I Watch TV: The Rookie

 

The Rookie (Season 6)

A short season of ten episodes, possibly due to the writers and actors strikes. Because of this most of the characters only get one story. Nolan and Bailey get married (not without drama, and one character manages to get distracted away and kidnapped from it – weddings not very lucky in this show). They then start considering kids, an interesting point given that this was a break up reason for Nolan back in season 2 when Sarah Shahi’s anti-terrorism expert was dating him.

There’s room for one ongoing plot which turns out to be a leak from the police department to organised crime. This revolves around amoral lawyer Monica Stevens turning out to be evil and deciding to move in on various criminal gangs as a partner, or destroying them for whoever she’s working with. This seems a bit silly; inevitably her actions cause one of the more violent criminals to send someone to kill her, which precipitates her having to react in ways that break her role as just a lawyer doing her job (for mobsters).

Stevens as an antagonist who was part of the system, even with her pursuing a nuisance lawsuit against Nolan, was pretty good as a character; even her as a desperate one trying to find out who’s targeting her ahead of the police (who would learn her dubious actions) wasn’t bad. Her as a cool calculating nemesis brought down by her own hubris, well that’s okay. But we are left with the slightly unfortunate conclusion that all defence lawyers are either corrupt (Stevens) or naïve (her ex- Wesley, married to detective Lopez, who changed sides to work for the DA’s office).

Three members of the cast of cancelled spin-off The Rookie: Feds turn up for an international mission which is nice to see. They’re still out there, we’re just not making a TV show about them.

Watch This: Still charming, and manage to include small police stories along with the large
Don’t Watch This: The evil defence lawyer targets the noble cops (some of whom get very close to committing murder in a storyline I didn’t mention)