‘The Rookie’ Recap: Season 5, Episode 5 “The Fugitive”

ABC/Raymond Liu

In this week’s episode of The Rookie, some personal matters for the characters pop up while John and Celina hunt down a fugitive.

Captain Lucy

Before their shift, Tim and Grey go to a breakfast meeting with another person. Tim doesn’t eat much with the diet he’s doing with Ashley, but Grey does eat. This comes back to bite him when he collapses in front of Lucy at the hospital due to food poisoning. He’s put in the other bed in Tim’s room. He’s fine by the end of the day but spends most of the day in the hospital bed, rolling in pain.

With Grey sick and Tim hurt, the next person in charge goes by seniority which is Smitty. They send Lucy to go keep an eye on things and keep him reigned in. She gets to the station to find Smitty sending people home early despite the short staffing. She tells him off and tries to keep things in order only to find most of the officers turning in their war bags to leave early. They don’t respond the first time Lucy tells them they can’t just leave, but she goes to Nyla who pushes her to stand her ground. Lucy firmly asks them to help out with both sergeants being out and everyone being spread thin with the hospital lockdown. They respond well to that and Smitty comes up and asks if she’s in charge now. When she says that she is, Smitty happily accepts it.

When Grey comes back, Lucy is fighting to stay awake at the desk. He tells her that he spoke with some people and heard she did a great job.

The Breaking and Break-Up of Tim Bradford

While chasing a suspect, Tim manages to hurt his back. After being pushed by Lucy and in extreme pain, he caves and gets it checked out. Calling back to the pilot episode, on Lucy’s first day on the job, Tim got shot and when they did the surgery, they had to leave a bullet fragment in. Tim managed to shift it and now it’s pressing against his spine. It requires a potentially risky surgery which the doctor reveals at Lucy’s request to her, Ashley, and Tim. Tim decides to go forward with the surgery despite the risk.

Ashley pushes Tim to consider retiring after the surgery and pulling disability. As Ashley tries to convince Tim, Grey throws in his semi-joking encouragements about the pay benefits. She ends up leaving to get food and Tim decides to go for a walk before the surgery, since he’ll be laid up after it. In the hallway, he runs into Nolan’s murder suspect and tries to stop him. The suspect pushes him into a wall which shifts the bullet and causes him to be temporarily paralyzed. The doctor, Ashley, and Grey all rush over to him. The doctor tells him they have to operate immediately and Tim asks Ashley to call his sister. After she walks away, Tim tells Grey to not tell Lucy about this because she has too much on her plate already.

Later, Tim walks up to Ashley by his bedside. She tells him that the surgery went perfectly and he’ll be okay before admitting to him that she watched her dad do this job and it was hard on her and her mom growing up and she can’t do that again. She ends up breaking up with him and leaving.

Grey informs Lucy of what happened when he’s back at the station and she rushes over to the hospital. She’s upset that she wasn’t in the loop until Tim admits that he told people to not tell her because he didn’t want to worry her. After poking fun at him for being worried about her while he was hurt, she asks about Ashley not being there. Tim lies and says that he sent her home because she was tired. With that information, Lucy, despite being dead on her feet from being in charge with both sergeants out, sits in the chair at his bedside and tells him that she’s going to keep him company.

There’s a Fugitive Loose in the Hospital

After responding to a call related to someone being hurt, John and Celina arrive on the scene where they meet Bailey. The suspect gets taken by Bailey to the hospital. In the ambulance, Bailey realizes on top of the wounds they know about, the patient has a gunshot wound. She calls it in and at the hospital, she sets out to get help from inside while another paramedic stays with the patient. The patient, who they thought was asleep, grabs a fire extinguisher off the wall and hits the paramedic in the face a few times and takes off.

The hospital is notified and put on lockdown. After that, John, Celina, and Lucy work on sweeping the place for him. They also have learned that he murdered a woman that morning and that’s why he’s on the run. The search isn’t successful by the time they run into Bailey again, who informs them that the paramedic broke two bones in his face and will be getting surgery. They discover bloody medical supplies in a closet next to Bailey that the suspect used to try to fix his wound. Shortly after, he runs into Tim, but nothing is done in the commotion. While walking around, Celina admits to John that she doesn’t like hospitals due to what happened to her sister and spending time with her in one.

While looking around, Celina notices the alarm to an exit has been cut. They follow it until they come to a crossroads and split up. While apart, the suspect sneaks up on Celina and puts a gun to her. He tells her to do as he says and not alert anyone of what’s going on. She follows his lead and isn’t able to answer Nolan’s radio calls. The suspect tells her to turn off the radio, which she does but when she does, she turns on the setting so Nolan can hear what’s going on for her. She tells the exact location they’re going to but frames it as a question to the suspect. He takes her to an ambulance outside and tells her to drive it, but she convinces him to let her give him an antibiotic for the wound first. When she does, she manages to slip him morphine instead. Nolan shows up to help her and when he’s got the suspect distracted, she slips out of the ambulance. She tells him to wait a moment for the drug to kick in rather than continuing a gunfight leading to them arresting the suspect.

A Lopez Family Affair

ABC/Raymond Liu

When Angela’s mom shows up on her doorstep hurt, she’s quick to figure out who did it. After getting her to the hospital and checked out, Angela gets all the information from her that she can and learns that the person who attacked her is someone one of her brothers is involved with. She gets them all to come back to the station and has Nyla interrogate them. Welsey jumps to defend them for brownie points with Angela’s family.

The interrogations don’t lead them far but her brother, Damien, works with some people involved in gangs. A few of them learn about what happened to his mom and do their own investigating. To Angela’s dismay, they show up with a suspect. The evidence that they present is that Damien, a priest, has been sleeping with the guy’s wife, so he probably wants revenge. In private, Damien confesses that he has been struggling to honor his commitments. Angela rules out the husband as being the person who attacked their mom, though.

She goes back to her mom, who is trying to set Aaron up with Angela’s cousin in exchange for Aaron setting up one of Angela’s brothers with someone, to see if there’s any information she’s missing. Angela learns that her brother, Benny, who supposedly was doing really well for himself, finally borrowed their mom’s car. She realizes that he’s not actually doing good and is in deep trouble with a loan shark. After Angela and Nyla pressure him for more information, he tells them everything. They go to the loan shark’s office and see wounds from Angela’s mom fighting back on his employee’s face.

After arresting the man, Angela, Welsey and the rest of the Lopezes have dinner together. They all praise Welsey for stepping up and helping them, and then Angela’s mom gives a speech about how she’s always loved Angela as much as the boys. She fails to show it at times, though, because of how independent Angela is and how much she relied on her, but she should have done better about being there for her.

The Proposal

Despite Nolan’s concerns, Bailey goes back to work a week after what happened with Rosalind. She reveals that it’s not the first time she’s technically died and she’s fine, which isn’t as comforting as she was intending.

After a stressful day of chasing and catching a murderer, Nolan pushes Bailey to tell him about her comment about dying more than once. She explains the situation which leads to a speech about how her near-death experience made her think about the possibility of losing him. In the end, she asks him to marry her, to which he responds, “try to stop me.”

The Rookie will be back next Sunday, October 30 at 10 p.m. ET on ABC. Until then, check out our other coverage of the show!

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