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The new season of 9-1-1 is ready for takeoff.
ABC’s soapy firefighter drama returned to the network for its ninth season and it’s poised to take fans on a journey unlike any other. While chatting with PEOPLE at a recent private dinner in Los Angeles, actress Aisha Hinds teases the show’s newest heights: outer space.
“I am going to space,” says Hinds, 49, with a laugh.
In the trailer for season 9, Mark Consuelos plays billionaire Tripp Houser, who’s looking to reward Hen (Hinds) for saving his life after being swallowed by a whale. Tripp offers to send Hen into space and once her wife Karen (Tracie Thoms) turns her down, it’s Athena (Angela Bassett) that will accompany Hen beyond the stratosphere.
On the heels of its buzzy trailer, Hinds wants fans to expect the unexpected this season.
“I mean, no surprises, right? Because if you have been a diehard follower and fan of 9-1-1, you know that every year is a level up,” Hinds explains. “These cases go from the rooter to the tooter. It’s a wild ride. So we have to go where no one has gone before, so here we are off to space!”
The new season of 9-1-1 will also see how the crew moves forward without Capt. Bobby Nash, whose shocking death in the previous season meant Peter Krause’s exit from the show.
Michael Becker/ Fox/courtesy Everett Collection
In May, Angela Bassett, who played opposite Krause since the first season, told PEOPLE that she was still “in mourning” following Krause’s character’s death. During the I Know What You Did Last Summer premiere in July, Jennifer Love Hewitt, who joined the cast in the second season, told Entertainment Weekly that “nothing was the same” without Krause. However, Hinds assures fans that Krause’s “spirit will not be forgotten.”
“Peter offered us such rich performances in the first eight seasons of this show,” says Hinds. “He will always be felt in the canon of work that we know as 9-1-1. As we go into more seasons, though his physical presence may not be with us, his spirit remains always and I think that the team that he kind of led, [Station] 118, we carry a part of him in every emergency that we go to.”
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PEOPLE spoke with Hinds exclusively at Hollywood Confidential’s dinner celebrating iconic girlfriends in TV, film and media at Redbird on Sept. 30 in Los Angeles. The dinner was a prelude to Hollywood Confidential’s Forever Our Girlfriend event on Oct. 1 honoring Mara Brock Akil, whose popular sitcom Girlfriends celebrated its 25th anniversary on Sept. 11.
While speaking about her own circle of girlfriends and fellow actors, Hinds offers a sobering moment of reflection.
“It is not lost on me that we are in a time right now where the industry has gone through quite a number of changes,” she begins. “I have a number of peers who have been without work for quite some time. So I’m hyper aware of the blessing that it is to still be telling the stories, to still be playing Hen. I’m praying fervently that we can kind of stabilize ourselves and be able to have more stories being told and [have] my friends back to work soon.”
9-1-1 airs Thursdays at 8 p.m. ET on ABC.
