Explaining Bobby Nash's Shocking '9-1-1' Death — and Why It Had to Happen (SPOILERS)

Warning: This post contains spoilers 9-1-1.

It's never easy to lose TV characters you love, and that only gets truer the longer they stick around. Peter Krause's Bobby Nash has been a part of 9-1-1 since the beginning, and the show decided to end its two-part Contagion event by killing him off.

As fans try to wrap their minds around Bobby's death, many of them are wondering why the show decided to kill one of its central characters off after such an extended run. Here's what we know:

Bobby's death on 9-1-1 came as a gut-punch near the very end of the episode. After Chimney received the only antidote for the virus, Bobby revealed that there was a hole in his breathing apparatus and that he had caught the virus as a result.

He gets final moments with his crew and family, but those moments only make the whole thing hurt even worse.

“This isn’t how I wanted to leave you. I’m not choosing to leave you. I chose to save my team because it was the right thing to do. It was never because I wanted to go. I don’t want to go. If I could choose, I would stay with you. Always," he tells his wife, Athena. “LA was supposed to be my penance, not my home. And then you said yes to a dinner invitation, and I started to live again. I love you, baby.”

In speaking with TV Line, showrunner Tim Minear said that the decision to kill Bobby was his and his alone.

"No, this was entirely a creative decision on my part, really," he said. "I’ve been thinking about it for a while. I kind of hinted at it in the Hot Shots episode when Brad Torrance is saying that [his character] isn’t going wake up from his coma, and he had that fan going, 'You can’t kill him off! He’s what holds the [firehouse] together!'"

"If the stakes are never real, if there’s really no chance that any of this peril in which these characters find themselves amounts to anything, I think the show could die," he added, making it clear that part of the reason Bobby died was to prove that the characters on this show were taking real risks in their work.

According to Tim, the decision to have Peter leave 9-1-1 was totally his call, and had nothing to do with Peter wanting off the show.

"He was really professional about it and completely understood, creatively, why I wanted to do it. None of us wanted to do it, because if I kill off Bobby, then Peter Krause is going to be a casualty of that choice. That was the hardest part about it, to be honest. I didn’t want to not keep working with Peter," Tim said.

Unfortunately, Peter and Bobby are both gone. As Tim mentioned, the decision was "hard for everybody," but it was one he felt he had to make.