‘The Rookie’ Boss Reveals How Lucy & Tim Navigate Her Return to Work After Major Trauma

Over the course of her eight seasons on duty, The Rookie‘s LAPD Sgt. Lucy Chen (Melissa O’Neil) has had her share of on-the-job jeopardy. She’s been drugged, kidnapped, and buried alive in a metal barrel by a serial killer’s accomplice; suffered PTSD-triggered panic attacks; and, just recently, endured a car bomb explosion that tore apart the precinct.

“We’ve seen Lucy go through [so much], obviously there’s the barrel episode, which we alluded to back in Episode 3 of this season,” says showrunner Alexi Hawley, admitting that callback was to plant a reminder of her abduction and what she survived. “Sadly, she’s not new to surviving trauma, so, I thought it was important to keep that in mind as we did [this week’s] episode that Lucy’s been through stuff before, but nothing quite like this.”

Picking up after last week’s 28 Days Later-esque hour, the hour sees Lucy returning to work, still haunted by her lethal-force encounter with one of the feral toxin-poisoned remediation workers at the abandoned Westview psychiatric facility. Ahead of the episode, Hawley warned us that “there’s sort of an episode-long storyline at Westview that sort of comes out of nowhere [that] ultimately has a layer of violence that’s got some repercussions on Lucy.” What he didn’t prepare us for was O’Neil’s heartbreaking performance as Lucy attempted to grasp the brutal reality of her situation, the tragic loss of life, and emotional come-down following the highly adrenalized Westview crisis.

“I think [Episode] 10 is an action movie of a sort,  so, driving into 11, I think we’ve set story up in a really compelling way, and 11 is a bit of a pivotal episode that sort of follows up on a lot of stuff we set up. It also sort of launches the next chapter in the season,” the showrunner explains.

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Without spoiling what the fan-favorite character has been doing since she was relieved of her weapon, Hawley hints that a big part of the drama involves not just how Lucy is processing the trauma of killing her attacker but also “navigating how everybody deals with her and her situation, what they can and can’t talk about, that kind of thing.”

It will be particularly tricky for Lucy’s live-in beau and Watch Commander Tim Bradford (Eric Winter), who made sure that they both handled the immediate aftermath of the crisis by the book to prevent any possible Internal Affairs issues.

“Tim’s sort of assessing her return to work afterwards and whether she’s ready,” notes Hawley. “He’s walking that line of treating her the way he would any other officer under him when, obviously, she’s not just any other officer. There comes some conflict from that, about whether he’s being too protective.”

At the same time, Hawley confirms that “the super complicated” Liam Glasser (Seth Gabel) case will “start coming to a head in [Episode] 11,” in regards to “whether the prosecution will ultimately be successful or whether it’s going to get worse for Wesley [Shawn Ashmore].” Across the country, Bailey (Jenna Dewan) is in for a major shakeup during her new stint at the Pentagon in D.C. as well. “Let’s just say things take a dark turn and we get a little bit into some conspiracy world, which I think is kind of fun to do,” says Hawley. “That storyline, I’ll just spoil it, will come to a pretty big head in Episode 12.”

Disney/Mike Taing

To temper these tense developments, Hawley happily reports there will also be some levity in the hour, as comic Flula Borg’s bounty hunting oddball pops back into the Mid-Wilshire station to help with the hunt for a wanted murderer. “We see a version of Skip Tracer Randy we’ve never seen before, which is very funny,” Hawley says with a laugh. “It’s such a well-balanced but really compelling episode.”

The Rookie, Mondays,10/9c, ABC