Please tell me Henry’s kitchen faux pas was an isolated incident.
On Blue Bloods Season 12 Episode 9, Jamie struggled with realizing his beloved grandfather was getting older after Henry accidentally left a burner on, causing a small fire in the kitchen.
Henry seemed at peace with the possibility that someday his mind would fail him, but Jamie was the opposite, and his determination to help his grandfather made for a beautiful story.
For the most part, Henry seemed like himself, so that fire in the kitchen was probably a fluke.
Henry: What is the first thing you do when you get up?
Jamie: Work out.
Henry: I take stock. What is my name? What is my social security number? What city am I in? Because every day could be the day I don’t remember those things anymore.
Jamie: You got a long way to go before that, Pops.
Henry: Maybe. But someday time will win, and no amount of age-proofing the house is going to change that. So back off.
Jamie: So you don’t want pizza?
Henry: Oh, I’m keeping the pizza.
It saddened me that Henry was so keenly aware of the possibility of age-related dementia that he checked his memory every morning, but that was part of his reality that Jamie didn’t want to deal with.
Henry also probably knew that the rest of the family, especially Frank, would make a big deal out of the fire and constantly check up on him. Jamie was bad enough, from his perspective, without Frank or Danny hovering.
If Henry’s problems were severe enough that Jamie thought the family needed to intervene, he probably would have told that secret anyway. But since Henry wasn’t in that bad a shape, it was understandable that he didn’t.
Still, though, I was glad he told Eddie the truth.
Ever since Jamie and Eddie tied the knot, they seem to have had less screen time than before. So it was refreshing for them to discuss Henry’s dilemma and for Eddie to offer Jamie advice.
Her advice was perfect, too, and Jamie and Henry’s final scene brought tears to my eyes.
It underscored Jamie’s fears for Henry and that time passing affects both of them.
Jamie: You weren’t home, so I thought I’d unload the car while I was waiting for you. I need you to help lead me through rebuilding the porch.
Henry: You’re talking to someone who’s spoken to enough mayors to see through that trick.
Jamie: And were they too proud to ask for help?
Henry: If I ever need your help, I’ll ask for it.
Jamie: Look, Pops. I need you to stay healthy and stay around for a long time, cause the older I get, the more questions I have for you about how to be a good cop. How to be a good husband. This granite’s got nothing on how thick your head is.
Henry: I hope you have your receipts for that wood.
Jamie: So I can return it?
Henry: Just some of it. That porch is only 10 x 12, so you don’t need that much unless you were planning on us rebuilding the whole house.
And it finally got through Henry’s thicker-than-granite skull so that he could let Jamie help him.
Meanwhile, Eddie’s secret could have caused friction between her and Jamie, especially since she refused to tell him what was going on even after he told her about Henry.
Instead, the couple handled it with grace and humor. Eddie first told Jamie a semi-truth via a hypothetical, then asked for time to solve the issue her way, and Jamie gave her the space to do that.
Plus, he didn’t resent Eddie for confiding in Erin before she confided in him.
Eddie: Can two women even make a tribe?
Erin: When one of those women is Eddie Jenko, yeah. You’re worth a dozen men.
Erin and Eddie don’t always get along, so their bonding over this was a nice touch, and it gave Eddie (and viewers!) some badly needed insight into Erin’s character and history.
Erin isn’t always the warmest character, so I appreciated her explaining how many people supported her and her encouraging Eddie to reach out to Cora.
Cora’s decision about how to handle her pregnancy wasn’t well thought out. At a certain point, she’d be showing. And if Eddie noticed her pregnancy symptoms, there was no reason to think other cops wouldn’t figure it out too.
Still, though, Cora had solid reasons for not wanting to disclose her pregnancy yet. It sucks that in 2021, female cops going the detective route won’t be treated as equals if they’re pregnant. But that’s the reality, and Cora was trying to protect her career.
Of course, she was also risking her baby’s safety by working the streets without informing anyone of her pregnancy so that they could take it into account when confronting suspects. If her baby had died in the shooting, she might have had a hard time overcoming her guilt.
Danny and Baez’s case was equal parts bizarre and compelling.
The initial Terry stop seemed like a setup. It was odd that the woman recognized Danny and Baez as cops when they were wearing street clothes and didn’t have visible badges. And then she dropped the whole thing as soon as the crowd pushed back against the cops stopping the suspect.
Of course, the woman couldn’t have known that the ID checking system was down unless she was in on the ransomware attack, but the whole thing still seemed suspicious.
I’m surprised that there was no way to manually check IDs if the computers were down. That’s an essential part of the cops’ jobs, and it didn’t seem reasonable to have to let everyone go that they stopped because they couldn’t find out if there were any outstanding warrants.
It was bad enough that this guy turned out to be a serial assaulter. What if he’d been wanted for murder?
In any case, the Philadelphia detective who lashed out at Baez for letting the guy go was as ridiculous as the citizens who insisted the suspect’s rights were being violated.
The victim declined to press charges, and there was no way of checking whether the suspect had any warrants. What exactly were Danny and Baez supposed to do?
Baez spent most of the rest of the hour struggling with burnout from seeing so many brutal crimes over the years. It was emotional, but I had to wonder what it was about this particular case that triggered those feelings in her.
She seemed to freeze after she and Danny found Iris and didn’t want anything to do with this case, yet those feelings seemed to disappear instead of intensifying after she was shot.
That didn’t make much sense. I wish Blue Bloods had explored Baez’s feelings and backstory more here. They often do an excellent job of explaining why certain events affect certain cops the way they do, but they dropped the ball this time.
Frank’s story was also a bit odd. It wasn’t about the cyberattack, which was quickly resolved, or about Sloane’s possibly having caused the attack so that she could offer her services to the NYPD, which was also quickly resolved.
No, it was about Frank’s unresolved feelings for Sloane and how both of them didn’t seem to care about having drifted away from each other until all of a sudden Sloane was upset and not talking to Frank.
Blue Bloods probably intended this story to be the beginning of Frank questioning whether he had made a mistake by being married to his work instead of being open to dating.
But the non-resolution at the end muddied the waters and made the whole thing seem pointless.
Your turn, Blue Bloods fanatics! Am I being too hard on the Frank/Sloane story? Did Baez’s dilemma make sense to you? And is Henry losing it, or is Jamie overreacting?
Hit the big, blue SHOW COMMENTS button and let us know what you think!
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Blue Bloods airs on CBS on Fridays at 10 PM EST/PST. The next new episode airs on January 7, 2022.
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.