9-1-1 Season 4, Episode 12 recap: Treasure Hunt

9-1-1 Season 4 deals with quite a wild story in this week’s episode, “Treasure Hunt.” Things get started as a father and daughter stumble across a message in a bottle during their hike. Rather than some romantic note to a stranger, the note asks for help from someone stuck on a cliff.

The stranger’s letter is written on a receipt just five days old. The first responders go to work locating this stranded person. There was a strong possibility this person was no longer alive, but it’s never stopped our team of responders from doing their job anyway.

Luckily, the man is found on top of a mountain, and it turns out he is there for a very particular reason. An author named Hollis Harcourt (Patrick Fischler) hid a treasure worth nearly $5 million somewhere in Los Angeles, and now the world is out there looking for it. He declared this treasure hunt on television, which came just as it was announced that he had passed away.

Interesting way to leave your legacy behind.

9-1-1 Season 4, Episode 12 recap: A treasure hunt gone wrong

While all of Los Angeles is out there searching for the late author’s hidden treasure, Station 118 decides to get in on the search. Of course, they’re fully aware that anyone out there looking for the treasure is putting themselves in dangerous situations and getting really hurt.

Before passing away and leaving the treasure behind, Hollis also posted a poem that contains all the clues about the location online. The risk-taking began, but it didn’t stop Station 118 from getting involved in the chaos.

Buck (Oliver Stark) is the first to take the plunge, but given that he was spread thin answering 9-1-1 calls around the city, it didn’t give him much time. He wanted to do go treasure hunting with Taylor (Megan West), but she was just as busy as him covering the news on all this madness.

Eventually, Buck joined Taylor’s treasure hunt “team,” which included Taylor’s cameraman. The plan was to split the treasure money equally if they were to find it, but that was proving more difficult than imagined.

9-1-1 Season 4, Episode 12 recap: Station 118 joins in on the fun

With Buck hot on the treasure hunt trail, Eddie (Ryan Guzman) decides to join his team as well. They start strategizing by asking their co-workers where the most calls were coming from. They would mark all the locations on the map as a process of elimination to limit the search to a smaller radius.

Hen (Aisha Hinds) and Chimney (Kenneth Choi) realize no one has asked them to join their teams, so they form their own, while Bobby (Peter Krause) decides to take it on solo. Of course, Bobby had to hide that he was trying to look for the treasure from Athena because he knew she wouldn’t be too happy to know he was. But she finds out what he’s been up to when she finds his map and notes pasted all across a board.

Instead of freaking out on him, Athena helps narrow down the search by marking the places she had arrested people. It’s a kind gesture on her behalf, but she can’t help but wonder why Bobby is so into this. If he finds the treasure, he plans to set up a trust fund for the kids, potentially retiring, and maybe go on that honeymoon they never did.

While Bobby might be ready to retire, Athena is not, despite the near-death experience she had last year. She wants to do what she loves and is not ready to give it up yet.

9-1-1 Season 4, Episode 12 recap: Just kidding, he’s not dead

As the episode goes on, Athena gets a call about a break-in at Hollis’ residence. When she gets there, she realizes that Hollis isn’t actually dead. Instead, he pretended to be dead, so he could watch people run amok trying to look for the treasure. It was a way for him to get over his writer’s block and finish the book he’s been trying to write. The real-life treasure hunt was his way of getting content for the book.

With this revelation, the Station 118 guys called off their treasure hunt since they realize Hollis wasn’t exactly the sanest person in all of this. But in their moment of giving up, Athena figures out the final clue and realizes where the treasure is actually hidden.

When she and Bobby arrive at the location, they find Chimney, Hen, Eddie, and Buck there as well. Each of them had figured out the location in their own ways, and now that they were all there together, they decided to split the money. Well, they’d have to include Taylor and her cameraman as well.

It turned out someone else had beat them to the treasure, aka the probie Ravi (Anirudh Pisharody). But when the box was opened, there was nothing inside of it. Pissed off at the whole ordeal, the group heads to Hollis’ house only to find him dead on the ground and the cops showing up right behind them.

9-1-1 Season 4, Episode 12 recap: Who killed Hollis, for reals?

Of course, the group didn’t have anything to do with Hollis’s death but based on the security camera footage, someone went into the house right before them. It was a woman that had interrupted one of Taylor’s news reports earlier in the episode to say that the treasure hunt was a scam and her husband nearly died trying to find it.

When the woman showed up, Hollis had a heart attack and passed away. With the whole ordeal being a hot mess, Athena and Detective Rick Romero (Danny Nucci) decide that the District Attorney wasn’t going to take this case on.

As it turns out that the treasure was real, but Hollis’ assistant, Jeremiah (Ithamar Enriquez), stole it when Hollis asked him to hide it. He was tired of being treated like crap, and so he took the money and flew off to the Maldives. Since there are no extradition laws there and there is proof he even committed a crime, they decide to leave the whole thing as it was.

The end.

What a wild and wacky episode, right?

Did you like this week’s episode of 9-1-1 Season 4? Tell us in the comments below?