Shows are starting to come back from their hiatus! Yesterday it was the turn of The Rookie and here we are, to tell you what we think about this premiere of season 3. In general, it has pleasantly surprised us, both the pace and the issues to be discussed, brave and controversial issues. The show has not shied away from dealing with unseen realities, as it opened up new plots and solved others, and we love it!
Here we go!
The premiere begins right where the season finale ended: with the sirens being heard outside Nolan’s house, just as he had just discovered the evidence that Armstrong placed to incriminate him.
Luckily, Nolan makes a smart move and calls Wes to be his attorney. However, somewhat later, he was not at all smart and ignored all of Wes’s advice and recounted everything he and Harper planned to unmask the real culprit: Armstrong, while he recovered from the shooting in a hospital.
This, how could it be otherwise, did not go too well. Warning from someone who knows about this: Always follow the advice of your attorney, Nolan.
In the end, Gray accepts, without much conviction, Nolan’s plan to unmask Armstrong by infiltrating Rubén Darien’s organization as a corrupt agent, making him believe that he was going to replace Armstrong.
And here we have to stop to say that we love that each and every member of the team didn’t hesitate for a second about Nolan. They knew he was being framed. Except Bradford who, from here, although we love him, we send him to hell for a while.
We think he is so skeptical because he tries to protect himself. The truth is that he cares for Nolan, and doesn’t want it to hurt him if he ends up disappointing him. And everything that happened with Isabel marked him, hardening him but he has to learn to differentiate between situations and people.
The point is that everyone turns to prove Nolan’s innocence. But that doesn’t eliminate the fact that Gray and his superior are disappointed in Nolan and Harper, but most of all, him. It shows, and we feel it in our bones. The downside of disappointment is that it lasts much longer than anger because along with it comes a loss of respect.
The quest to find evidence of Nolan’s innocence leads Lucy and Bradford to jail to see Rosalind … and she doesn’t miss the opportunity to mess with Lucy’s head. We were afraid that this would bring her down, but she is stronger than that and we are proud of her because she has not let it get into her head and, if it has affected her in some way, she knows that she is not alone.
Gray’s instincts about Nolan’s plan did not fail and Nolan ended up alone in a junkyard with Ruben and Armstrong, who managed to escape from the hospital upon learning from Rosalind that nothing was going as well for him as it seemed.
Rosalind has always been a master of manipulation and has Armstrong as desperate as she wanted. That is her revenge, knowing him as destroyed as she is. Revenge is a dish served cold … and Rosalind is satisfied. Armstrong, for his part, clearly never minded getting his hands dirty to save his own ass so he doesn’t hesitate to go kill Nolan, when it seems like he’s lost everything.
This shows us that Rosalind and Armstrong are not as different as he tries to think. They are both murderous, manipulative, cold, calculating … psychopaths. We don’t see too much difference.
Armstrong is willing to kill Nolan and end the problem, but his gun jams just at that moment … then all hell breaks loose. Nolan manages to kill Darien’s henchmen and Armstrong himself, by catching Darien in the process.
Nolan killed those men, but honestly, he did it in self-defense. They were shooting at him, he just defended himself. What did they expect? For him to nothing? We don’t understand exactly why they punish him. We assume that because he broke the rules at the beginning and did not follow the chain of command. So the punishment would be justified, but for the shooting? Just NO!
The point is, Nolan is in a very difficult position right now and Harper is trying to take responsibility for what happened. She know Nolan is a rookie, and even if he is not fired, his career would inevitably be damaged and he will never be able to fulfill his dreams of being an inspector. But she has a history in the department and she can fight that battle.
We love the friendship, the brotherhood of Nolan and Harper. She always tried to keep Nolan from entering her heart and becoming really important to her, but the truth is that he is and she is not going to let his career end before it starts, so she tries to defend her own actions and Nolan’s against her superiors. Now she realizes that it was wrong but, then it seemed the best thing, because they did not know how far the corruption went.
Yes, it’s hard to think that you can’t trust your own superiors but honestly, it was common sense for Nolan and Harper to think exactly that. I mean, they broke the rules but can we understand it? Of course.
Gray, on the other hand, has other plans that collide with Harper’s. He knows what Harper is trying to do and he’s not going to let her do it. She is partly to blame … but not entirely to blame. At the end of the day, Nolan – like Harper – is not expelled but is punished for what was an act of the “end justifies the means.” The punishment is a letter of reprimand on his file and, for a newbie like him, especially at such an age, it usually means that his career is over and Nolan’s dream of being a detective… will not come to pass.
For Nolan, that stain on his file is a dead end, because he could become a patrol officer or a training officer… but he will never be able to remove his uniform to be a detective or enter a specialized unit. All his dreams have simply gone to waste.
We have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, we are happy to see a show punishing a policeman who broke the rules. As we see lately, unfortunately, this is not usually the norm, if not the exception. However, as for the shooting, this was not in cold blood, if not in self-defense, without excessive use of force, we believe that this makes a difference.
As for what happened before the shooting, of course, he deserves punishment for breaking the rules, even for understandable reasons but … doesn’t it seem a bit unfair that after being framed, putting his life at risk and seeing his name and reputation dragged to the ground, does Nolan face the loss of his dreams? We do see it as something unfair if we think about it coldly. So we hope Nolan can recover from that stain on his record, learn from it, and fulfill his dreams.
In a happier tone, we find out that Angela and Wes are expecting a baby just before Gray announces her promotion to detective. And we love this! We ship this couple and we’re just as excited as they are for this baby. We can’t wait to see them as parents!
The scene where they talk about it, Angela’s fears, Wes’s response … it’s just perfect. Angela just wanted a little romance before thinking about babies and diapers and schools … but Wes doesn’t mind that. He loves her and will be thrilled to see her at their wedding, he will be fascinated to see how her body changes … he will always love her, and they will always have that romance, with or without baby. And I melt here and now.
However, not everything is happiness. Now Angela will be promoted to detective – and we’re glad, she deserves it and we hope that she continues to appear on the show – which means a new job, new colleagues, new bosses … and that she will have to start over from scratch in terms of proving herself same to all of them.
A pregnancy, realistically, is not the best way to start because that, it will inevitably slow her down. They will entrust her with the least dangerous jobs … they will practically tie her to an office and that, for an action girl like her would be to shut her down completely … and it is not the best way to start a new job that she is passionate about.
In other words, they won’t take her seriously. So Angela decides to hide her pregnancy for as long as she can, not saying anything to Gray, much less to her new bosses.
This strikes me as very brave of the show’s part. This reality of women hiding their pregnancy just because it makes their bosses or partners think less of them, or that they don’t value them the same or that they judge them, is a situation that happens more often than we are willing to admit.
It’s an invisible situation but it exists and it seems incredible to me that this show finally dares to give voice and visibility to this situation. From here we say: hell yeah!
For Angela to decide to hide something that makes her so happy just to be able to fit into her new job, and for the show to tackle how society has made us have to do it or what it means for a woman to hide a pregnancy and the price they must pay, it’s huge.
A very ambitious story that we are looking forward to seeing how they develop. We like that this injustice is finally dealt with in a main character, it is finally talked about, it finally comes to light. This is really important. We need to talk about it. It about damn time!
After all this, Armstrong’s cases will be reviewed and that includes Rosalind. And she seems to have a new fixation on Nolan. We just imagine that she will give trouble later in the season.
And this has been our review of the premiere of The Rookie. Stay tuned every week for our review!
