Previously on Rookie Blue, 15 Division was all up in arms because Holly disappeared into thin air and poor Gail has hardly had any screen time this season. Oh wait, no, that’s why I’m up in arms. 15 Division is up in arms because Oliver is being blamed for the bomb in the evidence room.
In last week’s episode, the man who sold the bomb parts to the dirty cop only thought he met with Oliver Shaw, but Traci found out it was actually Steve Peck he met with. So, this morning, Traci is understandably a little jumpy when Steve appears in her bed and slithers all around her room, looking more suspicious than ever.
Steve heads into the bathroom and Traci immediately goes for his phone. He catches her, but she comes up with THE MOST BRILLIANT LIE. She says her email was broken and she had sent him a test email. I don’t think I’ll suspect anyone of being a dirty cop any time soon, but sometimes I steal my best friend’s phone for mischief so it will be nice to have this TOTALLY BELIEVABLE LIE in my back pocket.
Across town, Santana pops over to Oliver’s for a visit and basically tells him that if he takes this really cushy job as head of security, the investigation will go away. It’s shady and icky but he leaves Oliver to think on it.
Nick finds Juliet at the precinct and asks why she left so early this morning like a puppy who missed his owner. He asks why she’s being weird and she confesses that she’s IA.
Well that was the kick that broke the puppy’s back and he storms out, angry at her for spying and lying all this time.
Andy is 100% ready to get to the bottom of this Oliver thing, so the first thing she does is finds Traci and suggests having the man who named Oliver pick him out of a lineup to make sure it wasn’t someone else using his name. Traci says he’s already been handed over to IA, but just because she’s not ready to let Andy investigate this doesn’t mean she won’t. She asks if she can tag along on Steve’s murder call, and even though it’s not Bring Your Girlfriend to a Crime Scene Day, he agrees.
Jarvis leads the morning report, and says he’ll be staff sergeant until this all gets sorted, and Santana will be around during the investigation. None of this sits well with our favorite rookies.
After they’re given their duties, Andy, Nick, Gail, and Dov sneak into a closet and Gail says she’s in before she even knows what the plan is. The plan is to catch Santana in the act of being dirty, which will be risky, but Andy is willing to shoulder any blame because she doesn’t want to work at 15 Division without Oliver anyway.
Team Rookie breaks and Andy finds Juliet to ask about Santana. Juliet admits that she was sent to find out who Santana was working with, but she doesn’t have any files on him. She does suggest a good plan of attack though, and it’s called an integrity test. They just need to make sure Satana overhears fake information related to the bombing and see if he takes the bait.
Andy brings this plan back to the team and they decide the fake evidence will be a copy of Ted McDonald’s hard drives that were destroyed in the explosion. Gail can dig this and, like a lesbian who maybe reads a lot of fanfiction, comes up with the perfect cover story: Ted gave a friend a second copy and told him to turn it in if anything happened to him and he’s finally gotten enough courage to do just that.
All they need is a guy to be the fake friend (which Nick has covered) and a Trojan horse to leak the information (which will be Selfie because he’s about as easy to manipulate as a mouse in a maze of cheese).
When Steve gets to the scene, he meets up with Frankie Anderson, homicide detective. And Frankie Anderson is the shit. How do I know this? Let me count the ways.
- She opens with snark: “Take your time, it’s only a homicide.” Immediately in love.
- She is played by Katharine Isabelle who
- was on an episode of The L Word.
- plays Margot, the lesbian character on Hannibal.
- was in Another Cinderella Story.
- is adorable.
- was in a movie called Ginger Snaps that looks right up my alley so brb watching it immediately.
- Her name is Frankie, and girls named Frankie/Franky are always the shit.
- When you watch as much TV as I do, you can tell when someone is a one-off character (like the shady detective from last week’s episode) and when she’s a keeper (at least for more than one episode) and my instinct is telling me this isn’t the last we’ll see of Frankie.
So, as you can imagine, within 30 seconds of her being on my screen, I shipped her with Gail, who isn’t even in the same zip code, currently. She has so much swagger!
ANYWAY, Steve flinches when he sees the body and runs away to make a phone call, which Frankie and Traci both think is a weird reaction.
Back at 15, Andy and Nick lure Gerald in by using their best Gossip Voices, and feed him their fake story. Of course he takes the bait, and within an hour manages to spill the beans to Santana. Which is good because that’s what they wanted, but also bad because it shows how much they can really trust him. All it took for him to crack was one little tap with a ball peen hammer on his fragile ego.
Back in the car, Traci asks Steve why he’s being so squirrely, and he shrugs it off, saying the dead guy reminded him of someone he knew. But he’s still being weird, and drives them to a broken-down part of town and tells Traci to wait in the car while he sneaks down an alley. Traci starts to follow him and sees that the mail to the building Steve went in was addressed to the suspect in the murder they just came from and when she confronts her boyfriend about this, he just gets extra weird and spastic.
Nick picks up his brother and drives him to the station under the pretense that he’s Tom McDonald’s buddy with the backup hard drives. Santana listens in as Andy takes his statement and is obviously a little thrown. He tells Dov not to do anything with the information until a detective looks it over. Andy and Dov warn Nick and Gail, who are lying in wait at the warehouse.
Swarek finds Oliver in a bar, feeling backstabbed and helpless, and tells him Santana is dirty. Oliver isn’t surprised; it explains the icky visit he got this morning. But the thing is, right now he has two options. One is messy and right: Go through with the investigation to prove who’s innocent and who’s not, potentially deplete his savings account and ruin his career. the other is tidy and wrong: Gets a big fancy job with good hours, let Santana get away with it. Neither is ideal.
In the precinct, Andy is doing a surprisingly good job of trying to follow Santana around, but he catches on and more or less threatens her, letting her know full well that Oliver saved her ass once so the least she could do for him was stay out of things.
Frankie shows up at the precinct (where she will hopefully soon be staying) and tells Traci to thank Steve for his tip, which Steve then shows up to explain, making Traci think that maybe she overreacted and he’s not as sketchy as she thought he was. Steve promises he’s done lying and tells her to ask him anything, but Traci says her questions can wait until they’re drinking at the Black Penny later.
Meanwhile, at the warehouse, Gail is eating chips while they wait for Santana, even though-actually, no, probably entirely because it’s driving Nick batty. Nick decides to try to quell the crunching with conversation, asking Gail what she would do if she found out someone she trusted was lying to her. Gail isn’t one for heart-to-hearts, but for Nick she’ll play along: she has no room for liars in her life. Everyone has their dealbreaker, the thing they will not bend for, and Gail’s is a lying liar who lies.
At the bar, Oliver admits to Swarek that he’s scared. Before he was at 15 Division, when Santana was his Training Officer, Oliver accidentally did some shady dealings. Add that to making Izzy’s drug charge disappear, and he knows IA could build a decent case against him if they wanted to. Because life’s not fair and the good guys don’t always win.
In the warehouse, Gail and Nick get a call, so Gail calls Andy to let her know. Andy decides that she can probably handle this situation herself, since that has always worked out for everyone in the past, and heads to the warehouse. She slinks around all quietlike until she finds someone rooting around the drawer they put the fake evidence in. Andy tells the figure to put their hands in the air, and is unpleasantly surprised when the man turns around and is none other than Steve Peck.
Andy gives him a chance to explain, but he starts off on the wrong foot by trying to tell her Gail told him to come here. She calls him on his bluff and he backs down, saying it was actually Alonso Santana who sent him. Andy pretends she thinks he’s being legit and asks to see his warrant, which Steve says is in the car.
Andy tells him to give it up, and Steve starts to confess about Alonso and his ties to the Irish mafia. It started as a favor or two, but what he thought was a wading pool ended up being a sinkhole and now he’s in over his head.
Andy asks about Traci, but he promises she knows as much as Jon Snow. Steve swears that, because of her, he had one foot out the door before Ted McDonald ruined everything. He admits that he planted the bomb, but says he timed it purposefully so no one would get hurt. And then when Santana killed Ted McDonald-well, that was the cinder block tied to his ankle.
Steve tries to convince Andy to let him go, to let him save Oliver and take down Santana without coming out as dirty himself. He asks her to let this go, for Gail, for Traci.
Andy says she can’t look the other way. She won’t. But he just strolls on out, so sure she won’t shoot her best friend’s boyfriend, her best frienemy’s brother. And he was right, but only because she didn’t have to. Nick and Gail are waiting for him outside.
Gail is shocked. She barely blinks in the parking lot of the warehouse, unable to move away from the wall she was using for cover. And even after they’re back at the station, she just watches silently as he’s admitted and put into holding.
As they put Santana into a car, Gerald yells at him, claiming to know he was used, but either way not caring, because he’s a better cop than Santana, even though he’s not a great cop, at least he’s a GOOD cop.
Traci goes into an interrogation room to see Steve and lets him know exactly how betrayed she feels. She let him into her house, a house that was recently violated by a criminal with an intent to hurt her. She let him watch her child, a child who has been through quite enough for his young age thank you very much. She doesn’t want to hear his plea for forgiveness, and in fact doesn’t want to hear from him ever again.
Chloe was barely in this episode, except to tell Dov that she can’t be just friends with him, but she was looking as adorable as ever, so here she is.
Also not super relevant this episode was Chris, who was Jarvis’s lackey, and quickly realized Jarvis knew Chris had been sleeping with his wife. Luckily, Jarvis was already dating someone else too, he had just been afraid of sending his wife on a downward spiral. But since she’s already doing blow off a beat cop’s nightstick, now’s as good a time as any. He gives Chris permission to continue to see Mrs. Jarvis, but tells him to proceed with caution.
Who else needs to be wrapped up? Oh, Juliet. She tells Nick she’s sorry not sorry. Her job can feel icky and it’s hard, but investigating and calling out dirty cops is better than ignoring it, than letting them get away with it. There’s no integrity in that, and she doesn’t need a test to tell her so.
On the way home, Andy feels terrible about everything that went down, but Sam says everything will be okay. Besides, Steve wasn’t a bad person as much as he was just caught up in a series of bad choices and unfortunate events. What he didn’t say was that they all better hope Gail sees her brother as the liar he is and doesn’t blame Andy for any of this somehow because otherwise someone’s going to have claw marks on her back soon. And not the good kind.
What did you think of “Integrity Test”?
