S02E14 - The Audit

"The Audit" is the fourteenth episode of Season 2 of We Can Fix Pawbert and the second part of the two-part Brooklyn Nine-Nine crossover. The annual Halloween heist is held at Site Two, and the officers of Precinct 99 run it as an overt security audit of the safehouse.

Synopsis

On Halloween, Precinct 99 arrives at the Site Two safehouse for the annual heist, which Captain Raymond Holt has reframed as an overt security audit. His rules require immediate disclosure of every vulnerability, forbid damage to the safehouse, and exclude bedrooms and bathrooms. Alliances form at once. Jake Peralta recruits Nick and Charles Boyle, Rosa Diaz partners with Luther, Amy Santiago and Judy trade contingency binders, and Pawbert Lynxley allies with Holt on a plan that keeps Holt visible and Pawbert unwatched. In the ceiling vents, Jake and Nick find a fifteen-degree blind spot in the kitchen camera. Rosa shims the reinforced roof hatch open in three seconds and passes Luther the tool. Terry Jeffords finds the basement window and back door frame both flex under pressure. When Holt draws the room's attention by remarking that Jake and Pawbert sound alike, Pawbert moves the real trophy into Charles's backpack, which Charles never puts down. Jake locates it minutes before midnight and gives it back rather than claim an unearned win, so Pawbert keeps his title. Nick names him as pack. Holt gives Luther index cards logging seven entry points, four vulnerabilities, and three surveillance gaps, and flags the oversized kitchen window as an accepted risk until security film and break sensors arrive. Jake takes a group photograph for Pawbert's corkboard.

Plot

On October 31st, two unmarked vehicles park outside Site Two and the officers of Precinct 99 come through the door. Jake announces a tactical assessment and counts the safehouse's vents at volume. Amy follows with a binder, Rosa maps the exits without saying anything, and Charles arrives under a cooler, a backpack and three bags of provisions, among them twelve cheeses and a charcuterie board that took him four hours. Terry ducks the doorframe, runs a hoof along the walls and taps a support beam hard enough to shiver the whole thing, then promises a more thorough assessment. Captain Holt enters last and sets the terms agreed with the pack the day before: possession of the trophy at midnight wins, alliances are permitted and betrayals expected, but the heist is an overt security audit, so every vulnerability found is disclosed on the spot rather than saved for the end. Nothing may be damaged, and bedrooms and bathrooms sit outside the heist zone. Amy hands Judy a laminated floor plan with the excluded areas in red. The trophy is on its shelf in plain sight, and Pawbert tells Jake to take it if he wants it.

Ten minutes of negotiation split the room. Jake recruits Nick and Charles for a plan built entirely around the ceiling vents. Rosa and Luther settle their partnership by the coat closet without either of them wasting a sentence, Rosa taking entry points and Luther the layout. Amy and Judy find that each has prepared contingencies against the other's scenarios and retreat to a corner to trade binders. Holt crosses to Pawbert at the window, where the lynx says he was holding out for the right partner. He has read Holt as a mammal who planned the night as an audit rather than a win, and he wants to turn what his family trained into him toward protecting something. Holt accepts, then lowers his voice to set the strategy: he will be visible and Pawbert will not, dismissed as a subordinate while the room tracks the captain's every move, and when Holt makes an opening Pawbert will recognize it.

Jake leads Nick and Charles into the ductwork, Charles scraping the walls with the emergency charcuterie kit he refuses to leave behind. Through a grate above the kitchen they find the camera's coverage is off by roughly fifteen degrees, leaving a wedge of unwatched floor in the northwest corner wide enough for a medium-sized mammal to cross. Jake notes it on his phone, drops out of a vent into the living room and hands the finding straight to Luther, who says he will have the camera adjusted that night.

Rosa takes Luther to the roof access door, which is locked, reinforced and secure from the outside. She slides a metal shim into the mechanism and has it open in three seconds, then relocks it and passes him the shim: the lock is standard grade, and a safehouse needs anti-shim pins. Terry works the lower level alone, leaning his weight into every frame he passes. The basement window bows inward under his hoof, and at the back entrance the door holds while the frame gives where wood meets wall, warped by exposure or age. He photographs both, recommends reinforcement bars and texts the second finding to Rosa.

Two hours in, Holt asks the room at large whether anyone else finds it peculiar that Jake and Pawbert sound alike. Everyone turns to look at the two of them, and Jake protests that his own voice is distinctive. Under cover of the argument, Pawbert moves the real trophy into Charles's backpack and leaves a papier-mache copy painted gold on the shelf. The pack then gathers for the first security briefing, which has landed four vulnerabilities in three hours: the camera blind spot, the roof lock, the basement window and the back door frame. Terry says he came to make sure his friends are safe rather than to win a trophy, and Charles weeps into a napkin printed with an inspirational message. Judy prices the fixes, a fifteen-minute camera adjustment, a hardware store run for the lock and contractors for the two frames, and Amy volunteers a prioritized remediation schedule cross-referenced against threat assessments. Holt notes that four hours remain until midnight and there is still a trophy to claim.

Amy and Judy set up a command center at the dining table and build a profile of Jake's method, which runs to vents most of the time and disguises the rest. Jake decides he needs a distraction and asks Charles to have a cheese emergency. Charles obliges by bursting out of the kitchen with a wheel of brie he says has been left near the radiator, and while the room watches him mourn it Jake reaches the shelf and lifts the trophy. It is too light. Without turning around, Pawbert tells him it is a decoy, and that anything left out where he could grab it was never going to be real. Jake asks where the real one is and is told it is somewhere he will not think to look.

By ten minutes to midnight three fakes have surfaced: Jake's, a counter-decoy Amy planted, and one Rosa built out of supplies in her jacket. In the hallway Jake and Nick reason through how a Lynxley would think and conclude that Pawbert hid the trophy on someone who would guard it without knowing, which points at Charles. Charles hands over the backpack in the kitchen, and the trophy is at the bottom of it, wrapped in a napkin. Holt steps into the doorway to confirm the alliance out loud: he was the visible threat, everyone anticipated his movements, and nobody watched Pawbert, who made the swap during the remark about voices. At 11:57 Jake is holding the trophy and could keep hold of it until the clock runs out, but he hands it back instead and tells Pawbert he will come for it again next year. Pawbert has it at midnight and keeps the title. When Jake calls him Nick's boy, Nick corrects him: Pawbert is pack.

Afterwards Holt produces a stack of index cards in neat penmanship and passes them to Luther. They log seven potential entry points, four significant vulnerabilities and three surveillance gaps, the kitchen camera among them. Terry adds the finding he likes least, the kitchen window, which is the largest pane in the building and which he can recommend no fix for short of rebuilding the wall around it. Holt has already logged that one as an accepted risk, with security film and break sensors ordered and pending, and tells the pack to treat the window as their soft point until the hardware arrives.

Before the Ninety-Nine leaves, Jake finds Pawbert at the corkboard, looking at Charles's napkin, his mother's recipe card and Maddie's card. He pulls a bright orange, sticker-covered Pawlaroid camera out of his jacket and herds everyone into frame in front of the board. The photograph that develops is a mess: half the group is looking the wrong way, Terry's ears are cut off and Charles is crying. Jake gives it to Pawbert for the corkboard. Terry lifts the lynx off the ground in farewell, Amy passes Judy the remediation folder at the door, and Holt takes Pawbert's paw in his trunk on the way out. In the quiet before dawn the trophy is back on its shelf and the photograph is pinned up beside the napkin and the recipe card. Luther observes that the Ninety-Nine found real vulnerabilities, and Pawbert answers that they can now be fixed. He calls the officers friends, a word he still says more slowly than the rest of the sentence.

Key Moments

• Pawbert leaves the heist trophy on its shelf in plain sight and invites Jake to take it
• Holt sets the terms of the audit: immediate disclosure of every vulnerability, no damage to the safehouse, bedrooms and bathrooms excluded
• Jake's tactical assessment of the safehouse, cataloging vents with theatrical enthusiasm
• Pawbert and Holt ally at the window on a plan that keeps Holt visible and Pawbert unwatched
• Rosa and Luther form their partnership by the coat closet without either of them wasting a sentence
• Jake and Nick discover the fifteen-degree kitchen camera blind spot while navigating the vents
• Rosa bypasses the roof access lock with a metal shim in three seconds and passes Luther the tool
• Terry discovers the basement window frame flexes under pressure during his methodical structural assessment
• Terry discovers the back door frame is warped, vulnerable to significant force
• Holt creates the opening by loudly noting a vocal similarity between Jake and Pawbert
• Pawbert executes the trophy swap during the distraction, placing the real trophy in Charles's backpack
• Terry tells the first security briefing he came to keep his friends safe rather than to win a trophy
• Charles's staged brie emergency draws attention for Jake's move on the trophy
• Jake grabs the shelf trophy only for Pawbert to reveal it is the papier-mache decoy
• Jake and Nick deduce that Pawbert hid the real trophy on someone who would guard it without knowing
• Charles processes his unwitting role as the trophy mule with dramatic horror
• Jake returns the trophy minutes before midnight rather than take a win he did not earn
• Nick names Pawbert as pack in front of both squads
• Holt gives Luther the index cards documenting seven entry points, four vulnerabilities and three surveillance gaps
• Terry names the kitchen window as unfixable without rebuilding the wall, and Holt logs it as an accepted risk pending security film and break sensors
• Jake takes a chaotic group photograph that captures both squads together
• Terry lifts Pawbert off the ground in farewell
• Pawbert adds the squad Pawlaroid to his corkboard collection alongside existing tokens of kindness
• Pawbert uses the word "friends" to describe the Ninety-Nine, still learning its weight

Key Lines

Characters Introduced

None. All characters appeared previously.

Locations

• Site Two — entryway, living room, kitchen, hallway, ceiling vents, roof access, basement, back door

Items

• Heist trophy — "ULTIMATE HEIST CHAMPION/GENIUS"; defended by Pawbert using the Charles gambit; returned to its shelf
• Papier-mache decoy trophy — Painted gold; left on the shelf when Pawbert swaps the real trophy out at hour two
• Security index cards — Holt's audit results in neat penmanship, documenting seven entry points, four vulnerabilities and three surveillance gaps
• Squad Pawlaroid — Jake's group photo, taken with a bright orange, sticker-covered Pawlaroid camera; added to Pawbert's corkboard
• Prioritized remediation schedule — Amy's folder organized by urgency, cost and implementation complexity; given to Judy at the door
• Amy's laminated floor plan — Color-coded zones showing the areas excluded from the heist
• Charles's emergency charcuterie backpack — Unknowing hiding place for the real trophy; contains cheeses, crackers and napkins with quotes like "CHEESE BELIEVES IN YOU"
• Rosa's shim — Metal shim that bypassed the roof access lock in three seconds; handed to Luther to make the point
• Charles's Napkin, mother's recipe card, Maddie's Card — On the corkboard, where Jake finds Pawbert looking at them

Notes

• The squad Pawlaroid joining the corkboard continues the visual motif of Pawbert collecting physical proof of kindness: a growing archive that includes Charles's napkin, his mother's recipe card, and Maddie's card.
• Holt's observation that Jake and Pawbert sound "eerily similar" is a meta reference to both characters being voiced by Andy Samberg. This callback to Pawbert's Jake impression in "The Heist" serves as an in-universe distraction while also winking at the audience.
• Jake's bright orange, sticker-covered instant camera is a Pawlaroid, the Zootopified form of the real-world Polaroid brand, modeled on the Polaroid OneStep line.