The Premise
Over on one of the writing forums where I hang out, we have a game going called “This Connects to That.” Someone started with a name, and you come up with another person somehow connected to the first one. They can share a name, or an appearance in the same movie, or something like that.
It’s not dissimilar from “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon.”
One recent chain:
- John Landis, who wrote and directed An American Werewolf in London
- Warren Zevon, who wrote and recorded “Werewolves of London.”
- Chief Justice Earl Warren, who headed the President’s Commission on the assassination of JFK.
- Oliver Stone, who did a movie about the assassination of JFK.
You get the idea. It can be fun looking for the connection sometimes.
Connections
Anyway, I was thinking of this because the other night, as my wife was watching an episode of Castle, the actor playing Castle’s (Nathan Fillion) daughter looked familiar. I don’t watch a whole lot of TV these days and haven’t for a while, so the familiarity surprised me. I looked her up on IMDB and discovered that Molly C. Quinn also appeared in The Rookie as Oscar Hutchinson’s daughter.
I thought it’d be fun to see who else has appeared with Nathan Fillion in other shows.
Turns out there are more than a few.
Tamala Jones, who played Aaron Thorsen’s mother Yvonne Thorsen, also appeared in Castle in three different roles.
Alan Tudyk, who portrayed Serenity’s pilot Hoban “Wash” Washburn, makes a couple of appearances in two seasons of The Rookie as crime scene cleaner Ellroy Basso, who’s a really fun character. I wouldn’t mind seeing him again. Tudyk and Fillion also appeared together in Resident Alien. Tudyk is a great actor in his own right, too, though he’s probably known more for his voice than his on-screen presence.
The late Annie Wersching played villains on both Castle and The Rookie, and if her appearances on the latter were any indication, I’m sure she did a chilling job on Castle.
Jon Huertas (Detective Javier Esposito) and Seamus Dever (Detective Kevin Ryan) have both crossed over to The Rookie. Huertas played an undercover cop, and Dever played a drug-seeking lawyer. Huertas also appeared in This is Us with Annie Wersching.
You may be thinking that John Nolan’s ethics professor from Season 3, Fiona Ryan, looked familiar. That’s because Toks Olagundoye played PI Hayley Shipton in the last season of Castle.
Other Rookie Connections
These connections all got me wondering who else on The Rookie has previously worked together.
Mekia Cox (Nyla Harper) & Eric Winter (Tim Bradford) appeared in Secrets and Lies, an ABC mystery anthology series from 2015-16. They also appeared together in The Mentalist.
Winter appeared with Jenna Dewan (Bailey Nune) in Witches of East End on Lifetime.
Five Rookie main cast members also appeared in various episodes of the Fox/Netflix urban fantasy Lucifer: Alyssa Diaz (Angela Lopez), Richard T. Jones (Wade Grey), Shawn Ashmore (Wesley Evers), Jasmine Mathews (Rachel Hall), and Lisseth Chavez (Celina Juarez).
Tricia Helfer, who played Claire Ivey in The Rookie, appeared with Fillion in Halo 3: ODST as well as four seasons of Lucifer.
Diaz and Titus Malkin (Jackson West) both appeared in Grey’s Anatomy, albeit in different seasons.
I know this probably isn’t all that surprising to lots of people. I just find it kind of cool to track down connections like this.
Nostalgia
A couple of weeks ago, I came across a pretty cool video that took me way back, like into my early teens. Back then, I was huge into video games. I don’t mean things like Halo or Minecraft or Battlefield, because those weren’t out then (because no computers, right?). No, I mean video arcade games.
Asteroids. Galaga. Missile Command. Centipede. Space Invaders. Joust. Yeah, the golden age.
You’d plunk your quarter down and play as long as you could. Some games let you continue your play with another quarter right away, but most often you had to start from scratch.
The cool thing about a lot of those games is that a place could stick a couple of cabinets in an unused corner of the store or bar or whatever and make a fair amount of extra money for practically no effort on their part.
There were two or three places like that in Marietta within easy biking distance of my house. And let’s face it: most of Marietta was in easy biking distance, which was good, because I couldn’t drive at 12.
I spent…far too much money on arcade games at 25¢ a game. If I had more than a dollar in any format, I’d be headed for one of the arcades in town.
It got worse in college when a friend and I discovered that the arcade in the student center used tokens that were the same size and weight as nickels.
I’m not really proud of that time in my life, for a lot of reasons.
At any rate, I played a lot of arcade games back then, and this video highlights quite a few of them. Take a trip back to the 80s with me.
I remember when Flash games were big, lots of arcade games got ported over. You can still find some as HTML5 versions but not as many as the old Flash versions.
By the way, you can play Asteroids online here. No quarters needed.
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