#tevan nation rise up

[firehose118]

Okay even after writing this I’m still thinking about the importance of Tommy calling Buck Evan.

Names are identities. Names can be armor or they can be intimate (if you want a deeper exploration of this in fiction, please watch Black Sails). A chosen identity can be especially important as a way to control how you are viewed by others.

He goes by Buck because that’s what they called him in the academy. “Buck” is a firefighter, and as we know being a firefighter is his whole reason for living (as evidenced by the cursed lawsuit arc). He could have gone back to “Evan” when he joined the 118, but he introduced himself as “Buck” very intentionally. It was a reinvention, a shedding of his past.

Evan is a name that he associates with his parents, and his parents are so much of the reason why it took him so long to understand who he is fundamentally. Evan is who he was as a child. Evan is his parents’ unwanted son, the name they’d say like a curse whenever he did something stupid to get their attention. He hates being called Evan because his parents yelled it at him so many times that the very sound of it feels like a scold.

As others have pointed out, he probably got flustered and introduced himself to Tommy as Evan Buckley before correcting himself and saying Buck. But Tommy latched on to that and kept calling him Evan. It doesn’t seem like Buck corrected him. He doesn’t mind the name in Tommy’s mouth.

Tommy isn’t talking to Buck-the-firefighter. He’s talking to Evan-the-man. When Tommy says “Evan” he’s saying, “I see the you that is underneath the person you project out into the world. I see the you that you really are and I will call you by your name.”

There’s something deeply intimate there. Buck was a womanizer (which, he wasn’t, but that’s another post). Evan is queer. Tommy sees the Evan that Buck has been suppressing for so long—the one he didn’t even know was there—and he brings that person to the surface. He speaks to the heart of him directly.

Think about how few times people call him “Evan” throughout the series. Maddie uses that name when she hasn’t even spoken to him in three years. Evan is her little brother. She starts calling him Buck when she gets to know him as a man, not a little boy. She respects that he is a different person now than he was when she last saw him. She understands the difference.

Eddie calls him Evan exactly once, as far as I can remember, and that was very intentional on his part. When he sat on that hospital bed and said “Because, Evan,” Eddie needed him to listen, needed him to understand how important what he was saying is. Eddie understands the power of calling him Evan, understands he needs to address a fundamentally different part of this man to get him to understand how important he is to Eddie. To Chris. At all.

One thing I haven’t personally seen discussed is the sort of meta reason why his character is called Buck: his defining characteristics in the first season are how young and inexperienced and reckless he is. He’s a young buck. I genuinely believe the writers came up with that and then decided to give him the last name Buckley as an excuse to call him that.

So for Tommy to call him Evan, and for him to accept that as an identity without cringing, is him growing up. Excuse the phrase, but it’s him healing his inner child. To hear “Evan” said casually, reverently, lovingly is a revelation. It is a connection between the lonely child and the actualized adult. It is the man in his totality.