The Rookie Episode Nathan Fillion Calls His Least Favorite (But Not Because It's Bad)

If you were to ask any of Nathan Fillion's many devoted fans, they might agree he's delivering some of the best work of his career in ABC's hit procedural "The Rookie." Fillion has been headlining that series as LAPD Officer John Nolan since 2018, and with a sixth season of crime-fighting action on the way, he appears to be settling happily in for what may become his lengthiest small screen venture to date. 

Given the way Fillion typically speaks about "The Rookie," and his cast mates on the series, the actor appears to be a-okay with that becoming the case. It seems, however, there's been a least one occasion where a production decision led to an unfortunate off-camera experience for Fillion. That experience has, in turn, left the actor with some decidedly mixed feelings about the episode in question, which he recently named as being his least favorite of the series.

He did so at the behest of "The Rookie: Feds" star Niecy Nash during an Entertainment Weekly chat, after first qualifying that he really likes the episode itself. "Not because it was a bad episode. It was a fantastic episode." Fillion added, "But there was an episode where I was being hunted by a serial killer. And we did it in a flour factory. It was four days of stunts and running and rolling around in dirt and flour." He'd go on to admit the mess of it all indeed left a foul taste in his mouth.

The episode of "The Rookie" Nathan Fillion is talking about is Season 4, Episode 7. Titled "Fire Fight," it finds John Nolan working a case about a possible arsonist who turns out to be a sadistic serial killer. After naming his suspect, said killer abducts Nolan and sets about making the officer his next victim. 

That doesn't pan out the way the killer planned, with Nolan eventually getting the upper hand. And as Fillion hilariously recounted, he got a first-hand account of what happens when you spend a few hours rolling around in flour. "They didn't clean it when they were finished with it, so we just used it as is. And there was a lot of flour around it," the star told Niecy Nash. "And it gets in every crack and crevice and in places where you don't think flour should be." 

Fillion went on to note that adding even a little sweat into that equation is also far from ideal. "And now you got a paste," he laughed, continuing, "and then it turns into a cast." But the problems didn't stop there, with the "Firefly" alum admitting he actually had to visit a doctor for help in getting the crusted flour off after it set.

One can only imagine that visit was even more embarrassing than it sounds. As such, we can surely understand his mixed emotions about what was otherwise a brilliant episode of "The Rookie."