Blue Bloods Season 13 Episode 12 Review: The Big Leagues

Frank was so disgusted by some cops’ negligence that he floated the idea of perp walking them.

In real life, police brutality is too often in the news, and people are divided over the issue of whether the bad cops are bad apples. We need more police leaders like Frank, willing to hold officers accountable for failing the people they are supposed to serve.

On Blue Bloods Season 13 Episode 12, Frank didn’t get his perp walk, but he did punish both the instigator and the two cops who followed crappy orders. It was too late to undo a tragedy, but it was better than nothing.

Frank has always been about doing what’s right, optics be damned. So it wasn’t surprising that he fired the officers involved in this mess and considered demanding a perp walk.

Frank: I talked to Hobbs and Renfrow. They say that you told them it was okay to look the other way on the domestics so that they could close a big case.
John: It’s a little more complicated than that.
Frank: If you say this is for the greater good, I’ll throw you out the window.
John: Not for the greater good, but we were closing a big case.
Frank: I don’t give a damn if you were curing cancer. You don’t use a woman as a punching bag.
John: That was not what I was intending to do.
Frank: Nevertheless, it’s what you did.

His devotion to justice made it so that Sid believed Frank was serious about the perp walk. It’s too bad that this idea had to remain in fantasy. These cops ruined a woman’s life and left her no choice but to kill her abuser before he could kill her.

They didn’t actively kill anyone, but their determination to look the other way led to Reginald’s death and Angela’s incarceration. While Frank’s desire for a perp walk was overruled, I hope he at least has a press conference explaining his decision to terminate these cops’ employment.

Captain Bates was an idiot to think he’d get away with pinning the whole scandal on his detectives. He claimed he was blindsided, but detectives rarely independently conduct an operation involving CIs. He’d have had to have signed off on their decision to look the other way.

And Frank wasn’t going to take his word for it, either. Bates should have known that Frank would get to the bottom of this and that his role in the scandal would come to light sooner or later.

Frank kept Sid in the dark about his plan to fire Bates so that Sid wouldn’t object. But would even Sid “Cops are always right” Gormley have taken Bates’ side on this one?

Sid didn’t seem any happier with Bates’ explanation of why his cops ignored Angela’s cries for help than Frank did. Maybe he was upset because he had a feeling Frank was going to discipline Bates, but he had a disapproving look on his face the whole time Bates was describing what happened.

Protecting a CI shouldn’t mean allowing him to beat his wife brutally. Surely there was a way the cops could have worked with Reginald, if he was that vital to their case, without giving him a free pass to do what he wants.

Frank: So she stabs her husband and the first thing she does is run up the street to the police station?
Garrett: I know it’s unusual, but it’s not our place to do anything about this.
Frank: I know I can’t fix the whole system, Garrett, but what I can do is make sure our part of it does not fail her again.

As the principal PR liaison, Garrett should have realized it would look terrible if Frank ignored this. That would have opened the department up to accusations in the media of covering up negligence that led to an unnecessary death!

While Frank was dealing with this crisis, Jamie and Danny got pushed into cases they didn’t want because they felt bad for the people involved.

Jamie’s case was interesting and relatively unique for Blue Bloods. He arrested a thief who claimed he was playing Robin Hood to undo the damage an abusive boss was doing by refusing to pay other immigrants and threatening to deport their families if they stood up for themselves.

I was surprised by how close this generally conservative series came to taking the side of an undocumented immigrant who had committed a crime!

Jamie followed the law by arresting Gustavo, but he broke it — or protocol, anyway — by letting the man wear a wire when he wasn’t supposed to be eligible for CI duty.

Unsurprisingly, this case went sideways when Gustavo revealed that he was working for the cops and threw his phone down so Jamie couldn’t hear what was happening. No wonder Jamie got a three-day RIP after that disaster, which never would have happened if he had followed the CI guidelines.

Baez: Reagan, you gotta get your head out of all this Mickey stuff.
Danny: There was a time when I thought of him as the fourth Reagan boy.
Baez: And now?
Danny: And now I just count him out.

Jamie’s story was more compelling than Danny’s.

Danny’s working for a friend he didn’t entirely trust felt like a rerun. Several stories have been like this over the years, and they usually end the same way.

This time, the twist was that Mickey was the victim of a scam, not its perpetrator. I’m not sure why Danny said he’d been had; if anything, he discovered his friend had been duped.

Still, Mickey is bad news, and I’m not sorry that he left as quickly as he came. There also weren’t enough Danny/Baez interactions in this one, though their conversation about caring for people who continually fail to turn their lives around was a nice moment.

Erin went on one last stakeout with Anthony, but is she going to go through with running for DA?

Anthony: Didn’t you ever hear patience is a virtue?
Erin: I like action. I like results.
Anthony: You like action and results and you’re running for DA?

So far, her experience with jumping into politics has been that she hates the outfits the image consultant recommends and doesn’t feel comfortable with powerful donors trying to ask for a quid pro quo. Now she’s already missing being out in the field.

Is working with Anthony enough of a draw to make Erin change her mind about running?

What do you think, Blue Bloods fanatics? Will Erin back out of the race? Do you want her to?

Hit the big, blue SHOW COMMENTS button and let us know your thoughts about that and the rest of the storylines. And don’t forget you can watch Blue Bloods online if you want to see it again.

Blue Bloods airs on CBS on Fridays at 10 PM EST / PST.

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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.

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