Season 7 of The Rookie Promises to Bring an Impressive, Dramatic and Emotional Return.
After a shortened season, The Rookie will be back in the first quarter of 2025, debuting with 18 episodes. Unlike its predecessor, the seventh season of the police series starring Nathan Fillion as John Nolan will air without multi-week breaks interrupting the story. While still technically shorter than past installments, The Rookie Season 7 will be a return to form for the Mid-Wilshire Police Precinct. However, that doesn’t mean there won’t be new faces.
The Rookie’s Season 6 finale was over-the-top, even for a series that had an episode where Los Angeles faced an imminent nuclear attack. (It was, of course, a false alarm.) Nolan and Nyla Harper (Mekia Cox) go to Argentina to chase down Monica Stevens (Bridget Regan) and Doctor Blair London (Danielle Campbell) with some CIA operatives. Meanwhile, Lucy Chen (Melissa O’Neil) jumps from a moving car onto a pickup truck to save Tim Bradford (Eric Winter). It was a fantastic television drama, but far from the patrol officer focus The Rookie usually has. Season 7 will almost certainly be a more familiar approach to The Rookie than the strike-shortened Season 6. Thanks to teases from showrunner Alexi Hawley and new casting reports, fans can figure out what to expect when The Rookie returns to ABC in January 2025. Also, fans know the cast is back on set filming new episodes since Eric Winter is a prolific TikTok poster.
The Rookie Season 7 Will Address the Cliffhanger from the Finale
In the penultimate Season 6 episode of The Rookie, Monica Stevens recruited a frequent foil for Nolan Oscar Hutchinson (Matthew Glave) for help. In return, she helped him escape from prison with Jason Wyler (Steve Kazee), the ex-husband of Nolan’s wife Bailey Nune (Jenna Dewan). In an interview with TV Insider, Hawley said, “I think Jason’s probably the most immediate problem,” though he didn’t rule out Oscar’s or Monica’s return. At the time of the interview, the writers’ room for Season 7 had only been working for a little more than a week.
This means that Jason’s revenge against Bailey and Nolan, who locked him up, will probably be the subject of The Rookie Season 7 premiere. The final scene showed the two characters calmly walking out of the prison, disguised as guards. Oscar talks about going on the lam, but Wyler wants to head to Los Angeles because he has unfinished business with Nolan and Bailey. While he doesn’t specifically say he’s coming for them, the sly smile Wyler gives Oscar carries plenty of implication. What will be interesting is if Season 7 picks up the story the next day or if there is a time jump like in the last premiere.
The finale also showed Nolan getting the call about Wyler’s escape at home while in bed with Bailey. In Season 6, Bailey and Nolan try to get pregnant, but they learn that it wouldn’t be possible without expensive and trying procedures. However, Nolan then convinces Bailey they should adopt. While it’s possible a time jump could have the majority of the adoption effort take place off-screen, that feels unlikely. Still, if Wyler wants to get revenge on the couple, interfering with that process would make for great drama.
Season 7 Will Devote Time to Characters The Rookie Slightly Ignored
Because of the shortened season, some members of the cast were ignored. At the top of the list are Angela Lopez (Alyssa Diaz) and Wesley Evers (Shawn Ashmore). The two characters are integral to The Rookie, and in Season 6 they served the story by simply being unshakable. The characters participated in the drama, but they weren’t exactly central to it. That will change in Season 7, and there may even be trouble in their particular romantic paradise to come.
Hawley told TVLine “[I]t’s easy to fall in love with your characters and round all the edges off of them…. We have so many great relationships on the show established, but if there’s no drama, there’s no drama. So, I do think we’ll start to kick the tires a bit on some of the other relationships.” Lucy and Celina Juarez (Lisseth Chavez) moved in together last season, and Tamara Collins moved out. That all happened pretty quickly, so it’s possible The Rookie Season 7 might cook up some drama between the two colleagues and/or Tamara, who is like Lucy’s little sister.
There’s also Nyla Harper and her husband James Murray (Arjay Smith), whose last major storyline involved them making plans for their children if they both died. James last appeared, briefly, in the second episode of Season 6. Hawley said in his TV Insider interview that he’d love to put Harper back undercover because “Mekia does such great work with that…we’re definitely going to go down that road in Season 7.” Of course, Harper isn’t the only undercover officer in the series.
“[I]t’s easy to fall in love with your characters and round all the edges off of them…. We have so many great relationships on the show established, but if there’s no drama, there’s no drama. So, I do think we’ll start to kick the tires a bit on some of the other relationships.”
Chenford Drama Is a Top Priority for The Rookie Season 7
The biggest shock for Chenford fans in Season 6 was Lucy and Tim’s breakup. Hawley couldn’t interview without addressing The Rookie’s most popular couple. He explained the decision was made to break them up because Bradford and Chen are two complicated characters. Bradford’s issues, which led him to therapy, needed to be addressed before the two could properly achieve “endgame” status. “I think we just need to keep challenging her and navigating her professional and personal life while he does what he’s got to do,” Hawley told TV Insider, though he added getting them “back to each other” is on the writers’ minds.
Of course, the clue to the direction The Rookie storytellers will take in Season 7 is found in the previous finale. The last scene with Lucy and Tim involves the latter thanking the former for her kindness. The breakup was handled poorly by Bradford, and Lucy was understandably angry with him for that. But Lucy does “understand ultimately why he did it even if she feels like he didn’t do it well, and to have the kindness to understand that he was going through something…was really valuable on a human level,” Hawley said to TV Line.
While Tim’s therapist, Dr. London, turned out to be a villain, it doesn’t mean Bradford’s therapy journey is over. Season 7 will likely see Tim continue to seek help for unresolved trauma and other issues. In the meantime, Lucy is going to continue to develop herself professionally and personally, perhaps with her new live-in best pal, Juarez. O’Neil’s and Bradford’s on-screen chemistry remains as potent as ever, so they won’t be apart for long, narratively speaking. However, whether they emerge from Season 7 as a couple again or not is an open question.
