The third season of Brooklyn Nine-Nine is once again at 23 episodes. It takes place in the fictional ninety-ninth precinct in New York, and follows the band of odd and lively characters that work there. It continues straight after the previous season where Captain Holt has been reassigned and forced to leave the Nine-Nine. His replacement immediately arrives, and he is one eccentric character. Combined with this are Jake and Amy’s relationship where both of them are somewhat awkward around it. The first episode kind of sets the theme and that is that it goes for an over-the-top humor moment. It works well though and is one of the funnier jokes that the show has.
So Holt has been reassigned to Public Relations. Considering his serious and non-humorous personality, naturally he’s not a great fit. However, he is motivated to still try his best and turn the department around. He encounters plenty of struggles, especially when the PR staff is your stereotypical airy fairy types.
As the season progresses, you’d notice that some of the supporting characters have their personality traits emphasized. It is to the point of being able to easily dislike those characters now. Hitchcock and Scully were never the most favorable of characters, being lazy and disgusting. There are some scenes in this scene where they do petty things, and generally be a tad bit too selfish to be funny. Then in the second half of the season, suddenly they’re helpful (whether intentional or not), and it makes it seem they aren’t as bad. It flip-flops all over the place.
One thing’s for sure and that is a lot of the characters of the Nine-Nine are competitive. We’ve seen this before but most of the characters place a high priority on winning. This is often to the detriment of cooperating and succeeding together but everything will work out in the end. The Vulture makes a surprise return and he is as unlikable as ever, perhaps even more so. He seems to find a reason to turn up quite often, and his negative traits and inappropriate behavior are dialed up massively. On the other hand, Holt’s arch-nemesis takes more of a backseat this season, which is unexpected considering how she turned up in the vast majority of episodes before.
Onto the positives and that is there are often good displays of camaraderie within the squad. What’s heartwarming is how Holt is every part of the team, where they have his back, and he has theirs. Holt even participates in the jokes now. While we still get the general stoic personality of Holt, he expresses his emotions a lot more and can feel like such a different person compared to how he was before. The flow of time is somewhat vague in the series. It’s hard to tell whether days or months has passed until someone just randomly brings up an event from say, six months ago and you realize so much time has passed in the space of a few episodes.
Each episode’s plot is self-contained and involves both personal relationships and police work. Often, the two are mixed together (rather unprofessionally at times). In this season, Jake seems to care even more about his friends at work, and their backgrounds. He makes a big deal out of it, and wanting to know about everyone’s past. Even Boyle has more to reveal, things that even surprises Jake given that they are best friends for a long while. We constantly get reminders about Boyle’s unlucky plight in romance. He seems to either not be able to meet people, or he meets them but they are not suitable for him. You can’t help but feel that he deserves something slightly better but alas, he is often the butt of the joke.
The season finale has a fairly involved arc that spans over multiple episodes. It was funny, it was interesting, and it highlights the best traits of the characters. While it can be hard to believe that NYPD can be so colorful and intense in terms of events, this was a good story about finding the mole within the police. The plot was slowly built up over the course of the season, with one event naturally flowing onto the next. Overall, the third season of Brooklyn Nine-Nine is strong. It has a stronger more coherent overarching direction. There is still the odd random one-off episode but there is a lot of minor foreshadowing that helps ties things together.
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