Why hello there, and happy Thanksgiving everyone! By which I mean “all members of the US”. Canada, I know you had Thanksgiving a while back. Japan had theirs on Monday (because almost all Japanese holidays are on Mondays). Oh, I see Brazil holds it at the same time, as does Mexico. So I guess I’ll extend that to “All Americans, and a belated one to Canada”.

Anywho, if you’re new to the site, I realized in the second year of posting that my Schedule had a problem: if I upload every Monday and Thursday, I will ALWAYS upload on Thanksgiving, since it’s the only holiday FORCED to be on a Thursday. And while I COULD just skip it, I resolved to instead talk about Thanksgiving specials, since they’ll almost always have a food component. Today marks another milestone in the process: The first LIVE-ACTION Thanksgiving special! A choice I am making purely for the love of the special itself, and not because I was up until 1:45 in the morning making a dish for Thanksgiving, and THEN remembered I had to write up this post.

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Jon O’Guin is RENOWNED for his prompt, thoroughly planned actions and submissions.

Accurate assessments of my asinine attempts to arrange activities aside, I DO love Brooklyn Nine-Nine in general, and this episode in particular. So, let’s dig in!

Just the Facts, Ma’am

Is that a Dragnet line? It feels like a Dragnet line. Or Kojak. I have become weirdly more informed about cop shows over the last couple months. (Fun fact: it was…n’t Dragnet. People REMEMBER it as a Dragnet line, but it’s not exactly right. Friday would say “All we want are the facts, ma’am”. Classic Mandela effect/”Luke, I am your father” situation.) Anywho, quick summary for anyone unfamiliar with the show:

Brooklyn Nine-Nine is a show about a squad of detectives in a fictional police precinct. (NYPD’s actual 99th precinct ceased to exist at some point, likely due to a re-drawing of precinct boundaries/a change in community needs or budget.) The show follows a main ensemble of 9 characters, shown here.

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The weirdest thing about this picture is that Hitchcock and Scully are so far apart. Those two are inseparable.

From (our) left to right, they are (there will be a quiz later!)

Gina Linetti, the secretary/assistant to the Captain. Very self-centered, actively undermines most of the cast.
Charles Boyle, the weak right-hand man and best friend of Jake Peralta. Noted for having very off-putting hobbies and tastes, and being very into food. He is also infatuated with Rosa Diaz
Norm Scully, with Hitchcock, the “old guard” of the 99. Noted for being very dumb and lazy, and medically disgusting. (ie, “has more types of diabetes than exist”)
Captain Raymond Holt, noted for his VERY serious demeanor, Raymond is the first openly gay black captain in the NYPD, and is very boring.
Jake Peralta (the guy with his arms spread, and basically the “main character” of the show) Jake is a care-free slacker and clown, who is, somehow, still one of the more successful detectives in the precinct. Obsessed with Die Hard, “undercover” police work, and shenanigans.
Sergeant Terry Jeffords. The mother hen of the squad, whose relatively positive demeanor serves as a contrast to his impressive physicality.
Amy Santiago: the ‘teacher’s pet” of the 99, loves binders and organization, chief rival/love interest for Peralta.
Rosa Diaz: the tough and intimidating member of the group. Hates excessively positive moments or interactions.
Michael Hitchcock: Like Scully, Hitchcock is also very dumb, disgusting and lazy, with the primary difference being that where Scully is medically disgusting, Hitchcock is much more romantically/sexually disgusting.

That is honestly more than you need to know for this, (indeed, some of the character details aren’t yet fully established by this point in the series) but it’ll give you the lay of the land for what happens. ON TO THE SPECIAL

Starting off With a Bang

We start off with the “Cold Open”: Brooklyn Nine-Nine, at least for the first 4 seasons, always had a cold open, a little 1-3 minute scene, often not even related to the plot of the episode, showing some little bit of hijinks/jokes the squad gets int. This one is “Boyle Bingo”: Charles is SO predictable in his actions on Thanksgiving that the squad has drawn up Bingo cards with actions (“Charles reminds us all that he had to play Pocahontas in his school’s production” “All the girls were too big!”) This upsets Charles, who, deciding that he’ll just silently sit in his chair to deny them their fun, misses, and falls to the ground. To the group’s surprise, no one has “Charles falls to the ground”, leading Charles to crow “That’s a win for Boyle! Boom, baby!” promptly all the other characters to announce they can check off their “Charles says ‘Boom’” square.

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A legitimate example of adding insult to injury.

From there, the basic set-up is pretty simple: Amy (the overachiever) has invited the entire squad to her house for Thanksgiving dinner, in order to give an elaborate speech and ask Captain Holt to formally mentor her. Jake is attempting to find any possible case he can use to avoid the dinner, as, coming from a troubled home, he hates Thanksgiving. Rosa has agreed because she assumes said dinner will be far more interesting (read “disastrous”) than having it with her family. Terry’s family is out of town, and Gina “wants to see if Amy’s house is the reason she’s single, or if it’s her personality.”

Charles accidentally ruins Terry’s lunch, which included a whole ham, because Terry has to consume 10,000 calories a day to maintain his muscle mass. This leads to him attacking Scully, demanding that Scully reveal a hidden stash of food Terry is certain he has.

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The attack turns out to be of flawed execution.

Jake finishes his current case, and discovers there are no open cases left for him to take. He complains that he has no desire to go to Amy’s dinner, and would much prefer to stay at home eating “mayo-nut spoonsies”, and watching the football game. “Mayo-nut spoonsies” being the ‘dish’ of a spoonful of mayo with a sprinkling of peanuts that he invented at age 6 watching football alone, because his mother always had to work on Thanksgiving, and his father had abandoned them. Holt, in deference to this sad story, agrees that he can have any case that opens up, but until one does, he has to go to the dinner.

With no open cases, the group all gathers at Amy’s house. There’s some initial awkwardness/humor (Gina mocks Amy’s décor, Hitchcock removes his shirt under the premise “I can’t spill food on it if I’m not wearing it”, and Terry has grown steadily angrier because he is starving.) Captain Holt arrives, and just as Amy is starting her speech, is informed that someone has stolen 10,000 from the evidence locker. He and Jake depart to solve the case, leaving the rest of the group behind. Amy stalls serving the food for a while, in case they come back, eventually relenting after Charles attempts to use a toast to hit on Rosa, but backs down, instead claiming her was talking about Hitchcock…where the cast discovers that Amy is a TERRIBLE cook: ie, her green beans tasted “like fish vomit”, and she ran out of salt, so her mashed potatoes are ‘seasoned’ with Baking Soda.

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A completely understandable and reasonable exchange.

This leads to the squad all secretly dumping their food into Amy’s toilet, clogging it, and forcing the group to roam the streets of New York trying to find food, while Jake and Holt hunt for the thief. Jake convinces Holt to play along with a fictional persona, and Holt even uses the gravitas of the backstory to stop a family argument long enough for Jake to discover the REAL criminal in the suspect’s family. (Un)Fortunately, the thief has already bet all the money, so the case must continue.

The squad tries the local ‘cop bar’ (not a police-themed bar, but rather, “a bar that is the preferred drinking spot of local law enforcement”) but the cook has gone home, and they have to leave after an expensive accident. Scully relents, revealing his secret stash of food to the Sergeant…only to discover it’s been devoured by rats. At their wit’s end, Charles announces that HE will save this, and he only needs an hour.

Jake and Holt track down the bookie, hidden in a Mahjong parlor, and get the money. Jake insists he’s going to go home, while Holt reminds him that he could overcome his bad memories of the holiday by building new, happy ones “with his new family”, but excuses him. Boyle arrives with a Thanksgiving spread composed of take-out food from a variety of New York take-out restaurants. As he sets up the dinner, Amy attempts to ask for Holt’s mentorship, but can’t find the words. However, it turns out Gina had given Holt a copy of Amy’s (8-page, single-spaced, double-sided) toast, which Holt had read, and enjoyed. He counsels her that some of her word choice could be improved, and he has marked the relevant words with “awk”, for “awkward”. Amy is ecstatic, as he is directly mentoring her on the toast.

Charles unveils the dinner, drawn from local South American, African, and Asian restaurants.

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Fun fact: this is a very unusual presentation for peking duck: normally, they chop up the duck, so you have sections of meat and very crisp skin.

The ‘stuffing’ is a collection of vegetable samosas (which I don’t know if we’ve covered on the site, but are, to be WILDLY reductive, essentially the Indian version of an Egg Roll/Dumpling/Hot Pocket/Pierogi: a thin pastry shell over a cooked filling, often some mixture of starchy vegetables, spices, and sometimes meat or cheeses.), the “potatoes” are replaced by Empanadas (which are…basically the exact same dish as Samosas, but Latin American instead of Indian, so we can assume that the Empanadas are themselves filled with potatoes) and also served with…oh, hey!

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Chinese food? That’s very common in New York, Jon. And America as a whole.

Ha-HA! That’s right, LENTIL GRAVY, Baby! A through-line for the month. I am the greatest.

Anywho, Jake arrives, having dressed up as Amy had asked for the initial dinner, gives a toast where he explains that he got the moral of the episode, that the Squad is his new family. Charles, who is, as noted earlier, basically the Le Fou to Jake’s Gaston, loves the toast so much her cries…which causes Jake to fill in his last square needed to win Boyle Bingo.

I really dig this episode. I brushed over swathes of it so I wasn’t spoiled every joke, but it’s a really fun take on a pretty common idea in sitcoms: the Thanksgiving curmudgeon being brought around, the dinner going horribly awry and being saved by embracing similar-but-new versions of the dishes. It’s fun, fun-ny, and a nice introduction to the characters as a whole if you haven’t seen the show before. Happy Thanksgiving, everyone (though I actually passed out at 4 AM Thursday morning, and ended up not finishing this until, legally, the wee hours of Black Friday) Brooklyn 99 can be found on Hulu, NBC (with ads), and the premium edition of Peacock.

MONDAY: LET THEM EAT CAKE. A CREAMY, SWEET CAKE WITH TWO NAMES, AND TWO COMPONENTS.

THURSDAY: I MIGHT TALK ABOUT A COOKBOOK. AND I LIED ABOUT THE QUIZ.