As a Moments subpage, all spoilers are unmarked as per policy. You Have Been Warned.
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Season One
Episode 1 - Pilot
- Marjan jumping off a bridge into water to rescue civilians trapped in a submerged vehicle.
- Michelle performing a chest tube insertion, while the victim is on a picnic table in public, as he wouldn't have made it to the hospital.
- The team performing and succeeding in their first rescue together.
- Owen single-handedly rescuing a 10-month-old from the top of a tree.
- The 126 crew getting a conspiracy theorist to leave his house that's about to blow up from a gas leak by pretending to be part of the conspiracy.
- How the 126 crew handles the Racist Grandma making a highly-exaggerated nuisance 9-1-1 call against her Hispanic neighbors simply because their barbecue pit inadvertently spread smoke into her yard, siding with the neighbors and deciding to perform a citizen's arrest on the woman. And it turns into a Double Whammy when, after the woman fakes a heart attack to avoid the arrest, the team uses their ethnicities (Marjan and Mateo), sexualities (T.K.), gender identities (Paul), and lack of CPR certification (Owen) to further expose the woman's bigotries, and toy with her to the point that she demands to be taken to jail.
- Bonus awesome points go to Judd, who refuses to be complicit in her bigotry and just says "No", standing in solidarity with his team.
- Just the sheer amount of respect shown to both Marjan and her religion by her team's reaction when she loses her hijab during a rescue. They immediately form a barrier to give her privacy to put it back on and all of them, even openly gay TK, avert their eyes because they are fully aware and completely respect that only immediate family should see her without the garment and she should definitely not be exposed in public.
Episode 6 - Friends Like These
- Grace guiding a man to help revive his choking friend by making a makeshift hot press.
- Owen saving Billy Tyson's life after he just got through explaining how he was going to get rid of everyone at the 126 just to spite Captain Strand. To add salt to the wound, he carried Tyson to the golf clubhouse from the green inadvertently proving himself physically fit for duty despite his cancer. As they point out, he carried a grown man from the 12th to the clubhouse in under 4 minutes...in the rain.
- The Laser-Guided Karma is even sweeter when you consider the timing: Owen offered to gracefully resign from Austin FD and step aside for Billy to get the 126 on the condition his team remain. Billy could've accepted and they probably went inside for drinks. Instead he chose to emphasize that he would get rid of them for petty and bigoted reasons, and not ten seconds later he gets struck by lightning. Not only does he get saved by the man he hates but his injuries leave to step-down as Captain to recover. Early in the episode, Judd said it would take an act of God for Owen to pass the test; one can't help but take Billy getting hit by lightning as God's way of saying “Getting ahead of yourself, don’t you think, son?”
- Michelle encounters a man who draws a sword on her and the other paramedics on a call, and subdues him with a defibrillator after deciding to briefly play along with checking his mother’s corpse for vital signs.
Episode 10 - Austin, We Have a Problem
- TK springing into action to save a bus driver after the events of the solar storm cause a mass power surge and the collision of her bus with a hydrant and gasoline truck— even as the situation worsens with the bus starting to flood and catch fire, and the stitches on his gunshot wound opening from the effort of getting debris off of her, he stalwartly stays at her side to give her rescue breaths until Owen pulls him out and rescues them both.
Season Two
- A food truck owner, with help from Grace, keeps her wits and bearings about her in order to ward off a swarm of scorpions long enough for Carlos to drive to her location and get her to safety.
Episode 5 - Difficult Conversations
- Off-screen, Marjan goes with Mateo back to a tattoo parlor and gets the artists who laughed at his tattoo misspelling to redo it free of charge.
- Grace helping a young woman, Kristen, through escaping a domestic abuse situation from her ex-boyfriend, mostly through the guise of a pizza delivery call and then through a Christian “encouragement” to said boyfriend.
Episode 6 - Everyone And Their Brother
- After Pearce flat-out refuses to join Owen in the minefield, TK volunteers himself to lend his own paramedic certification skills.
- When he, Nancy and Tommy are taken hostage by the three bank robbers who fled an exploded apartment building, TK removes his sobriety chip from his pants pocket and drops it near their van just as they’re headed back to the ambulance. Doing so without the robbers hearing a clink takes some wits.
- Sure enough, it leads into Carlos and Owen finding the chip when they go looking for the crew; then Carlos, using what he learned previously about his father’s case into the robbers and TK’s sobriety party, quickly deduces what happened: one of them had gotten critically injured in the apartment explosion, and since they didn’t trust anyone at a hospital to not report them to the police, the wounded robber’s girlfriend feigned a pregnancy to lure paramedics to them. But since Tommy’s group wouldn’t want to go too far into or out of the city, they would need both a sufficient hospital-esque setting and somewhere familiar to be rescued at: her husband’s restaurant.
- Tommy and Nancy make an escape attempt from the robbers with minimal discussion, and put up a good fight until Owen and Carlos arrive.
- Non-Action Guy TK doesn’t hesitate with fighting back either, despite having just as little combat experience and suffering a prior concussion— when the robber’s girlfriend attempts to grab her gun, he follows behind her and kicks the gun out of her reach…
- … and towards the front entrance, where Owen arrives, picks it up and shoots the lead robber just as he’s about to rush Tommy.
- An offscreen one for Billy. Even with the pre-existing ailments he told Owen he was recovering from in the previous episode, he figures out which factory the other firefighter would be investigating from their prior conversation about the serial arsonist, and repays Owen’s rescue by carrying him out of the burning factory, taking him back to his house, and waiting for him to wake up.
- Major Reyes’ Batman Gambit to catch the season arc’s arsonist.
- Mateo, coming back to the 129 fire station with lunch, gets trapped in the midst of the dust storm. After it settles, he’s basically alone with everyone in the center of the city in chaos. Instead of waiting for help, he steels himself, creates a makeshift triage area for the injured citizens, and starts single-handedly multitasking between herding people in and looking for any distressed survivors. Probie. No. More.
- When Billy announces he’s closing down the 126, Owen punches him right in the face.
Season Three
Episode 2 - Thin Ice
- Lindsey offers to fix Paul’s broken radio, and does so successfully. This allows Paul to keep in contact with Judd, Mateo, and their respective captains about their location in the church’s ruins and how to rescue them safely.
- Though it later puts his own health in jeopardy when the ice breaks, TK near-successfully improvises a rescue for Abe (the little boy who was found trapped in the frozen pond) with the ambulance rig’s bedsheets and a laryngoscope.
Episode 8 - In the Unlikely Event of an Emergency
- Gwyn may have had her own flaws and differences from Owen, but she handled herself admirably with helping TK overcome his substance addiction, as the flashbacks to 2017 show. From bravely walking through a drug den to look for her son, staying there till TK came down from his high, then firmly reserving him a spot at a rehabilitation center in Los Angeles, to staying with him throughout the flight there despite his misery from the withdrawal… many viewers who have family members/ friends who were addicts, or were addicts themselves, could strongly identify with this part of TK’s and Gwyn’s lives.
- After the lizard TK brings to the loft escapes from the fish tank, Carlos practically wrecks the living room keeping up the search for it off-screen, and succeeds in both retrieving it alive and keeping it inside. This is after he’s established as distinctly uncomfortable with the reptile.
Episode 17 - Spring Cleaning
- When a woman trapped under a van reveals she was escaping with her two sons from her abusive husband, he sneers that she couldn’t prove those allegations. Even Carlos has to concede that the husband still has legal custody of her sons and can take them back. Then Owen decides to add a charge of assault of an enforcement officer to his record by goading the man into thinking that the wife cheated on him — he may still be a maverick with doing the right thing, but he’s learning a thing or two from his enemies and his anger management.Owen: Are you sure [his two sons] are your kids? ‘Cause they don’t bear much of a resemblance. Got me thinking: (smirks) when was the last time a wife-beating cuck like you actually—?(The man throws a right hook at Owen’s face.)Owen: (pained but triumphant) Officer, would you do me the honor of arresting this man for assault?Carlos: With pleasure.
- After Wyatt ends up botching his job interview, Judd decides to drive back to the same building and convince the interviewer.
Season Four
Episode 4 - Abandoned
- TK, even through his intense agitation over Carlos’ disappearance, doing his utmost to help Gabriel with both finding the serial killer who took Iris and solving the related case, if it means saving his fiancée’s life. The standout moment being his identifying a key location that the serial killer and his past victims had in common, which turns out to be another integral connection between the victims’ socioeconomic statuses and physical descriptions.
- It ends with him very nearly dying when Trudy sticks with protecting Darryl and drugs him with a whole vial of morphine, but Carlos talking her into cutting him loose, then beating the absolute tar out of her son for his monstrous actions when he arrives home.
- The whole episode is an entire moment of awesome for Marjan. After Grant trails her and runs her off the road, she manages to stay upright and beat him back to his RV despite sustaining injuries from the crash, and later a bullet to her gut. When he then corners and threatens to kill both her and the 126 members who formed a search party (Owen, Judd and Paul), she keeps on holding her own with nothing but her grit, her blood loss, and a flare gun.
- Keep in mind, flare guns are meant to flash a distress signal. “A” being the keyword; in self-defense, there’s no telling if the flare will just bounce off the target, or miss. Either way, there’s only one chance — and even with no small amount of luck, Marjan successfully defends herself and alerts the team of her location so they can save her.
- It got him onto a dark path with a violent end, but if Mateo’s sitcom-style flashback is any indication, Marvin framing himself for his cousin’s arson was a big thing to do for Mateo so that he wouldn’t be deported or have a black mark on his record.
- Grace, with help from Carlos and Detective Washington, uncovering the presence of an organ trafficking ring after receiving a call from a scared Black girl, Lexi, who was forcefully made a donor.
- Later in the episode, she finds herself alone at a bar with a man strongly liked for being part of said organ trafficking ring, and at risk for getting drugged and forcefully made a donor (much like Lexi). Though she soon gets caught in the bathroom trying to stall him until the police arrive, the man collapses just as one detective who rebuffed her story enters. Turns out, at the start of their “date”, she’d noticed the man spiking her cocktail beforehand and simply took his non-spiked one under his nose. It helped that she’d also informed the detective about being at the bar before she even went there, of course— but it doesn’t change the fact that she served justice using only people skills and keen observation from her experience at dispatch.
