Tonight on ABC their new series The Rookie airs with an all-new Tuesday, April 9, 2019, season 1 episode 19 called, “The Checklist,” and we have your The Rookie recap below. On tonight’s The Rookie episode as per the ABC synopsis, “Sergeant Gray informs the rookies that they must track down a specific set of crimes in a 48-hour period in order to qualify for their final exam. Meanwhile, Officer Nolan and Officer Bishop answer a silent alarm call at will.i.am’s house.”
Make sure to bookmark this spot and come back from 10 PM – 11 PM ET for our The Rookie recap. While you wait for our recap check out all our The Rookie news, spoilers, recaps & more, right here!
Tonight’s The Rookie recap begins now – Refresh Page often to get the most current updates!
Sergeant Gray made an announcement at roll call. He said that in the wake of the scandal involving former Detective Jenkins that the department was wanting to cover themselves. Gray informed his officers that brass is now tightening the rules for the field training program and what that means for the current group of rookies is that they have to complete a checklist. There were several crimes that were deemed crucial and the rookies all had to act as primary on each crime listed, but the rookies have to complete this list before they sit down for the sixth-month exam and that in two days. The training officer had gotten upset when they heard about this checklist because it changes how they teach and forcing the rookies to do everything in two days was bound to have a negative effect on how they respond.
The officers were going to be putting this checklist before their actual jobs. They were supposed to be serving the community and they couldn’t do with new guidelines hanging over their heads, but Gray said his hands were tied and so it was in everyone’s best interest to adjust to this whole checklist business. There were three crimes that Officer West needed to complete and seven for Officer Chen. Officer Nolan, however, was in the clear. His Training Officer took the approach of teaching him by giving him first-hand experience. Nolan had the opportunity to act as primary on most of their cases and now he doesn’t have to worry about any list. He does, on the other hand, have to worry about his partner, Officer Bishop. Bishop lied on an official document and she could be fired for that.
Nolan didn’t want to lose her and so he tried to comfort her, but when all else failed, he suggested talking to brass himself and vouching for her because he still wanted to do something. Only his word doesn’t matter. He was a rookie and was lowest on the totem pole. There was nothing he said that would have been genuinely considered by their bosses and so everyone told him to leave it. Even Bishop didn’t want him interfering. She told him that rookies didn’t matter and he heard the same again from Detective Wolfe. Wolfe liked Bishop and he talked her up with the bosses because she saved his life. Wolfe felt indebted to her and its why he also asked that Bishop and her rookie, Nolan be assigned to his case. Nolan would have been put on desk duty until Bishop’s situation resolved itself and instead he got to assist with the arrest of a wanted criminal.
Greg Lawson went on the run after he embezzled money from his family company and it was believed that he would come back for his father’s funeral. The funeral had been announced in the papers and so all Nolan and Bishop had to do was wait. They waited for someone matching Lawson’s description and just they were about to move in they all received a nasty surprise when the elderly man in the coffin woke up and attacked his son. It seems the funeral was all a ruse. The family company was in debt and needed money. They thought luring Lawson back home would allow them to corner him and get some of that money back, but as it turns out Lawson went through it all and so the ruse had been for nothing. His father had injured himself falling out of the coffin for nothing and, after his brother attacked Lawson, the poor man had to be arrested as well.
Nolan was getting good cases despite having finished his checklist, but his fellow rookies weren’t half as lucky. West decided to rebel against form his rule following ways and it made him dangerous in the field. He was now taking on too many risks in order to complete his checklist and his TO had no idea what to do with him. Meanwhile, Chen was desperately trying to complete her list and couldn’t find a single one. She relied on her TO to know all the right people she could arrest and he didn’t. Not anymore anyway. He took her to arrest a junkie he knew that always carries and the man himself had to apologize because he got clean. He was a month sober and had gotten a chip and everything. And so Chen could have acknowledged the man’s achievements and she chose to focus on how far behind she was with this list.
The TOs took their rookies to lunch and Nolan kept telling his friends that even if this faced a setback that it would all work out in the end, but they weren’t buying and they ran the moment they heard about a crime close to their location. The rookies raced each other to be first on the scene and this time West won. He got to the victim first and that’s when he saw that it was Nolan’s old friend Ben lying injured on the ground. Ben’s new Ferrari had been stolen and the man that took it had beaten severely for the keys. Ben had needed to go to the hospital afterward and that’s when Nolan was informed about what happened to his friend. He went to see Ben at the hospital and seeing how injured he was had angered, Nolan. He wanted to help catch the thief and he basically demanded to Wolfe that he be allowed to join.
Wolfe has worked with Nolan several times in the past and he knew that Nolan could be counted on with this latest case. The thief that they were looking for was part of a much larger operation. These guys were stealing all the fancy cars and reselling them when they couldn’t be used for parts but catching the man that beat up Ben wasn’t the top priority. They eventually found the guy and that’s when Nolan was informed that they wanted to flip him. They were going to let this man go as long as he passed on credible information on his crew and so he quickly coughed up names as well as locations. Wolfe and Nolan had needed a backup with arresting everyone and Officers Lopez and West had heard the call. West hadn’t been taking advice from his TO at that point and so he ignored her when he tried to take a shortcut to the scene and nearly a mother with her baby.
It was the almost killing someone that got through to him and made him realize he shouldn’t be putting this checklist over everything else, but he wasn’t the only one that came to hate the checklist. Chen soon felt the same when she came close to arrest a woman in dire need just to finish her list. She saw it that it didn’t always take into account what happened on the street and so she told her TO she didn’t want the checklist to compromise her principles. Officer Bradford respected her more for that and he didn’t let her shift ended until they completed the damn checklist. He had his contacts in dispatch hook him up and they came across a woman that checked all the boxes. She was inebriated in public, crashed her car under the influence, tried to run although she ran into a fence, and what she did to poor Bradford could be considered assault against a police officer.
This one woman was the epitome of crime and it allowed Chen to finish the checklist within the appropriate time. Her friends had been glad to hear it and they all said that no matter what happens that they were all going to be cops together, except that just worried Nolan about Bishop. Bishop had a meeting with Chief Williams and Internal Affairs and it hadn’t been going well. She knew that she was going to be fired and so when she saw Nolan she tried to talk him out of bursting into the office. But he wouldn’t take “no” for an answer. He went in there and he gave a great speech about how amazing Bishop was. He even admitted that he started probation with a deficit and that Bishop helped him overcome that by telling him to use his life experiences in the field. Nolan did everything he could for Bishop and it put him in the limelight with the Chief.
The Chief warned him that now he was going to throw everything at him during the oral exam in two weeks and still Nolan refused to regret what he did. He just said that Bishop had prepared him enough that he was going to pass that exam and so he hoped that his speech helped change things for his partner, but it wasn’t that great of a speech compared to what Bishop did. She was going to be fired and the only way to avoid it was if she took the deal that IA was offering her. They wanted someone inside her squad to be their eyes and ears and they offered that position to Bishop. She would have to rat on her friends and so she didn’t want to take the opportunity only it was that or get fired.
THE END!