Brooklyn Nine-Nine: Admiral Peralta (7x10)

Jake is going to be such a good dad!!

Cons:

I'm going to be That Person and talk about the whole gender reveal thing. It's such a weird idea, and the pink and blue color scheme is so prescriptive, and it feels very dismissive of the fact that not everyone is comfortable with the gender they were assigned at birth, and the fact that some people are intersex or genderqueer or what have you. And I felt like the show kind of tried to acknowledge that, by having Jake call it a "sex reveal" party instead of "gender reveal" and having him say it's about the "biological sex of the child." But it felt odd to include that story at all, without actually grappling with it in any meaningful way.

Pros:

Amy and Rosa have a short little plot with Hitchcock and Scully, where they yell at the men for messing up on a case by forgetting to write down the name and contact information for a key witness. However, it turns out they were protecting the witness, who is undocumented. The case is therefore unable to go forward, and Amy "punishes" Hitchcock and Scully by giving them leave with pay. I liked how this plot thread played with the idea of Hitchcock and Scully's incompetence but then landed somewhere more interesting instead. And I also like how this little story touches on an actual issue without turning it in to a Very Special Episode kind of thing.

The other subplot features Holt teaching Terry how to play the flute for the NYPD band. I love Holt getting all intense, and Terry getting flustered, and then in the end, it doesn't matter because Terry is the only flutist and he gets in without an audition. My favorite is Holt continuing to yell at Terry, asking - "are you playing the muffin man, or the garbage man?" Until Terry bursts out with - "I'm not a garbage man, I'm a muffin man!" in that patented loud and indignant Terry way. Very cute.

The main plot of the week is all about Jake and his family. He and his father have been reconnecting, but Jake learns of the supposed family curse, that all fathers and sons in the Peralta line are destined to have bad relationships. When Jake meets his grandfather, and sees the bad relationship between him and his father, he starts to worry they're right. But when disaster strikes and the sex reveal cake falls off the counter, Jake rallies the troops, including Charles, to clean up the kitchen and make a new cake in time for the party. Jake's father tells him that he's going to be a good dad - he tried so hard to repair a broken relationship, and he cares so much and is so excited about having a kid.

There were so many funny moments here, and also genuinely sweet ones. Like Jake and his father and grandfather all putting on blindfolds to clean the cake without seeing it, but making a catastrophically bigger mess instead. Or Jake's grandfather calling Charles his butler, and Charles saying "thank you" instead of correcting it. Or the fact that Amy finds out she's having a boy when she sees Hitchcock and Scully have eaten the cake and are covered in the frosting. I could go on.

I also want to shout out the comedy in the cold open, where Amy and Jake make their pregnancy announcement but it turns out everyone already knew because of Amy's silly ways of trying to hide it. We cut to various examples, all of which are poking fun at the crazy ways TV shows have hidden cast members' real-life pregnancies in the past.

I think I'll stop there, although I'm sure I've missed several funny moments. This is one of those shows where I always want to keep track of all the great jokes, but there are just too many to write down!

8.5/10