The 5 best Chicago PD season 5 episodes

2. The Thing About Heroes

“The Thing About Heroes” was the most thought-provoking episode of this Chicago PD season, so it was easy to see why NBC pushed it up the schedule by a week to make it the second episode of the season.

It mixed two high-profile topics, in tackling both distrust of the police and the profiling that often takes place, particularly when terrorism is involved. A patrol officer disappears after a bomb blast, and is suspected of being involved with the terrorist group who set it off. It’s only after a lot of digging from Kim Burgess (Marina Squerciati), who had trained said officer, that the team finds out he was working to stop the terrorists.

Squerciati is in great form throughout the episode, which demonstrates how Burgess has come into her own since becoming a full-time member of Intelligence, and in general just how much more mature—and more jaded—she is now compared to when she was on patrol in the show’s first season.

But this episode’s biggest strength is its guest cast. Corey Reynolds (Murder in the First and The Closer) appears as an FBI agent who joins the crew, and Ben Youcef (Law & Order and Munich) is stellar in the role of accused officer Frank Toma. This is really Frank’s story, and Youcef puts us in Frank’s head as he goes from earnest cop to terror suspect to a man who winds up broken by the end of the episode.

What he ultimately chooses to do is the second-saddest moment of the entire season, and that’s saying a lot considering that he’s a character we just met about a half-hour earlier.