‘The Rookie’ Recap: Season 5 Finale — Is [Spoiler] Dead?

ABC’s The Rookie this Tuesday closed out Season 5 with an intense hour during which members of the Mid-Wilshire Division were targeted by creepy af, mask-wearing goons. When all was said and done, which officer’s life was left in limbo?

“Under Siege” opened with Thorsen and Juarez on the way home after a late night of D&Ding when a noise down an alley catches their attention. As they split up to patrol the alley, Thorsen gets sneaked up on and walloped. Juarez runs to help him, only to find him on his knees, seemingly about to be killed execution-style. The gunman shoots Thorsen in the back, while Juarez gets KO’d by one of his two accomplices. But before she passes out, one masked man whispers into her ear a weird rhyme.

As they’re both rushed to the hospital, Thorsen goes into surgery, while Juarez makes a point to relay the rhyme to Nolan before she loses consciousness again. Nolan returns home to Bailey, but soon spies one of the masked men outside their kitchen window. Nolan slips outside to confront the man, but only finds the mask — meaning the attacker is inside, now attacking Bailey. Bailey gives about as good as she gets, and at one point when the guy is attacking John, she plunges a knife into his back. The attacker is undeterred, though, until Nolan puts a bullet in his shoulder. When prints come back, they realize the attacker is a high-paid merc.

Similarly, Nyla and James are at home when Nyla spies a masked man on the baby monitor. By the time she darts to Leah’s room, the crib is empty. She and James give chase, but the baddies speed away in a car. Luckily yet oddly, Nyla and James find Leah in the bushes, unharmed.

Angela and Wes, at the hospital about to have their latest baby, wind up working the rhyming riddle on the whiteboard in Angela’s room, and eventually get an assist from Grey’s wife Luna. The closing line to the riddle, they realize, is palindromic and in fact says “TRAP EVIL A REVILED GOD.” That leads them to a line from a short-lived L.A. play, that used the creepy masks worn by the suspects. The masks were bought by a goon named Gracco, but when the team descends on his home, they find him dead — and the place booby-trapped.

A subsequent lead points to seven people who A) have a beef with Mid-Wilshire Division and B) have ties to Gracco. Lucy and Tim team up to knock on the door of one low-threat suspect, Luke Moran, and we soon realize it’s all a trap. Lucy and Tim realize it, too, as a full platoon of mask-wearing, riot shield-toting goons march toward them in formation. Lucy and Tim head up the stairs to gain the high ground outside, before turning and whipping out their batons and delivering an epic beatdown on their attackers. Nolan & Co. arrive at the location to assist, and a surrounded Moran chooses suicide by cop, while Nyla uses her sniper skills to pick off the stragglers attacking #Chenford.

The threat is seemingly snuffed, yet Nolan can’t help but wonder aloud to Sgt. Grey and the others how Moran — who had served 90 days for elder abuse, and was by no means a man of means — was able to recruit mercs. As they puzzle over that, and more LAPD units and ‘copters respond to the site of the fracas, we see a pair of Escalades traveling on the highway in the opposite direction. The well-dressed passenger in the lead vehicle (played by Orphan Black‘s Donny aka Kristian Bruun) laughs at the all-out police response to an event that is “away from our target,” chalking up the distraction as “money well-spent.”

“And by the time they realize the damage we’ve done,” he gloats, “we’ll be long gone.”

Meanwhile at the hospital, Angela and Wes welcomed their baby girl…. and Thorsen got out of surgery/was in a coma, and Juarez was at his bedside rooting hard for him to pull through, when a Code Blue sounded and doctors/nurses stormed the room, before the season ended….