Brooklyn Nine-Nine: The Therapist (6x11)

I found the main plot thread this week to be pretty uninspired in some ways, but there was still a lot of good material in this episode, and in that main story, to discuss.

Cons:

I enjoyed the idea of Jake coming face to face with his trauma and learning that therapy could be a helpful tool. But it seems like the framework surrounding this story was a little overplayed. Jake's suspicion of therapists is meant to be funny and absurd, but then he ends up being right about the therapist being the murderer. It comes across like Charles isn't good at his job, and that Jake is justified in indulging his paranoia. That was an odd choice for the episode. Wouldn't it have been stronger if Jake had been wrong altogether?

Similarly, the scene where he's pretending to be a patient with multiple personality disorder just didn't quite hit the mark for me. There were a couple of somewhat funny jokes, but mostly it just made this therapist seem like an idiot for not picking up on the fact that Jake was lying about stuff. Could Jake not have just told the woman what was really going on? Showed her his badge and asked for her cooperation? The whole setup for the joke seemed forced.

There's an odd little subplot where Amy discovers that Terry ordered a book about how to please his wife in bed, and Terry is embarrassed so he denies it. I kept waiting for this plot thread to either a) get funny, or b) become meaningful. Amy's right that it's not shameful to want to improve and keep your wife happy. So if she's not amused by it, why does she keep pushing him to admit the book belongs to him? That felt oddly insensitive of her. And the resolution is that Amy ends up believing Terry that the book didn't belong to him, so it kind of ended up going nowhere.

Pros:

That said, I did enjoy the fact that Jake faced some hard truths about his past, and might be getting some help in the future. It's been a running joke that Jake is in denial about a lot of his trauma, and as is so often true with this show, they're taking the subject matter seriously even if they sometimes make it humorous as well. I did like Jake's horror and reluctance at the idea of imitating the various personalities when he was with the therapist. Those accents were truly awful.

So, since the main plot and Terry/Amy's plot thread were both pretty weak, we're lucky that the final plot thread of the night was pretty darn amazing. Holt finds out that some of the others have met Jocelyn, Rosa's girlfriend. He tries to invite Rosa and Jocelyn over to have dinner with him and Kevin, but Rosa is elusive. She doesn't want them to meet, and even ends up going as far as to hire an actress to play Jocelyn so that the real Jocelyn and Holt won't meet. In the end, Holt does meet Jocelyn and seems to like her, and Rosa reveals that the reason she was nervous to introduce them is because she likes Holt, and values his opinion, and she was worried that Holt wouldn't like her.

Yay! We're meeting one of Rosa's girlfriends! I'm so very pleased. I loved everything about this story. Holt and Rosa's relationship doesn't necessarily get a lot of focus, because there are more mentor/mentee vibes going on with Holt and Amy, or Holt and Jake, for example. But their relationship is unique in this show. They both have slightly different flavors of stoic, but they each approach life with that unfeeling veneer overlaying their genuine depth of emotion. They get each other's humor and attitudes about things, and I can see why Rosa would place great value in Holt's opinion.

Some humor highlights: Holt's horror at fake Jocelyn being "an actor," and then the actress trying to sell Diaz drugs. Holt trying to be non-judgmental with Hitchcock and Scully, and then when he gets what he wanted, he just blows them off immediately. And, my favorite, when Holt meets Jocelyn, she pretends her name is something else and that Holt has just revealed that Diaz has been cheating on her. That was hilarious. I think I'm going to like Jocelyn, and I sincerely hope she sticks around.

So that's that! This was probably the weakest episode we've had this season, but even a so-so episode of Brooklyn Nine-Nine has a lot of gems to discover.

7/10