THE ROOKIE Post-Mortem: Alexi Hawley on Aaron’s New Job, the Lingering Danger of Oscar and Jason, and Wesley’s Accidental Secret

[Warning: This post contains spoilers for the Tuesday, January 7 season premiere of THE ROOKIE.]

THE ROOKIE finally returned from its (very) long hiatus with new faces—and a departure of one of their own.

Over the hiatus, it was announced that Tru Valentino, who played Aaron Thorsen since 2021 would not be returning for season 7. And in the premiere, it was revealed that Aaron was now working in North Hollywood—which was at least still quasi-close to his former colleagues.

“Look, it felt important to land him somewhere that’s in our world, obviously,” THE ROOKIE creator Alexi Hawley tells Give Me My Remote. “We loved Aaron Thorsen as a character, and Tru as an actor was brilliant. We told a lot of, I think, really great story with him. But it ultimately felt like, creatively, there were some other roads to go down. But we wanted to keep him close, with the possibility of seeing him again, down the road.”

Though Aaron left, the fallout from last season’s corruption scandal is ongoing, with Wesley (Shawn Ashmore) tasked with going through disgraced therapist Blair’s (Danielle Campbell) recordings of her sessions, to see what sensitive information might have been revealed/at risk. Unfortunately for Wesley, he found out something personal: One of the sessions included a colleague making it clear he was attracted to Angela (Alyssa Diaz), Wesley’s wife.

“I mean, ultimately, [listening to those tapes] is really about the personal,” Hawley says. “That seemed like a fun way to not brush, so to speak, the corruption scandal, under the rug, but to keep it alive. But at the same time, do it in an unexpected way, which is that, among the tapes he’s listening to, is this confession that [this man] has the hots for his wife. But also, just to watch him twist, [Wesley] is a guy who legally cannot tell anyone what he’s going through.”

“And so, to us, that was the way to do that story in a really fun, dynamic way, rather than dredging up stuff,” he continues. “Which, look, doesn’t mean never, ever [revealing what was said to Blair in other sessions], but it’s just as we talked about the beginning of the season, it felt like, ‘Oh, that’s that’s the way to do that story’—to make is to just twist it and make it about Wesley.”

One thing that’s still on the horizon? The return of Oscar (Matthew Glave) and Bailey’s (Jenna Dewan) ex, Jason (Steve Kazee), who remain MIA. (Bailey was also off-screen to accommodate Dewan’s real-life maternity leave.)

“Just on a purely practical front, the Jason storyline is the one that comes to a head in the first half of the season,” Hawley previews. “I don’t want to get more specific than that. But not right away, because ultimately, the sort of fear and paranoia of having someone who’s so primally dangerous to Bailey, and to Nolan, was something we wanted to live in. The unknown of that, when is he going to strike, what’s going to happen? Jenna does come back towards the end of episode 3…[but we’re] still living [with the tension] even when she comes back.”

“It also allows us, ultimately, to have a deeper conversation about the trauma that she suffered being in an abusive relationship with this guy,” he continues. “The reel of stuff that she hasn’t even processed yet because of it, things that she hasn’t sort of even come clean to herself about, and really dealt with. And we thought that that was the really important story to tell as well. Obviously, we have the primal danger of this guy. But what does it do to her that he’s out there?”

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