Valloweaster is the eleventh episode of Brooklyn Nine-Nine's seventh season.
It's heist time, once again, at the Nine-Nine. This time, the squad is splitting into teams with the added twist that teammates have to remain handcuffed together for the duration, Jake with Holt, Amy with Charles, and Rosa with Scully. Terry, meanwhile, declares he's retired and Hitchcock is ignored. As usual, Hilarity Ensues.
However, things go awry and the heist, which began in Halloween, 2019, is still ongoing in Easter, 2020!
This episode provides examples of the following:
- Answer Cut: The episode opens on two officers walking in on chaos. One says "This is still going on?" and the other asks "What is?" Cut to a Title Card that reads "Six Months Earlier", then cut to Jake introducing the Halloween heist.
- Call-Back:
- Chained Heat: The twist to this year's heist is that diametrically opposed teammates have to remain handcuffed.
- Jake (sloppy) and Holt (fastidious)
- Amy (self-confident) and Charles (walking doormat)
- Rosa (tough and competent) and Scully (anything but)
- Comedic Sociopathy: As per usual with a Heist episode; Holt installed a spy camera in Jake and Amy's bedroom, Rosa overfeeds and body shames Cheddar to serve her plans, Amy sets up fake therapy sessions for Jake that she then spies on (as does Rosa), Holt takes Rosa taking the handle off the filing cabinet as a sign that he could have cut off Jake's hand to make things easier (Jake understandably declares the handcuffs to be a one-and-done after hearing this), and Rosa ends the episode smiling evilly as her friends start bickering over their heist record.
- Continuity Nod:
- Holt starts the heist still being a uniformed officer, only being Captain again after he's re-promoted in the gap between Valentine's Day and Easter.
- When Rosa mentions her dog Arlo, Jake has no idea who she's talking about; in the episode where Rosa got the dog, Jake and Holt were both quarantined at Holt's house.
- Easter Episode: Some awkwardness involving the crew's annual Halloween heist leads to the event being held in Easter, leading to such events such as a master plan involving an army of Easter Bunnies.
- Evil Laugh: Rosa lets out a witch-like cackle as she jumps from the roof.
- Food and Animal Attraction: Rosa got Cheddar to swallow the gems first by secretly feeding him ham so Holt will put him on a diet, then rubbing ham on the gems for good measure. She also gets Scully to swallow the gems the exact same way. And to top it off, she secretly put ham in Terry's smoothies.
- Gambit Pileup: Each team piles on gambit after gambit until it's impossible to tell who's trying to outwit who. Rosa comes out on top, technically winning three times.
- Goofy Suit: By the end of the heist, everyone is dressed in Easter Bunny costumes.
- Hypocrite: In Heist 5 when Amy suspected the proposal might be a ruse she threatened to dump Jake, and yet in this episode she not only arranged for him to seek treatment from a therapist who was actually an an actress she was paying to get heist intel, but when Jake finds out and is upset she just hand waves it
- Inanimate Competitor: After Scully is taken out of the heist for medical reasons, Rosa's new partner is a file cabinet, which is felt to be just as useful. Just as she planned it.
- Insane Troll Logic: When Terry mocks the rest of the squad for competing over a bunch of stones that were in a dog's butt, Jake argues that a dog's butt is cleaner than a human mouth, reasoning that dog mouths are cleaner than human mouths, and dog mouths lick dog butts. Holt, caught up in heist mania, actually agrees with Jake.
- Lampshade Hanging:
- Jake notes that each heist is meaner and more vindictive than the last, drawing attention to the escalating nature of each heist episode.
- Holt questions why Bill keeps returning for heists.
- The episode is unsubtle about hiding Melissa Fumero's pregnancy by pointing out the strange outfits Amy wears and blatantly hiding her abdomen behind set dressing.
- Leaning on the Fourth Wall: The characters make some metatextual commentary on the nature of Brooklyn Nine-Nine's heist episodes and their gags.Rosa: Anyway, I knew Cheddar would be making an appearance.
Everyone: [various noises of agreement]
Holt: Everyone loves to see Cheddar. - The Load: Scully, predictably, is almost totally useless as a partner. The only thing he does that actually helps Rosa is to swallow the Gems (which was an accident on his part that she had to orchestrate). It says a lot about Scully's versatility that Rosa makes more progress when handcuffed to a filing cabinet than with him.
- Loophole Abuse: According to the rules this year, the handcuffed pair must remain together for the entirety of the heist and will be disqualified if they open the handcuffs. Rosa gets away with having Terry remove the handle of a filing cabinet that's connected to, as she isn't violating the rules as the cuffs remain closed.
- Mundane Made Awesome: Cheddar's introduction, done in slow-motion and repeated for extra emphasis, set to "I Wanna Be Your Dog" by The Stooges.
- Noodle Incident: Whatever happened to Bill between heists. He starts to explain, but Jake cuts him off because he considered it irrelevant.
- Not So Above It All: Although he keeps saying he's out, Terry eventually decides that he wants to participate.
- No, You: When Jake is arguing with Holt about the Easter Bunny outfits.Jake: How is this any different than my bunny suit idea?
Holt: Oh, it's very different. I gave the bunnies glasses and little blue vests.
Jake: The vests add nothing.
Holt: The vests add gravitas.
Jake: Your butt adds gravitas! - Oh, Crap!: Subverted; Rosa fakes dismay when Scully swallows the Gems, but it's only to hide that everything is going exactly as she planned.
- Overly Long Gag: Cheddar's introduction is the same sequence played over and over again.
- Perverse Sexual Lust: In the flashback to his therapy session, Jake tells his therapist he's attracted to Jane Jetson and Betty Rubble.
- Portmanteau Title: A combination of Valentine's Day, Halloween and Easter, reflecting the three holidays across which the heist takes place.
- Rivals Team Up: Amy tells Charles she attempted to invoke this by getting Jake to team up with Holt for the heist — first with Lincoln, next with X-Men: Days of Future Past, and tries to exploit this by hoping Jake and Holt will implode.
- The Scream: Rosa screams from inside the men's room as Scully uses the facilities (first apologizing for the sounds that will come out of him).
- Shoddy Knockoff: Since a real Infinity Gauntlet movie prop was too expensive, Jake instead got a Russian knockoff, the Infinitude Gobbler, as seen in the movie The Avengaboys.
- Shout-Out:
- The knock-off Avengers film mentioned in this episode is a shout-out to the Vengaboys, a Eurodance group.
- The stones on the "Infinitude Gobbler" are referred to as the "Infinitude Gems", a reference to the original name in the comics for what the Marvel Cinematic Universe calls the Infinity Stones.
- According to Charles, the "'92 dream team" were Aladdin and Abu.
- Suicidal "Gotcha!": The person in the Easter Bunny outfit who takes the gems jumps off the top of the roof. When the others look down, they see Rosa standing next to a landing mat with her name written in fire.
- Time-Passage Beard: Bill goes from being clean-shaven, to scruffy, to fully bearded (and completely beaten down) across the episode's three time periods.
- What the Hell, Hero?: Jake briefly gives Amy and Rosa grief for spying on his therapy sessions, and is even more shocked to hear that the therapist was a fake.
- Whole Episode Flashback: The episode begins with two uniformed officers seeing that the heist is still going on even though it's April. The rest of the episode explains why.
