Jake From 'Brooklyn Nine-Nine' Is A Budding Creep
The eighth season of the hit Fox/NBC cop comedy Brooklyn Nine-Nine, set the premiere later this year, will be the show’s last. Not because—as you’d logically assume—a ninth season of a show called Brooklyn Nine-Nine would spell out 999 which, as science has confirmed, is a flipped mark of the devil, thus heralding the end of days. No, no, the show is ending because of racism. After the death of George Floyd and the resulting BLM protests, the writers, producers, and actors felt that they don’t want to make a comedy show about the police. Some like Stephanie Beatriz even donated the money they got from playing cops to a bail fund.
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But here’s the problem with that: If B99 doesn’t want to glorify “problematic” people, then that’s their business, but that ship has sailed many seasons ago when the show revealed that its main character is a disgusting creep torpedoing straight towards a spot on the sex-offender registry.
Jake Peralta (played by Andy Samberg) is a messy, undisciplined but talented detective who often puts others above his own well-being. Too bad that that doesn’t mean jack seeing as he’d been stalking a woman for 20 years. In the season 2 episode “Boyle–Linetti Wedding,” we find out that Jake was dumped at his Bar Mitzvah by a girl called Jenny Gildenhorn and he did NOT take it well. He admits that he’d been keeping tabs on her ever since and now knows about every single person she ever dated. And remember that a big part of Jenny’s love life must have taken place well before the advent of social media when being a terrifyingly obsessed creep required things like going outside, powerful binoculars, and a camouflage poncho.
And seeing that Jake knows that Jenny was once in a lesbian relationship but her own mother does not, you do have to wonder if Jake ever used police resources to gather information on this poor girl. It gets worse, though. See, it also turns out that Jake isn’t actually attracted to adult Jenny. He’s specifically attracted to teenage Jenny.
You get glimpses of it in the “Boyle–Linetti Wedding” where he blurts out that he secretly wishes that Jenny (whom he’s planning to “accidentally bump into”) shows up to the titular wedding dressed in her high-school field hockey uniform. That’s an insanely creepy thing for a 35-year-old man to fantasize about but, somehow, that is still better than Jake’s previous fantasies.
In the season 1 episode “The Bet,” Jake’s coworker Amy loses a bet and goes on the purposefully “worst date ever” with Jake, during which he gets to control everything, including how she dresses. And he chooses to make her look, in his own weird-ass words, “like every girl at every Bat Mitzvah I ever had a crush on.” The final pieces of the puzzle fall into place later when it turns out that Jake has a thing for Amy and wonders out loud if they should go get her braces for their date (just like the ones we see Jenny wear in the season 1 episode “Charges and Specs.”) And with this, you realize that the puzzle was in the shape of a restraining order all along.
Because it’s starting to look like Jake used the bet as an excuse to dress a woman that he was physically attracted to into a living stand-in for his obsession. Not just Jenny Gildenhorn but Jenny Gildenhorn around the time of his Bar Mitzvah. It’s like being dumped stopped Jake’s emotional development so even as an adult, his dream woman continued to be a 12/13-year-old girl in braces. And that’s how sex offenders are born.
Top Image: NBCUniversal
