Spoiler warning: This review contains spoilers for season eight of Brooklyn Nine-Nine.
For those of us who remember the desperate internet outcry to save Brooklyn Nine-Nine from its original cancellation back in 2018, it seems incredible that the police sitcom made it to a definitive final season. To see it end so decisively is almost bittersweet.
At only ten episodes, the final season is half the length of those that ran on Fox, and still significantly shorter than the reduced episode runs of seasons six and seven. However, this shorter season arc works in the show’s favour, preventing a heartfelt goodbye from potentially becoming bloated and overdone. Whilst season eight has garnered mixed reviews from its audiences, despite some issues, it’s a great final season.
It would be impossible to discuss the new season without mentioning how it handled the subject of Black Lives Matter. For years the show has been criticised as ‘copaganda’, and star Andy Samberg told People magazine that the writers struggled with how to continue the show in the wake of such horrific acts of police brutality. They make a valiant attempt: Rosa Diaz (Stephanie Beatriz) quits the force in the very first episode, citing the protests as her reason for doing so, Captain Holt (Andre Braugher) and Amy (Melissa Fumero) share a season-long arc attempting to reform the way policing works, and the character of O’Sullivan makes for an amusing, if bleak, satirical representation of the corruption of the NYPD. However, it comes across as somewhat ham-fisted. Whilst it is clear that the writers wished to critique the police, we can’t have our cake and eat it too. It is difficult to fully achieve this whilst having Jake Peralta (The Lonely Island’s Andy Samberg) continuously defend the choice to remain part of a corrupted institution.
In spite of this, if you accept the show for what it is and always has been – a comedy set within a police precinct – it is possible to still enjoy watching. I watched the final season with my family, and not an episode went by without someone laughing out loud. Despite alterations to the core cast, with characters such as Diaz and Hitchcock taking on more external roles, the show never loses sight of the fact that it is their relationships that make the show worth watching. Many are even given new depths that hadn’t been explored before. Captain Holt’s marriage to Kevin, previously a secondary plotline, becomes part of the main fabric of the show, taking us on a simultaneously heartbreaking and heartwarming journey of reconciliation between two older gay men — a dynamic not often explored on mainstream television. And, without his comical-yet-sinister scene partner Hitchcock (seen almost exclusively over FaceTime this season) the character of Scully becomes ever more loveable, set adrift as he is after the sudden retirement of his best friend.
The relationship at the heart of the show has always been the will-they-won’t-they romance between Jake and Amy, culminating this season in their struggles as new parents. Their storyline balances both humour and seriousness; in episode two, Amy is insecure in her abilities as a mother. She leaves her baby in the ‘capable’ hands of Charles, only for him to lock little Mac in a room. In the penultimate episode, Jake reveals his plans to quit the force in order to become a stay-at-home dad, effectively becoming the father he never had growing up. This perfectly resolves his eight seasons of daddy-issues-based character development.
References to past jokes and storylines are littered throughout the season, including a shocking revelation about the Boyle family. However, none are more satisfying than the central concept of the two-part season finale: a (non-holiday based) heist!
Perhaps one of the most popular genres of episodes amongst the fanbase, the return of the heist also marks the return of fan favourite character: Gina Linetti (Chelsea Peretti), who officially exited the show in season six. Throughout the episodes, Jake attempts to give both his coworkers – and us, the audience – a perfect goodbye, but is thwarted at every turn as each of them betrays one another in an attempt to win the title of Grand Champion of the Nine-Nine. In one of the biggest plot twists of the series, none other than Mr Nine-Nine himself, absentee Hitchcock, beats them all at their own game and comes out on top.
The verdict
With so much love for both its characters and its storylines, the final season of Brooklyn Nine-Nine is a wonderful goodbye to its faithful audience. Admittedly, season eight was more sombre in tone than its prior seasons, dealing with more serious topics from parenthood to divorce to police corruption. Even so, the show maintains its quick-witted humour and creates the ideal sendoff for each of its main characters, leaving the doors slightly ajar behind them, on the off chance that we might return to this bunch of loveable weirdos.
Words by Georgia Keenan-Hill
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