‘Blue Bloods’ season 7, episode 11 review: Erin’s adoption drama; Danny, Jack Reagan talk enlistment
The seventh season of “Blue Bloods” returned to CBS for the first episode of the new year Friday night, and we would say that, as a whole “Genetics” showed itself to be a worthy chapter in the annals of this series.
Will it go down as one that shook up everything we know about the show? Hardly, but you should be familiar enough with it at this point to realize that this is something that is rarely going to happen. So long as the individual components of an episode are interesting, we find that we’ll be happy in the end.
Erin gets roped in to adoption drama – Thanks to some rather-unwelcome words from Jamie, Erin found herself for most of the episode forced into trying to come to terms with two sets of parents who were each trying to secure custody for good of a little boy in Kyle. The biological parents signed away his rights without realizing completely the gravity of what they were doing, but years later, they were ready to take the boy home. Erin ended up trying to advise all parties involved, but it proved difficult. Kyle’s adoptive parents were not as cohesive a family unit as they seemed, and this in turn produced a potentially devastating hole in their arrangement.
Yet, his adoptive mom did show some strength and determination in not running off with him, and as a result of that, is facing a situation where she may be able to hold on to custody even if things between her and her husband aren’t exactly rosy as they originally seemed to be. This was one of the stronger Erin episodes of the season, mostly because of the even-handed ways in which she handled both sets of parents; she was firm, sympathetic, and captivating enough to keep us focused on her story.
A different sort of convincing – Danny’s son Jack had it within his mind that he wanted to enlist in the military, mostly because that’s “what Reagans do.” So many members of the family have been in the Marines, and he felt the pressure to do the same without being truly ready. What was great about this episode is that it forced Donnie Wahlberg to play a different, more emotional side to his character, and he’s rather great at that. Danny the father had to relate to his son in ways that Danny the cop often cannot his suspect, and he helped him to realize that it’s okay for him to be whatever he wants to be, even if it is not a Marine or a cop.
The Frank dilemma of the week – Speaking of the military, Frank was told that many veterans were judging the results of the psych tests, hoping to give the most favorable episodes in order to get in uniform. While this was wrong, the reality was that this test could be slanted against veterans, and these were almost people interested in serving and afraid of not having a chance. This is one of those cases where a compromise was necessarily, and luckily, it was a compromise that we got by the end of the episode as Frank decided to handle the interview process, at least for now, himself.
Overall – The Frank story was probably the weakest of the episode mostly because it went beat by beat exactly the way in which we expected it to. Otherwise, we had a nice balance of two very strong stories this week, and while there was very little Jamie or Eddie, it was still an engaging hour of the show. Grade: B+.
(Photo: CBS.)