Frank and Jamie both faced tough choices.
Father and son are so alike that they each struggled with whether or not to go by the book or by their gut on Blue Bloods Season 12 Episode 18.
Frank felt the weight of his choice afterward, while Jamie seemed to bounce back more quickly. Could this be foreshadowing of things to come?
Throughout the past several episodes, there has been a ton of focus on Frank, Jamie, and the ways they are alike. Frank has even suggested that Jamie would be the ideal candidate to take his place in the commissioner’s office if he were ever to retire.
Many fans think that would be a fitting end to the series should it not be renewed for a thirteenth season, and Blue Bloods continues to drop hints that may be the eventual ending.
The ending of this story provided one more potential clue to where we’re headed, with Frank wondering aloud whether he made the right choice about Captain Phillips and admitting that it’s getting harder to live with the difficult decisions he has to make daily.
Those sound like the words of a man ready to retire, yet Blue Bloods is committed to keeping Frank in the PC chair as long as the series continues, and while Blue Bloods has not yet officially been renewed, the chances are high that it will be.
So it would make little sense to plan for Frank’s retirement at the end of Season 12. But at some future point, the series WILL end, either through cancellation or (more likely) through Tom Selleck or other actors not wanting to do it anymore.
When that happens, Jamie will probably take over as PC to end the series, and it seems like the writers are planting seeds for that to happen now.
Sid: I could talk to him.
Frank: And say what?
Sid: Tell him to keep his trap shut so you can make a decision yourself. Only I wouldn’t say it like that. More like, give you the courtesy.
Frank: A Marine who has risked his life for this country might not appreciate being asked to keep his trap shut –
Garrett: Give you the courtesy.
Frank: Give me the courtesy so that I can save face.
I’m not sure that Frank did make the right choice in this instance.
Garrett was insistent that Phillips would become a liability when his Marine training put him at odds with what was expected of police officers, and he flamed out.
Nobody else thought that, and there was no evidence that it was likely to go down that way.
Besides, presumably, Phillips wouldn’t be thrown out into the field with zero training because he was a former Marine who had saved two people’s lives.
He’d be given the same training exercises as everyone else, allowing Frank to observe and see if Phillips was cop material. So what was the big deal here?
Being a Marine doesn’t necessarily mean being a hothead who sees everyone as the enemy. Surely there was some way to evaluate Phillips’ fitness for duty rather than unequivocally rejecting him because he was a Marine.
While Jamie offered an innovative solution for Nichols’ conflict with the other cop, I thought his initial instinct to discipline her was correct.
Jamie, great leaders don’t lead by the words on a page. Leaders lead by their hearts.
Henry
Nichols’ history as an abuse survivor might have explained her desire to lash out at the other cop. But still. She took a swing at him because she was angry about how her daughter was being treated on the hockey team.
It wasn’t professional behavior, and Jamie was right that she disgraced the uniform by engaging in it.
Nobody but Jamie saw this altercation, but what if next time she gets into it in front of a civilian or worse, if she attacks a suspect or a witness?
If her unhealed trauma partially drives her behavior, then she will go off on someone else, and the department could pay a steep price for Jamie’s lenient treatment of the woman now.
A compassionate response would be similar to on Blue Bloods Season 11 Episode 9 when Frank insisted Sid attend counseling before returning to work at 1PP.
A cop who gets physically violent without provocation is a cop that doesn’t need to be on the streets, at least not until she gets her anger under better control.
That’s the sort of thing Garett should be saying instead of worrying about unlikely scenarios in which Captain Phillips only lasts three days in the NYPD,
Could Erin’s old classmate be any more obnoxious?
As a public defender, I protect the people who your office runs over with the freight train of justice.
Michael
His sole purpose seemed to be to gloat that Erin had made a mistake. He claimed it was about justice, but it didn’t seem that way.
It felt like he had a personal problem with her and wanted to make her feel small.
Erin is generally self-righteous, sometimes to the point of insufferability, and this guy was even worse!
I’m not sure what she learned during the course of her investigation, either.
She and Anthony came up with a new suspect, and it turned out he had no alibi and might have been the real murderer.
But the last we saw of him was him claiming that Williams had done something WORSE than kill his pregnant girlfriend. What was that all about?
This story felt like it had no resolution. The cops got Bell for the murder, or at least I think they did, but discovered a new mystery in the process that wasn’t anywhere near solved.
Finally, the circumstances of Jimmy’s kidnapping didn’t match the outcome of the investigation.
After Jimmy’s mother let him walk to school alone, he screamed, then vanished. Yet things were super chill when the cops caught up with him and his bio-dad.
The scream was obviously a red herring, but it didn’t make sense. Jimmy wasn’t scared of his bio-dad, and the scene looked like a random abduction by a stranger.
Tommy’s arrest was the one time I wished the cops could look away during a major crime.
The guy just wanted to spend a little time with his son. He expected to go back to jail and even welcomed it, suggesting he got caught on purpose because he didn’t feel he could handle life on the outside.
Despite the irrelevant-seeming scream at the beginning of the story, the kid wasn’t hurt and was heartbroken to be away from his dad. And Tommy planned to bring Jimmy back home.
This was one guy who should have been diverted to a mental health program. He wasn’t dangerous; he was just a guy who took the wrong route toward spending time with his son.
Your turn, Blue Bloods fanatics. Hit the big, blue SHOW COMMENTS button and let us know what you thought. You can always watch Blue Bloods online right here on TV Fanatic if you missed the episode.
Blue Bloods airs on CBS on Fridays at 10 PM EST / PST.
Jack Ori is a senior staff writer for TV Fanatic. His debut young adult novel, Reinventing Hannah, is available on Amazon. Follow him on Twitter.