As Santiago tries and fails to get the at-risk kids excited about the program by using a street voice (“Why does the kid who sells drugs sound black?” asks one kid), Gina starts her trademark heckling and leads the kids in a hilarious chant, “Black people CAN sell drugs!” to the chagrin of Santiago and Captain Holt.
Diaz reads Santiago and tells her that the kids don’t identify with her because they can’t relate to her. Gina tries to use her own no-nonsense street cred to level with the kids (or scare them straight) but they make fun of her. “This has never happened before..I don’t like this,” she says.
The two detectives turn to Gina as a last resort, and convince her to try with the kids after buttering her up. Gina first tries wooing the kids with her “passion,” an awkwardly stilted but amusing interpretive dance to Christina Aguilera’s “Beautiful,” but ends up just leveling with them about how cops get decent salaries and a gun. Eight kids sign up for the program, and Gina gets credit from Captain Holt in the form of a promotion to personal assistant.
This episode centered on mishaps happening to Jake rather than Jake causing them, so it left more room for situational slapstick gags in place of Jake’s sarcastically hilarious one-liners. The winning character of this episode was clearly Gina, who always manages to steal a scene even in the presence of the “loose cannon” Jake.
Other highlights include a nonsequitur discussion about the best cop movie, which happens to be a surveillance video of Detective Hitchcock getting robbed by a prostitute, and a smaller interstitial storyline involving Sergeant Jeffords’ failed attempt to a dollhouse for his twins’ birthday, which adds to the regular play of Terry Crews’ physical build against his character’s sensitive and neurotic personality.
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