‘Brooklyn Nine-Nine’ Returns To Duty With ‘The Audit’

Brooklyn Nine-Nine is back from hiatus, and I have a quick review of tonight’s episode coming up just as soon as I think William Atherton is the second-best Die Hard villain…

When last we left our constabulary heroes, Gina had just gotten the full Todd Mulcahy from an oncoming bus. Fortunately, Chelsea Peretti wasn’t leaving the show, even temporarily, and “The Audit” opens with Gina returning to work earlier than she should, a halo brace holding her together but also making her movements painful. It’s a good physical comedy showcase for Peretti, particularly when Gina has to pop and lock while screaming in agony.

Instead, the real danger in the episode is to the Nine-Nine itself, which is being threatened with closure because of a drop in crime throughout the borough. While this could be one crisis/transition too many in a season that already had Holt and Jake in Witness Protection, the squad stuck on the night shift, and the arrival of Captain Stentley, for the moment it’s a threat rather than an actuality, and one that puts the whole ensemble into an amusing crisis mode as their attempts to save the precinct keep making things worse. It helps that one of the problems (the $21,000 Japanese copy machine) was caused by Stentley, while another involves the return of Kyle Bornheimer as Amy’s dull ex-boyfriend Teddy, last seen early in season two. This way, it feels like it’s not just a calamity coming entirely out of the blue, but a series of compounding errors we’ve seen the squad make in the past.

Of the various individual catastrophes and awful solutions, Boyle dressing up in a sexy cat costume to deal with a rat infestation using the big jug of wolf urine he ordinarily rubs on Nikolaj’s shoes was the winner because… well, did you read the earlier part of that sentence? But “The Audit” also had fun establishing the many different ways Teddy is boring (along with Jake’s obsession with the size of his penis), and even managed to bring Tom Haverford’s ex-wife from Parks and Rec (aka Jama Williamson) as the new girlfriend Teddy is willing to toss aside the second he thinks Amy wants him back. And good to see Kimberly Hebert Gregory from Vice Principals as Terry’s ex, who seems a much bigger danger to the Nine-Nine than Teddy was.

All that, plus Holt saying both “brb” and “Your libido has endangered us all.” It’s good to have Brooklyn back.

What did everybody else think?

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