it was a captain working towards commissioner, but yeah, that's the episode summary. it ends with jake, the writer's room's go to self insert character, saying "i guess i am part of the problem and figuring out how to fix that is harder than i thought"

the final episodes leave the impression that jakes decision to retire is driven solely by fatherhood, but the overall season implies that jake both wants to be a present father and to raise a son who has a dad who's a former cop rather than a cop. obviously he still supports his cop wife, amy, but i think there's a lot of meat there to that jake views her work reforming the nypd and their sexist biggoted ways that he's spent the last 2 years finally seeing as important to making new york a meaningfully better place.

i also think it's important to note that one of jake's last acts as a police detective is slipping a pen into his non-violent criminal friend's pocket so he can escape from prison.

look. brooklyn 99 is copaganda but it's the one piece of copaganda i recommend people check out because there's very much eras to it and as a piece of media it reveals an interesting shift in american politics. it's a unique relic for this reason, and it's probably the safest piece of copaganda to expose someone to without risking them leaving thinking the police stats is good. but anyway the eras of brooklyn 99 are:

• uncritical celebration of the television staples of workplace comedy and cop show
• cop show as social critique of racial injustice with an undercritical view of the role of copaganda in racial injustice
• hopeful projection of what would be possible if community policing was focused on care rather than punishment
• exhausted and frustrated deconstruction of copaganda, seemingly from the perspective of that the making of this show that they had loved working on, and loved working on together, was from the beginning a naive mistake

and remember kids: problematic media from a prior age should be celebrated for having become problematic. problematic media from a prior age means the overall narrative has shifted. brooklyn 99 was once beloved by liberal audiences and now leaves them uncomfortable. brooklyn 99 hasn't changed. it can't. it's over. but the culture's relationship to it has because our shared understanding of ourselves and eachother has. now we can get our detective show fix from something like Poker Face where the detective is a drifter on the run from the mafia and the fbi, and all the cops are in the pocket of a powerful rich man.