‘Blue Bloods’ season 7, episode 9 review: Frank’s confession hurdle; Jamie and Eddie’s first dance

After some major revelations last week when it comes to the Jamie / Eddie relationship, “Blue Bloods” on Friday night reverted back into more of what it does best: Standalone cases and not a whole lot of progress on any particular storyline that will be evident in all of the various weeks to come.

With that being said, we’ll at least give some credit where credit is due to CBS and the show’s producers, given that they also did not entirely put the genies back into the bottle completely when it comes to the Jamie – Eddie relationship. Tonight, the two attended a wedding (or at least a rehearsal) for one of his old friends on the force, but they went as “partners.” What happened from here was a little bit hairy, since Jamie allowed his temper to get the best of him when he realized that one of the other officers, someone he considered to be a jerk based on first impressions, started hitting on her. When the two of them danced, he let a fist fly and ended up spending the night in a holding cell. He was released in the morning, and eventually he and Eddie did come more to terms with the fact that there are some feelings there. While they didn’t make a move forward tonight in terms of them being together, at the same exact time they did ponder over what their lives could be like were there not such professional limitations put upon them.

Frank’s big hurdle – The marquee story during this episode, fittingly titled “Confession,” related to Frank and what he wanted to do when it comes to the case of a missing child. The problem here is that there was a priest who knew the whereabouts of the kid and how to help him, but the information was handed down via confession. Frank had a dilemma: Either risk the kid’s life, or get the priest to break his sacred vow and risk his entire career in order to help in the investigation.

Eventually, we learned that this said priest was willing to make the move, but it didn’t matter since Frank found another way — albeit one that caused him to spend much of his moral capital. He went over the priest’s head and obtained surveillance footage needed in order to identify the key players, and that was enough for him and his officers to execute their mission without the priest needing to break any vow. Granted, there was a conflict later between Frank and the higher-ups at the church over the use of the word “credible threat” in order to get the necessarily footage, but at that point, he didn’t care: The job was done.

In one way, nothing was altogether original about this story — we’ve seen similar ones many times before. At the same time, we’ll certainly admit that we appreciated it.

A victim with a secret – We really cannot say the same about the Danny / Baez case this week, largely because we’ve seen cases on other crime shows recently with the same exact twist — a secret life as a call girl. It was very reminiscent of a recent case on “Law & Order: SVU,” with the main difference over there being that the victim was alive. We’re not saying one copied the other or anything like that; there are just certain tropes in the crime-TV genre that if accidentally paired too close together, they lose their impact. That’s also why we’ll preach for finding some sort of unique angle to stir things up in a way we haven’t seen before. We really didn’t have that happen this time around, even if we do appreciate the dedication that Danny and Baez have towards getting the job done.

Our overall take – “Confession” is a solid episode of “Blue Bloods” — while we were hard on the Danny storyline, it wasn’t terrible. It just wasn’t anything to. The other two plots we found more compelling than average, and while the show isn’t necessarily flinging Jamie and Eddie into the future quickly, they’re at least moving at a fast enough speed to keep us entertained and to remind us that they’re not being ignored. Episode Grade: B.

(Photo: CBS.)