Brooklyn Nine-Nine‘s annual Halloween Heist sees New York’s finest perform outlandish schemes for the title of “Amazing Human (formerly Detective)/Genius.” However, the 99th Precinct’s Sgt. Amy Santiago (Melissa Fumero) went to an extreme in Season 7, spying on the therapy sessions of her colleague — and beloved husband — Det. Jake Peralta.
In fact, her actions are even more unsettling than that. As she reveals in Season 7, Episode 11, “Valloweaster,” she actually hired an actor to give Jake (Andy Samberg) fake therapy sessions so that she can listen in without issue. Although she claims that she only did this to find out Jake’s plan for the Heist, justifying herself by saying that the fake therapist “actually helped him a lot,” she still violated her husband’s privacy just to win a contest.
Of course, all of the Nine-Nine employs increase their outrageous tactics to win the Halloween Heist with every passing year, something Jake points out at the start of the episode. Indeed, he and Amy took particularly intense measures in the previous season’s 16th episode, “Cinco de Mayo.” In that installment’s Heist, they used tasers against each other disguised as gifts, culminating in Amy lying about being pregnant to prevent further shocks.
In this instance, though, Amy’s manipulation was impulsive, having previously refused to stoop that low when it was suggested by her teammate, Andre Braugher‘s Capt. Raymond Holt. Furthermore, the electric shocks she gives Jake and vice versa reflect the entire squad’s use of slapstick violence during a Heist, rather than poking holes in their marriage.
In “Valloweaster,” Amy’s behavior moves away from the fanciful comedy space Brooklyn Nine-Nine often occupies and into realistically toxic territory. Unlike her pregnancy scam, her actions are premeditated. She deceived her husband for several months into believing he was getting treatment from a mental health professional, all so she can find out things he would not tell her otherwise. Jake is not even allowed to process just how gravely his wife has betrayed his trust, his objections being brushed aside by his colleagues at the episode’s end and never mentioned again.
What makes this worse is that Jake willingly receiving therapy was the culmination of enormous growth he went through in Season 6, specifically in Episode 11, “The Therapist.” Initially, he claimed he had never been to a therapist, dismissing them all as “Chianti-loving cannibals.” Yet, when held at gunpoint by a patient-murdering psychiatrist, he confessed that he went to family counseling as a child but later blamed the experience for his parents’ divorce. After recognizing how helpful it was to process his trauma, Jake planned to find his own therapist and continue healing.
In other words, Amy’s deception could have caused her husband to fall back on his trust issues and his instinct to bottle things up, a contrast to the positive force she typically is in his life. In other instances, she has given him the space to be honest about his insecurities and taught him to recognize the value in himself, making it all the more shocking for her to hurt him in this way. If this sort of behavior only occurs when a Halloween Heist is on the cards, then the only way forward may be for them both to end their involvement in the festivities.
With Brooklyn Nine-Nine‘s eighth and final season wrapped, one last Halloween Heist is likely also in the can, and that’s probably a good thing. The show has developed Jake and Amy from snarky rivals to utterly devoted partners. However, the damage they inflict on each other during these contests has come to undermine that journey. Ending this tradition is perhaps the only way to avert a serious stain on an otherwise positive fictional relationship.
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