Warning: This article contains spoilers about Sunday night’s season 3 premiere ofThe Rookie.
The Rookieis back, and John Nolan might just be stuck in that titular purgatory forever.
Jackson (Titus Makin) helps keep eyes on Armstrong in the hospital.
Credit: ABC
They decide to keep it a secret when Lopez finally makes detective.
Things go haywire, putting Nolan’s life in danger as Ruben Derian invites Armstrong to shoot him.
How much did that shift your approach to this cliffhanger and how you would resolve it/begin season 3?
ALEXI HAWLEY:It had a huge impact.
The pandemic was first.
Then, George Floyd was killed and everything changed.
But there were definitely some adjustments we made based on the conversations that were going on.
There were a couple scenes in there that were incredibly necessary.
One was the one between Nolan and Wesley, about how Nolan’s experience differs from many other people.
Specifically, Wesley’s clients of color.
And really has been the bad guy in popular entertainment for decades.
IA have always been the rat squad; they’ve always been the guys that cops can’t trust.
Really their job is to police the police to keep them from doing bad things.
Those scenes probably would not have existed in the form that they have without this movement going on.
You referenced this glimpse into the processes of Internal Affairs.
Grey explains the term Noble Cause Corruption.
In the pilot, we had a whole sequence on how to set up a police car.
Even taking you through what an arrest and processing looks like.
Because the premiere had to wrap up this story.
Ok, let’s stop the conspiracy theories now.
Nick is dead, yes.
It wasn’t my intention necessarily for him to die at the end of the episode.
When we were breaking it, I did think that having him around still might have value.
This season we needed to live in a world where actions have consequences.
I firmly believe that the only way that policing changes is if cops start to police themselves.
We have to put our money where our mouth is.
It does tie our hands in some way.
We basically said that we can’t have cops going rogue anymore, because that’s not okay.
And that’s sort of a foundation of TV cop shows.
We definitely have set up an obstacle for Nolan which is very real.
He doesn’t have a 20-year career staring him in the face.
He’s 46 years old.
That’s always been the point of his desire and desperation to get ahead quickly.
That’s where growth comes.
Can you explain what his immediate punishment means?
He will have to stay a rookie longer than his friends, yes?
His is extended, yes.
Now he has an additional 30 days beyond that to remain a rookie.
He needs to make his peace with it, but that’s not always easy to do.
What about for Nyla?
Shes just now won respect and trust back, so how will this hurt her going forward?
Nyla is in a different place.
To a large extent, she’s already had advancement in the career.
She was a detective already.
She was one of the top undercover cops in the state.
She’s already been to the mountaintop a little bit.
She’ll wear that letter of reprimand without the consequences that it has for Nolan.
You brought Rosalind back into this action again, tying off her storyline with Armstrong.
But now shes clearly intrigued by Nolan.
Can we expect to see her again?
It seems like shes definitely not finished with him.
Might she be likeCastle’s3XK killer and keep returning?
I don’t know honestly.
I love that he hung up on her at the end.
She might come back.
I don’t know that she’s a 3XK pop in of character.
We do try and keep the show grounded, although within reason, it is television.
I’m not saying no, because I love Annie as an actress and her character.
Lopez is pregnant, but also has just now made detective.
How will this complicate things for her?
Alyssa just had a baby in real life.
Because it’s 2020 and we’re just rolling with everything.
But I do think that ultimately it’s been a great storyline for her character.
It does add a great layer of drama and complication to her story.
How does she navigate being pregnant on the job?
How does she navigate when and where to tell people?
There’s a lot of really rich stuff that we mine with her.
How much is wanting to keep her pregnancy secret going to become a challenge for her and Wesley?
There is definitely a bit of a culture clash between them.
How does he navigate having a training officer who he has problems with?
Tim and Lucy get drawn into that conversation in some unexpected ways.
How would you tease next week’s episode?
At the end of this three part journey, we go back to the normal of our show.
We’ve got some fun storylines going on.
Nolan and Harper get assigned to work at a neighborhood community policing center.
There’s definitely fun to be had, but also some new challenging storylines that we start.
