'Brooklyn Nine-Nine' Season 7 Episode 11 Review: An unlikely underdog wins the 'Valloweaster' heist this year
Spoilers for Season 7 Episode 11: 'Valloweaster'
After watching the biggest goof-ups in the Nine-Nine squad win Halloween heists year after year, fans will be elated to know that this year's heist and Thanos' infinity gauntlet — an interesting and timely change from the usual cummerbund that the Halloween heist winner gets every year — have been won.
Almost pulling off a stunt like Gina Linetti (Chelsea Peretti) had managed to back in season 4, detective Rosa Diaz (Stephanie Beatriz) emerges as the winner this time and the gimmicks and tricks she applies are beyond marvelous. What else is unique? Well, this was the first Valloweater on the show so props to that as well!
When we meet the Nine-Nine on this episode, it's a flashback to the original Halloween heist from 2019, which was skipped as the show decided to do a six-month time jump recently, while Jake Peralta (Andy Samberg) and Amy Santiago (Melissa Fumero) were struggling to conceive.
The flashback sees Amy dressed in a giant pumpkin costume, and funnily enough, while most might think it was to hide the pregnancy, suspicious people in the squad think it is to hide her heist tools as if Amy would ever need them to win a heist.
Moving on, Jake has this brilliant idea to make the heist more about friendship and teamwork in duos, then a competition, but Rosa is having none of that. The moment she hears the word friendship, she backs off from being on Jake's team, because we all know how that works out.
Instead, however, in a haste to have her pick of the squad as her heist partner, Rosa ends up being cuffed with Scully — literally, because those are the rules. Heist partners have to be handcuffed together throughout the duration of the heist that involves finding the aforementioned infinity gauntlet.
The heist, however, doesn't take place and has to be postponed several times before the squad can finally find out who is this year's best detective slash genius in their precinct. The first time it gets postponed is because Captain Raymond Holt's (Andre Braugher) dog Cheddar swallows the infinity stones slash gems from the gauntlet.
Thus they move on from Halloween Heist to hold it sometime during Valentine's Day, thus making it a Valloween Heist. This time the gems end up inside Scully's body somehow (because that can clearly happen with him) and once again, the heist has to be postponed all the way to April — suiting the current time as we head towards Easter Sunday thus giving the Nine-Nine a chance to celebrate the titular Valloweaster.
But in all of this, what goes unnoticed by everyone is the misleading swarm of distractions that are being brought in from the queen of poker face — Rosa's end. From sneaking the gems by flooding the precinct with florists and bouquets to even sneaking up on Jake while he's at his therapist's office listening to his full session in secret to find out what he and his partner Holt's plans are, Rosa doesn't leave a stone unturned.
Jake tries to ensure a win by bringing in the Charles Boyle (Joe Lo Truglio) lookalike Bill back into the heist again, and while the poor guy's happy-go-lucky aura has shifted to a depressed, fully bearded one, there's no denying that the heist wouldn't be the same without him.
Or even Gina for that matter, who is deeply missed during this season's heist but at least we have Rosa acting up the way Gina would have and emerge winner among the "bunch of losers" as we call them.
The episode also gives us Jake and Holt's partnership after a hot minute of making things too Holt and Terry in a buddy cop movie. And while we can endlessly gush about Jake in a bunny costume, it is Fumero channeling her sassy Amy energy that you need to watch out for.
From taking a dig at Holt's "dusty skeleton" to his precious Cheddar staging a distraction — Amy leaves nothing unsaid and that just might be character development at its finest.
There's not much else to wow and gush about in the episode, with the script sticking to its signatures to give us what we love the best about each character. And the biggest gift of all comes right at the end of the episode when Rosa gets crowned the best detective slash genius, and Jake — possibly out of a smidge of jealousy — decides to ruin it for her by reminding her that those gems on her gauntlet were inside Scully's a**.
Rosa shoots Jake with one of her death glares and as she mutters "don't you dare" and we are once again left wowed by the sheer precision with which Beatriz plays a character so different from her in real life. Beatriz has addressed the topic saying "it's called acting" but to us, it's still pure genius and nothing short of that.
'Brooklyn Nine-Nine' Season 7 airs on Thursdays at 8.30 pm only on NBC.
