9-1-1: Lone Star Boss On Season 3 Finale Twists, Including That Long-Awaited Moment: 'It Felt Like The Right Time'

Monday's 9-1-1: Lone Star finale just gave the 126 plenty of reasons to celebrate.

TVLine spoke with executive producer Tim Minear about the episode's biggest surprises, including how some of them will affect the show's just-ordered fourth season. But first, a quick recap:

For starters, don't worry about the building collapse. Everyone you care about survived, though my heart goes out to poor Judd for re-breaking his leg. But the dangerous rescue (coupled with the possible return of his cancer) triggered a vision quest for Owen, who stared down the ghosts of his past and gained a new lease on life. Lastly, faced with his father's mortality, an emotional T.K. woke Carlos up in the middle of the night to propose... and he said yes!

Grade the finale and season below, then read on for our full interview with Minear. Which part of the #Tarlos proposal was improvised? Which couple was supposed to get together much sooner? And is there still hope for a pair of friendly exes? All those (and more!) questions are answered. As always, be sure to drop a comment with your thoughts.

The moment every #Tarlos has been waiting for finally arrived in the finale — T.K. and Carlos are engaged!

"There was a lot of conversation about how to do it," Minear says of the big moment. "For me, it just felt like the story was telling me to do it. You get to this point where T.K. and Carlos have both been through the wringer. Owen has also been through the wringer. You realize what's important and how transitory a moment can be. Owen learns that in this episode, and I thought it would be nice if T.K. also learned that."

Minear had "a couple of different endgames" for the couple this season, not wanting a proposal to feel "rushed." But as the events of the season unfolded, "it felt like the right time." He admits, "If you had asked me at the beginning of this season if I thought they were going to get engaged, I probably would have said no."

And if you swooned a little bit when Carlos referred to T.K. as "Tyler" while accepting the proposal, you apparently have Rafael Silva to thank for that.

"I'm pretty sure that was Rafa," Minear says. "I'm not sure that was actually on the page. I think it was probably Rafa."

The finale was no picnic for Owen, who once again found himself haunted by the ghosts of 9/11 — not to mention vivid memories of better days with Gwyn — while struggling to save the victims of last week's building collapse. The final shot of the episode found Owen putting away the piece of the World Trade Center that he'd been keeping in his office.

"What I didn't want to say is that he's forgetting about 9/11," Minear explains. "He talks to the representation of the ghost of that day, which is Manny, who asks him, 'Why are you keeping that thing like a holy relic?' He needs to find a balance. He can't forget it, but he can't keep living in it, either. Still, she has to move forward. His state of mind is complex, for sure, because he's not closing the box on that day. What he's doing is saying that he has integrated that day into who he is without letting it completely define him."

Owen received a "thinking of you" card from Catherine in the hospital, but if Minear had his way, Amy Acker would have had a larger presence in the finale.

"I really tried to somehow get Catherine into this episode, but you only have much room in a finale," Minear says. "Plus, Amy is off in another country doing another show, so she wasn't even available to me. It actually worked out weirdly, because that last scene with Owen at the bistro where he had his last scene with Catherine was potentially going to be a Catherine scene. But it ended up becoming a Tommy scene, and that is exactly what it was meant to be. Owen had his epiphany with a person who either wasn't real or wasn't alive, so he wanted to bring the most alive, flesh-and-blood human being to share his good news with."

"There was a lot of debate about this one," Minear says of Tommy and Julius' polarizing relationship. "I know the audience is incredibly ambivalent about it. Gina [Torres] and I were both ambivalent about it at first. But if you think about it, she's not betraying anybody. Charles is dead. But a portion of the audience has some cognitive dissonance about it, or flat out doesn't like it, and I completely understand that. No matter how you slice it and can lay out the logical facts, there's a visceral element to it that cannot be ignored."

Minear won't say whether we've seen the last of Julius, but he's happy to clarify exactly how he feels about Tommy:

"It's not that Tommy has fallen head-over-heels in love with Julius," he says. "That's not what happened at all. He's almost an usher leading her to another seat in her life. He's somebody who helps her awaken a part of herself that has been in hibernation in all of her grief. The problem for Julius is that he doesn't just want to be an usher. He's in love with this woman, which must be very complicated for him. He doesn't abandon her in Episode 17. For me, it was Julius saying, 'I appreciate how you feel about me, but I feel more deeply about you — and I have to go."

While we're talking about happy couples, let's take a minute to address Mateo and Nancy, the show's newest lovebirds. (Step aside, #Tarlos!) Their relationship became apparent towards the end of the season, but according to Minear, that wasn't originally how it was supposed to happen.

"My plan early on in the season — and you can see flashes of it in those earlier episodes — was to reveal that they had gotten together during the hiatus, the same way we revealed that T.K. and Carlos has shockingly broken up," he tells TVLine. "There's even a moment in the first rescue, the one with the guy who almost gets decapitated buy the shield of ice, where Mateo and Nancy give each other a look. That's a vestige of when that was going to be early in the season."

So, what kept these two apart for so long?

"It was always my plan to put them together, but it just never fit," Minear says. "We kept running out of real estate in the episodes as we went forward. I wanted to reveal them in bed together, as if they'd been together for a minute, and that was going to be in Episode 4. But I just couldn't get it to fit in there. The one moment that the audience really noticed was when everyone was watching Owen and T.K.'s plane making its perilous anding — Mateo reached over and took her hand. That was the most blatant beginning of something."