The Odyssey is going to become the scene of a safe heist on Thursday’s (March 20) “Casino Week” episode of Doctor Odyssey, and 9-1-1‘s Angela Bassett will be bringing Athena’s detective skills to bear for the onboard investigation.
The request for her presence, as the look-ahead teaser reveals, will come from Don Johnson‘s Capt. Robert Massey as the ship becomes a gambler’s paradise off the coast of Los Angeles.
For Johnson, the opportunity to work with Bassett has been a long time coming. “We’ve known each other a long time, but we’ve never gotten to work together. And she was joyful,” he told TV Insider. “When you get Angela to set, you go, ‘Okay, I’m just gonna take her hand and let her lead this dance,’ and she’s a pretty good dancer.”
Of course, considering what happened last time she was on a cruise ship — let’s just say her honeymoon was a disaster at sea — it won’t be easy for her to hit the deck again.
“They’re gonna get her on very reluctantly, but… when there’s a call to duty, she’ll be there,” Bassett explained. “This is a call that she has to accept. She’s hoping to get on there, find the perpetrator, and get right off, but of course, that doesn’t happen. And so there’s a little bit of anxiety, as you can imagine, ’cause she doggon’ near lost her life and her husband’s life, so there’s a little anxiety that rises up in her, but she’ll just have to power through it.”
Bassett said of the plot, “There’s someone who’s trying to sneak on board who isn’t supposed to, so she goes to get him off, ends up setting sail, unfortunately, so she’s just got to make the best of it.”
One person who will enjoy a change of pace with this case is Joshua Jackson‘s Dr. Max Bankman, who will lend a hand to Athena in her search for the suspect and enjoy that temporary oasis from the love triangle and pregnancy drama that’s informed the back half of the season so far.
“I think as a man, it’s good for him to have a little break from impending fatherhood and heartbreak and all the rest of it,” Jackson said. “It’s a breather episode in the midst of that storyline.”
While Max will follow Athena’s lead on the case to help “ferret out who’s actually behind lifting these jewels off the boat,” Jackson said the doctor will still have a chance to do his job along the way. “Of course, there’s always a medical element, and that becomes part of the reveal, and it is part of how Max puts some of the things together. But it is, as we call it, the big tuxedo episode. I’m in my black and white for quite a lot of the time,” he teased.
“For Max, it’s like a fun game,” Jackson continued. “I think he enjoys it thoroughly because it’s a criminal investigation run through the eyes of The Odyssey. So it becomes a cat-and-mouse game, and this is, in many ways, our Ocean’s Eleven episode.”
The fact that a 9-1-1 crossover episode like this is happening on Doctor Odyssey‘s maiden voyage on television, Johnson said, proves once again, “There are no limits on this show… It has legs. It has dynamics that we can continue to play with and explore and hopefully thrill our audiences.”
“That’s the power of Ryan Murphy,” Jackson added. “It speaks to the massive amounts of success that he has had and continues to have. But I also think it’s the brilliance of this show that he put together for us is that we can be everything… We just finished up these two action-adventure episodes [in “Shark Week”], and now we have a heist episode, and then we have the spring break episode [“Sophisticated Ladies Week”] and it’s a little raunchier… We’ve done weddings with very serious overtones and a threesome and plastic surgery, and there’s endless ways to take this story. I’ve never worked on a show where each episode is basically its own self-contained story, its own little movie, and it’s been a lot of fun.”
Doctor Odyssey, Thursdays, 9/8, ABC
This story originally appeared on TV Insider
