TV

An Overly Emotional Farewell To Gina Linetti, The Human Form Of The 100 Emoji

"I'm Gina Linetti, and I approve this message."

by Patrick Lenton  1 February 2019
Gina Linetti Brooklyn Nine-Nine Season 6

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“I feel like I’m the Paris of people,” says Gina Linetti, during one episode of the beloved comedy Brooklyn Nine-Nine. Like with most Gina Linetti statements, it’s at once absurd and weirdly honest, more mood than fact, a bombastic nonsense line — which nevertheless rings true. If anyone was to embody Paris, it would somehow, weirdly, impossibly, be Gina Linetti.

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It’s been announced that actor and writer Chelsea Peretti is leaving Brooklyn Nine-Nine during its sixth season, which means that the episode ‘Four Movements’ will involve the truly upsetting writing out of her character, Gina Linetti.

“I want to thank you for the hours you spent watching Gina be Gina,” wrote Chelsea Peretti on Twitter.  “Confident, idiotic-but-smart, pithy, and infused with rhythm and cell-phone radiation.”

As teased by last week’s episode, Gina’s ambitions look to move outside her role as a civilian administrator for the Nine-Nine, and perhaps go into app development. It’s not particularly a surprise — of all the characters, she was the most unfulfilled, full of wild dreams about her dance troupe (Floorgasm, and then Dance-y Reagan) or her reality TV show (Linetti, Set, Go), or her fragrance line (Gina In A Bottle). She deserves to fulfil whatever her dreams are, whatever that may be: “I was born for politics. I have great hair, and I love lying.”

But it’s still devastating.

I don’t think it’s hyperbolic to say that watching Gina Linetti leave will be the hardest day I’ve ever experienced in my 31 years on this Earth. Gina isn’t just the glue that keeps the Nine-Nine together, she’s the entire school project, a fabulous wreath of uncooked macaroni, nonsense and hope.

Gina isn’t just a character, she’s a feeling, a sensation. She’s somehow the realest thing in the show, and also the most otherworldly. She cannot be trapped inside a box. She cannot be limited by your words! Nevertheless, it’s my job to try.

So in lieu of stumbling out into a dark, trash-strewn alleyway, sinking to my knees and crying in the torrential rain, screaming to the sky about the sudden dearth of Gina Linetti in my life, let’s explore exactly what makes Gina Linetti, the human form of the 100 emoji.

“At Any Given Moment I’m Thinking About One Thing: Richard Dreyfuss Hunkered Over Eatin’ Dog Food.”

Gina Linetti is a beautiful twirling avatar of chaos.

In Brooklyn Nine-Nine there is a scale that all the main characters sit somewhere on — and that’s the old normal to weird scale. It could perhaps be interpreted instead as order to chaos, but let’s go with the first. Amy is pretty normal, Jake is pretty normal. Terry and Holt. All functional people, with some quirks. Then we move down — Hitchcock and Scully? Gross and disturbing, but still in the realm of possibility. Boyle? Inherently odd, but timid and feeble, constrained by rules.

But then we have Gina.

Gina is not interested in playing by your rules. Gina is unapologetically, and irredeemably weird.

“Not to brag, but I was name-checked in my kindergarten teacher’s suicide note,” she tells us.

In one episode, a bunch of psychologists who study abnormal psychology, or “freaks and weirdos” as Rosa puts it, surround Gina at a party and find her absolutely fascinating. When asked what she’s thinking about, she says “I was thinking about how I’d be the perfect US President, based upon my skillset, dance ability, and bloodlust.”

It’s this true strangeness which both defines Gina, and also illustrates what she brings to the show. She’s the author of some of the best quips in the show, and always a wild burst of weird energy in every scene.

In a comedy show like Brooklyn Nine-Nine, she’s an invaluable addition, an important component in the big steaming cocktail of the show. A classic Gina moment is having the other characters painstakingly build something up, only to have Gina come crashing in, and kick down the entire sandcastle.

A classic example is in the episode ‘The Slump’, in which Captain Holt asks Amy and Rosa to run a Junior Policeman Program for at-risk teens (including a young Pete Davidson FYI), which they of course bungle — Amy being far too much of a nerd, Rosa being too unapproachable. Gina comes in, and somehow through the medium of insults and dance, manages to get the youth to sign up for it.

Also, she’s just totally extra.

“Adults don’t care about their birthday’s, Jake!” she says in one episode.

“Last year you came to work on a horse…”

“My Mother Cried The Day I Was Born Because She Knew She Would Never Be Better Than Me.”

But how did Gina Linetti become the perform storm of pandemonium? What defines her weirdness?

Sure, she’s got a lot of quirks — she’s a snappy dresser, her hair is lustrous and beautiful, she loves texting. But these are all symptomatic of one thing — her complete and utter self-absorption.

“A complete overlap of ego and ID — it’s been theorised, but I’ve never seen it before,” says one of the aforementioned psychologists.

“I’m exquisite,” answers Gina.

It’s such a perfect comedy character, because it’s inherently funny for someone to break social conventions by always putting themselves first, by not pretending to be anything less than an actual goddess, a scion of perfection. It’s also particularly noticeable in the tight, squad-to-family vibe that the Nine-Nine promotes — her compulsive independence is often the thing that separates, defines, and creates comedic trouble in an episode.  Gina sometimes remains on the periphery, by being mostly self-contained and self-sufficient, because she doesn’t always particularly need anyone else.

She loves attention, but she doesn’t NEED people. It’s always on her own terms.

A symptom of this self-absorption, about only caring about her own opinion, means that she is a truth-teller. To be honest, she loves lying — but she also can’t be bothered pussyfooting around and coddling people by lying to make them feel better.

“What? The only thing I’m not good at is modesty, because I’m great at it.”

Chelsea Peretti IS Gina Linetti

We simply wouldn’t have Gina Linetti as we know her without Chelsea Peretti — others could have tried to depict her, to embody her extravagance, and they would have failed horribly. Frankly, it’s hypothetically very embarrassing for whoever dared try.

Chelsea Peretti was once asked on a panel about what traits she has in common with Gina, and she answered: “It’s harder to say what we don’t have in common.”

Obviously, Chelsea brought a lot of herself to Gina. Chelsea is a superb stand-up comic (watch her Netflix special, it’s basically an alternate timeline of Gina Linetti doing a set), she’s written for Parks and Recreation, the spiritual parent of Brooklyn Nine-Nine, and she’s done a bunch of acting. She’s multi-talented, just like Gina!

But the similarities don’t end there — obviously, there’s the vague spoonerism of their two names, for one thing. There’s the fact that they basically wrote Chelsea’s pregnancy into the show, making Gina also have a baby at the same time. There’s the insane fact that just like Gina and Jake, Chelsea and Andy Samberg were childhood friends.

They are the same person!

“Isn’t Gina Linetti More Of A State Of Mind?”

But the thing is — Gina might be a maelstrom of craziness, and a satisfied house-cat who has taken human form, but this is Brooklyn Nine-Nine, one of the most wholesome comedies on TV — so she’s also somehow a good and lovely friend.

Gina’s friendship is often expressed in roundabout ways — think of the time she started her own cement-based prank show, which seemed to be not only a distraction, but active sabotage of the Nine-Nine while they were trying to save their precinct from closure. But — it was the cement-drinking pranks which engaged the community and actually saved the precinct, saving everyone’s jobs. Sneaky.

Or think about the recent episode, in which Jake discovers that Gina had snitched on him in High School, which left him with a terrible nickname and reputation as a snitch. We eventually learn that this isn’t Gina being mean, or sneaky — she’s deeply concerned with teenage Jake’s flirting with crime, and does it to save him, and his dream of being a detective.

Good friend!

There’s a multitude of these examples — Gina’s inspiring speech to Holt dressed as a pigeon, Gina “She’s All That-ing Amy for her presentation, Gina setting up Rosa with a good date.

Sometimes you wonder — why would Gina bother about being a good friend to people she’s absolutely better than?

Because Gina Linetti is amazing at everything she does, and we should never forget that.

Australians can watch the new season of Brooklyn Nine-Nine every week on SBS VICELAND or SBS On Demand. Noice.

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Patrick Lenton is the Entertainment Editor at Junkee. He tweets @patricklenton.