public only a taste of what we truly wanted. I hope they open season nine with 14.8 million bees descending from the sky and everyone going, “Oh yeah, the bees.”

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