Despite the title referring specifically to Officer John Nolan (Nathan Fillion) at first, The Rookie has always been an ensemble series. Considering it's set in a Los Angeles Police Department precinct, it also makes sense that the ensemble was almost primarily cops. The episode when Nolan's fellow rookie Lucy Chen (Melissa O'Neill) first meets Tamara Colins (Dylan Conrique) is about expanding the cast to other people who live and work in the community. The first two seasons of The Rookie heavily focused on the beat cop experience, though with far more thrilling and deadly adventures than wha is representative of real life. The show established its central characters by showcasing that rookie or veteran, the police in the LAPD's Mid-Wilshire Patrol Division are almost all idealized cops.
Starting with Season 3, The Rookie expanded its perspective to civilians and other first responders, like firefighters and Nolan's now-wife Bailey Nune (Jenna Dewan). This season also started the storyline where Officer Jackson West (Titus Makin, Jr.) was paired with a corrupt and racist training officer, Doug Stanton (Brandon Routh). In her second season, Officer Nyla Harper (Mekia Cox) meets James Murray (Arjay Smith), the community leader who eventually becomes her husband. Lucy Chen meets Tamara Colins after she steals Lucy's car. Since then, Tamara has become an important part of Lucy's extended family and a recurring character in The Rookie.
Tamara Colins Is Lucy Chen's First 'Rookie Puppy'
Tamara Colins first appears in The Rookie Season 3, Episode 2, "In Justice," an episode which kick-started the shift in the series' focus towards people outside the police precinct. While on patrol, Lucy Chen and Tim Bradford, still her training officer, spy the former's car on the side of the road. Lucy sees that a person is inside of it, and when they pull the police cruiser in behind the vehicle, the occupant tries to flee. Lucy, however, is quick to stop her and immediately puts her in handcuffs. Tamara tries to lie, saying the guy who owned the car lent it to her, prompting Chen to reply, "I'm the guy who owns the car."
Lucy talks to the handcuffed girl whom she quickly realizes is living in the car. As Bradford searches the car, a teddy bear falls on the ground, and Tamara reacts just like a kid would. Because she was also the victim of grand theft auto, Lucy had far more power in this situation than she normally would. Seemingly on impulse, she tells Bradford that she's not pressing charges for the theft. She then offers to take Tamara to a children's shelter. However, the high-school-aged girl informs her those shelters aren't the safe havens Lucy seems to think they are.
Lucy promises to help Tamara find a safe place to live while finishing high school, prompting Bradford to call her Lucy's "puppy." He says that every Rookie finds a person in need of help that they try to "change" for the better. He even implies he had one as a rookie. Still, he doesn't discourage her from trying to help Tamara. While the character only appears in a handful of scenes, it's clear she's going to stick around. She's also part of the larger narrative in The Rookie Season 3.
Tamara Was One of Many Characters Meant to Shift The Rookie's Focus
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Even though Jackson West was killed off in The Rookie one season later, Makin almost left the role before Season 3. He wanted the show to do a better job of highlighting bias in policing, and his storyline directly reflected that. Since his training officer, Angela Lopez (Alyssa Diaz), was a detective, Stanton came in to finish his training. He was an example of everything wrong with policing, culminating in Stanton allowing West to be beaten by criminals as he watched. He was only caught because West tricked Stanton into saving the footage on his bodycam. While this was the heaviest story that season, it wasn't the only one expanding The Rookie's focus.
On the more positive side of storytelling, James Murray became a central figure in The Rookie Season 3. Along with romancing Nyla, he is a community leader who served to guide her, Nolan and other officers about the best way to help members of the community like Tamara and Silas March (Nik Sanchez), a youth with autism. They become friendly with The Rookie's central characters, going so far as to help Lopez plan her wedding to Wesley Evers (Shawn Ashmore). It's no accident Tamara only first showed up in the series as someone who broke the law that Lucy decided to help rather than arrest.
When The Rookie was focused primarily on the precinct, the show became somewhat myopic. Internal Affairs officers and defense attorneys were antagonists, if only via inconvenience, getting in the way of the "good" police officers. Season 3 was the first time the show really explored how sometimes the cops aren't the best people to take charge. Even the officers far better than Stanton had to work to earn the community's trust. From the first episode that introduced Tamara, James and others, The Rookie tried to show there is more to serving and protecting than arrests and shootouts.
Why Lucy Decided to Help Tamara and Not as a Police Officer
What makes the relationship between Lucy and Tamara unique is that most of it happens outside of the former's role as a cop. At the end of the first episode of The Rookie to feature Tamara, Lucy actually gives her the car she stole. Tamara told Lucy that her parents were dead, and since she wasn't going to stay at the shelters, the car provided her some safety.
However, Lucy added some caveats: she demanded that Tamara text her every day to "make sure [she's] okay." She also offered to help her work with social services to find a more permanent living situation. Had Tamara actually been Lucy's "rookie puppy," it would've been, at best, an ill-conceived and overdone plotline. Lucy did the most for Tamara out of uniform as a civilian than she could as a police officer and symbol of authority. Of course, it wasn't easy.
In the very next episode, Season 3, Episode 3, "La Fiera," Lucy catches Tamara selling the car for $4000. In fairness to her, the car was unreliable and didn't even lock. The girl also called it a "ticket machine" because parking in Los Angeles costs money. While funny, it also served to show how Lucy didn't quite understand (at first) what Tamara needed from her. Like everyone else in Season 3, she had to take her cues from the people in need of help rather than what the police thought was best for them.
Why The Rookie Made Tamara Colins a Recurring Character
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When not spending time with Lucy or the other characters, Tamara's living situation was left vague. Eventually, in The Rookie Season 4, Lucy asks Tamara to move in with her, allowing her to graduate high school and move on to college. The focus of The Rookie has shifted back to more precinct-focused stories, so Tamara no longer represents a segment of the community the police overlook or underserve.
Now she's a member of Lucy's found family, a kind of baby sister who keeps a watchful eye on the Chenford relationship in the show. Since the death of West, Tamara has become Lucy's sounding board for relationship troubles and other emotional concerns. She's no longer a representative of street kids who struggle to succeed in a system stacked against them. Now she's just a member of the family, though she's not often seen outside of Lucy's apartment.
Still, Tamara is a vital character in The Rookie even if she only appears in an episode for one scene. She serves as a reminder to the audience that these characters have lives outside of the uniform. While much of the series' focus in later seasons has been on Nolan and Bailey's relationship and Diaz and Wesley's growing family, Tamara is still in the series. The Rookie does have a large, expensive cast, so while she doesn't appear that often, it doesn't lessen her importance in Lucy's life.
The Rookie debuts new episodes Tuesdays on ABC at 9 PM Eastern, and the episode streams the following day on Hulu.
