The good news: The officers of The Rookie all survived the finale (and given the position Eric Winter‘s Tim is in at one point, a definite plus). The bad news: There’s a whole lot of trouble coming their way.
Some of The Rookie: Feds agents tag along to help Nolan (Nathan Fillion) and Harper (Mekia Cox) rescue Blair (Danielle Campbell), whom Monica (Bridget Regan) had kidnapped after using her, and the therapist tells them everything they need to know. Meanwhile, Monica follows through with her end of the deal after Oscar (Matthew Glave) gets her in the information she needs on the man who wanted her dead, and he’s free at the end—but he enlists Jason (Steve Kazee), Bailey’s (Jenna Dewan) ex-husband, for help and gets him out, too.
How early on did you know that you wanted to end the season with not only Monica and Oscar working together, but the plan including him breaking out of prison and enlisting Jason to help and them bringing him along?
Alexi Hawley: I knew about the Monica and Oscar of it all. I think that Jason was sort of a later discovery of, oh, that would be good. You go down different roads and maybe they’re not working. And then you’re like, oh, what would be good? You know who else is in prison? At this point now six seasons in, we do have a history of villains, some of them who’ve been great. Elijah is still out there. He’s in prison, too. Then you start to go, well, those people might be in the same prison, and if they are, it’s not a stretch to think that they could interact. That was an exciting idea.
I think I knew coming into the season that we needed to keep the drama in their relationship. It’s easy to fall in love with your characters this deep into a show and sort of round the edges off of them, off of their relationships and even on a professional level in terms of, there’s still a hierarchy. If you forget about that, you just lose the stakes and you lose the drama. It really felt like, how do we organically put obstacles in everybody’s way?
For Tim and Lucy, to bring something from Tim’s past back that basically turns his whole life upside down because of a realization that he’s sort of been hiding or running away from some of the mistakes that he made in his past and because of that is basically punishing himself and sadly punishing her at the same time, once it’s all over was a really heartbreaking thing. I always feel like we’re bad at our jobs if we don’t do the most dramatic thing we can do. So it felt like that and then obviously we’ve been, as a show, championing therapy, especially for police officers since Season 1, and I think it’s an incredibly important thing. Obviously we were also going down a road with Blair, where I knew going in that she was going to be compromised. It all felt like it was all just coming together in a good way.
I do think that Tim is—as much as he plays the drill sergeant and he has a sense of honor and I do think that he means it, and he was brought up in that sort of culture, whether it was sports or the military or now the police—not unaware of his persona, but I do think that him going to therapy and actually having to confront some stuff was very valuable to him. I think that he’ll be conscious of that going forward, that he’s still got work to do.
What did you want to do with Lucy while they’re apart? Then you start bringing them back together a bit in these last two episodes, with moments in the elevator.
Yeah, we were very elevator-centric with them this season—and parking lot. What was the most important thing to me was not for Lucy to ever feel like the victim, not for her to ever feel like she didn’t have agency in the breakup or in the relationship or in the aftermath, that her anger at him was completely real and earned and not to be dismissed in the same way that—she can’t just say, okay, you’ve done a little work and we’re back together. I think he broke something that’s going to need a little longer to fix. And so 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. And then also just, how do they find their way back to each other?
What can you say about your plans for them in Season 7, to offer fans some hope or at least not more heartbreak?
I can’t say a lot yet. The room’s only been going for a week and a half, but I do think that we need to find the adventure. To me, the joy of the show is that even when there are stakes, even when there are bad things that happen, the show is always a ride and always entertaining.
