One Chicago questions of the week: Week of March 13

5.  Would Voight really have sanctioned Burgess and Upton taking on George Lair without backup?

At a critical point in the serial bombing investigation in the crossover event, Chicago PD‘s Kim Burgess (Marina Squerciati) zeroed in on a cryptic message that George Lair, the man who sold the bomber his C4, received from the suspect stating “package delivery 7p”. Burgess and Hailey Upton (Tracy Spridakos) quickly conferred on what the message meant and concluded that the package could be another bomb and that “7p” meant 7pm.

They sped out of the office to George Lair’s house, apparently without telling anyone else what they were doing. Once on scene, Burgess and Upton breached the house, guns drawn, and surprised the unsuspecting Lair. That didn’t stop him from putting up a pretty nasty fight to try to escape, tossing both Burgess and Upton around the room before they were able to subdue and cuff him. Where was their backup? Did they really head into such a dangerous situation on their own?

It was only after they’d subdued Lair that Upton and Burgess contacted Hank Voight (Jason Beghe) via phone and Chicago PD made clear that Voight knew what they were up to. But do we really believe that Voight would have sanctioned such a play? It was only hours before the bust that a sting had also taken place at Lair’s home to allow Adam Ruzek (Patrick John Flueger) to clone Lair’s computer hard drive – a sting that three quarters of the unit took part in because Lair was assumed to be so dangerous.

While it was great to see Burgess and Upton in action, it strained credibility that they would go into such an unknown, unpredictable confrontation without more members of the Intelligence Unit on hand, especially when the remainder of the unit was not far away. Could they have waited a few minutes for extra help?