Chicago Fire season 6’s best moments, ranked

3. Dawson’s great escape

In the season’s fourth episode “A Breaking Point” what should be a mundane errand goes very wrong for Gabriela Dawson (Monica Raymund). Out to pick up a gift for her husband to celebrate his impending promotion, she instead winds up trapped inside a half-collapsed parking garage.

Dawson does eventually extricate herself from the rubble and is reunited with an understandably very worried Matthew Casey (Jesse Spencer), and her great escape—helping someone else get out first before saving herself, in true Gabriela Dawson fashion—is one of the season’s most entertaining moments.

For one, it’s just a lot of fun to watch Dawson essentially play MacGyver, figuring out how to get everyone out of the parking garage before the rest of it comes down on their heads. It proves that our heroes are heroes, even when they’re not in uniform.

For two, the fact that she helps extricate the very soldier who’s been giving her attitude all episode says a lot about her character; after that some other folks might just let him dig himself out, but not Dawson (or anyone on Chicago Fire, really).

And in retrospect, there’s a third element that makes this memorable—now that we know she won’t be returning to the show next season, this was also the last true spotlight episode for Dawson. She had big moments in the rest of the season, but this was the biggest and in this escape, she proved why she’s so beloved by many One Chicago fans.