This post discusses plot points from the Brooklyn Nine-Nine episode “The Audit.”
The midseason finale of Brooklyn Nine-Nine ended on a fairly grim note. Chelsea Peretti’s Gina Linetti got hit by a bus after receiving a text from Detective Charles Boyle. But, never fear, in the spring premiere we immediately learn Gina is alive and doing fine—give or take a constricting medical halo. And the image of Peretti in that brace was one of the reasons the accident took place at all. “Almost immediately at the same time as thinking about her getting hit by the bus we thought it would be super funny to see Chelsea Peretti/Gina Linetti wearing a medical halo and dancing,” co-creator Dan Goor explained when The A.V. Club asked how his team plotted her return. “That idea really motivated in a lot of ways the bus hit, and also immediately suggested how we should come back from it.” He added: “It felt like almost no one in the world is funnier than Chelsea Peretti, but Chelsea Peretti wearing a medical halo seemed like somehow the only way to be funnier.”
According to Goor, they didn’t drag out the reveal, in part because viewers feared the worst for poor Gina. “We felt like people were very upset when she got hit by the bus and more people were convinced that she was dead than I had expected,” he said. ”I felt like we love our fans, and we had a funny way to bring her back so we decided to bring back as quickly as we could.”
As for what is coming the rest of the season, next’s week’s episode continues the story of the audit while also offering what Goor calls a “pitch perfect” appearance from Nathan Fillion as an actor who—wait for it—plays a cop on television. Goor also noted that the show will tackle in “what it’s like to be a police officer in this changing climate” in the future. He previewed an episode in which Terry gets racially profiled, as an example. “I think [it] is both a really interesting episode for us to do and also one of the funniest episodes we do this year,” Goor said. ”It was a really high degree of difficulty and I’m really happy with how it turned out.” Brooklyn Nine-Nine airs Tuesdays at 8 p.m. Eastern.