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The Rookie Season 7, Episode 2, “The Watcher” focused on Celina Juarez’s (Lisseth Chavez) plain-clothes day, meaning she got to ride around with her training officer, John Nolan (Nathan Filion) and make the calls. That, of course, didn’t exactly go as planned for either Celina or Nolan.
Ultimately, Celina passed her plain-clothes day, proving she could handle patrol by herself. But there were some obstacles along the way, and one of them proved to be her own TO. Celina might be a rookie, but Nolan is still a rookie TO and there were some growing pains for him in his first plain-clothes day as a TO.
He started the episode making it clear to Celina that he was just there to observe. In fact, he said he wasn’t even going to talk. But when they got into their first real sticky situation, instead of letting Celina handle it by herself, Nolan stepped in when he shouldn’t have and took control of the scene.
Later, Celina called him out on it, telling him that by doing so he was not only showing that he didn’t trust her – he was hurting her because she had more to prove than he did. She is, after all, a woman, and not a white woman, at that. Nolan seemed to take the words to heart, and though he continued to struggle throughout the episode with letting Celina take the lead, he kept to his word and did not intervene again.
It was a good thing he did because if he’d continued to intervene, that could have meant the end of Nolan’s short career as a TO and his firing from the role. His entire role that day was to ascertain if his rookie was ready to do the job on her own, and his continued intervention meant she couldn’t actually prove that and not through any fault of her own. In fact, if we’re being honest, Nolan came way closer to failing plain-clothes day than Celina Juarez ever did.
Near the end of the episode, Lieutenant Grey tells Celina she passed her plain-clothes day. He also tells Nolan that he did pretty well for a rookie TO. There is, of course, room for improvement. And the day will surely be a lesson for both Celina (who still has some time left as a rookie) and for Nolan, who will one day have to train other rookies who aren’t Celina and deal with what that means – the same way Lucy and Tim are now dealing with their respective rookies.
Was it just overprotectiveness over Celina or is there something else going on with Nolan? The Bailey matter has yet to be resolved, so Nolan’s wife is still out of the country, basically in hiding, which has to be weighing on him. Sure, it’s all because of Jenna Dewan’s maternity leave, but in the show, Nolan is dealing with trying to do his job while knowing there’s still someone out there who is a danger to the woman he loves. That can’t be easy, and it’s surely a storyline the show will have to pick up again when Dewan is ready to return.
