‘Brooklyn Nine-Nine’ Finale: A Power Outage Plunges the Squad Into Chaos (RECAP)

Brooklyn Nine-Nine - Season 7
Spoiler Alert
John P. Fleenor/NBC

[WARNING: The following contains MAJOR spoilers for Brooklyn Nine-Nine Season 7 Episode 13, “Blackout.”]

It was just another night at the precinct — until suddenly, all was plunged into darkness. When the power goes out in Brooklyn, the Nine-Nine has to spring into action. But given that Amy (Melissa Fumero)’s nine months pregnant, she really shouldn’t be “springing” anywhere… and it soon becomes apparent that she’ll need to get to a hospital ASAP, because the Peraltiago baby is on the way!

But of course, Jake’s (Andy Samberg) across town, and he has to take drastic measures if he wants to have any hope of being there for the birth of his son. Coolcoolcoolcoolcoolcoolcool.

Dancing Through Distress

The squad needs to initiate blackout protocol, but there’s just one issue with that: the two people who have the power to give that order are trapped in an elevator. To free Terry (Terry Crews) and Holt (Andre Braugher), the group has to call the Fire Department. Being stuck in an elevator is a nightmare of Holt’s, so Terry teaches him dance moves to distract him from the situation.

Amy and Rosa (Stephanie Beatriz) stay behind at the precinct, while Jake and Boyle (Joe Lo Truglio) head to the source of the outage, where someone lost control of their car and hit the transformer. They follow a trail of blood to find the drunk driver. Meanwhile, back at the precinct, Amy’s water breaks, and Rosa urges her to go to the hospital. “I don’t want a birth happening around me,” the leather-clad detective says. “It’s too gross.” Although she initially protests, it becomes clear that yes, Amy does need to get to a hospital.

Setback After Setback

Boyle’s ready to fulfill “his purpose in life” — to get Jake back to the precinct so he can see the birth of his child. Except they (and “they” now includes the drunk driver and an elderly lady named Dottie) get stuck in a traffic jam. They decide to walk, but they hear a cry for help from an apartment, and they find a woman with her neighbor, who got a concussion from falling down the stairs. As if that wouldn’t slow them down enough, they hear the sound of gunshots; Dottie shot the drunk driver in the leg because “made a sudden motion” (he sneezed).

All hope seems lost, but they end up taking a bar pedal car… and that gets delayed, because one of the women already there for her bachelorette party lost a shoe. While they wait for her to find it, the drunk driver lets it slip that he was two years sober: he wasn’t drunk, which means he had an ulterior motive for causing the blackout. That motive? His group was plotting to rob all the banks on Union Street.

The power comes back on, so Holt and Terry are saved, and Amy plans to head to the hospital. Across the city, Jake and Boyle arrest the would-be robbers and get them on the pedal car. Jake calls his wife, but she has bad news — she can’t make it to the hospital. She’ll be having their baby at the precinct. Jake’s too far away to make it there by pedal car, but not by horse, so Boyle calls in his old enemy Lt. Peanutbutter to help. So Jake makes it there, just barely, on horseback.

Happy Ending

Jake and Amy do end up at the hospital eventually, where they hold their son and talk about the whole parenting thing. “Are we going to be okay at this?” Jake wonders aloud, and Amy reminds him that they’ve already talked about how everyone balances work and kids. Jake responds by saying everyone’s not a cop (true), but there’s a benefit to their profession: on the day their son, Mac (short for McClane, after John McClane) came into the world, his dad saved people and foiled a robbery while his mom kept things running at the precinct.

Eventually the rest of the squad shows up, and Terry lets Jake know about how he and Holt distracted Amy while she was in labor (they both did the dance routine Terry taught his captain when they were in the elevator). Jake pretends not to care, but when Rosa tells him she got it on video, he tells his wife to “hold this baby” and snatches the phone from his friend. So sure, Jake’s a dad now — but some things will never change.

Brooklyn Nine-Nine, Season 8, 2021, NBC