In the midst of the ice storm, the 126 paramedics attempt to rescue a young boy trapped under a frozen lake; Judd and Mateo try to figure out how to rescue Paul and a young girl trapped in the rubble of a community shelter; Owen and his mysterious neighbor encounter a wounded man.
Tropes:
- Berserk Button: Invoked by Paul in order to delay his and Lindsey’s drowsiness. Lindsey returns the favor a few minutes later, when Paul nods off himself.
- Cliffhanger: The episode ends when Owen, Elena, and the Mexican migrants are threatened by the same man the former helped out of the ice storm; back in Austin, Tommy, Nancy, and Carlos await news about TK, who fell comatose not long after Abe’s rescue.
- Dangerous Drowsiness: Paul and Lindsey attempt to ward this off while awaiting rescue.
- Danger — Thin Ice: Abe learns this the hard way. When rescuing him, TK re-learns this as well.
- Fan Disservice: By the time Nancy and Tommy find him lying prone in the forest, a naked TK’s hypothermia has worsened to the extent of “paradoxical undressing”. As it can be inferred, the situation is too tense for anyone to admire his body.
- Genre Savvy: Captain Andrews, though reluctant to allow Judd and Mateo to go in, acknowledges how stubbornly they’d still do so if he told them no.
- Heal It With Fire: After settling the wounded Hispanic man in his cabin, Owen does this with a heated fire poker to cauterize his stab wound.
- How We Got Here: At the beginning of the episode, an asthmatic boy named Abe is told by his mom to stay in his house even as he longingly watches a group of children playing in the snow. By the time he decides to join in, they’re walking home to avoid the oncoming ice storm; Abe then ventures further out to a frozen pond to play hockey by himself, but accidentally falls through a patch of thin ice into the water.
- I Lied: Nancy guiltily admits to setting up Carlos to meet TK at the hospital, but he only has a few seconds to absorb this before the below Internal Reveal.
- I'm Cold... So Cold... / Distressed Dude: Paul and TK experience this to varying degrees, with timing of their rescues being the only difference between their situations.
- Internal Reveal: Abe’s mother, while asking Nancy to thank TK for rescuing her son, inadvertently reveals to Carlos what happened to cause TK’s coma.
- Meaningful Background Event: While Tommy and Nancy are helping the turtle rescuing couple back onto the road, they don’t notice that TK has wandered into the woods. Eagle-eyed viewers can even pick up his hunched figure trudging away from the group in one of the wide shots.
- Oh, Crap!:
- Nancy and Tommy twice: once when they learn TK isn’t with them; and again after they find him and try to get him moving, only for him to experience cardiac arrest seconds later.
- Right after Owen offers to help Elena and her migrant group, the barn door opens to reveal the wounded man from earlier… who takes out a handgun and starts threatening everyone in Spanish. Owen’s face says it all.
- Parting-from-Consciousness Words: While prone on the ground, a naked and freezing TK mumbles lines from what seems to be the Mourner’s Kaddish, and remains conscious enough to tell Nancy and Tommy that he attended and presumably learned the prayer in Hebrew school.
- Redheads Are Uncool: The ginger-haired Lindsey has severely low self-esteem: she minimizes her own contribution to Paul’s rescue, blames herself for not immediately running out with the rest of the church group, and bemoans her past anxieties with trying out new activities.
- Wham Shot: The wounded Hispanic man who fled Owen’s cabin re-appears, pulls out a gun, and starts yelling threats— he wasn’t just a victim, he was a coyote working for an unknown villainous party.
