With Brooklyn Nine-Nine's season finale this week, last week's penultimate episode continued to tease how the season would wrap up. The episode started with a great cold open where Holt tells Peralta that he injured his hand in a hula hooping class simply for the reason that no one would ever believe Jake. “You sick son of a bitch!” Jake snarls.
After he breaks the precinct record, Jake is given the weekend off by Holt. However, after hearing that Amy is going on a romantic getaway with Teddy, her new boyfriend, Jake decides to team up with Terry to crack Case 52ABX-32QJ. “We have to find a way to abbreviate this thing.” Jake says after Case 52ABX-32QJ's full name is repeated four and a half times in the space of fifteen seconds. 52ABX-32QJ is a case from eight years ago, deemed unsolvable, where a victim was murdered in a boat explosion with no witnesses and only a charred finger and a melted torso as evidence. After several weeks of training camps, wedding planning, apartment searching and birthday parties, it was nice to see members of the Nine-Nine return to solving cases. As well as an interesting plot, it also reintroduced the way in which Peralta interacts with criminals and suspects, for example, his deadpan analysis on a prisoner who had apparently shivved himself three times in a row accidentally. While recent episodes have left out police cases to focus on character development, Unsolvable manages to do both. After Peralta solves the case by working out that the 'victim' had in fact murdered the suspect and cut off his own finger as evidence (a supercool twist), he is still sad. The episode ends with with a nice scene where Jake lets Terry know the reason why breaking the precinct record and solving Case 52ABX-32QJ hasn't made him happy: Amy.
Amy's storyline this week had it's moments but came off as contrived in a very sitcomy way. Amy had forgotten she had offered to help with a community outreach meeting and made plans to go a weekend away with her new boyfriend, Teddy. Instead of telling Holt the truth, she panics and lies about a dental appointment. The whole thing escalates and ends up with Holt sitting next to Amy in a dentist chair while a dentist shows them X-Rays of Amy's mouth. The entire storyline could have been saved if it had turned out that Holt was simply fucking with her. Otherwise, it just comes across as unrealistic. Holt's sadistic “I feel like you deserve this.” when Amy is told she has seven cavities and Amy's failed attempt at drinking after did bring a smile to my face.
As said in every Brooklyn Nine-Nine review we've written, there is a great unbalance between the characters. While Peralta and Holt kill it week in, week out, the other character only generate the laughs of these characters sporadically. Three character's who rarely generate as many laughs as other characters are Charles, Rosa and Gina. Unsolvable has a story that featured all three of these characters as well as Scully and Hitchcock. Unsurprisingly, this storyline was met with incredibly low expectations. It appears that Vivian still wants to move to Canada. Due to the continuation of this plot, it seems as though this will be the reason Charles won't go through with next week's wedding. The storyline starts and ends incredibly quickly with Charles immediately telling Hitchcock and Scully about the secret bathroom Gina and Rosa tell him about. Gina supplied a good few laughs with her insistence that she knows 'the Papa John' and her love of her wolf decorated blanket, Wolfy and Rosa plays the straight man very well but like most non-Peralta or non-Holt stories, it was only okay.
Like a lot of modern sitcoms, for example, New Girl and How I Met Your Mother, Brooklyn Nine-Nine makes use of flashbacks. This episode displayed the good and the bad. Amy immediately volunteering and a flashback of eight years ago where Peralta briefs his colleagues with the exact same words but wearing louder outfits did provide some contextual hilarity. However, a section where Gina says that Charles can't keep a secret followed by a clip of Charles telling her that people are throwing her a surprise birthday party almost seems as though the writers forgot to write a joke.
After weeks of teasing, it will be very exciting to finally see how they round up the season. My prediction is that Charles will not go through with the wedding and Jake and Amy will have a moment but will more that welcome a surprise ending.
After he breaks the precinct record, Jake is given the weekend off by Holt. However, after hearing that Amy is going on a romantic getaway with Teddy, her new boyfriend, Jake decides to team up with Terry to crack Case 52ABX-32QJ. “We have to find a way to abbreviate this thing.” Jake says after Case 52ABX-32QJ's full name is repeated four and a half times in the space of fifteen seconds. 52ABX-32QJ is a case from eight years ago, deemed unsolvable, where a victim was murdered in a boat explosion with no witnesses and only a charred finger and a melted torso as evidence. After several weeks of training camps, wedding planning, apartment searching and birthday parties, it was nice to see members of the Nine-Nine return to solving cases. As well as an interesting plot, it also reintroduced the way in which Peralta interacts with criminals and suspects, for example, his deadpan analysis on a prisoner who had apparently shivved himself three times in a row accidentally. While recent episodes have left out police cases to focus on character development, Unsolvable manages to do both. After Peralta solves the case by working out that the 'victim' had in fact murdered the suspect and cut off his own finger as evidence (a supercool twist), he is still sad. The episode ends with with a nice scene where Jake lets Terry know the reason why breaking the precinct record and solving Case 52ABX-32QJ hasn't made him happy: Amy.
Amy's storyline this week had it's moments but came off as contrived in a very sitcomy way. Amy had forgotten she had offered to help with a community outreach meeting and made plans to go a weekend away with her new boyfriend, Teddy. Instead of telling Holt the truth, she panics and lies about a dental appointment. The whole thing escalates and ends up with Holt sitting next to Amy in a dentist chair while a dentist shows them X-Rays of Amy's mouth. The entire storyline could have been saved if it had turned out that Holt was simply fucking with her. Otherwise, it just comes across as unrealistic. Holt's sadistic “I feel like you deserve this.” when Amy is told she has seven cavities and Amy's failed attempt at drinking after did bring a smile to my face.
As said in every Brooklyn Nine-Nine review we've written, there is a great unbalance between the characters. While Peralta and Holt kill it week in, week out, the other character only generate the laughs of these characters sporadically. Three character's who rarely generate as many laughs as other characters are Charles, Rosa and Gina. Unsolvable has a story that featured all three of these characters as well as Scully and Hitchcock. Unsurprisingly, this storyline was met with incredibly low expectations. It appears that Vivian still wants to move to Canada. Due to the continuation of this plot, it seems as though this will be the reason Charles won't go through with next week's wedding. The storyline starts and ends incredibly quickly with Charles immediately telling Hitchcock and Scully about the secret bathroom Gina and Rosa tell him about. Gina supplied a good few laughs with her insistence that she knows 'the Papa John' and her love of her wolf decorated blanket, Wolfy and Rosa plays the straight man very well but like most non-Peralta or non-Holt stories, it was only okay.
Like a lot of modern sitcoms, for example, New Girl and How I Met Your Mother, Brooklyn Nine-Nine makes use of flashbacks. This episode displayed the good and the bad. Amy immediately volunteering and a flashback of eight years ago where Peralta briefs his colleagues with the exact same words but wearing louder outfits did provide some contextual hilarity. However, a section where Gina says that Charles can't keep a secret followed by a clip of Charles telling her that people are throwing her a surprise birthday party almost seems as though the writers forgot to write a joke.
After weeks of teasing, it will be very exciting to finally see how they round up the season. My prediction is that Charles will not go through with the wedding and Jake and Amy will have a moment but will more that welcome a surprise ending.
Grant Robertson
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