Rewatching 21 Jump Street! Hope you like morbidity, because there’s a lot of it in this one — season four, episode sixteen, “2245.”

What’s goin’ down: Ronnie Seebok, the drug dealer we saw in the season two episode “Besieged,” is now on death row, where Hanson visits him regularly, hoping to get more info out him before it’s time for the ol’ lethal injection. From there, we get flashbacks to Ronnie’s rise and fall as a criminal.

Down on death row.

Here’s Hanson: Hanson is mentoring Dari, a cop only two months out of the academy, and new to the “cop pretending to be a teenager” thing.

Obligatory “Depp’s hair” screencap.

Penhall’s prerogatives: Penhall says he and Hanson have spent “years” investigating Ronnie.

Undercover blues: I thought they were setting up this new guy Dari as a potential replacement for the outgoing Johnny Depp, but no — turns out Dari is the person Ronnie murdered, which led to the death penalty.

BLAM! Shirtless!

Goin’ to the chapel: This episode establishes that the background extras at the Jump Street chapel aren’t just “support” for the main characters, which is what we’d previously been told, but some are working their own undercover cases.

Torn from today’s headlines: I guess you could say this one’s about the death penalty, but it doesn’t really say anything about that, except that death row is one depressing place.

Trivia time: It’s Rosie Perez! She plays a sassy neighbor girl who gets caught up in Ronnie’s murderous schemes. Also Don Davis of Twin Peaks and Stargate SG1 makes his fifth appearance on the show, playing a different character each time. In this one, he’s the minister who comes to visit Ronnie on death row.

“Nicholas Cage better share that lottery ticket with me.”

Jumpin’ or not? The better episodes of 21 Jump Street are the ones that have fun with the show’s outlandish premise. This one, though, is so serious and downbeat that it loses what makes the show unique. The “mystery” of why Ronnie is on death row is answered in the first act, so we spend the rest of the hour bored while waiting for the rest of the dominos to fall. Not jumpin’.

Next week: “Roger!” “Huh?”

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