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A Fan-Favorite Cop Is Finally Back in an Action-Packed Hour
The Rookie has never shied away from getting rid of beloved characters. Talia Bishop (Afton Williamson) left after Season 1, and Captain Zoe Andersen (Mercedes Mason) and Jackson West (Titus Makin Jr.) were tragically killed in the line of duty. But there’s one character exit that just never sat right with me. Officer Aaron Thorsen (Tru Valentino) was a great addition to the Mid-Wilshire precinct starting in Season 4, but was written out before the Season 7 premiere with a perfunctory goodbye. Luckily, The Rookie is making things right by bringing Aaron back in Episode 5, and his reappearance just demonstrates that he should never have left in the first place.
‘The Rookie’ Brings Aaron Thorsen Back for an Interesting Operation
We open up the episode with John Nolan (Nathan Fillion) getting the stuffing beaten out of him in a dimly lit warehouse. We don’t get any more context as the action flips back to 12 hours prior. Aaron surprises the gang by saying that Lieutenant Wade Grey (Richard T. Jones) is bringing him onto the Monica Stevens (Bridget Regan) task force. FBI agent Matthew Garza (Felix Solis) and his niece, Elena Flores (Michelle Natalie Nunez), are at the station to brief everyone on a complicated operation. The team is tasked with intercepting a million dollar phone network that bad guys use to communicate with each other. Aaron is going to buddy up with a heroin trafficker that he met when they were both incarcerated years back. Aaron successfully tips the criminal off, and that gives the FBI and our cops the idea to isolate the phone network so that they can listen in when the enemies are talking to each other; being able to overhear while criminals are discussing their operations would be a valuable tool for law enforcement.
Nolan estimates that the servers for the telephone network are in a tunnel located underneath the LA River. He asks for a spot on the team, and once the team is there, we see that this is where the episode first opened up. A hectic and intense battle takes place between the trafficker’s henchmen and our crew, and, of course, there are plenty of explosions and shoot-outs to keep our adrenaline-seeking brains happy. Nolan is beaten up pretty badly, but the gang is still able to come out victorious. It’s exciting that Aaron’s police work resulted in a successful operation, except that we then see Monica on the phone with someone, assuring them that she’s going rogue. She has now warned the criminals that their phone system has been compromised. This episode is so much fun because of Aaron’s energy, but it falls back into disappointing territory now that we know Monica is back to her old tricks. It also makes no sense that they would have included Monica in the details of this operation in the first place. She’s obviously proved herself to be untrustworthy over and over again.
‘The Rookie’ Season 3, Episode 5 Shows the Dangers of Inter-Office Romances
The second investigation keeping our cops busy is when they’re called to an abandoned warehouse, where two officers have been shot. They claim that a CI named Salvadore Arroyo is the culprit. But Lucy Chen (Melissa O’Neil) conducts some impressive detective work, and realizes that the crime scene layout doesn’t match up with the officers’ stories. A confrontation takes place with Arroyo (at his mother’s gravesite no less); his biker buddies arrive as back-up. A subsequent interrogation allows Angela Lopez (Alyssa Diaz) and Nyla Harper (Mekia Cox) to discover that Arroyo actually had nothing to do with the shooting. Arroyo does give them an interesting tip: the male officer has been known to get romantically involved with his rookies.
Ultimately, through a team effort, the crew realizes that the two cops actually shot each other in a lovers’ spat gone wrong. This is an interesting storyline because I’m not sure if we’re supposed to take a greater meaning from the plot. Perhaps The Rookie writers are trying to do a bit of foreshadowing for Chenford or other couples on the show. Maybe working together could lead to dire consequences. But then again, there’s also the chance that they just wanted to write a storyline that has a fun twist — it’s not always the criminals stirring up trouble, but rather the supposedly moral police officers.
Several Characters Struggle With Conflicts in ‘The Rookie’
There are several side plots that don’t really add much to the storytelling in this week’s episode. Angela freaks out about not having a great wardrobe, especially now that Wesley Evers (Shawn Ashmore) is running for DA. He also struggles with writing a campaign speech, and although it’s nice to see Nyla’s husband, James Murray (Arjay Smith) resurface to help Wesley, it’s not super captivating to see the conflict between the two of them about what to include in the speech. Then there’s Nyla having a silly conflict because her daughter is becoming a Clip-Talk star with her videos. It’s resolved fairly quickly, and I don’t really see the point of following Nyla as a mother, instead of as a badass cop.
The conflict that I did find to be intriguing is Nolan and Bailey Nune’s (Jenna Dewan) continued argument about her desire to move to Washington D.C. She asks him to investigate whether he could work for the FBI in D.C., but that’s quickly thrown out when Garza informs Nolan that the cut-off age to join the FBI is 35 years old. Nolan puts his foot down and says he’s not moving, and then digs himself into a hole by claiming that Bailey has a “pathological need for movement.” He insists that he’s just trying to save their marriage, but Bailey quips back that she didn’t know it was in jeopardy. Although Nolan’s words are harsh, Bailey is sort of steamrolling past what Nolan wants in this situation. There’s definitely some trouble in paradise with these two, and I can’t wait to see how it plays out in the rest of the season.
This is another episode without much Chenford action (although Lucy does attest to being a fan of carpooling to work), but otherwise, it served as a great vehicle to bring Aaron back into the precinct. I’m getting incredibly tired of seeing Monica on my screen, and I’m already sort of bored with Wesley running for DA, but the action-filled investigation with two of The Rookie: Feds characters still makes this episode a fun one to watch.
New episodes of The Rookie air on Monday nights on ABC, with episodes available to stream on Hulu in the U.S.