Brooklyn Nine-Nine: “The Funeral”
(Episode 2.02)
Boyle is back, baby! Okay, maybe the resuscitation of Charles Boyle’s latent dating life is, in the grand scheme of things, Brooklyn Nine-Nine’s least important third season development thus far, but after last week’s “New Captain,” there hung in the air a question as to what the show intended for him in a post-Jamy world. Would Joe Lo Truglio merely be relegated to the role of Jake’s and Amy’s personal relationship cheerleader? It’s a fair if perhaps overdramatic question—one episode alone can’t determine the trajectory of a character for an entire season, can it? But fair or not, the question has been answered in “The Funeral”: Boyle’s lookin’ for love again, but regrettably, for the time being, in all the wrong places.
The one problem with “The Funeral” emphasizing Boyle’s sadsack melancholy is that Gina and Rosa wind up caught in his gravitational pull and find little to do but react to his uncharacteristic display of debauchery. (Hearing him declare that he’s going to put, “the bone back in boneyard” is a shocker, that’s for sure.) At the very least, Chelsea Peretti and Stephanie Beatriz are good at reacting to people, but if Gina’s torrid and unholy affair with Boyle can get a mention, then it feels like a missed opportunity for Rosa to offer a helpful anecdote about her and Marcus as supplemental material (because even tough-as-nails, stiff-upper-lip Rosa is capable of doling out the rare helpful anecdote when circumstances demand it). Ultimately, they just play cogs in the wheel of the Boyle subplot, which frankly doesn’t feel like a great use of the characters’ time or the actress’ respective talents.
But such are the challenges of balancing the sitcom’s three-plot structure, especially when your show’s ostensible leads are still dealing with a major story thread that’s just been made more major. If the arrival of The Vulture at the end of “New Captain” didn’t spell “trouble” clearly enough for you, then his immediate action taken against Jake and Amy in “The Funeral” should crystallize that meddlesome orthography. But let’s be real: Everyone knew that Dean Winters resurfacing on Brooklyn Nine-Nine meant bad news for our favorite new couple, and in true oily, full-douche fashion, The Vulture employed like a mallet on Jamy within the first few minutes of “The Funeral,” barely allowing breathing room after the opening credits. So goes his ultimatum to Jake: Break up with Amy, or get knocked down from detective to beat cop. Ouch.
Unsurprisingly, “The Funeral” focuses on Jake’s crisis of conscience as Boyle’s one-night stand foments in the background and Holt returns to the precinct with little fanfare (much to Gina’s dismay), on behalf of his PR job. Between the Jake and Amy A-plot and the Boyle C-plot, Holt’s B-plot is, surprisingly, the most arresting of the three, chiefly because we’re all still in a mental space where we’re waiting with baited breath for Holt to get his old job back. But will he? (Yes. Yes he will.) Holt doesn’t seem to think so. Gina’s pep talk in “New Captain” appears to have stuck to Holt’s ribs like a bowl of granola. There, he looked defeated. In “The Funeral,” he’s hit rock bottom and found that his rock bottom had a secret secondary bottom of its own.
That’s too bad for Jake and Amy, who put their hopes for getting The Vulture off their backs on Holt saving the day. Jake is in the driver’s seat here, working overtime to scheme and connive his way out of The Vulture’s clutches; his plans all backfire, of course, but Brooklyn Nine-Nine isn’t premium, high-art television, so we can guess with relative ease how his and Amy’s plight will iron itself out, though Jake’s public, veiled pronouncement to Amy is remarkably sweet. It’s so sweet, in fact, that the show’s refusal to bow to change as it usually does feels like, if you’ll pardon the expression, a cop-out. If Holt can be booted out of his role as captain, why not have Jake lose his detective’s badge to show his love for Amy? Maybe that kind of change is too much for Brooklyn Nine-Nine to sustain, but what a great narrative that would have made.
In between the conflict and resolution of the Jamy A-plot, there’s a lot—seriously, a lot—of terrific Brooklyn Nine-Nine banter, much of it shared by Winters and Andy Samberg, whose Brooks-level back and forth reminds us all that Winters doesn’t get enough work either playing his go-to (“bro-faced meathead”) or, well, anything else. He’s almost the MVP of “The Funeral.” Almost. Andre Braugher still reigns on Brooklyn Nine-Nine, deposed or not. B.B. King could win a guitar duel by playing just one note. Braugher can win the best line of an episode by uttering just one word. “Pain,” he tells Terry as he prepares his eulogy for Dozerman (though simply writing it out doesn’t do his performance any justice). He draws the syllable out and practically turns it into a sentence.
Terry, for his part, is allowed to be the goofball we were starting to miss in the wake of the 99’s departmental shifts, and if the supporting cast is underused here, they all still get in a good line apiece at least (even Joel McKinnon Miller, who turns Scully’s sudden and painful divorce into agonizing hilarity). Yet all of Brooklyn Nine-Nine’s primary and secondary players bow before Braugher’s comic eminence. Holt might not be the captain of the precinct anymore, but Braugher is still in charge of Brooklyn Nine-Nine.
Boston-based critic Andy Crump has been writing about film for the web since 2009, and has been contributing to Paste Magazine since 2013. He also writes for Screen Rant and Movie Mezzanine. You can follow him on Twitter. Currently, he has given up on shaving.