Summary
Another laugh-a-minute episode of Brooklyn Nine-Nine delves into the heartthrob pasts of Hitchcock and Scully to typically hilarious results, as the rest of the Nine-Nine attempt to co-exist on the same floor.
With names like Hitchcock and Scully, it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that in their 80s heyday the slovenly detectives were perp-busting heartthrobs – just the kind of guys to make off with a missing duffel bag full of dirty money. In this episode’s cold open Hitchcock and Scully are played by the absurdly athletic Alan Ritchson, fresh from his excellent stint on Titans, and Dear White People’s Wyatt Nash. It’s hard to imagine how these two became Dirk Blocker and Joel McKinnon Miller, which is, of course, the big joke of the episode.
That money belonged to local drug kingpin Gio Costa, and now Internal Affairs want to know where it is – Holt (Andre Braugher) puts Peralta (Andy Samberg) and Boyle (Joe Lo Truglio) on the case, presumably to wring maximum laughs out of their slobby colleagues once upon a time being the “studs of the Nine-Nine”.
“Hitchcock and Scully” essentially stretches out the regular jokes made about the eponymous characters’ weight and general incompetence into a full episode, and after five seasons it’s amazing nobody thought of doing this already. The gags are absolutely relentless and take the form of both one-liners and elements baked into the plot, such as the fact that Scully pays for a parking spot in which he stores a gaudy and stinking van he has nicknamed the “Beaver Trap”, which Peralta and Boyle end up briefly stuck inside.
The investigation leads to Wing Slutz, where Gio Costa’s wife (and Hitchcock and Scully’s old informant) Marissa still works. The IA investigation turns out to have been a ruse designed by Costa, fresh out of prison, to ferret out the snitch, but it’s really a ploy by the show to have a scene set at a place called Wing Slutz, home of the life-saving S**t Sauce.
On the continuity front, Holt has made an enemy of new police commissioner John Kelly, the new season’s smug antagonist, and as a result the entire precinct is forced to work on the same floor. There’s a lot of petty back and forth between Amy (Melissa Fumero) and her uniformed officers and Jeffords (Terry Crews) and Rosa (Stephanie Beatriz), mostly over who’s allowed to use the microwave, but it’s made doubly funny by repurposing terms like “downstairs people” as sly, affectionate digs rather than, you know, explicitly classist prejudice. The show’s good like that.
Let’s be frank: the show’s just good, period, and nothing at all has been lost in the move to a new network. It continues to be ceaselessly hysterical and regularly profound, while continuing to give all its characters amusing things to do in different compositions. Brooklyn Nine-Nine remains a masterful sitcom that hasn’t been given new life so much as proved that it never looked anything less than completely healthy in the first place.
