Chicago Fire season 6, episode 19 recap: Where I Want To Be

Chicago Fire made major changes at Firehouse 51 this week, including one character leaving. Here’s what happened in Chicago Fire season 6, episode 19.

This week’s Chicago Fire changed the lives of several characters, but were they changes for the better or for the worse?

Thursday’s episode is called “Where I Want To Be” and opens with Otis (Yuri Sardarov) still doing well in physical therapy. Maybe overdoing. He’ll have to wait and see if the doctor clears him to be back on Truck again.

After Stella Kidd (Miranda Rae Mayo) risks being late to work because she’s fooling around with Kelly Severide (Taylor Kinney), she and the rest of the crew fight a fire at a stash house. It’s one-part fire, one-part crime scene, and we’re explicitly told how everything must be accounted for.

Jake Cordova (guest star Damon Dayoub) goes MIA when he’s needed, which leaves Stella having to get help from Severide to rescue a trapped woman. They get the job done, but where the heck was Cordova?

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That makes this a bad time for Chief Boden (Eamonn Walker) to ask if Cordova deserves to be a permanent part of the team. Still, he’s not the first firefighter on Chicago Fire to go rogue, so he basically gets a pass from Matthew Casey (Jesse Spencer).

Stella finds Sylvie Brett (Kara Killmer) and Gabriela Dawson (Monica Raymund) outside, so they can laugh about how “hot” her life is with Severide. But Stella admits the remarks from Severide’s mom are still on her mind.

"Brett: He’s come a long way from his wedding in Vegas days.Stella: What wedding in Vegas?"

Luckily for Brett, Ambulance 61 is called to a car accident where the victim has the Spanish word for “thief” spray-painted on the trunk of his car. Are the two crime scenes related?

Time to call in Antonio Dawson (Jon Seda) from Chicago PD, who talks about missing drug money. While we consider how much further they’ll go to get it back, Stella confronts Severide about that Vegas wedding and asks if there are “any other surprises” she should know about.

She wants to know if he has himself figured out, which is totally code for asking if he’s different now. And “I’m working on it” is not the right answer.

Dawson asks the woman that Stella rescued if she knows anything about money missing from the stash house. The woman tells Dawson that a man tried to kill her, but can’t describe him very well. While that’s going on, Antonio comes to ask Casey about the fire, and specifically Cordova. Is he a suspect? Chicago Fire cuts away before Antonio says anything.

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Instead, Casey finds Cordova at Molly’s and asks if there’s anything he needs to know. There are three bundles of cash definitely missing from the stash house. Cordova immediately gets angry at Casey’s accusation, and in turn he accuses Casey of just wanting him out of Firehouse 51 and away from Dawson. When Dawson finds out, she’s not happy with Casey either.

"Casey: It’s possible you’re letting your history with Cordova affect your ability to see this objectively.Dawson: Or you are."

The next day, Christopher Herrmann (David Eigenberg) is likewise in hot water with his wife. Cindy (Robyn Coffin) shows up at the house to inform him that she caught their son watching porn. As all the rest of the crew runs for it, Stella tells Casey she wanted “some time to myself” and asks him if he knew about the Vegas wedding. The two of them talk about being involved with people who are holding things back.

But then Casey has to finish dealing with Cordova, who now has to face Boden. Cordova tells them he saw someone else in the fire and followed him, which would match the story Dawson got from the victim. He then walks out, finds Dawson and begs her to tell him if Casey is reporting him to IAD—which is where Dawson draws a line with him.

Chicago Fire really needs another call about now, so here’s a baby stroller stuck in a fence over the river. After the baby is saved, Otis meets Cordova and has the crazy idea that if he can’t pass his next medical evaluation, he’s going to step aside and let Cordova permanently take his spot in the firehouse.

Herrmann presses Lee Henry into cleaning duty as punishment, while Stella decides that she is interested in moving into Lee Henry’s now-vacated apartment. Why would she want to move out from Severide’s place?

"Stella: We moved in together and we skipped the dating part, and um, I’m just starting to think it was a mistake."

Severide doesn’t hear this, because he’s huddling up with Casey and Boden to keep looking for the missing money. The two have found a false wall in the house, and when they take Cordova down to check it out, there’s the body of the man he saw and the money. Cordova was innocent all along and at least he gets an apology from Casey.

Casey says he’ll recommend Cordova for a permanent gig at Firehouse 51, but you can see from Cordova’s face he doesn’t want it anymore.

Stella informs Severide that she’s moving out because she doesn’t want to be “another mistake.” He tries to remind her that Brittany didn’t mean anything, but Stella says that’s what concerns her and leaves him standing in the locker room.

In the final few minutes, Chicago Fire has Cordova take the unprecedented step of showing up at Dawsey’s place. He says he’s turning down Casey’s job offer because he feels like all he’s been is trouble. When he says “sometimes things don’t work out the way you really wish they had,” one wonders if he means the job or his short-lived relationship with Dawson.

Casey understands and says he’ll put in a good word for Cordova wherever he chooses to go. We then move on to Otis seeing a ton of supportive texts from his firehouse family before he goes in for his next evaluation, and Stella emoting as she’s moved into her new apartment sans Severide. But that doesn’t mean he won’t show up there!

"Severide: I don’t care where you live. Wherever you are, that’s where I want to be."

So at least there’s still a good relationship between these two, even if they’re not cohabitating. But will it last? And is anyone a little bit concerned about Herrmann being Stella’s new landlord?!

“Where I Want To Be” is a Chicago Fire episode that some will love and some may hate. It has a lot of action, and a lot of big plot twists, but it’ll be a matter of personal opinion as to whether or not those twists are good ideas.

We finally say goodbye to Jake Cordova, and in looking at the totality of his character arc, you have to ask what the point was. If he was meant to create tension between Casey and Dawson, he did not do much of that because both of them are mature adults who could handle it. All he did, as she pointed out this week, was put Dawson on the spot.

You kind of understand why he wants her to support him, since she’s the only real friend he has, but that part is outweighed by how he should know that he can’t ask her to be in the middle and think she’s going to solve his problems.

Meanwhile, the Stella and Severide story once again feels like it’s going around in circles. While her reasoning in “Where I Want To Be” makes a certain amount of sense, Chicago Fire fans may think it feels like she’s overreacting to a marriage that we saw didn’t last and wasn’t that serious. Of course, Stella doesn’t know that, but it does change how we look at Stella’s decision-making.

And since this ship has already taken long enough to sail, it’s frustrating to have something else thrown at it again. They’re not broken up, just not living together, but for fans it’s still yet another speed bump the two don’t deserve. At least, hopefully, Chicago Fire better give us some hilarious Herrmann as landlord scenes.

The one big positive is that this episode is implied to pave the way for Otis’s return. But tying up all the loose ends had pros and cons, and we’ll see if some of these choices wind up backfiring or not in the last three episodes (counting a two-hour season finale!).

Next: Chicago Fire's most WTF shipper moments

What did you think of this week’s Chicago Fire episode? Leave your reaction to “Where I Want To Be” in the comments.

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

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