Who is the “Drone Kid” on The Rookie?

Today, I explain what the deal is with the “drone kid,” Dash, on The Rookie.

In Pop Culture Questions Answered, I answer whatever questions you folks might have about movies, TV, music or whatever (feel free to e-mail questions to me at brian@poprefs.com).

The long-running TV series, The Rookie, is well-known for re-using guest stars. As I noted in a piece a while back, Alexi Hawley, the creator and showrunner of The Rookie, clearly likes to use the history of his show in a big way, as there are constant callbacks to past episodes. Heck, the show had a spinoff, The Rookie: Feds, that only lasted a single season, and yet most of the cast has continued to make appearances on The Rookie after the spinoff was canceled. Like Olive Garden, once you’re on The Rookie, you’re family.

Even with that in mind, though, it was still odd to see a character from Season 7 show up again in Season 8. The reason is because in Season 7’s season finale, “The Good, The Bad, and The Oscar,” John Nolan (Nathan Fillion) and Detective Nyla Harper (Mekia Cox) drive two hours from Los Angeles to try to track down Oscar Hutchinson (Matthew Glave), a recurring villain on the series who shows up at least once every season. They think he’s been by a motel, where Oscar has likely killed one of his former crime partners. Once there, they encounter a teenager named Dash, who is filming with his drone.

Dash explains that they’re headed to Las Vegas because his mother wants to work in a casino. Nolan asks him for his drone footage to see if he has seen Oscar. He hasn’t, but he tells Nolan he’ll keep an eye out for anything shady. Oscar then kidnaps Nolan, and Dash helps Harper discover that Nolan has been kidnapped. Harper then asks Dash’s mother if Dash and his drone can go with her to help find Nolan, who Oscar has taken into the desert to help dig for buried diamonds.

Eventually, Dash discovers Oscar’s car. Oscar is about to kill Nolan, so Harper has Dash fly his drone into Oscar, distracting him. Oscar escapes, but he doesn’t get the stolen diamonds.

Okay, fair enough plot, but then, bizarrely, in the current season, Dash suddenly pops up in last week’s episode working as an intern for Dropout TV! When Nolan notes that he and his mom were headed for Vegas, he replies, “Yeah, uh, that didn’t work out, so we moved to LA. My mom always wanted to be a hand model, which is going as well as you would expect. So I got a part-time job with these lunatics– lovely people– while, uh, I wait to graduate high school.”

Then this week, Dash went on a ride along with Nolan (who feels he owes that much to Dash, since Dash DID save his life). Even for a show that brings characters back a lot, this was a bit odd, since it wasn’t like Dash was some major character (and, again, he’s a teenager, so not a lot of way to work an effectively random teenager into a cop show).

Well, as it turns out, Dash is played by Beckett Hawley, the son of the show’s creator, so, well, there ya go.

Notably, Hawley’s OTHER son, Zander Hawley, is famous for playing Rodge on the show, a joke character who sang a song about Nolan, “Daddy Cop,” who later became the boyfriend of one of the other cops.

So it’s a family business (Zander also sings the theme song for the show)!

If anyone has a pop culture question, drop me a line at brian@poprefs.com!