Chicago Fire season 6, episode 8 recap: The Whole Point of Being Roommates

How much did Chicago Fire heat up the show’s relationships this week? Here’s what happened in Chicago Fire season 6, episode 8.

This week’s Chicago Fire didn’t waste any time raising the temperature on the show’s various relationships, and it created a bit of a hot mess.

Season 6, Episode 8 is called “The Whole Point of Being Roommates,” and the episode starts as Gabriela Dawson (Monica Raymund) is checking on Bria (recurring guest star Quinn Cooke), whom she rescued the week before.

After they bond, Dawson reports to the firehouse and tells Kelly Severide (Taylor Kinney) that she thinks something is wrong with Bria. While Severide ponders that, Sylvie Brett (Kara Killmer) isn’t all there, and everyone knows it’s because she’s seeing someone.

Brett won’t tell them, but she has no problem blurting it out to Dawson, who looks like she really didn’t need to know that her partner and her brother are sleeping together again.

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Thankfully there’s an emergency call that cuts off their conversation. Ambulance 61 and Truck 81 roll to help a police officer who has literally been impaled on a white picket fence in a traffic stop gone way wrong. We’ll never look at picket fences the same way again.

The cop’s partner is understandably having a panic attack about his survival, which prompts him to hit Christopher Herrmann (David Eigenberg) when Herrmann tries to get him to step back. As you can figure, Herrmann is not cool with this.

Plus, Chief Boden (Eamonn Walker) is surprised when his brother-in-law Julian Robbins (guest star Michael Cognata) is not only in town, but being pawned off on him for the day.  He promptly tries a move on Connie (DuShon Brown), which Boden shuts down pronto:

"Boden: You don’t want no part of Connie, trust me."

After delivering the wounded police officer to the hospital, Dawson sees Bria being discharged and convinces her to let the ambulance take her home. But home looks mighty suspicious and Dawson is not impressed when she meets Bria’s drug-addicted father.

Bria tells her that her father had a workplace accident several months earlier and started taking painkillers, and she’s now his caretaker. The drugs she was stealing from the clinic were for him. She begs Dawson not to report her, and Dawson relents—for now.

She comes back to the firehouse and once again asks for Severide’s take; Matthew Casey (Jesse Spencer) overhears and is much more skeptical than his wife. Dawson tells him that he could just trust her judgment, and Casey wisely backs away:

"Casey: I’m just going to trust my judgment and take myself out of this conversation."

More awkward is Boden, who is convinced Julian is only in town to get something out of him. The next day, Julian proves him right by giving him a business proposition.

And more awkward than that is Brett blowing off movie night with her roommates so she can hook up with Antonio. This naturally fuels their fire to find out what she’s up to, pun intended. The best part of this is Otis (Yuri Sardarov) making a Dungeons & Dragons reference.

But just after Dawson is amused at how wrong he is, she gets a phone call from Bria, and she and Severide rush to her apartment to find that her father is having a seizure. He stops breathing but Dawson is able to get him back just before the ambulance arrives. Instead of being grateful, Bria glares and tells Dawson that “they’re going to split us apart now.”

The next day, with Bria’s dad stable in the hospital, Dawson is determined to keep Bria’s words from coming true. Boden consults with Herrmann and Mouch (Christian Stolte) about whether or not he should confront his brother-in-law about his business, which looks to be fake. And Otis has figured out that Antonio is Brett’s mystery man, which makes Cruz flip:

"Cruz: We have to keep her from going down that path again."

At the hospital, Dawson recognizes Tina from the Department of Children and Family Services. She approaches her and confirms that yes, Tina is there for Bria and her father. But while Dawson tries to plead for Tina to take it easy on this case, she realizes that Bria has disappeared. Dawson winds up blaming herself, as much as Casey and Severide tell her not to.

But it’s not all bad news. Boden realizes that he was completely wrong about Julian—his company does exist and he’s made good on their deal, at a discount no less. And Brett realizes that Cruz and Otis know about Antonio, which is as hilarious as you think it is. She leaves them there before she has dinner with Antonio—dinner that takes a very serious turn because she realizes that this isn’t what she wants.

Brett tells Antonio that she didn’t want to “catch feelings” for him, and she leaves because she’s not wanting anything more than fun out of this. Watch the quasi-breakup scene below and weep with us:

To close out the episode, Severide and Dawson are still on the hunt for a missing Bria, in a few places you don’t want to be after dark. Will they find her? We’ll have to wait until at least next week to find out.

“The Whole Point of Being Roommates” is an episode where what happens with our characters is almost as important as what happens to them (which is somewhat amusing since the same could be said of this week’s Chicago PD, too). The episode has clear ideas it wants to push about certain stories, and the plot of the episode feels formed around that.

Obviously the buzzworthy part is Brett’s renewed affair with Antonio, and while it’s great for all the Brettonio fans that they’re back together, it takes awhile for that to gain any real steam. Them sleeping together is fine, but that’s not what fans really want. We want to know that they’re going to seriously stick it out, and they don’t.

The rumor is this won’t be the last of Brettonio, but even if it isn’t, the way this ends does feel like another tease—giving shippers what they want, but only for a little bit.

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What’s more interesting is how Dawson handles the Bria situation and the friction that it creates in her relationship with Casey, but that feels short-lived. It seems like Chicago Fire could’ve gotten more mileage out of that, especially since we haven’t really seen Dawson and Casey in conflict in this season. We’ve seen Casey vs. Severide, but the idea of Dawson and Severide vs. Casey never actually materializes.

(But the callback to Louie is really nice, especially since it does feel like Bria is almost a surrogate kid for Dawson to fill that Louie-shaped hole in her life.)

This week’s Chicago Fire season 6 episode isn’t the game-changer that the promos made it out to be, and it’s more about personal issues than any big rescues. Yet the actors, and how much we like to see them work together, carry the day even through some possible missed opportunities. You could say the whole point of this episode is how talented this cast is, and everything else will sort itself out.

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What did you think of this week’s Chicago Fire episode? Leave us your reaction to “The Whole Point of Being Roommates” in the comments.

Chicago Fire airs Thursdays at 10/9c on NBC.