Brooklyn Nine-Nine: Blue Flu (8x03)

I'm not sure how to fully articulate the level of distaste I felt at watching this episode. I don't envy the writers the task they have, at trying to keep a liberal show going under the guise of all the main characters being cops, but... this ain't it, that's all I can say.

Cons:

So, the premise of this episode is that a bunch of police officers pretend to be sick in protest for a police officer being "attacked" when he found a mouse in his burrito. They're obviously faking, so it becomes the task of the Nine-Nine to prove that it's a hoax and end the "Blue Flu" so the cops will get back to work.

Um... okay. So. Collective action is one of the most important tools our workforce has to combat unfair working conditions, right? In this story, the cops were striking for a bad reason, pretending to be victims and basically punishing the populace for all the anti-cop sentiment that has been rising up over the last couple of years. But in concept, unions are... good? And the collective power of a strike is... good? I just found it really weird that this story was: "let's stop people from striking." It felt messy to me, when in reality, if we really, really want to be honest about the police: each individual police officer isn't a "bad person", whatever that means. Pretending they're all evil and want to hurt you isn't going to do any political good. If all the "good ones" or whatever could use their collective bargaining power to demand real systemic change... that's a good thing? We should want systems in place allowing them to do that?

The other thing about this that I find really gross is that when everyone is out on strike, Amy's job becomes how to continue patrolling/policing. Now, to the episode's credit, they did eventually come around to the super obvious realization that with all those cops off the streets, quotas were not being made, so less arrests were being made, and... ultimately that's a good thing. It distressed me that this wasn't the obvious point reached in the first minute, but instead a last-minute "aha" moment from Holt. And then? The bad guy ends the Blue Flu, putting the cops back on the street. Holt says they'll use this lesson to change things, but... I don't know. Doesn't this feel muddled and unclear to anyone else?

To synthesize this, I think I'm realizing that in the show's attempt to show the problems with the police, it's just shedding a light on the culpability of these characters over the whole course of the show, the ways in which they complacently contributed to a shitty system. I've seen procedural cop shows tackle the corruption in the police force before. This show has done it, in fact. But the vibe is still "we live in a mythical universe where most cops are good, and there are some bad ones, but the good ones are here to weed out the bad." That's... well, that's propaganda, obviously. It's also perhaps the only way to make a comedy TV show that's... fun to watch about these characters who are in fact cops? Because that's the show? I don't know. There's really no way to make this work, honestly.

I also thought the comedy subplot about Holt's tattoo was a little odd. Did I forget a running gag about discovering that tattoo, or something? Because honestly it felt odd that it was being brought up here as if it was a known thing that Jake was desperately trying to find out about Holt's tattoo. This plot also included one of my least favorite gendered jokes, where Jake reveals that he spend two thousand dollars on finding out about the tattoo, to which Amy reacts with anger. This idea that Jake spent this huge amount of money carelessly without consulting his wife is... well, it's not funny, I'll tell you that much.

Pros:

Of course, I found Boyle's confrontation of his own mortality very moving... I like how Jake and Charles' friendship is mostly played for laughs but there's this surpassing warmth and connection underneath it all, highlighted when Charles realizes just how well Jake knows him. They're both a couple of weirdos with different goals and tastes, but they love each other underneath it all.

I also somewhat liked the whole trident/fork running joke about what to call the secret plan, and who gets to be which part of the trident and which one is strongest/sharpest/most important. That was a little funny. The other districts sending in their Hitchcock and Scully-equivalents also made me smile.

That's it... god, I hate that reviewing this show for its final season is going to be such a bummer. But there you have it. Onward to episode four...

4/10