A review of tonight’s Brooklyn Nine-Nine coming up just as soon as I vacation in Banff…
On the one hand, devoting three episodes to the question of whether the Nine-Nine would be closed seems like the epitome of schmuckbait, the writers room term for a plot designed to trick the audience into believing something may happen that is obviously not going to happen. You can hit Gina with a bus, or transfer Captain Holt to City Hall, or upend the status of any single character, without fundamentally changing what this show is, but the Nine-Nine itself isn’t going to be dismantled, especially not late in a season that already did arcs where Peralta and Holt were in Witness Protection and where all the cops were demoted to the night shift. The question of whether the precinct would close was the falsest of tension, the schmuckiest of bait.
But while the two previous episodes in this mini-arc had their ups and downs, “The Last Ride” was a lot of fun because it used this bogus cliffhanger to essentially do a series finale in miniature: an episode where Jake, Charles, Holt, Amy, Gina, and the rest of the group all think this is their last day working together, and act accordingly. Jake and Charles try to live out all of their (really, all of Jake’s) cop movie fantasies, even though the only case they have left involves a stolen bicycle, the Captain tries to give Santiago years’ worth of mentoring in a single day, Terry tries to break Hitchcock’s precinct record for solved cases, and Gina tries to launch her “Ginazon” portal with a series of viral prank videos that are all the same prank: trying to get people to drink cement. (That joke takes quite the David Letterman route, where you can’t believe they keep going back to that well until it becomes funny that they keep doing it.)
Had this been the actual end of the precinct, and the series, it wouldn’t have been perfect — I could have done without the dirt bike chase, the latest example of Brooklyn devoting time (both production and story-wise) to a comically underwhelming stunt, when the show would’ve been better served just putting any pair of characters in a room together and letting them talk — but it would have felt sweet and amusing and right. It’s a particularly great showcase for Boyle, who gets to be both the worst (his run of inappropriate references to police gear as “Toys for Boys,” “Adult Toys,” etc.) and the best (out-cooling Jake by dubbing their back-to-back stance idea “the Bullet Tornado”), but also for Holt and Santiago as they speed their way through all his advice (“Silk is for sex workers and musicians”), and even for Hitchcock, who gets to revel in having the record over Terry, but revels in a uniquely Hitchcock way, like the tattoo that makes it look like he’s eating his gun rather than blowing smoke from the muzzle. And the various Last Rides intersected well, with Jake and Boyle doing the right thing by waiting for the drug bust, while it was Gina’s many followers who saved the day after she live-streamed Holt’s inspirational farewell speech to the troops.
The only real problem with doing this idea now is that Dan Goor will have to come up with a new idea for whenever Brooklyn actually ends — which hopefully won’t be for many, many, many years. (And hopefully with more eyebrow pumps along the way.)
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What did everybody else think?