Tuesday’s episode of The Rookie will be continuing the prison escape from the Season 6 finale and creator Alexi Hawley shared with PopCulture.com what will be going on with Nolan and Bailey. With Bailey’s psychotic ex-husband Jason Wyler out in the open, Nolan is growing more and more cautious. Since Jenna Dewan was on maternity leave when filming started for Season 7, Bailey is only just now appearing in Episode 3, and it’s going to be quite a homecoming.
Hawley revealed that Nathan Fillion’s cop has been “very afraid of Jason and the impact he’ll have. He was hoping to catch him before she got back.” He continued, “But there’s a very fun storyline in 3 about him trying to basically bullet armor his house, the most insane security system that he’s installing, and all that kind of stuff. But ultimately realizing that you can really live in such fear that it’s destructive rather than constructive. So I think that that’s really useful. And then driving forward from there, there’s a lot of stressors from having Jason out there, her ex-husband.”
Played by Dewan’s IRL fiancé, Steve Kazee, Jason was introduced in the fourth season, and it was clear from the start that he was not a good guy. He is abusive and violent and is one of the worst criminals on The Rookie. With his escape, the show will focus not only on what he might do to Nolan and Bailey, but what he has already done to Bailey.
“We are gonna dig into some stuff that Jenna’s character, Bailey, actually has not fully processed from being in an abusive relationship with this guy, partly because he was not physically abusive, that she sort of characterized it differently in her head and never really sort of processed some things,” Hawley explained. “And so she is reactive to some stuff. There is some tension in the relationship because of some choices she makes. We wanted to really sort of honor the real effects that being in a toxic relationship can really have. And so we get the sort of plot, plotty, ‘Where is he coming first?’ The paranoia, ‘Is he around the corner?’ Plus, the sort of real-life repercussions.”
It’s going to be an episode that will surely keep fans on the edge of their seats and the tip of their toes, and there is no telling how it will all go down. Not to mention the fact that it’s still very early on in the season, so it’s likely that this storyline will continue for at least a little bit longer. Make sure to tune in to a new episode of The Rookie this Tuesday, Jan. 21 at 10 p.m. ET on ABC to see what happens with Nolan, Bailey, and Jason.
