‘The Rookie’ Stars Tease Lucy & Tim’s Fight for Their Lives in Season 9
What To Know
- Season 9 of The Rookie will open with a high-stakes two-part premiere.
- The cast and showrunner talked to TV Insider about what’s to come in the search for Tim and Lucy after the Season 8 finale cliffhanger at San Diego Comic-Con.
When The Rookie returns for its ninth season in 2027, there’s one mandate for the Mid-Wilshire officers: Get two of their own back. And so when TV Insider caught up with showrunner Alexi Hawley and the cast at San Diego Comic-Con, we had to get the scoop.
The Season 8 finale ended with the moment that fans had been waiting for — Tim (Eric Winter) proposed to Lucy (Melissa O’Neil), and she said yes — only for the newly engaged couple to be kidnapped by people operating under the orders of international crime boss Heath Everett (Jeffrey Vincent Parise). When the series picks up again, a week or two later, as Hawley previously told us, we’ll see what that means for Tim and Lucy and if the others can find them before it’s too late. The good news? It’s going to be a two-part premiere.
“Our first order of business is getting them back,” Hawley confirmed to us at Comic-Con. “We jump right into that at the beginning of the season, but it’s a lot more complicated.” Jenna Dewan chimed in, calling it “exciting and surprising.”
Shawn Ashmore teased how the season begins. “I personally was incredibly moved and excited about the opening scene and sequence of Season 9. To me, it was unexpected, but when I read it, I was like, oh, this is a perfect way to come back in. It’s got a lot of heart and it sort of is the best of what I think The Rookie does,” he said. “It creates an unexpected situation and it brings us back into Season 9 after the cliffhanger of Season 8 in a really kind of emotional, powerful, but also sweet way.”
Erin Maxwell
For now, Tim and Lucy are “currently incapacitated, unconscious with bags on their heads,” O’Neil said, with Winter adding, “Fighting for their lives.”
While they couldn’t detail what Tim and Lucy will be going through, “we hope they survive, first of all,” O’Neil said before echoing what Winter told us in May. “It would be great to see them separated, and kind of dealing with that on their own would be really interesting. Also, if he’s trying to torture Bradford, what better way to do that than to have his fiancée completely out of sight?”
As for who’s going to have a harder time with the other in trouble, both agree it will be Tim. “Everett gave a message at the end, and I think he would feel responsible for everything,” pointed out Winter. “She got caught up in his revenge.”
O’Neil told us, “I feel like Lucy’s the type of person when the s**t’s really hitting the fan, I think that she’s able to think clearly to get through it and she kind of falls apart after. So I think that while it’s happening, she’ll probably be pretty methodical and then freak out if it goes poorly.”
As for the “after” of it, O’Neil is hoping that this isn’t resolved quite so quickly. “I hope they drag it out a little bit. It would be nice, if they live, to kind of see a journey to get them back,” she explained.
The others are going to do “whatever it takes to find them,” Lisseth Chavez said, especially her character, Celina. “I don’t think she’s stopping until we find answers. So that’s what I picture. Another missing person, not on my watch.”
Deric Augustine agreed, pointing to Miles’ “great relationship” with the missing officers. “Tim is his first TO and I think he has a big will to help find his first TO and also his friends. And I think he’s very adamant about being on the rescue team, hopefully, and hopefully saving these guys before they get into some major, major trouble, which they’re already in,” he shared.
“They’re family,” Mekia Cox told us and pointed to the Season 8 episode in which Nyla and Lucy went undercover. “They’ve just gotten closer over time and so I think she has a special place in her heart for both of them and so she really wants to find them.”
Richard T. Jones called them Grey’s “kids, so I’m always looking out for them. Grey has to get them back. He believes that everybody gets to go home every night and everybody’s going to make it through every shift. So when something happens like this, he gets very concerned. He can’t sleep and that type of thing.”
What are you hoping to see when Season 9 begins? Let us know in the comments section below.
The Rookie, Season 9, 2027, ABC
—Additional reporting by Erin Maxwell
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