Blue Bloods: “The End … ” and “ … Justifies the Means” (Panda Productions, CBS-TV, aired May 14, 2021)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night I wanted to watch the season finale of a police show I rarely see but I really like – Blue Bloods, a CBS drama that’s been on since 2010 and which is based on the odd conceit that the Reagan family (pronounced “REE-gun,” by the way, not “RAY-gun” as the late former President did) and its extensions constitute about half the New York Police Department, including police commissioner Frank Reagan (Tom Selleck, who like Robert Taylor and Errol Flynn in a previous generation got to be a better actor once he lost his looks); his father, former commissioner Henry Reagan (Len Cariou) – when he gave a lecture about the best way to reheat pizza I couldn’t help but recall his most famous previous role in Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd, in which he played a man who killed people so his girlfriend could make them into meat pies – his son Danny Reagan (Donnie Wahlberg, Mark Wahlberg’s older brother and a man who by now is a pretty Old Kid on the Block), Danny’s wife Erin Reagan (Bridget Moynihan) and quite a few assorted people, including folks who are blood Reagans but because their descent is matrilineal have different last names. I’ve faulted this show on occasion for having too many intersecting plot lines (a gimmick they seemed to have copied from law shows, where the formula is to have three plots in every episode).

But these two episodes, a two-part series finale called “The End … ” and “ … Justifies the Means,” were a coherent and quite powerful story about a young branch of the Reagan family, Joe Hill (the drop-dead gorgeous Will Hochman), whose dad was also a cop and was working undercover when a fellow cop mistook him for a real crook and fatally shot him), who’s gone undercover himself to bust an illegal gun-running ring (they buy guns legally in North Carolina and then smuggle them illegally into New York and sell them for five times what they paid for them). The show begins with a hit person for the ring, Max Fagan (Shane Patrick Kearns), massacring an entire family for having crossed them in some way that never quite gets explained, not that it really has to be, and the show’s suspense hook is whether the gangsters will “make” Joe Hill as a cop and kill him before he can bust them. The complications include an officious Black woman agent for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms who is running Joe Hill as an agent and being very close-lipped about just what he’s in there doing – much to the consternation of Frank Reagan, who would like to see the gun runners get busted but not at the cost of the life of an NYPD officer, especially one who’s also a relative. Joe Hill befriends gang member Tyce Dickson (Shannon Wallace), a Black gang member who’s the other man the gang leaders suspect of being the undercover infiltrator – while the gang have their own undercover in the police, a man posing as an active ATF agent but who actually retired several months earlier and has wormed his way into the NYPD and is getting information and relaying it to the gang.

The first episode ends with a grim scene of a car burning with a body inside, and it’s identified as Joe Hill’s because his St. Jude medal is found in the wreckage – but at the start of part two it’s revealed that the burned body in the car isn’t Joe’s and he’s still alive, and still trying to get word to the police of what the gang is up to while avoiding being “made” by the gang as a cop and killed. The final shoot-out is a bit too pat – especially when Tyce is killed (the writers, Ian Biederman, Kevin Wade, Siobhan Byrne O’Connor and Kevin Riley, didn’t want to face the dilemma of the moral culpability of a gang member who wanted out and helped the police officer at the end, so they went with the sort of solution a 1930’s Production Code-era writer would have and knocked off the character instead), and Joe gets wounded and we’re not sure he survived until he turns up, relatively unscathed, at the next Reagan family dinner. But overall this pair of Blue Bloods episodes told a quite engaging and powerful story – the title about the ends justifying the means is from a plot twist in which the key information that helps the cops bust the gang at last comes from a totally illegal search of Max’s apartment (where he is out but his wife and dog are there – this reminded me of a Law and Order episode in which the hit man was a family member with a wife and a dog, and supposedly his wife had no idea what he did for a living – he just left for work in the morning and came back at night like anyone else, which to me made him more chilling as a character) – with good suspense direction by Alan Zakarzewski and (in the second episode) David Barrett that built up a real sense of suspense about the outcome.