[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for The Rookie Season 7 Episode 5 “Til Death.”]
Don’t mess with Nyla Harper (Mekia Cox). That’s what the latest episode of The Rookie proves.
It was in Episode 4 that the LAPD discovered there’s an unidentified serial killer — while apprehending Harrison Novak (Noel Fisher) — and Nyla ended up in her own mini-horror movie; she was stabbed with a needle and temporarily paralyzed. And so when she returns to work in Episode 5, she’s very determined to find who was responsible. “After having something so traumatic happen to her, she is now jolted into action,” Cox explains on TV Insider’s Booked: The Rookie Aftershow. (Watch the full video above.)
Nyla trusts her gut when it tells her that the man they think could be responsible for the killings isn’t and instead, it’s Liam (Seth Gabel), whose vending machine company supplies the hospital they were investigating when she was attacked. But they don’t have enough on him to arrest him. “She’s smart, so she knows she can’t, but there’s a part of her that just wants revenge,” admits Cox. “There’s a part of her that just wants him behind bars immediately, but she knows that if she does not take the right steps and do this in the right way, that there’s no way he’s going behind bars and he could do this again and she does not want that.”
Disney/Carlos Lopez-Calleja
But Nyla does make sure Liam knows at the end of the episode that the LAPD will be watching him. She knows he’s used to being the smartest guy in the room, but she also knows that he can’t help what he is, and while he may be disciplined for a while, he won’t be able to stop. When he takes another victim, she promises, they’ll be there. He’s gotten away with everything because he moved in the shadows, but now he’s in the spotlight and he’ll stay there until she finds a way to hang the murders on him and lock him away for good.
“That was great,” Cox says of that monologue. “It’s nice when you have that. We don’t have, as actors, monologues often. But that was a nice little chunk and I remember doing it and just looking into his eyes and I was completely Harper in that moment and I was like, ‘You about to feel this.’”
Gabel will be back. “He comes up every now and then,” Cox teases.
Earlier in the season, Nyla and James (Arjay Smith) had problems after she was surprised by questions about the LAPD from people from the community (more than she’d expected) upon walking into their house. After, she’d said she was worried they got married too fast. How much did she mean that?
“I think Nyla reacts. She reacts and she reacts harshly sometimes, but it is definitely a reaction to the conflict and it’s her fault. She’s the one who said, let’s get married. But I think she’s questioning everything in that moment and she’s frustrated and she knows that he’s frustrated as well,” Cox explains. “And there’s been a lot of that, I think, recently for them and she doesn’t know what to do about it. So she’s grasping for straws. She’s trying to figure out what the best thing is to do.”
They will be “tested a lot” in these next few episodes, she teases. Plus, in the Valentine’s Day episode, which includes a gala (“this is the episode where we all get dressed up and fancy”), “there is a relationship that comes to a head surrounding the two of them.”
Watch the full video above for much more from Cox, including filming that scene in 704, the Nyla-Angela (Alyssa Diaz) partnership, Nyla’s relationship with James, and the Valentine’s Day episode.
The Rookie, Tuesdays, 10/9c, ABC
This story originally appeared on TV Insider
