SPOILER ALERT: The story includes details about the Season 8 finale of ABC‘s The Rookie.
The Season 8 finale of The Rookie ended with Tim (Eric Winter) and Lucy’s (Melissa O’Neil) lives in danger as they were abducted right after he proposed and she said yes. The finale also found Grey (Richard T. Jones) at crossroads. He spent the season working for Garza’s task force, with Tim taking over his post as Watch Commander at LAPD’s Mid-Wilshire Station.
But when Tim said to him earlier in the finale, “The task force’s ending, I assume you’d want your job back,” Grey was noncommittal.
“Closing up the task force is gonna take months,” Grey said. “After that, I’m not sure what my next move is. Unless you’re asking me to step in while you’re planning the wedding. In that case, I’m happy to help out.”
Deadline asked The Rookie creator, executive producer and showrunner Alexi Hawley about the task force being disbanded and what Grey will do next.
“The task force is all but over. It was based around Monica (Bridget Regan), it was sort of our Blacklist homage. Now that she’s gone, the task force has no center,” he said. “I do think part of early writers room for Season 9 is going to be figuring out exactly what Grey’s next chapter is.”
‘The Rookie’ (L-R): Bridget Regan, Richard T. Jones
Disney/Mike Taing
Grey’s old job will be temporarily vacant, not for the reasons he suggested, Tim and Lucy’s pending nuptials, but because the couple were taken. Would Grey go back?
“I am always looking for a fresh way, I don’t think going backwards is necessarily the way to go, but I also want it to be satisfying and dramatic,” Hawley said. “So one of the first things we got to figure out is what are we going to do with him that feels like growth.”
But is original Rookie cast member Jones or another series regular leaving ahead of Season 9?
“No, we’re status quo. We like everybody, we’re making it work,” Hawley said. “Richard is a hugely important piece of the puzzle of our show. Again, without treading water, what are we going to do? As long as we treat it as an opportunity, I think we’ll figure out something fun to do, for sure.”
Deadline spoke with Hawley last month about the fact that The Rookie is yet to kill off a main character — something long-running dramas do for both story and financial reasons. Would Hawley do it?
“I don’t think so,” he said. “You never say never. At the end of the day, one of the things that I’ve always tried to lean into in the show is that you have to do the most dramatic thing possible when you can, even if it’s hard on the audience, like breaking Chenford up a few seasons ago, people were not fans of that. But I felt like it was important to do that for the story. No, there’s no plan to do anything crazy right now, but never say never.”
For more on Chenford’s [Lucy Chen & Tim Bradford] big proposal and shocking abduction, read Deadline’s postmortem interview with Hawley, in which he dissects the Season 8 finale and previews Season 9, which is in very early stages. You can read Hawley’s update on The Rookie: North spinoff here.
