For all the enviable strength of its ensemble, Brooklyn Nine Nine is still a show built
around Jake Peralta, which means that the supporting characters’ arcs could
always be repurposed as stories for the show’s leading man. That’s precisely what happens as Terry transfers his fears to Jake. Sergeant Jeffords’
long journey back to active duty represents the most sustained,
clearly defined arc that the show has done so far, but it’s mostly
unfolded while Jake wasn’t around. It was Boyle who helped Terry build the
castle for his little girls way back in “The Slump,” it was Holt and Gina who
helped Terry get recertified at the shooting range, it was Gina who busted into
Terry’s disastrous psych evaluation and told him that the Captain was in peril,
and it was Boyle—with the precise opposite of help from Holt—who smoothed
things over with Terry’s wife when she learned he had re-entered the field. With
Jake busy elsewhere with those episodes’ main stories, Brooklyn Nine-Nine took what started out as a fairly broad visual
gag—a freaked-out Terry gunning down a defenseless mannequin—and added a
clearer human dimension to the sergeant’s story. And Terry is the character who
would most benefit from such special treatment, because he isn’t as easy
to immediately pin down as the rest of the ensemble.
Every other supporting character has one obvious, overriding
personality trait that guides how their interactions typically play out: Holt
is the deadpan authority figure, Boyle is an endlessly enthusiastic loser, Diaz
is terrifying, and so on. This isn’t meant to take away from the great work that Brooklyn Nine-Nine’s cast and creative team has done in
making the characters feel like real, well-rounded people in such a short span
of time. Really, this is just smart comedy writing, as the show can generate quick
laughs simply by sticking characters together in a room and letting them act
precisely as we would expect them to, as when Holt tries to get Diaz to imagine
a scenario in which someone has broken into her house and she has no throwing stars to defend herself with. Besides, every move has to
have a countermove, and so the show derives easy gags by subverting our
well-honed expectations of how the characters are supposed to act. Indeed, such
a reversal of expectations is particularly effective as the emotional foundation
of an entire subplot. I was as shocked as Santiago and Diaz to learn that Gina
is capable of what humans would call vulnerability, even if I was entirely
unsurprised that she would lodge a civilian complaint against her theoretical
friends and then retain the services of Leo Sporm, world’s worst private
detective. Highly amused, but entirely unsurprised.
Terry has never been so clearly defined. He’s a
consummate cop and a doting family man. He’s a workout freak and a gifted
artist. He can explode in rage or collapse in tears. He is, as Boyle so eloquently
puts it, an enormous, muscular Ellen DeGeneres—he also really likes his yogurt,
a fact which resurfaces tonight in one of the show’s all-time great callback
jokes. Basically, whereas the other characters have one dominant characteristic
that can be comedy, the humor in Terry’s character lies in the fact that he’s
such a lovable mess of contradictions. It’s a good fit for Terry
Crews’ strengths, as the man is at his funniest when swinging between
big, broad, diametrically opposed emotional states. As such, Sergeant Jeffords needs
a little more room to breathe than, say, Boyle or Diaz, which is why it makes
sense that it’s taken so long for Terry to team up with Jake for an episode’s
main story. The fact that he’s paired with Jake as opposed to one of the other
officers is a good indication that his current arc is complete and he really is
over his fears, as he’s now positioned less as a character in his own right and
more as someone for Peralta to react to. Essentially, Jake absorbs Terry’s past
emotional state and relives a compressed form of the story Terry has lived
through over the first 13 episodes. This can’t help but flatten the sergeant’s
character, and the episode never fills in the blanks on Jake and Terry’s
relationship like, say, “The Pontiac Bandit” did for Peralta and Diaz.
The reason why this doesn’t bother me that much is that “The
Ebony Falcon” is really damn funny. I found Brooklyn
Nine-Nine consistently amusing from the very beginning, but it’s now really
rounding into form, and there’s a feeling of increased experimentation and
craziness that wasn’t present in past episodes. Again, the fact
that Gina can be played as something other than the most assured and powerful
person in the room is a sign of the show opening up new storytelling avenues,
and it’s damn near impossible to argue with an episode that features Holt
reading out a lengthy list of her most prized possessions, including handmade
Joseph Gordon-Levitt nesting dolls. The episode also makes particularly great
use of Boyle, who finds his true calling as the new manager of Brooklyn Total
Body. It’s not that we really learn anything about Boyle that we didn’t already
know, as his obsessions with cloud-based scheduling and water temperature
management show precisely the same grinder’s approach that he brings to his
police work and the same passion for mundane trivia that he brings to his pizza
email blasts. It’s just that this particular bit of gym-filtration represents
the apotheosis of Charles Boyle; as he proudly, if nonsensically, observes, he
has finally become himself. Honestly, I’m almost surprised that Boyle didn’t
consider leaving the force to attend to the gym, since he has clearly fond his
true calling, but I suppose would never abandon Jake like that.
Indeed, “The Ebony Falcon” tries to dig deeper into Peralta’s
abandonment issues, with at best moderate success. Brooklyn Nine-Nine is playing the long game with this particular bit
of backstory, so it’s not surprising that the story only vaguely touches on the
underlying reasons for Jake’s sudden protectiveness. It’s just that the
connection between Jake’s sudden concern for Cagney and Lacey’s father and his
own personal trauma is something that we are told about without ever quite
being shown. I’m generally a fan of Andy Samberg’s performance, particularly
how he infuses Jake with his specific brand of off-kilter goofiness, but he’s
not quite at the point where he can sell such a big emotional revelation in
just a handful of lines. That’s the kind of problem that should be solved
simply with more time in the role, so when Brooklyn
Nine-Nine really digs into this story sometime later—perhaps in its now all
but assured second season—I suspect Samberg will be up to the task.
In the meantime, “The Ebony Falcon” stands as another very
solid entry in what has been one of the most impressive freshman years for a
comedy in some time. Brooklyn Nine-Nine is
officially past its initial 13-episode order, and its future looks brighter than
any other point in its short existence. This episode doesn’t match some of the
highs of previous episodes—it’s definitely a minor step down from last week’s “The
Bet,” for instance—but what’s exciting is that the show is still expanding its
scope. The way that “The Ebony Falcon” uses characters like Terry, Gina, and
Boyle feels different from what would have been possible when the show began,
and that character progression is the most promising sign of what lies ahead.
Stray observations:
- Molly will be back next time for the show’s big, post-Super Bowl broadcast. Thanks for letting me sub in.
- So then, is Kelly Scully’s dog or Scully’s wife? I think we can’t rule out that Kelly is something else entirely. Something far more disturbing.
- “Leo Sporm. How’s business?” “You know this guy?” “Everyone knows him. The Picasso of hucksters!” “I like that.” “…‘Look up who Picasso is.’” This really better not be the last we see of Leo Sporm.
- “I’m black Trent! One of many!” I appreciate that Terry can make a nervous idiot of himself just as effectively as Peralta can.
- “What kind of woman doesn’t have an ax?”