Nashville’ Hacker Is Same as ‘9-1-1’ Season 5, Plus Is Blythe Alive?

[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for 9-1-1: Nashville Season 1 Episode 6 “Good Southern Manors.”]

The 9-1-1 franchise is known for its big disasters, and Nashville is certainly heading into a short hiatus with a big one, with the November 13 fall finale: a hacker has hit the city, causing a cascade of problems. Oh, and yes, this is the same hacker who caused trouble back on 9-1-1 in Season 5.

The episode leaves off with quite the cliffhanger, with everyone locked out of their computers (meaning dispatchers can’t take calls or send anyone anywhere, the paramedics can’t check their inventory, and more) and false alarms sounding, including one that spooks the horse Blythe (Jessica Capshaw) is on. It throws her off, and she lands in barbed wire, leaving her cut up and unconscious. Plus, a ferry’s about to crash into a bridge. Oh, and of course, there’s family drama: Blythe’s father, Edward (Tim Matheson) hates Don (Chris O’Donnell) but is wealthy enough that he can solve all the NFD’s money problems, meaning multiple firefighters don’t have to be cut, but only if Don fires Blue (Hunter McVey). Yeah, he’s not too happy about his son-in-law’s other son.

The episode also reveals how Cammie’s (Kimberly Williams-Paisley) husband died: choking at dinner with her. She called 9-1-1 and was sent to voicemail. And so when an efficiency expert (Anna Wood) wants her to do the same thing to a caller with no one answering, she refuses and is right to do so because she saves a woman choking alone.

Below, showrunner Rashad Raisani breaks down the fall finale and teases what’s ahead, including an upcoming crossover with 9-1-1 and the origin story of the Don, Blythe, and Dixie (LeAnn Rimes) love triangle.

Talk about figuring out what you’d have occur as a result of that hack.

Rashad Raisani: The origin of the hack is — one of the things that I always felt was 9-1-1, there was a hacker attack in Season 5, but we never caught the hackers. They just disappeared into the night, so it’s always kind of been in my craw a little bit, like, if you do something on that scale and get away with it, you’re going to do it again. Then I thought, well, now these people have had three years to raise their game, and they can make a lot more money if they force the issue. I always also regretted that we never had them attack Austin [on 9-1-1: Lone Star]. We ran out of episodes before we could do it. So, Nashville, we thought, OK, let’s have ’em do that.

And then in terms of the actual attacks, my dad was a doctor, and his hospital was hacked, and they couldn’t do any medical procedures, they couldn’t access their medications, they couldn’t get the records. They just paralyzed the hospital for a month for a ransom. We just kept picturing, what if you had access to all of the traffic system, to the water filtration system, to the airport, to this, to that? The amount of calamities that you could create intentionally is crazy, and unintentionally is even crazier, so, we let our imaginations run wild about if we could just wave a wand and shut something down, what would it be, and what would be the scariest thing to happen? And so hopefully, we come up with some disasters that you may not see coming and some that you might see coming because you’re like, well, that would be bad, and of course, we want to do it.

I was going to ask if it was connecting back to 9-1-1. So, is there the possibility of any crossover because of that?

Not because of this. There is a crossover coming, but it won’t be in this episode, so I don’t want to give people false hope on that. But we definitely talk about L.A. and the L.A. hack and that history. We see some clips from our old show about saying, here, they put giraffes on Hollywood Boulevard. This is the kind of crazy stuff you can expect to happen. So, we are fully aware of our own universe on that, but it won’t be a crossover yet. That will come a little bit later.

What can you say about that crossover that is coming?

I can say that it’s brewing, that we’re starting the formal conversation as of literally yesterday. It’s not gospel yet, but I would like it to be some 9-1-1 characters coming to Nashville. We’ll see. We’re kind of figuring out our story, about which story makes the most sense to tell, but we want to make this not just a one-time thing, that we can start to develop a relationship between these casts so that it won’t be always so out of the norm to be able to do it.

So it would just be in the one episode, it wouldn’t be like a two-hour event?

We’re still in that conversation. …. It could be a two-hour event or it could be a more modest thing. It’s really just about the story. When the story makes sense, we’ll know the answer. We haven’t figured out quite, but we know we’re doing it.

You did keep mentioning L.A. in the dispatch center…

You caught it, yes!

Disney/Jake Giles Netter

Blythe is unconscious, by herself, it’s not like she can call 9-1-1. Even if she could call 9-1-1, can’t get through. What’s next for her? Could that kind of soften things and lessen the tension between Don and Edward as a result?

Wow. Yeah, you should write for the show. Part of what we wanted to do with Blythe was she represents on the show this sort of grace and privilege and beauty, she has all these things, but the thing that I see also with her that may not be as obvious, that is particularly obvious if you know the actor, is that she has a tenacity and a grit and a toughness that belies the exterior sometimes. We wanted to show that off about Blythe and about Jessica, about how tough she can be. And then the added benefit is it forces — and part of the irony here is that nobody even knows that she’s missing for the front part of this episode or for a big chunk of it. And once they do realize it, Edward and Don, the one thing that they have in common is that they love her more than any other human on the planet, and so as much as they can’t stand each other, that bond is stronger than all the antipathy between them. I’m spoiling the next three episodes, but that’s the kind of journey that they’re going to go on together. It’s not going to resolve everything for them, but it is going to force them to kind of acknowledge that they share this very important thing.

And then postpone that war and scorched earth that Blythe warned is coming?

It’s part of it. There’s other things that will go into that, but yes.

Before her accident, things were a little tense between Don and Blythe. She hung up on him. We’re seeing how Don’s relationship with her father is affecting their marriage, even though she comes to his defense in this episode. Are we going to continue to see things like that, maybe some little cracks in that marriage, because of that?

Yeah, I think so. The way I look at it is that good, healthy relationships still have problems, and part of having a healthy relationship, sometimes you’re allowed to be angry and hang up on your spouse and then you get past it or you get through it, but you’re allowed to be hot and have problems, and it’s how you deal with those problems. Don, to be fair, has also put Blythe through hell this year. It’s not his fault necessarily, but he brought this kid into their marriage, and she’s been so gracious about it, and she’s had to swallow a lot of things that I think would be understandably frustrating and take the high road and take the high road and take the high road. Then pretty quick into this episode, he goes behind her back and threatens her dad. So, I would be pissed, too. I wanted her to have some justification sometimes to say, I’m not OK with what you just did. Don’s still our hero, but he’s not perfect and she’s going to call him on it.

It seems like every week there’s an obstacle in the way of Blue being a firefighter. This week it’s, fire him if you want this money — I feel like Edward could use that to his advantage because of the ransom. I don’t know if I’m on the right track.

You might be.

Why did you want to keep throwing so much at Blue when it comes to him being a firefighter and therefore also at Don and Ryan (Michael Provost) as a result, in a way, because they’re all tied up in it?

Part of the reason why we focus on it so much in these early episodes was just to solidify Blue as a firefighter because we do start with such a wild premise that this guy who has minimal training is going to suddenly become a firefighter, so I think that we had to really push that all the way in terms of acknowledging to the audience through the other characters, what the hell are you talking about? This guy’s a firefighter? And make Blue prove himself enough times so that by the end of this particular journey, we’ll stop asking that question because it’ll feel like, OK, he’s a firefighter, he’s shown that he may be raw and he may be a novice, but that he’s got chops. At the end of this particular adventure, I think we’ll put that question to rest. Is Blue a firefighter? Is he competent? Is he going to fit?

Don and Blue just got past the secret of Don knowing he existed. Now there’s another secret with Edward’s terms. Is that going to cause more conflict?

It’s going to be more internal conflict for Don about how do I tell this kid? It’s like if they said, hey, 10 firefighters are going to go in the street to save someone, and one of ’em is going to be killed by an accident, whose hand would go up first, and all 10 would go up first. For Blue, you can save the fire department if you fall in the sword, he would be like, I would do it. And I think that if anything, the reason why Don’s keeping it a secret from Blue is because he’s trying — He was going to tell Blue in this episode, but then Blue says that thing, drops a penny for Don about, maybe there’s a way to keep this from happening. So I think for now, Don isn’t telling Blue not because it’s a deception, that he’s trying to maliciously hurt Blue. It’s more, maybe he’ll never even have to know because I can protect him from ever even having to go through the pain of it.

Why reveal how Cammie’s husband died by having her open up to Ariela, why have that be how he died, and why have that lead to Cammie in this career? I love Cammie in this episode.

Yeah, she’s terrific. She’s wonderful. Kim is just — I felt like we had this Ferrari in the garage for the first five episodes and we just couldn’t get it out and let it rip because there were all these other storylines going. We knew Kim Paisley was going to be, pretty early in the process, our 9-1-1 dispatcher, but in these first few episodes, you don’t go too deep on her. I was like, we need her to have something that’s unique to her and that gives her real ballast as a character and a deeper well to draw from.

And when Brad Buecker, the director, and I were location scouting in Nashville, we were at dinner at this really beautiful restaurant, it was like a nightclub, there was music, it was low light. And then, during the performance, while we’re eating, suddenly the people started screaming. They were like, shut up, turn it off, turn on the light. And we thought, these people are just drunk, and everybody just kind of ignored him. Then the guy’s like, please for love of God, turn the lights on, please. They turn the lights up and this woman has choked to death at the table and her husband’s standing there helpless, and — it was four feet behind us — nobody noticed. I just will never forget that husband standing there, so it was very traumatic. But the thing that really hit both of us as we were walking back to our hotel that night was, imagine if you’re in the prime of life and suddenly your partner just drops dead just like that.

I had also been reading a lot about 9-1-1 call centers. So many of them in America are so understaffed and overloaded that you call them and get voicemail or you get put on hold for 30 minutes. I started thinking, what if that was Cammie’s experience? She didn’t really know how to do the Heimlich on the ground, and then she called 9-1-1, and nobody answered. [Her husband] comes from an incredibly wealthy family, she takes a big chunk of his estate and just pours it into Nashville so that it’s what gives the technology side of our call center. It gave her life this new purpose, and the second half of her life is going to be about this.

And it gives her, I think, a real specific character drive in this back half of the season. Because while she is doing this world-saving work, she also is sort of living in the past. She’s really thinking about her dead husband. That’s why we went back and added the scene where she leaves her husband voicemails. She’s just very stuck in her old life; even as she’s doing this great stuff in her day job, in her personal life, she’s still very much in mourning even though it’s been four or five years.

Disney/Jake Giles Netter

So, Dixie called Blue and Don “my boys” in the hospital.

Oh, yeah, you catch all the little things.

We’ve talked about how there could be potential feelings still there on her side. How much are those potential feelings going to be explored in upcoming episodes on Dixie’s part and then testing Don, maybe?

Yeah, they’re going to be explored a lot because what we’re going to do in Episode 11 is we’re going to do an origin story of this love triangle of Dixie and Don and Blythe. Because one of the things that I always try to say is with Edward, when he says [when Don breaks a glass and yells at him to leave], “The real Donald Hart, ladies and gentlemen,” he’s not just saying nothing. He’s speaking to a truth. And I think for Dixie, there is something about Dixie that connects with Don that Blythe does not have, and there’s something about Blythe that Dixie does not have, and that’s why that love triangle still persists. And so in this origin story, I really wanted to show off, here’s what Dixie meant — when they met each other, when they were young, here’s what she brought to Don’s life. And you see, oh, OK, and that’s why Blythe is so threatened by her and vice versa, that each of them brought a major component of Don’s character to him. That relationship is what allowed him to become who he became. We are going to explore Dixie, and you’ll see that she is a true threat in a profound way because of her history with Don. That’s the thing that the next few episodes start to deal with.

What does Ryan and Blue’s relationship look like going forward? That diner scene was great.

Yeah, they’re terrific. That diner scene, I think, is going to define their relationship, and they are going to become best friends. They see the world differently because of their backgrounds. But I think that as you’ve seen in that diner scene, there is a shared level of respect and love between them. They’ve gone through the different sides of the same coin, which is that they were both lied to about each other, but yet they both turned into these two first responders, so clearly, there’s something about that in them that’s the same. They’re going to be an odd couple always: one’s a little uptight and short, and the other one’s tall and loose. But I think that there is a lot of love and respect between them, and we’ll keep playing that.

9-1-1: Nashville, Season 1 Midseason Return, Thursday, January 8, 2026, 9/8c, ABC