Don-Dixie-Blythe Backstory Episode, LeAnn Rimes Song

SPOILER ALERT: This story incorporates major plot particulars for Thursday’s episode of ABC’s ”9-1-1: Nashville.”

It’s the second all “9-1-1: Nashville” followers have been ready for: the origin story of Don Hart (Chris O’Donnell), his previous flame Dixie Bennings (LeAnn Rimes) and his spouse Blythe Hart (Jessica Capshaw).

Titled “Don Begins,” the episode flashes between the current day in Nashville with the 113 again to when Don was a younger boy who suffered via the trauma of his dad and mom and child sister dying during an arson at their household dwelling. That same night time, little Don meets little Dixie, who occurred to live down the avenue from him together with her grandmother. Dixie and her grandmother consolation Don and stick with him at the hospital as he waits for CPS to come back and his entire life to alter.

Time then skips ahead to when Don was a younger grownup (performed by Ben Winchell) and crossed paths with Dixie (Noa Bess Solomon) as soon as again — this time once they’re each caught in a jail cell in a single day. Once they had been out and capable of reconnect, their love story correctly started. They moved in to a tiny residence together, he supported her in her music profession, she supported him in his firefighter training, and their life together was pretty until it began to unravel attributable to stress and time.

Don finally meets and falls in love with Blythe (youthful version performed by Hunter King) when Dixie takes off to go on tour as a backup dancer for Faith Hill and he figures out what he needs to do with the remainder of his life. When Dixie returns and desires to select issues again up, it’s too late. Don and Blythe are so shut that Blythe has gotten the Nashville Police Department to reopen his household’s arson case, resulting in the arrest of the killer.

The episode ends with one more flashback, this time to the night time Dixie and Don slept together — conceiving their son Blue — when he was separated from his spouse Blythe.

“It was so cool to know that this was coming and that people really got a glimpse into the origin story of Dixie and Don,” Rimes told Variety. “I think it gives you a different point of view on these characters from here on out. It changes the dynamic between Don and Dixie. I think people have seen Dixie in all of her manipulative ways. But I think that now, seeing young Dixie and the heart of her through Noa, who is just, she’s so brilliant. In this episode seeing her portray Dixie, this wild heart and just the heart of her before life got a hold of her and turned her into a more bitter kind of manipulative flair. It is so fun for me as an actress to play all these different layers of her.”

Rimes added: “I’ve seen so many people conflicted, ‘We love her, we hate her.’ It’s back and forth depending on the episode. And now I think they’re really going to be conflicted, because you really see the connection that Don and Dixie had.”

Another purpose why the episode was a particular one for Rimes, though she was only playing Dixie in the current timeline, was she wrote and carried out a tune as younger Dixie called “Wild Things Run.” Solomon initially sang the tune while taking pictures, however Rimes recorded the vocals two weeks in the past for use on top of the scene. And in an effort to do that, Rimes needed to make some changes to the approach she sings these days.

“Her voice is my voice, and I had to make myself sound 20 years younger,” Rimes said. “I took all the bottom end out of my voice, and kind of just did the whole resonating through like my nasal area. And it took me back to the ‘Coyote Ugly’ days when I had to do that for Piper Perabo’s voice.”

Rimes pitched the thought of her writing a tune for the present when “9-1-1: Nashville” showrunner Rashad Raisani first told her he was plotting this origin story episode for Dixie and Don.

“I know they have so many great writers for the show, but when I heard that they were looking for a song that kicked off Dixie’s career, I was like, this is what I do,” Rimes, who co-wrote “Wild Things Run” with collaborator Darrell Brown, said. “I do write music and sing for a living. So utilize me. And I went to Rashad and said, ‘Hey, I want to take a stab at this, because I think it would be so powerful for someone who’s lived in this character to write for her.’ And he said absolutely. So he sent me the first draft of the montage scene, just to give me an idea where to jump off from. And I was laying on a massage table in Hawaii and the title ‘Wild Things Run’ came to me. And I was saying, oh, man, it’s perfect, because it felt like that was kind of these two wild hearts as youngsters running towards each other and then running away.”

By the end of the present-day timeline in the episode, Don is making a testimonial on behalf of the man who killed his household, providing forgiveness however to not overlook. Blythe thanks Dixie for serving to Don attain that second of peace via an earlier dialog once they shared their recollections of the night time of the hearth. But when Blythe and Dixie half, it’s with Dixie declaring as soon as more that the “universe” will always deliver her and Don again together.

And Rimes says Dixie isn’t just antagonizing Blythe — she means it.

“Oh, I think she knows that that’s very true,” Rimes said. “She thinks it’s really, constantly, from the very beginning they can’t seem to get away from each other. And she’s clearly always going to be in love with this man. And I mean, it’s her baby daddy. But it’s not just that. I think there is a real connection and a real pull and history that Blythe and Don don’t have. And I think maybe it’s the universe, and maybe it’s also Dixie always putting herself in the line of fire that, she always somewhat makes herself available to that, too. But I think there is this real connection; that she truly believes, no matter what, they’re going to be connected in some way.”