The Nine-Nine gets a new member of the precinct as season 7 comes to a heartwarming close.
Does a real crisis make an imaginary one feel that much more real, or does it heighten the slap-happy ingenuity? Either way, “Blackout” is a great season finale of Brooklyn Nine-Nine, coming off the heels of two excellent episodes.
Last week’s “Ransom” gave us three hilarious individual plots that never interconnected, a formula that “Blackout” reverses with three plots so intertwined that when you see how all of the pieces fit together you’ll stand up and applaud. Spoilers and talk of childbirth below, so proceed with caution.
This season of Brooklyn Nine-Nine has definitely taken bigger risks and had bigger payoffs, but so much of it has circled around Jake (Andy Samberg) and Amy’s (Melissa Fumero) desire and fear of being parents. Dan Goor obviously put a lot of love into directing and writing this episode (with script co-written with Luke Del Tredici), and while Jake and Amy’s insecurities probably won’t disappear, the waiting is finally over.
When a blown transformer puts Brooklyn in a blackout and leaves Holt (Andre Braugher) and Terry (Terry Crews) stuck in an elevator, it’s up to Amy to run the Nine-Nine and oversee emergency protocols until the power is restored. It’s a sweet, sweet homage to the action movies that shaped young Jake Peralta, with his wife starring the seen-it-all cop one day from retirement (or in this case, just starting her maternity leave).
Of course, it’s exactly the kind of situation that Amy Santiago was made for. She runs the precinct so beautifully even Holt would be impressed and proud, doubly so considering as soon as Jake and Boyle (Joe Lo Truglio) are out investigating the source of the blackout, she goes into labor. But not even childbirth can ruffle Amy when she’s on a mission. She even manages to stay calm when an increasingly-frantic Rosa (Stephanie Beatriz) keeps insisting that she get to the hospital.
While Rosa is following Amy and reminding her how narrow her cervix is at any given moment, Holt is having a much more vocal freak out in the elevator. It’s kind of perfect, given their relative dispositions, how similar Holt and Rosa are in a crisis, with Rosa taking her frustrations out on Hitchcock (Dirk Blocker) and Scully (Joel McKinnon Miller) and Holt berating the only person on hand, Terry. Undaunted, Terry uses a tactic he learned growing up in his unhappy home. Naturally, that tactic is teaching Holt the “Salt and Pepper” dance.
“Blackout” is a great season finale of Brooklyn Nine-Nine, coming off the heels of two excellent episodes.
Meanwhile Jake has his hands full with the drunk driver who knocked out the transformer, causing the blackout; Dot, the “sweet” old lady who turns out to be a little more Dirty Harry than Sofia Petrillo; and a pedal pub packed with a drunk bachelorette party. While Dot’s Cheney-esque antics lead to her arrest, they also spur the drunk driver to reveal that he wasn’t actually drunk, but facilitating a bank robbery.
Even with the power restored, the streets are still clogged with stalled cars, leaving Jake and Boyle with their motley crew of criminals and miscreant bachelorettes. The Pedal Pub is too far from the precinct, and Amy doesn’t have the time to get to the hospital. Not wanting Jake to miss the birth of his son, Boyle calls on the one NYPD officer who can get him back to the Nine-Nine on time… his old rival, the newly-promoted Lieutenant Peanut Butter. Jake should be thrilled; riding a horse through Brooklyn is very John Wicks.
Scully and Hitchcock finally come through for something other than cleaning out the refrigerator when they set up a birthing suite for Amy, Holt and Terry distract her from labor pains by performing their dance routine, and Jake arrives just in time to see the his son crowning. Welcome to the world, little Mac Peralta-Santiago! If you couldn’t tell, Mac is short for McClane, naturally.
While Boyle is content to be “Uncle Charles”, Rosa still manages to one-up him with an “Aunt Ro-Ro.” There’s no doubt that little Mac is going to have a lot of extremely loving and excessively weird people in his life.
Random Observations:
- The callbacks in this episode are chef’s-kiss perfection, from the mention of pedal pubs causing an uptick in female public urination to one of the Bachelorettes relieving herself in a public trash can (shudder).
- Dot was the worst kind of Fox News baby boomer, but she was so adorable I just wanted to follow her around for another episode just to see what kind of horrible things came out of her mouth.
- I wonder if there are any plans to dive a little deeper into Terry’s troubled backstory.
- Of course, it would be Hitchcock and Scully’s meatballs that lead to a Schindler’s List moment, which came out of nowhere so fast I found myself blindsided (and, I’m sorry, delighted).
- It was a surreal moment to have the season finale end with a crisis while we’re at all home under quarantine, and hopefully, we’ll see season 8 once the world is a little less scary. Until then, stay safe and well!