A quick review of tonight’s “Brooklyn Nine-Nine” coming up just as soon as I buy a multi-surface cleaner to impress you…
“Windbreaker City” was a sequel of sorts to last year’s “Tactical Village,” offering a chance for the detectives to live out various action movie fantasies while Captain Holt and Gina remained office-bound. It’s still fun to watch Peralta and Boyle and the others play at being John McClane, but there were definitely diminishing returns for this one, just like there were when terrorists threatened Holly McClane’s life a second time at Christmas.
For starters, while Holt and Gina always make an interesting pair, it’s hard for any scenario with them to live up to Andre Braugher saying “Kwazy Cupcakes. Though I did enjoy how the captain manipulated Gina into doing more work even as he was apologizing for being a bad leader.
Also, even though the hostage overthrow idea was driven by the other detectives trying to distract Jake from the break-up with Sophia, the fact that the cops were so thoroughly undermining the point of the exercise made the thing feel a little too lightweight even by “Brooklyn” standards. The show tends to do a good job of balancing comedy with at least a vague sense that these could be cops in Brooklyn, but this seemed like a thing where another agency would have just pulled the plug once Jake and Charles started shooting everyone.
Still, some amusing moments (I liked the running gag about Boyle’s dog being consigned to Hell), plus Nick Kroll got to pull the duct-taped gun trick (setting up the later moment where Jake and Sophia are back to viewing the other as Hans Gruber). Not bad, but they’ve done this exact episode better before.
What did everybody else think?