Chicago PD season 5 midseason premiere recap: Rabbit Hole

Chicago PD collided Jay Halstead’s personal and professional lives in the midseason premiere. Here’s what happened in Chicago PD season 5, episode 10.

Wednesday brought Chicago PD back on the air, and the Chicago PD midseason premiere was a very hard time for a number of people—the fans included.

“Rabbit Hole” started exactly where “Monster” left off, with Adam Ruzek (Patrick John Flueger) on the hot seat after being exposed as the Intelligence Unit’s mole.

Ruzek was surprised to hear that Hank Voight (Jason Beghe) already knew what was being held over his head, and said there was nothing he could do about it. Voight told Ruzek to pick his side, and naturally, Ruzek chose Team Voight.

So his boss spared his life, though he made clear that he hadn’t said they were good.

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Meanwhile, Jay Halstead (Jesse Lee Soffer) was getting drunk at a party with Camila (recurring guest star Anabelle Acosta). Once again, she used flirtation to pull him back in, and the two were soon having sex in a back room. Classy.

But leaving the party, Halstead was alerted to one of Camila’s friends lying injured in the street and coughing up blood. Unfortunately, she soon died right in front of him, and Jay warned Camila to flee the scene before the cops arrived. The other cops, that is.

Some time later, Voight and Hailey Upton (Tracy Spiridakos) arrived to help Halstead, who claimed that Camila was just his confidential informant. Neither believed him, and Voight ordered Halstead back to the office, where Jay lied to his boss for the second time:

"Voight: Are you sleeping with this girl?Halstead: No."

Halstead left the district and went straight to Camila’s workplace, where he saw her meeting a man named Wallace whom she said “used to work here.” Meanwhile, Ruzek and Kevin Atwater (LaRoyce Hawkins) got the autopsy results, finding a stamp on the victim’s hand from a place called Echo.

Tracking her movements backwards enabled Ruzek to find an apartment, where Upton and Antonio Dawson (Jon Seda) were greeted by a man claiming to be a DEA agent. It turns out that the dead woman was Ella Porter, and she was working undercover for the DEA when she died. Well, that adds another layer to the Chicago PD layer cake, doesn’t it?

Voight went with the DEA agent back to their office and told them that Halstead is an undercover cop. He also asked why Ella was alone the night she died, and the agent admitted that she was “off book.” Halstead recognized Ella’s prime suspect Alex as a man he met through Camila at the party, and suggested setting up an undercover drug buy.

While Voight assigned him and Upton to that job, he told Ruzek to give Denny Woods (Mykelti Williamson) whatever he wanted, and to say he’s had a change of heart since Voight just passed Ruzek over for a promotion in favor of Atwater. Woods bought the story—for the time being.

Speaking of stories, Halstead was thrown to hear from Alex that Camila was a drug dealer, but rolled with it and convinced Alex that he and Upton were in the market to move product. Alex set up a deal for the following day, while Upton took her partner to task for his affair:

"Upton: You screwing her is a fireable offense."

Halstead begged Upton for a few hours to speak to Camila, so Upton covered for her partner while he went to his girlfriend’s place and confronted her with the information that the victim was a DEA agent. Camila claimed she was just dealing drugs to afford her rent, and didn’t know anything else. Furthermore, she told him she loved him and had only stayed in Chicago because of him.

Chicago PD cut to the next morning, as the Intelligence Unit was moving into place to catch Alex. But he figured out what they were up to, and was chased down while Atwater and Ruzek searched the drop location and found garage door openers for several other stash houses. After his arrest, Alex named Camila as the person who set everything up—so Halstead called Camila and told her to get a move on.

"Halstead: We’ll find a way out of this. Just me and you."

But when Halstead went to meet Camila, he was intercepted by not only Upton, but also Voight. They confronted him about the true nature of his behavior and told him that he was going to wear a wire. That means he got Camila on tape confessing to not only dealing, but getting other people to deal, and the DEA agent Ella was one of the people she was trying to recruit.

When she heard the woman being called by her real name, she tipped off the man she works for that Ella wasn’t who she said she was. Camila didn’t want to cooperate, fearing that she would be next on the hit list, but Halstead promised that she would be safe and told her that he loved her.

That was enough to get Camila to name her employer as Wallace, and she agreed to get him to come to the club. But the meeting went south in a hurry when Wallace pulled a gun on Jay, and then Jay got in a few angry punches on him in return. That and the quick response of the team enabled Camila to find out that Halstead, too, was an undercover officer and wouldn’t be running away with her after all.

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Camila was taken back to the district, where it’s her turn to confront Halstead. She wanted nothing to do with him, now that she realized she’d been lied to this whole time. But what did he expect? She then used their back room fling as her alibi for the murder, in a case of too much information.

Luckily for her, Wallace confessed to the killing under pressure from Voight. But Voight told him there would be no deal for his cooperation, leaving him speechless.

That night, Ruzek found himself called to another meeting with Woods, who told the other man that his beef with Voight was not hate, but “survival.” He had no idea that Voight was close enough to hear those words.

And last but not least, Chicago PD ended with giving us one scene for Trudy Platt (Amy Morton), who assured Upton that it wasn’t her fault Halstead had fallen down on the job. While Upton was still skeptical, Halstead got a home visit from Voight, who wanted a further explanation for all of his recent behavior.

"Voight: You looked me in the eye and you lied. You put this whole unit at risk."

Voight was not enthused with Halstead, while Upton went downstairs and told Camila that she could get her off the hook for those drug charges—as long as Camila didn’t say anything about Jay Halstead. As Upton pointed out, Camila never really knew Jay. And she made clear that she would bury the other woman to protect her partner.

A tearful Camila agreed to stay quiet, though she claimed that “the person you know, that’s the lie.”

“Rabbit Hole” is a decent episode for Chicago PD, but far from the season’s best. The tension from the cliffhanger is dissipated relatively quickly, and Ruzek’s story is mostly pushed aside in favor of the Halstead plot; there are only two scenes with Ruzek and Woods, and neither are that long.

But when the audience doesn’t seriously care about Camila, or Jay’s relationship with her, that means we don’t care about the plot like we should. It doesn’t really matter to us if she’s a drug dealer, if she gets arrested or whatever else. Just because he cares about her, doesn’t mean that the audience has to.

And it’s almost too easy to play connect the dots as Halstead goes through all the shifty moves and stages of denial as the case develops. Anyone who’s seen enough TV cop shows knows what his excuses will be and how he’s going to behave. That’s not the fault of Jesse Lee Soffer, who’s doing his best; that’s down to the writing, which is trying to infuse tension and ambiguity into a storyline where it’s just not there.

The good news is that “Rabbit Hole” wraps up this plotline, so Chicago PD season 5 can move on to other stories, and maybe Halstead will learn and grow from the experience. We knew that this season would be a rough ride for him, and it has been, but this is where he can have his eyes open and bounce back. The real storyline is where he, and Ruzek for that matter, go from here now that they’ve both been burned (and burned others) so badly.

Next: Who was the Chicago PD actor of 2017?

What did you think of the Chicago PD midseason premiere? Leave us your reaction to “Rabbit Hole” in the comments.

Chicago PD airs Wednesdays at 10/9c on NBC.

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