Chicago Fire season 7 character preview: Wallace Boden

What will happen

Unfortunately for Boden, and the audience, the Grissom problem doesn’t seem to be going away any time soon. We don’t know for sure that Gary Cole will be reprising his role, but it’s a safe bet. The show has also cast a new actor to play one of Grissom’s underlings, who comes to monitor the firehouse and generally try to get everyone into trouble.

That sets up a fairly straight-forward story in which Boden doesn’t like the new guy, and the two butt heads while the new guy does a bunch of underhanded stuff to make Firehouse 51 look bad. This will make Boden (and probably other characters as well) angry, but Boden can’t throw the guy out because he outranks him, so he’ll have to sit back and plot what to do with the man.

Fans should expect that most of Boden’s screen time in Chicago Fire season 7 will be tied up in this bureaucratic battle with the bad guys. He’s the character who is central to that storyline, so he has to be involved in it to the very end, whenever that is. If anyone else stopped Grissom, it would not be nearly as satisfying.

Maybe we’ll see more of his wife Donna Robbins-Boden (Melissa Ponzio) to help her husband with his new headaches, or Boden reminding Casey to keep his eye on the ball as Casey deals with his personal problems. But we don’t expect any huge surprises for Boden. Not when he has such obvious unfinished business.

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