After watching the season 5 premiere of Brooklyn Nine-Nine, I've found that picking somewhere to start this review is my biggest problem with it. Perhaps it's best to begin with a sharp, jarring "previously on ..." announcement: as you'll recall from the season 4 finale, Jake and Rosa are languishing in maximum security prison cells after being framed by Lieutenant Hawkins for a series of bank robberies, as reminded by Hitchcock in an example of the show's uncharacteristically unsubtle exposition. (This is doubly problematic when you consider that this exposition is placed in the dream sequence that makes up most of the cold open, as there's no way Boyle would need this reminder yelled by Hitchcock, entirely disrupting the flow of the dialogue.)
But that's really the most significant issue with the episode (other than to note it's a shame we saw so little of Rosa and her adjustments to prison life, although perhaps this ambiguity is somewhat true to character). The overall story was played out smartly: using this first part to focus solely on Jake and Rosa's prison ordeals made for an episode that lacked substantive movement but that delivered in everything Brooklyn Nine-Nine, which is a more praise-worthy sentence than it sounds.
One of those crucial parts of "everything Brooklyn Nine-Nine" - and the primary reason for my watching the show - is solid, believable, well-timed humour, which this episode had in spades. We might have wondered as an audience whether a plotline like this could generate the belly laughs we expect from this show, but those who did fear ought not to have. This was a brilliantly funny episode.
One of the most successful running gags involved the horrific but hilarious remarks about eating people made by Jake's cannibalistic cellmate Caleb, which escalated as the pair became more comfortable with each other. Rosa's entire sideplot, which saw Holt and Terry unwisely make a number of offers to do anything they could to help her, and her responding in kind by demanding increasingly outlandish things of them (Holt even had to cancel her cable!), was hilarious, and the writers even remembered to include the usual emotional closure we come to expect at the denouement of a Rosa plotline. Of course, the undoubtedly star punchline was Jake's repeated attempts to document the brutality of a prison guard in order to ingratiate himself with a cold-blooded prison gang, with cannibal Caleb continually failing to actually record Jake's ferocious beatings. I think I broke a rib when Caleb accidentally added the fiesta filter.
The final scene sees Jake welcomed into the fold of a brutal prison gang run by a nutcase named (My Name Ih) Jeff Romero, while he speaks to Amy on a contraband mobile phone. How either plotline will advance towards Jake and Rosa's exoneration I'm unsure, but if I haven't gleaned too big a hint at the direction of this arc, at least I've learnt a few other things today: shivving, shanking and stabbing are three very different things; not all cannibals only like to eat people; and Hitchcock has a prison wife. Ironically, I think it's the third detail that unbalances my stomach the most.
RANKING: 9/10
POINTS OF NOTE
- I'm sure I'm not the only continuity snob who saw the tattoo on Hitchcock's arm of him pointing a gun in his mouth and cheered.
- Jake's original search for a gang went beautifully wrong. "I'm excited to join ... ISIS."
- It took me a few seconds after Gina was said to be on maternity leave to remember this wasn't a euphemism for Rosa being in prison. I guess I'm glad this show is back!
- The beard. Must stay.
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