Chicago PD season 5’s best moments, ranked

2. Upton’s revenge

The episode “Ghosts” finally answered the question that was posed in Chicago PD season 4: What was that super-secret investigation that Hailey Upton (Tracy Spiridakos) had been working on just before she came to the Intelligence Unit?

It took the show most of the season to get around to the details, but when it did, the story was more than worth the wait. Audiences discovered Upton had a nemesis named Ronald Booth who not only killed her partner, but attacked her as well. And when the two met again in this episode, it was Upton who got to deliver one heck of a beating.

“Ghosts” was clearly setting up for a one on one confrontation between Upton and Booth (played by a perfectly cast Titus Welliver), and the episode’s biggest moment was a stairwell struggle that was one of Chicago PD‘s best fight scenes of the year. It ended with Upton pummeling Booth, as if to get out all the rage and hurt he had provoked in her before.

The moment still holds up on so many levels. Spiridakos’s performance is excellent, her best of the year, while Welliver makes a more than worthy foe that the audience wants to see get the beating he so richly deserves.

But beyond that, in this scene we finally see so much about Hailey Upton. It shows her vulnerability, her emotion, and that for everything she’s done by the book, even she can be pushed to the same dark places the other Chicago PD characters routinely go. In this moment, she has for good crossed the line and become one of them—while also putting her own ghosts to rest.