It's a Surprising Final Destination for Queer Couple 'Tarlos' on '9-1-1 Lone Star'

Spoiler alert: This article contains details about the series finale of "9-1-1 Lone Star."

The Rob Lowe-led Ryan Murphy spinoff has galloped home, and the queer couple fans have been rooting for have seen their story wrapped up. Read on to find out how!

In a series finale that saw station chief Owen Strand (Lowe) face down the perils of a nuclear accident triggered by an asteroid impact (!) while the station's various personnel overcame their own dilemmas – cancer, potential deportation, romance – Strand's son, T.K. (Ronen Rubinstein) and his husband Carlos (Rafael Silva) (or "Tarlos" as the couple were dubbed) navigated a bureaucracy that threatened to stymie their legal adoption of T.K.'s little half-brother, Jonah.

"In the final moments of the finale, it's revealed T.K. has quit his job as an EMT to care full time for his half-brother," Entertainment Weekly revealed, with his resignation removing the concern that both adoptive parents have jobs that are too dangerous.

"Once we introduced Jonah, you felt like this might be where the direction for Tarlos goes," Rubinstein told Variety. "For me, personally, it's extra surreal. The show seems to really imitate life, imitating art for me very often for all my big life moments. And as we were filming Season 5, I had a baby on the way, and I have a son now, who just turned four months old. And knowing that the direction of the season would be me having a son on the show, it's so bizarre."

Calling it "a really cathartic, beautiful full circle of how I wished we would end the show for these two," Rubinstein said that "for T.K., it truly is a happily ever after for them, and a beautiful way to leave these characters."

"I just wanted that last scene with them to be a celebration of where they are as a couple," one of the series' showrunners, Rashad Raisani, said in comments to EW. "They've come so far together, and they've really earned their joy through suffering and sacrifice. I just wanted them to have a truly happy ending."

"And I think you see both guys look like they have the weight of the world off their shoulders, which they've been carrying around for a lot of the last two years," Raisani added.

The showrunner explained the thinking behind giving each of the characters' arcs an upbeat conclusion, pointing to the Fox show's cancellation, which, Variety noted, was "primarily due to complications surrounding Disney's ownership of the franchise's studio, 20th Television, not its lack of popularity..."

"My ultimate feeling was, 'It's hard enough that the show's ending too early,'" Raisani mulled to EW. "That, to me, was the real loss. So why not allow these people to emerge, and give the audience a message of hope at the end of it? Letting them see these characters went through hell, but they came out the other side."

As for Lowe's character, who struggled with past losses (including the decimation of his previous crew in New York City as the result of 9/11), the end of his journey is another full-circle moment as he returns to NYC.

"He had completed his mission, his mission of the show, the conceit of the show, and from the very first moment of the pilot, which was: rebuild his family, rescue his son and then rebuild the shattered family of the 126 in Austin," the actor said in comments to Variety.

"And he leaves the 126 in Austin completely rebuilt, completely functional, a great family – and same for his son. And now it's time for for Owen to go off into, because he's going East, the sunrise, not the sunset, and build the next chapter of his life."

It's still possible that some of these characters could end up on the franchise's OG series, "9-1-1," which airs on ABC, or be integrated into a whole new series.

"Rubinstein says it 'would be kind of impossible to say no,'" Variety relayed, "and Silva thinks there's still 'so much beautiful opportunity to build the world' for their characters. So count them in."