For our review of the last episode of Brooklyn Nine-Nine, click here.
Synopsis: Gina plays a high-stakes game of chess with Capt. Holt; Rosa and Amy take Gina out for a fancy brunch; Jake and Gina must use their wits to infiltrate a posh club. (IMDB)
Writer: Phil Augusta Jackson
Director: Luke Del Tredici
Rating: TV-14
Running Time: 22mins
Airs: Thursdays at 8:30pm on CityTV (Canada)/9pm on NBC (United States)
Bye Gina, we’re going to miss you.
The cold open was of Gina calling an impromptu meeting to announce that she was leaving the 9-9 and giving everyone her two weeks notice in the most Gina way possible with a four movement interpretive dance.
The episode itself would be divided into four movements, hence the title. The first movement started with Gina explaining to Terry how she had been teaching Holt how to trash talk and he’s surprisingly good at it. Holt was concerned about Gina’s future but she wanted to take a risk. Also, their heated games of chess where each drew parallel’s to each other’s lives were entertaining. Gina still had goals left to accomplish and she used this as a teaching moment for Holt who had succeeded at everything he had set out to do except for being commissioner.
The second movement started with Gina vowing to teach the over-emotional Amy how to be cold and detached like Rosa. During lunch together, Amy gave Gina a book of all her witty tweets. In turn, Gina wanted Amy to burn it but Amy couldn’t do it. The ultimate lesson that Gina wanted to teach Amy to be herself, however, Rosa unexpectedly became emotional.
The third movement started with Jake wanting to throw Gina a going away party. They just needed a celebrity but in order to poach Mario Lopez, Jake and Gina needed to impersonate wealthy people so they count enter a rich people club. It wasn’t going well until they pulled out their ‘Daddy” routine. Unfortunately, the episode cut away from this before anything really happened but whatever they did worked as Mario Lopez would later show up at the bar. Gina immediately asked him to leave. Her lesson for Jake was that they didn’t need any celebrities as the others were all she needed.
The fourth movement started with Gina taking her time to finally leave. Everybody believed that she was having second thoughts but in reality, she was stalling until a gold statue of her arrived. She would leave a heartfelt video message for everyone which would still take some shots at Terry, giving him his own Gina moment.
Overall, Four Movements was a decent episode of Brooklyn Nine-Nine that gave Gina a decent sendoff, however, the impact wasn’t nearly as strong as it could have been. Perhaps this wasn’t in the writers’ control but the relative abruptness of her departure, four episodes into the season did not help Gina’s cause. Though episode would still have some fun moments in it with Holt’s trash talking or Jake and Gina’s rich act, the episode as a whole was a mess. Maybe that was intentional because of Gina but it just didn’t quite work. It will definitely be interesting to see what happens now that she’s gone.
Score: 7.5/10
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The EIC of the coincidentally-named keithlovesmovies.com. A Canadian who prefers to get out of the cold and into the warmth of a movie theatre.
