“The Tattler”
Original Airdate: January 24, 2019
A few months after we learned that Brooklyn Nine-Nine had been dropped by Fox, and then picked up by NBC, Chelsea Peretti, who plays Gina Linetti, announced she was leaving the show. Fans were super bummed and left to wonder exactly how she’d be written out. Peretti hinted that this wasn’t the last we’d see of Gina, but she’d no longer be a series regular. Well, in the latest episode, we found out how it’s going down. Let’s recap.
Jake and Gina are super excited about their 20th high school reunion. It’s 90s themed, so they get to wear what they did back then, and their self-named “Dope Denim Crew” rides again. They parade out into the bullpen in oversized denim jackets, jeans, and truly terrible t-shirts to show the team. Jake tells them all about the long hair and gold earring he used to wear (a look he stole from Gina). Boyle is surprised that Jake wants to go back to his reunion after “Tattlegate.” No one else knows about this, so Jake fills them in.
In his junior year of high school, the popular kids finally started talking to him — especially the coolest kid, football player Brandon Bliss. Brandon even asked Jake to tag along to help steal Brandon’s parents’ van, and then go get drunk in the woods. Jake was ecstatic. But the day before it was supposed to go down, someone ratted Brandon out to the principal, who told his parents, and he got in big trouble. Everyone was convinced it was Jake, and for the rest of high school he was known as the Tattler, and any hope of being popular was completely dashed.
But, 20 years later, Jake says he’s totally over it and besides, he figures everyone’s forgotten about it. Jake, Gina, and Amy all head to the reunion and things are going great at first. Gina spins a new lie about her amazing life for each person she meets: she’s been writing the Thor movies, she designed the Freedom Tower, she came up with the term “apps.” Everyone’s eating it up.
Then things start to go downhill for Jake. An old high school buddy brings up the tattling incident and soon there’s a crowd gathered around laughing about how Jake tattled all those years ago. Jake shouts that he wasn’t the Tattler, but no one believes him, and he realizes he still does care that he was wrongly accused all those years ago. Amy devises a plan for them to track down who the real Tattler was so they can clear Jake’s name.
Gina’s too busy to help because she’s pitching an app idea to Quentin, a tech mogul from Silicon Valley. She tells him all about her app idea, Toddler. “Like Tinder, but for toddlers,” she says. Basically, it’s to help parents find and rate playdates for their kids. Quentin is interested, and as his interest grows, so do Gina’s lies about how she has a thriving business, a board of directors, and lots of bidders who all want in on the Toddler app. Quentin’s hooked and makes an offer.
Back at the precinct, Terry, Hitchcock, and Scully are in the break room listening to a radio show. Holt walks in and wants to know why they’re listening to a trashy FM station and Terry tells him how the show does a contest. They play a mystery sound and whichever caller guesses it correctly wins a cash prize. Holt thinks the whole thing is stupid and a waste of time and doesn’t understand how they can find this fun. Just then the mystery sound plays. It’s a crinkling of some sort and now they have to narrow it down and figure out what kind of crinkling it is.
While Terry, Hitchcock, and Scully go on a “crinkle hunt,” Rosa enlists Boyle to help her with a personal problem. It turns out she’s been dating two people who found out about each other and now she’s not sure what to do. She needs to decide between them but she likes them both and doesn’t know how to pick. Boyle says that as genetically indecisive people, the Boyles have created a sure-fire way to make decisions. He has Rosa take a 309-question survey that will help her decide who she should be with.
Unfortunately, after answering all the questions, it’s a dead tie between the two. Next, Boyle convinces her to hang upside down like a bat so all the blood flows to her head and aids her in decision-making. This does no good and by the time Rosa gives up, she gets a text from one of the women breaking up with her. Boyle declares that his method was a success after all, because Boyles don’t make decisions — they just wait it out until the universe is forced to make the decision for them. Rosa decides she’s happy with the outcome and will just go with the one woman who’s left.
Hitchcock, Scully, and Terry are still in the breakroom arguing over what made the crinkling noise. Holt walks back in and is exasperated that they’re still working on this. He starts crinkling everything in sight to make the point that they’re never going to figure it out. He crinkles paper, coffee bean bags, and then opens Terry’s yogurt — and the yogurt opening sounds just like the sound they heard! Suddenly, Holt is invested. Terry calls in to the radio show and tells them the sound is a yogurt being opened — but they’re wrong! It turns out it was just a bag of chips. Even though they didn’t win the prize, Holt realizes this was pretty fun after all.
Back at the reunion, Amy grills Jake about what he remembers from the day Brandon Bliss got in trouble. Jake remembers that everything was fine first period, but after third period Brandon was mad at him. Jake also remembers that he heard a fellow football player had told Brandon that it was Jake who ratted him out. Now they just have to figure out which football player took third period with Brandon. They break into the administration office and look at the old records and get the name: Danny Matthews.
They interrogate Danny and he admits he told Brandon that Jake was the Tattler because he knows that he was — he saw Jake talking to the principal that day. Danny recognized Jake’s long black hair, gold earring, and even the denim jacket he’s wearing right now. Jake realizes that the only other person who dressed like that, matching jacket and all, was his fellow member of the Dope Denim Crew: Gina. She was the Tattler!
Jake confronts Gina in the middle of her finalizing her app pitch with Quentin, and tells Quentin not to believe a word Gina says because she’s a liar. Quentin storms off and the deal’s a bust. Jake tells Gina he knows she’s the real Tattler and she admits the whole thing. She says she’s sorry she let Jake take the rap all these years for something he didn’t do, but also says it would have been way worse if she hadn’t ratted out Brandon to the principal. Brandon and his crew were bad news, and if Jake had gone through with stealing a van and got caught, he’d never be the great cop he is today. Plus, she didn’t want to lose her best friend to Brandon Bliss, who isn’t even at the reunion because he’s on parole for various other crimes.
Jake realizes Gina’s right — isn’t she always? — and tells her so. They track down Quentin so Jake can apologize for ruining Gina’s deal and convince Quentin to take a chance on her. Jake delivers a super inspiring speech, but Quentin takes a hard pass. Jake’s shocked, but then Quentin admits he’s been lying this whole time. He isn’t a tech mogul at all, he was just saying that to mess with people.
Jake tells Gina that even though Quentin was a fake, that doesn’t mean Gina’s idea isn’t great. He encourages her to pursue her dreams of starting her own business, of creating something awesome. Gina decides she will, but if she’s going to pursue her own ambitions, then she won’t have time to work at the Nine-Nine. She tells Jake she’s quitting.
It’ll be sad not having Gina’s weekly presence — and the squad definitely won’t be the same — but may all your dreams come true, Gina Linetti.
Bullets on the Bulletin Board:
- “This is them. This is Marvel. They probably want to talk about Thor IV. Thor: More Thor.
- “Why learn to grow when you can fix the past?”
- “So the lesson here is to listen to Hitchcock and Scully more?” “No, that can’t be possible.” “I don’t think we earned that today.”
0 comments:
Post a Comment