What were Chicago Fire’s best moments this season? One Chicago Center ranks the top three moments that impressed us from Chicago Fire season 6.
When you look back on the latest season of Chicago Fire, what are the moments that you’re going to remember? We know what scenes have stuck with us, and that’s what this slideshow is about.
Over several months and almost two dozen episodes, there are a lot of moments. Each one of the One Chicago shows seems like it tries to pack as many jaw-dropping scenes into each episode as it can. But the biggest moments aren’t always the ones that mean the most, and the episodes that are the most memorable, may not always have the best moments.
That’s where we come in. Instead of looking for the biggest moments of the season, or the most surprising, we’re picking out our best scenes—the ones that we most enjoyed, that had the most meaning to the show, or that otherwise stood out as worth noting down in the records of Chicago Fire history.
SPOILER ALERT: This article contains spoilers regarding specific scenes from the sixth season of Chicago Fire. If you haven’t seen certain episodes, be aware of spoilers.
Click through the below slideshow to uncover our favorite moments from Chicago Fire season 6, and don’t forget to also check out our list of the season’s best episodes.
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.
2. Otis returns to Truck 81
Chicago Fire fans got a good scare when Brian “Otis” Zvonecek (Yuri Sardarov) was shot during the season’s first two-hour event. He did come back to Firehouse 51 on desk duty, but it was his official return to firefighting in “The Strongest Among Us” that got us a little choked up.
First of all, when Otis was shot several episodes earlier and then revealed to have lost feeling in his legs, we weren’t sure that the show wasn’t going to pull a Jimmy Borelli and write him out for good. But the storyline with Otis going through physical therapy, and also dealing with the fears that came along with a serious injury, was one of the best plotlines in the entire season.
Audiences’ hearts broke with Otis as we listened to him talk about how he’d lost his place, coming to the realization that so much of his identity was tied up in being part of Truck 81. We got to see, albeit only in a handful of scenes, the struggle he fought to get back on his feet again. And we saw how, while he was working a desk job at the firehouse, it was great but it wasn’t quite the same.
So when “The Strongest Among Us” revealed that Otis had indeed passed his physical and was back on the truck, there was much rejoicing—not just from his fellow firefighters and paramedics but from Chicago Fire fans as well, because we knew how much adversity he’d overcome and how proud we were of him for it.
1. Casey makes Captain
The fifth season of Chicago Fire had plenty of big moments, from a wedding to breakups to people almost being killed off. But there wasn’t really a huge moment for Chicago Fire season 6 until, in an honest surprise to him and to the audience, Matthew Casey found out he was being promoted.
Casey’s promotion ceremony, also taking place in “A Breaking Point”, was just note-perfect. From Dawson participating in the moment to the excellent speech singing his praises, it was the kind of moment that Chicago Fire fans couldn’t help but love. One of those warm and fuzzy moments that TV fans always remember.
But it was about more than just a bump in rank for one of our lead characters. It was important to the whole dynamic of the show, because most of the time, there’s reasons why our characters are not getting promoted. They make mistakes or we see higher-ups who undermine them. The promotion of Casey to Captain flew in the face of most of the show’s history.
And it also set up not one but two interesting dynamic shifts for the remainder of the season. As Casey found himself spending more time with Chief Wallace Boden (Eamonn Walker), the new rank also provided a new source of tension for him and Kelly Severide (Taylor Kinney). That fresh material led to some of the better story points in the remaining episodes.
Ultimately, the promotion was good for Casey, good for canon, and great for the fans—hence why it’s number one of our list.
Next: Chicago Fire season 6's best episodes, ranked
What were your favorite moments from the latest season of Chicago Fire? Let us know what’s on your Chicago Fire season 6 highlight reel in the comments.