NJRadioGuy

Well, at least their fires are slightly more believable than Chicago's (you know the ones, where you can actually see the gas jets feeding them on occasion) so I'll handwave a little bit here, but yeah, what's the sense going in without a charged hand line. Surprised nobody mentioned the potential of steam burns, though. But with all this said, watch a few YouTube fireground videos and even TV firefighters would be better on the scene than some of these ill-trained hosemonkeys in more rural departments. Roll up with light smoke, end up saving the foundation, etc. Maybe doing so would damage the set or the lighting equipment behind it, etc? But it would have been nice if they hit it at the base rather than the ceiling. Heh. What got me from the whole exploding wine bottle BS was why risk the patient's and your own safety going across the WineKillZone™ in the first place. Look at where the victim came to rest...right beside a stained glass window. Get on the horn and have a crew take out that window from the outside and get the victim that way. And speaking of radios, cellphones in the grocery store? Really?? Not their HTs?

You've obviously never been around a brotherhood career like this. It's expected behaviour. Ballbusting and getting in your business is a good thing, and is considered the ultimate sign of respect. Tell someone you don't like broccoli and guess what you get for every meal from now 'til doomsday. Suggest to the friend in a different house, on a different shift, that you're hot for someone in the department or a related agency and the entire known (and unknown) universe will know within about 4.8 picoseconds, and boy will you hear about it. There are no secrets, no unknowns, when the guy bustin' your chops over broccoli is suddenly the guy who's gotta have your back (or you have his) when the fecal matter strikes the rotary oscillator. You see the same stuff on Deadliest Catch and similar shows.

Thoroughly enjoyed the episode, warts and all. Loved decomp-guy, but their hazmat suits would most certainly not have been white when they got him out, especially after he sprung a leak...and there ain't no way in hell they're not pukin' all over themselves in that trailer wearing just the dust masks they started off with. And likewise, if it was that bad, there wouldn't be a crowd surrounding the trailer. Half man, I couldn't sit through. Had to hit the zapper. I guess I mis-spoke a few weeks back when I said how high voltage is a Hard Stop for me. Well it is, but I forgot about stories like this, although usually it's a crushed or twisted lower half under a platform in the subway. Happens real-world, and it's something that gives me utter effing nightmares. I can handle a lot, but that.... So, we got through 10 episodes of a show centered around a fire station and they didn't actually put out a single fire. Yay?

New Favourite Show, hands down. Only watched part one so far, but at least for the pilot, they wrote the job better than anything else on TV has done since Johnny and Roy rode off into the sunset 40-odd years ago. You could put water on an actual fire. Who knew (Chicago Fire, I'm looking at you). They got fire dynamics right, which pleasantly surprised me. I looked at those windows too, and how the beast was playing in the closed off room, and was saying "flashover" before they actually recognized it. Now, that said, it would take probably 10-15 minutes to set up the bags, but for a network TV show I'll handwave—the same way I'll handwave that fire not going to at least a second, if not third, when the first piece of apparatus rolled up. Also, where's the Battalion Chief to direct fireground operations? And who's on the tiller of L-19? I don't think they ever showed the guy or gal back there. Best job in the whole damned house as far as I'm concerned. And I dunno 'bout you, but passing up fresh, hot steaks to slide down a pole that'll still be there after lunch? Yeah. No. Eat when you can, cuz that bell don't wait for suppertime to be over! "Put the wet stuff on the red stuff." You betcha.

With the hoarder crawling through that tunnel of old newspapers with a cigarette lighter for illumination it's a wonder the whole place didn't go up. But I guess they also didn't have the budget for a 3 alarm house fire. Come to think of it, we're 9 episodes in and the Engine crew hasn't responded to a single working fire yet. So enroute to the elevator call we see a shot of Engine 118 responding, then in a wide shot it's TRUCK 118 (a completely different type of vehicle), then they're back to being an engine on the scene. That was a divide-by-zero moment for me. Protip: firefighters don't just drive whatever type of vehicle they think they'll need. I'd be good with them bringing in a background engine crew with no lines (much like Chicago Fire has), and keep the stars on the Truck, since truck companies generally have more interesting calls. Speaking of the elevator call, someone forgot to tell the writers that when elevators fail they almost always fail stuck since it's the application of power that removes the brakes. Also, how could the car go below the basement? Generally there's a bumping block at the lowest floor and the car couldn't go more than a few inches below the door threshold, if that. Good that they extricated the bum from the garbage truck and got him in a C-collar and on a backboard, but his head was flopping around like a rag doll. Just what you want to have when pt states he can't feel his legs. I was shaking my head. Sorry for Abby, but her mom's death was a given even in the premiere. I predicted it would happen by the end of the March sweeps, but since the show was pre-empted for the Olympics that didn't happen. Bet money that Buck and Abby aren't end game. Handcuff call was pure gold. And yes, it happens—more than you'd imagine, in fact. I have a story about that too, but I'll save it for another day, in perhaps a less family-friendly forum <g>.

So Nash has come out to one of his subordinates that he's actively contemplating suicide. Why is Han not burning up the phone to HQ demanding that Nash be placed on psych leave? Would YOU follow him into a burning building (he IS on an engine, after all, and that's what engine companies do) knowing he might take you with him?

Yeah, a backboard and C-collar all the way. I'll handwave it for the photographer. But maybe it would have been a better story if Casey's failure to put a collar on the guy resulted in paralysis. Casey gets in deep doodoo, maybe loses a bugle, photog gets his just desserts. No excuse for the grab on Severide unless he was being shown as about to sink Any Second Now, which he wasn't. At least get a backboard under him. But like everything else in televised rescue shows, you only have so much screen time and tedious procedures have to take a back seat to whatever keeps audiences from flipping channels. I've said it before, the ghosts of Jack Webb and Ron Cinader are up to 10,000 RPM in Lost Angeles.

23. Twenty three. I counted. That's the number of times I had to hit the FF button on my DVR this episode. Between discovering the pervy 'tog and Hermann's get-rich-quick-scheme-of-the-month, I just couldn't. Colour me surprised that the perv (and his gear) made it out of the firehouse in one piece. Still photographers who freelance for newspapers are well known by emergency personnel, and almost all of them have press credentials that let them do their job on emergency scenes with little interference from PD or FD. I did that exact job (freelance photographer covering FD and PD) for 12 years, and I knew an awful lot of the guys. It's actually a lot of fun, and you quickly learn where to go and where not to on the fireground. This guy's professional life would be completely destroyed. Criminal charges, a potential civil suit, and loss of press credentials, blacklisting by all the local news organizations, etc. Not to mention risking a beating in a dark alley when he least suspects it--not just from Casey but from his fellow photographers whose working lives will have just become much harder.

I adore shows like Game of Thrones, Outlander and enough detective shows to fill a squad room. I can spot BS at a thousand paces. But this. A thousand times this: I can handwave so much here because of what this show's premise is, and the network it's televised on. I know there's going to be a happy ending, I know that very little is going to change in the lives of the characters (and certainly nothing bad) and I know it's pure treacle that's as deep as a Kleenex. But I don't care. I like that once in a while. It's nice to have a Hallmark romance wedged between gratuitous beheadings in Westeros and solving grisly real-world homicides on The First 48. But what I don't like is bad story continuity. They get some parts right, others grossly wrong, especially some material from the early movies. Now that said, I just binged everything from the first movie through to Spellbound when the Olympics were on (no use for that), and all the mainstream shows were on hiatus. What bugs me the most is the constant change of location. Up until the start of the second season, the show was shot on King St. in Dundas, ON. Apparently the (real) town council decided on a 3 year moratorium on filming so the show had to move, and it seems to be flitting between Niagara On The Lake and Hamilton. But it's jarring nevertheless. Picone's food market is now always in a different spot relative to BB&C, Sam's moved from the original storefront medical building to what appears to be a suite of professional offices, and in a city of that size, there can't be just one part-time GP. One location I found rather interesting, and quite near and dear to my heart, was the exterior of Ben's theater...that's the Regent (formerly known as the Crest), on Mt. Pleasant Ave. in Toronto. I was a projectionist in Toronto for 20 years and worked that booth regularly. The theater interior was shot somewhere else (somewhere I didn't recognize), but threading that Century projector sure brought back memories—the real theater had a Cinemeccanica Victoria 8 and a platter when I worked it, and the real auditorium is a stunning and huge theater with a balcony. That was definitely a working booth, though, or one that could be made to work again if film still existed as a medium. Movies are now all on hard drives, projected digitally (grumble). And of course, even the theater exterior was shot elsewhere in Spellbound. Martha bugs far less now than in the early series and movies. Abigail needs to either go away, find someone to boff (probably in S4) or just grow the eff up. The constant smiling is disturbing after a while. Really disturbing. Where is Gwen (from the early movie storylines)? Couldn't they have found a way to write her out of the story? Where is Cassie's oldest daughter Lori? She's been MIA with maybe ONE mention since season 1's movie. If the actress is unavailable then recast, but the character's eldest child should not be that easily forgotten. Like many here, I wish Cassie's "witch" gifts would be more fully explored, or if not explored, at least on display as more than just mere suggestions. They missed a great reaction shot with the wooden steering wheel at the end of that episode. Will Sam ever look at the back of it? And if he does, that should be on camera.

Well maybe her real supernatural power is that she can grow a magically-protected money tree in the back yard that nobody but her can see. The rest is just for show. And of course we only see 2 or 3 minutes out of her work day; the rest of the time she's hawking $2 trinkets to tourists for $49.95, and having the shop moved 4 times in 3 seasons.

Beanie the Brain-Dead Bison (which was later changed to Beanie the cerebrally-challenged bison).

Oooooh. Now I know. They got personal coaching from Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson from "Skyscraper." And this page tackles the same physics. https://www.boredpanda.com/dwayne-the-rock-johnson-skyscraper-jump-funny-reactions/

I wrote about this in the thread for the episode in which it happened. I was on the scene of a fence post through the noggin' about 30 or so years back, and the dude walked out of the hospital under his own steam a couple of weeks later. It was a 2" OD pipe, not a 5/8" rebar, so yeah, it's possible, but it would have left one hell of a scar, front and back. Handwaved away because why bother with the makeup expense when they could spend that money renting a damned Cessna Caravan and putting it down on a golf course (or CGI'ing the hell out of it). Props (ahem) for the creative use of a checklist, I'll give him that. I'm a private pilot, although I haven't flown in years. On my checklist for a 172RG, before taking my now-wife up for a ride I did a custom pre-start checklist, which read in part "Fuel...on both, Mixture...rich, Master...on, <#HerName>...goosed, mags...both, CLEAR PROP...." Checklist completed, pilot smacked. Just sayin'. But I'd sure like to know how to get a NAV/COM to dial into the Public Switched Telephone Network. That was a neat trick, though definitely not better than making a MAYDAY call and requesting direct to BUR (2 minutes from where they were, by the looks of it), with EMS waiting. Oh, and there's a fire station on the field, too. And yeah, 65 knots my ass. About 80 over the fence! PsychoBabe was played great. Loved it. I learned to tie a necktie when I was about 8 or 9. And since he's wearing a $1.29 suit, why not his uniform clip-on tie to go with it if he's that dumb? I swear, I lost IQ points watching this tonight, but it had its moments of stupid fun, so there is that.

Forgot about Washington Sq. Park. I go to the BBQ festival there every year. I think they've had a few starts in Central Park as well. They've managed to ignore New Jersey, which is probably for the best.

Well foo. I thought we had one more week before the Olympic break. This was the cliffhanger. Next episode on March 1st. Looks like the rest of February is a write-off TV wise, too.

Just like the Chicago Fire producers need to see that nobody likes Dawson. Hey, maybe there could be a 2-for-1 swap between LA and Chicago. 9-1-1 gets Saint Gabby, Buck goes to 51 in Chicago.

The closest ones to me were the Season 1 Finale (Unisphere, in Queens, a block away from where my ham radio club met), and Gotham Hall at B'way and W. 36th St, a block away from the best steakhouse in the known (and unknown) universe. I remember the one in Salzburg (the palace, whose name I forget at the moment), Lauterbrunen, Switzerland, Interlaken, Switzerland and a few others I'm forgetting at the moment. EDIT: FOUND IT: http://bit.ly/2EnvD2L Now to enjoy a Staropromen beer (with two fingers' worth of head) while I'm there :). I'll also try to find the Pitstop from Season 15 at Střelecký Ostrov, and the one from Vienna.

Did anyone manage to catch the name of the beer from the detour, and the overlook used for the pitstop? I will be visiting Prague this June, and I want to add that pitstop to the dozen or so I've visited over the years (most recently, the St. Peter and Paul fortress overlook, and in the park behind St. Isaac's).

But...but...but that would take away screen time for our Beloved and Blessed Saint Gabby. Heaven forfend!

I think the writers got a rebar through the brain. It would explain much.

Yup, crispy-critter, given what they described as the facts. And let's just say for the sake of everybody watching on TV, it was not realistic-looking. I'll leave it at that. Normally, of course they don't. The fire depicted in Bobby's building was based on the real-life Grenfell Tower fire in London last June, in which 71 people died. In that case cladding that was not up to code was bolted on to the building, there was only one staircase for the entire building, and no sprinklers, among other problems. In the episode here, the responding firefighters mentioned siding, and that the sprinklers weren't working. If you're interested, read this Wikipedia article on what happened, and how: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grenfell_Tower_fire. The failures that led to this are unimaginable, and had it not happened in real life but portrayed as such in the movies, I'd never have believed it possible in a first-world country in 2017.

Connie or any clerical staff, or if it's just Engine, or Squad, or Truck that goes, the folks from the other apparatus or Boden, I guess. Trudy can have some fun in her off-times. 21st District and House 51 are obviously a big extended family; that's totally realistic. Everybody knows everybody else's kids, family situation, etc. And especially in Trudy's case since she's married to a T-81 FF. Naw, Molly's 2 will be back since Otis is involved with the woman who's dad used to own it. That's B-plot stuff, or even C-plot. With Brie's storyline (hopefully) done, they need a new A-plot to take them to the Olympic break cliffhangar. I think that's going to be Severide and Grissom, and/or Grissom coming after Casey's fresh new bugle. A-freakin-men. BTW, prisoners in transport are usually shackled hand and foot, hands behind the back, and after Freddie Gray in Baltimore, securely fastened to the prison van's body to prevent injury in case of a crash. Prisoners in TV shows are always shown hands-in-front. Sorry bunky, it don't work that way <g>. There are also usually a whole slew of police cars at an MVA scene for traffic control, accident investigation and so on. That was a head-desk moment. She's still somewhat new to Chicago and may not have made many friends outside of work. I agree about Kidd and Severide being forced back together (by bad writing). They've been intimate before, but now he sees her as a trusted colleague and a good friend, so to me that's a pretty good foundation to build something real over. Only problem is, if it crashes and burns, you've got a very toxic workplace all of a sudden, and the old "don't crap where you eat" proverb comes into play.

Yeah, I was thinking about that too last night. They'd have gone over like a couple of stones. No way that place doesn't have a road or driveway or something on all four sides. Magical TV fire, of course. Couldn't they have just vented the tank to atmosphere, if the alternative was DeathAndDestruction™?

I can see the electricity being off if it was vacant, but there would always be heat; the risk of pipes bursting would be too great otherwise. Burst pipes in an apartment building would cause massive flood damage to the unit and everything below it, plus it makes economic sense to have central heat in the building. I doubt any building in that part of the world would not have central heat.

See, show? You can do an episode that's fun without Gabby. Overall it was decent. Loved Platt and the kidlet. Pure gold, but I was disappointed that Hermann didn't give her the grand tour, let her climb a ladder (tied off safely, of course), play with the the siren, but I get that maybe he didn't want to encourage her to do something dangerous with her life. Still, that kid rocked. First rescue was a good plot staging area, which hopefully won't go beyond this episode. Liked Casey taking the high road later on: "We met last night." I was afraid it would devolve into the usual fight/animosity with Ramifications Later On, but pleasantly surprised they didn't. I don't think there's a copper anywhere who wouldn't thank the FFs who did their best to rescue their own, even if the outcome was bad. Rule One: You can't save everybody. Didn't we see that professional difference of opinion a few weeks ago at another scene between Severide and Casey? Chain of command. Cap makes the call, but also takes the shit if things go pear-shaped. Both ideas looked sound, but it should have taken a lot less time to get a chain around the steering wheel and pull it out of the way, or hell, just use the Hurst to cut the steering column/wheel right off. R&D on the "slamigan." Just. No. That plot should Never Be Heard From Again. Really thought Zach was going to snuff it, with his dying words to Kidd, "Take care of Severide" or some such nonsense. Glad neither happened. I think they let an out-take make it to air. In Molly's, Grissom tells Hermann, behind the bar, "I'll have whatever Taylor's having." At least that's how it sounded on my system. OK, the Big Call. I've got carpal tunnel from handwaving all the idiocy away, but I'll at least give them props for going in with full SCBA. Masks don't make for good TV, but they do make for firefighters coming out alive, so yeah. Thanks for that. Why was there still power on in the water plant? If there's a risk of explosion, wouldn't you want to cut any additional source of ignition? Of course the shutoff was stuck. Of course it was an old wheel valve. Why would there be high-pressure acetylene in a water treatment plant? I'm also not a chemist so I don't know what the reaction is between acetylene and chlorine, but it seems overly contrived for that scenario to exist. Rooftop idiocy: OK, they're holding the valve closed by hand. I'll let that crap sit for the sake of TV drama. Clockwise pressure is all that's needed. So raise the aerial, get some men up with chain and a come-along, loop it around what they're holding onto for dear life, tie off to something immovable on the roof itself and take the load. That'll hold the valve until a team of pros can come up and effect repairs, meanwhile bring the men back down the stick. But hey, jumping into water of unknown depth from 50 or 60 feet up, in full bunker gear, looks like so much fun. Especially after they're both physically exhausted from a major hazmat incident and rescue. Silly, stupid fun, though.