[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for 9-1-1 Season 8 Episode 15 “Lab Rats.”]

This might make you miss Peter Krause more already because he knows his character so well. The Thursday, April 17, episode of 9-1-1 ended with the tragic loss of Captain Bobby Nash, and showrunner Tim Minear reveals a key moment from his final scene was the star and executive producer’s idea.

“It was Peter’s idea to kind of turn away from Athena [Angela Bassett] and go to that table and kind of get into a prayerful posture. That was Peter. That was all Peter,” Minear tells TV Insider. “I just thought that was a really lovely choice on his part. And it just kept things kind of elliptical and kind of non-linear because what you’re really watching in those last whatever, two minutes, probably would’ve taken place over some hours.”

Bobby died after exposure to a super strain of CCHF (Crimean–Congo hemorrhagic fever); there was only one vial of anti-viral, and he gave it to Chimney (Kenneth Choi), who had already reached the stage where he was significantly bleeding (from his nose). Bobby only revealed he, too, had been exposed — his air supply line tore during an explosion in the previous episode — once his team had been evacuated. Bobby then had a heartbreaking goodbye with both Buck (Oliver Stark) and his wife Athena.

Minear tells us that he saw “a combination of Bobby and Peter” in his final scene. “Some of that’s Peter. Some of that is Peter, maybe even talking to me. I was there for that. It was tricky how we were going to approach this because just based on what that virus was and what it does, the thing could have turned into a ghoulish, body horror, horror movie, which is not what we wanted. You have to understand what’s happening, but we also just didn’t want it to be a particularly ugly death, which is what this would be.”

For the showrunner, this was “a very hard creative choice to make,” he shares, noting that he has continually put these characters in life-and-death situations — it’s their job, as first responders — but not killed anyone off. He knew that doing so with Bobby would affect every other character.

“It made a certain amount of sense for the arc of his character and that he came here for redemption and that he came here with a death wish, really. And then his whole story is about how he no longer has a death wish. He never feels completely worthy of the happiness that he’s received, but when he makes that sacrifice, he doesn’t want to go, but he achieves the culmination of everything that has been driving that character for eight seasons,” Minear says.

He stresses that “nobody wanted Peter to leave, most of all me.” He spoke with Krause a month ahead of the rest of the cast. “We all just felt like we were losing a real person, someone that we loved. Peter’s great. We talk all the time, and I can’t wait to do something else with him.”

According to Minear, Krause understood the creative reason for killing off Bobby. And as the showrunner puts it, “Peter Krause was sort of an unfortunate casualty of Bobby’s death because everyone loves working with Peter. He loves working on the show. So it was a really hard personal sacrifice that we’re all kind of making.”

9-1-1, Thursdays, 8/7c, ABC