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The Rookie Season 7, Episode 9 “The Kiss” picks back up after the cliffhanger from “Wildfire” left James’s life hanging. On top of that, it also takes most of the episode to give viewers an answer on his life and his relationship with Nyla (Mekia Cox). And though it ends up delivering both answers on a neat bow, once it does, it feels like the kind of answer we can’t really trust. It’s too easy and seems like an answer that the show plans to take away from us sooner than later.
Nyla’s husband James spends most of the episode on the brink of death, and his relationship seems like it’s on thin ice for about as long as James is in danger, considering that Nyla becomes a suspect of James’ shooting pretty quickly. The reasoning is solid for a show filled with cops. The last thing Nolan (Nathan Fillion) saw was James kissing Kylie. Then James and Kylie got shot by someone Nyla had previously arrested. It’s not too far a leap.
Of course, Nyla’s friends don’t believe she had anything to do with it, and they set out to prove it. But circumstantial evidence piles up against her. It all looks very bad, and even the appearance of impropriety makes it so everyone walks on eggshells against Nyla, trying to make sure that they all do everything by the book so they can prove that she didn’t do anything wrong.
Then, Nyla finds out about the kiss, and since she was told about it from someone other than James, she obviously spirals. She even asks Wesley if James is having an affair — and the fact that she wonders that is the most relatable thing she does in the hour. Where else could her head go? Her husband is dying and she just found out the last thing he did before his death was kiss another woman.
Wesley reassures her that James has told him nothing about any other woman, and that seems to settle Nyla a bit. But still, it’s not until the end of the hour that we get a somewhat definitive answer on the question of James and Nyla that the show has been making fans ask for months: Whether they stay together or break up. And for now, the answer seems to be that they’re together and solid.
I say for now because a near-death experience isn’t really dealing with the underlying issues. These two still have a lot of differences in how they see the world that they haven’t touched upon. Love has never been the problem. We’ve never doubted that James and Nyla love each other. But, if anything, their resolution feels like it’s only pushing off what at this point feels inevitable: James and Nyla just put a band-aid on their problem. But the wound underneath they’ve done nothing about.
And unless they begin to address their problems, The Rookie is sure to go back to the other revelation from this hour — the mysterious photo of James and why it made absolutely everyone in the station concerned. If the person in the photo with James is someone the police are interested in finding, this is a storyline the show will certainly revisit. And James and Nyla are doing well now, but their fundamental disagreement will come out again when they do.
The Rookie streams on Hulu.
