“A Tale of Two Bandits” & “The Crime Scene”
Original Airdates: February 7 and 14, 2019
They head to the funeral and meet Doug’s sister, Trudy Judy (played by the hilarious Nicole Byer), who ropes Jake into singing an impromptu song in tribute to Doug. While he’s upfront doing a truly terrible job, Jake spies Doug standing in the back. He’s alive! Doug motions to Jake to meet him in the back room where he tells Jake and Terry that he had to fake his own death because a real bad guy named Stefano Lucas is after him. Lucas thinks Doug stole his vintage Ferrari and put a hit out on Doug. Even though Doug has an alibi for the night of the car theft, Terry isn’t buying that Doug’s really on the straight and narrow now.
Jake convinces Terry that it must be a copycat using Doug’s moves, and that only Doug can help them catch the car thief. Terry remains unconvinced but Jake offers a challenge he can’t refuse: whichever one of them is wrong has to do 100,00 push-ups. Terry agrees to give Doug a chance, and Doug tells them where he thinks the copycat would go to boost cars that evening. Before they head over, they have to make a detour so Doug can sing at a bar mitzvah.
Meanwhile, the rest of the Nine-Nine heads over to their regular bar after a hard day’s work. But it turns out the bar has been taken over by firefighters! The bar the firefighters usually hang out at burned down so they’ve decided to make this their regular spot. The Nine-Nine isn’t having it. They appeal to Holt for help, but he refuses, saying the bar is beneath them anyway, and this is a great opportunity to find a better one. The team then turns to the bartender but he refuses to take sides, saying he just wants to make money. That’s when Boyle has a great idea and says if it’s just about money, they’ll just have a drink-off against the firefighters. Holt refuses to participate and leaves, making it nine firefighters against five Nine-Niners. The odds aren’t great, but the team is confident they can do it.
Back at the bar mitzvah, Terry interrupts Doug’s DJ-ing to tell him and Jake that a car theft just went down exactly where Doug said it would. Terry had sent some plain-clothes officers on ahead to stake the place out and they caught someone red-handed. Jake’s delighted, because this means Doug’s innocent but Terry says not so fast. He’s now convinced that Doug intentionally brought them to the bar mitzvah to establish his alibi while his partner boosted cars. Jake’s dubious until Terry reveals who the car thief is: Trudy Judy! Doug’s sister!
At first, Doug swears his sister is innocent, saying she’s a good girl who’s studying to be a nurse, but she was caught in the car with all the car-boosting devices she needed, so it’s pretty obvious she’s the culprit. Trudy tells them she was falling behind on her student loans and that’s when she discovered Doug’s notebooks about how to steal cars and it was a great way to make money. She swears she was only going to steal enough cars to pay off her loans and then go straight again, and she definitely had no idea she’d stolen the car of big-time criminal Stefano Lucas, who then put a hit out on her brother.
Doug convinces Terry and Jake to take pity on her and reduce the charges if she helps bring in Stefano Lucas, who’s a much bigger criminal than either of them. Doug says he’ll call up Lucas, tell him he’s the one who stole his car and offer to give it back if Lucas will call off the hit. Then, when Lucas comes to get his car, the police will be there waiting. There’s only one problem though: Trudy doesn’t have Lucas’ car anymore; she’s already given it to a fence named Dallas who’s a really creepy dude.
Over at the bar, the team is having trouble of their own. They’ve fallen behind the firefighters. Boyle delivers an inspiring speech to motivate them, but manages to throw up in the middle of it. Hitchcock is the only one who’s left standing, but just then Holt shows up! Apparently Rosa left him a ton of voicemails. In one of them, after she thought she’d hung up but didn’t, she rambled on about how Holt didn’t care about them. That shook him to his core, Holt says, and he had to show up to support his team, even if he does hate the bar. He orders bottle after bottle of the gross, knock-off wine the bartender carries, and seconds before closing time, he manages to scrape ahead of the firefighters! The Nine-Nine is victorious! The firefighters admit defeat and storm out to find a different bar.
Meanwhile, Jake and Terry, along with Doug and Trudy Judy, are staging a meet with the fence, Dallas. Terry pretends to be Trudy’s beefy boyfriend, which spooks Dallas and he runs off. They grab the car and call up Stefano Lucas for the meet. But while they’re waiting, the car blows up! Terry and Jake run to investigate what happened. Terry’s convinced this was the Judys staging a distraction so they could get away, but Doug is still there and reminds them he doesn’t work with fire. That only leaves one person: Trudy! In all of the commotion, she’s disappeared!
Just then she calls Doug and he puts it on speaker phone so Terry and Jake can hear too. It turns out she’d been scamming them all this whole time. She only ever went to one nursing class, she says, and it was boring. She’d actually spent her time running internet scams until she discovered her brother’s notebooks about how to boost cars, and she’s been having a great time doing that. Also, Dallas was never her scary fence — he’s her employee! Even though Jake and Terry had offered to reduce her sentence, a reduced sentence is still a sentence, and she wants to be free. Something tells me this isn’t the last we’ve seen of Trudy Judy.
Bullets on the Bulletin Board:
- “No one likes hip-hop more than a 13-year-old boy.”
- “1,000 push-ups? That’s a lot to you? Make it 100,000 and I’m in.”
- “I never throw up. I just tell my stomach to deal with it. My body is terrified of me.”
- “You guys, we don’t have time to figure out what suspenders are for.”
- “Don’t be so hard on yourself. We all make poor choices when we’re younger. I was once in a flash mob.” “Ew.”
“The Crime Scene”
Original Airdate: February 14, 2019
In this episode of Brooklyn Nine-Nine, Rosa and Jake are at a mysterious crime scene. An investigative reporter who was doing a story about a poultry farm was murdered in his apartment, but the doors were locked from the inside and his security system was still on. Jake’s super excited to be investigating a “dope” case that’s full of intrigue. His excitement is dampened by the arrival of CSI Franco McCoy, whose arrogance rubs them the wrong way. Things go from bad to worse when the victim’s mom shows up and demands that they promise her they’ll find her son’s killer. Rosa refuses but Jake caves because he says she reminds him of his own mom. He then ends up promising a bunch of other friends and family members of the victim that he’ll find the killer. Rosa’s furious because Jake broke the number one rule of investigations, but Jake’s even more determined to make good on his promise.
Unfortunately, finding the killer means working with Franco McCoy, who is becoming more unbearable by the day. He lets them know the victim was stabbed 30 times. He also finds the delivery guy who brought food to the apartment the evening of the murder. They know from the security camera that the delivery guy was the only one who went near the apartment around the time of the murder, but he never went inside, so he definitely didn’t do it. When they talk to him, they realize that the person who answered the door and took the food must have been the murderer and the victim was already dead. Unfortunately, the delivery guy is always high and so he’s not much help. He keeps starting over with the sketch artist and the end result is that they’re looking for someone who resembles Bilbo Baggins, Winona Rider, or Seth Meyers.
By day four on the case, Major Crimes is gunning to take over, and Holt comes down to the crime scene to find out how Rosa and Jake are doing. Jake begs Holt for more time and admits he promised the victim’s mom he’d solve it. Holt tells him that’s a rookie mistake, but even so, he agrees to get them more time. By day 21, Jake has resorted to blaming Harry Potter. By day 36, Jake is seeing Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson in the blood spatter, and by day 50 Jake is convinced the amount of tax charged on the delivered food is somehow connected. Recognizing Jake is in way too deep to be useful, Rosa agrees to give the case over to Major Crimes.
But Jake hasn’t given up yet. He recreates the crime scene in the precinct, using Boyle slathered in ketchup as the victim. Jake is spiraling out of control, and though the rest of the team tries to talk him down, he can’t let this go until he solves it.
Next, Amy wakes up covered in red Post-Its with Jake hovering over her. Naturally, she punches him in the face when he startles her from sleep, but things go from bad to worse when it turns out Franco McCoy is there too, and has agreed to help Jake. Amy yells at them to get out, so Jake moves to the bar and next recreates the scene with mozzarella sticks and olive stick people. Rosa shows up and convinces Jake that he needs to just come clean to the victim’s mother and admit that they’ve exhausted every lead, and he won’t be able to find the killer after all.
Rosa and Jake sit down with the mother, who takes the news well, albeit tearfully. She says she understands they did everything they could, and she mostly just feels guilty because she and her son had a big falling out shortly before he died and she never got the chance to make amends. This has a huge effect on Rosa, who hasn’t spoken to her own mom since coming out as bi, and next thing Jake knows, Rosa is promising to find the killer. Looks like they’re back on the case!
It’s day 55 and Major Crimes has already labeled it a cold case, but that’s not going to stop Rosa. They head back to the crime scene but the place has been scrubbed clean now that Major Crimes has released the case. But while they’re standing there trying to decide what to do next, Jake and Rosa hear a rattling noise. It’s coming from the AC vent! Despite having spent hours and hours in this room over the past couple of months, Franco had never let them turn on the AC for fear the air would disrupt the evidence. They take off the vent cover and discover a ton of water bottles and food wrappers inside. It looks like the murderer was hiding out in the vent until the body was discovered and then snuck out sometime after. Then, Rosa remembers that Jake counted 15 hazmat guys on the scene, even though Franco insisted he only had 14 team members. The murderer must have snuck out in a hazmat suit!
On day 56, the case is reopened thanks to Jake and Rosa. They review the video footage with Franco and spot someone in a hazmat suit who isn’t wearing the booties the real CSI people do. They find footage of the guy removing the suit outside the apartment building, and it turns out he’s a hitman who was hired by the owner of the poultry farm the victim was investigating. The owner was bribing the FDA and the victim was about to publish an expose about it, so the owner hired a hitman to take the reporter out.
Jake relays the news to the victim’s mother and promises (again) to make sure the poultry farm owner is brought to justice. Even though Rosa’s annoyed that Jake made another promise, she understands where he’s coming from. In fact, Rosa’s called her own mom and is doing lunch with her later that day.
Bullets on the Bulletin Board:
- “You look like Edna from The Incredibles.” “My girlfriend’s in cosmetology school and she’s been trying a bunch of different hairstyles on me.” “Is she... passing?”
- “This guy ordered his dinner from House of Lettuce. There’s no way he knew he was gonna die. No one orders lettuce as their last meal.”
- “Just so you know Franco, we’re not responding well to you as a person.”
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