A quick review of tonight’s “Brooklyn Nine-Nine” coming up just as soon as my childhood home has been replaced by a denim pants store…
If “The Funeral” had just been Holt and Terry getting drunk and depressed at the bar… Dayeenu. Hell, if it had just been Andre Braugher’s elongated delivery of the word “pain” as Holt read the first draft of his speech, and/or Terry dancing the Carlton, this would have been a marvelous episode. Fortunately, there was a lot of funny stuff happening around the spectacle of the show’s two most sensible characters drinking too much after a very bad day.
It’ll be a challenge to ever have the Vulture be quite as horrible a dude-bro as Dennis Duffy was, but the “Brooklyn” writers and Dean Winters are certainly giving it their all, particularly in the sequence where Jake tried and failed to go full douche to bromance him. We’ll see how long the Vulture remains in command – I’m guessing that Archie Panjabi’s Lt. Singh winds up running the squad for at least an episode, just for the tension that would create with Boyle – but it’s enjoyable watching everyone have to work around someone who’s quite this awful and smug. And Andy Samberg and Melissa Fumero both do well playing the levels of desperation Jake and Amy were at as the funeral threw one obstacle (the bagpiper) after another (Jake becoming Prostitute Jake) in front of their plan.
Boyle’s hook-up with the vegan Singh felt a little slighter than the other stories, even though it may have actually had more screentime than Holt’s despair(*), but Boyle being super-gross about sex is almost always a winner.
(*) FOX’s press site has several stills featuring Scully and Hitchcock in a subplot that got excised altogether, other than perhaps the mention of Scully’s wife finally leaving him. With a cast this big and only 20-odd minutes to play with, things are always going to get cut.
What did everybody else think?