The Reagans’ passion for justice is one of their best qualities, but everyone better watch out when they butt heads with each other.
Many viewers were looking forward to Joe’s return on Blue Bloods Season 12 Episode 12, and it didn’t disappoint.
Joe and Jamie spent most of the hour fighting, but they made up over poker in the end. Hopefully, Joe will feel more comfortable with the Reagans next time he shows up.
One of Jamie’s most endearing qualities is his commitment to doing things the right way. He’s very much like Frank, which often pisses off people who want to get away with something in the name of the greater good.
That’s what fueled his conflict with Joe throughout the hour. I was glad they made up by the end, but I wish that Jamie and Joe had had the opportunity to sit down and talk this through after everything was said and done.
Joe: Jamie, what are you doing? THis is my first case with the task force and you’re blowing it out of the water.
Jamie: We don’t threaten people’s lives to get information out of them.
Joe: We? What we? I’m not part of you!
Instead, they worked together to rescue the kidnapped mother and daughter, and then the whole conflict just evaporated into thin air.
Sure, Jamie and Joe played poker together as an unspoken act of forgiveness. I’m all for more Reagan family time, but I thought clearing the air would have been helpful.
Otherwise, this issue will rear its ugly head some other time. Joe doesn’t have the same mentality. As Jamie pointed out, he cares more about making collars than ensuring things are done right and protecting the lives of everyone involved.
That hasn’t changed just because he and Jamie defied orders together and successfully rescued two hostages.
That hostage rescue scene was a bit odd, too. I wasn’t clear why Joe’s supervisor didn’t want them going in, and it seems strange the kidnappers left the hostages to their own devices and didn’t even bother to tie up the little girl.
Also, what happened after Jamie shot at one of the kidnappers? The next scene took place outside with the hostages relieved to be safe and Jamie nodding at Joe’s supervisor.
Despite these hiccups, the Jamie/Joe story was solid entertainment.
Jamie wasn’t the only one butting heads with a family member, either, as Eddie took Erin’s rejection of a rape case personally.
Eddie was so invested in this case that I thought she might threaten to abandon ship and join Law & Order: SVU if Erin didn’t get with the program. Bringing the survivor in to tell her story was a Benson-like move that both pissed Erin off and lighted a fire under her butt to get this case solved that Eddie needed.
Erin was in a tough position. Even though she empathized with Melanie, she needed enough evidence to make the charges stick, which came off as uncaring. I wish she hadn’t been so damn pompous about it when she told Eddie that.
If Erin had been able to keep calm and explain to Eddie what they needed to do to make charges stick, they could have worked together without all of this extra drama.
Erin wasn’t even the one who made the initial decision not to press charges, but she got invested in proving it was the right call. Her bruised ego got in the way, and it almost happened again after Eddie invited Melanie to her office.
That’s my whole problem with Erin as a character. She tends to get self-righteous when she disagrees with her cop family about anything, which sometimes interferes with justice.
Erin’s comment that Erin accepts being challenged by her brothers but not her sister-in-law was interesting.
I’m not sure that’s true. Erin blows up at Danny and Jamie regularly, and there have been plenty of tense Reagan family dinners when she hasn’t done what they wanted.
But it did feel different with Eddie as if both of them were taking their fight personally.
Elsewhere, what exactly did Archbishop Kearns expect to happen after he went to Frank with his non-news about the murderer who confessed to him?
Kearns didn’t want to break the confessional seal, but he did want Frank to investigate. It wasn’t likely that Danny or anyone else would find the real murderer without looking into who visited the confessional that day.
All the physical evidence pointed to Lamar. It’s not like he was arrested because the cops had a confession and nothing else. And it wasn’t likely that they were going to find the real murderer without involving the church at all.
Kearns should have been prepared for the possibility that the cops would find a way to look into who visited the church without forcing him to violate the sanctity of the confessional seal. He may be a man of faith, but believing that they could find the murderer some other way was too big a leap.
And in the end, what Danny and Bae did allowed the cops to catch the real killer without Kearns breaking his word or making people feel they couldn’t trust him to keep their secrets private.
That’s a win-win situation, and Kearns’ anger at Frank over it seemed over the top.
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Jack Ori is a senior staff writer for TV Fanatic. His debut young adult novel, Reinventing Hannah, is available on Amazon. Follow him on Twitter.
