Which One Chicago finale had the best cliffhanger?
Chicago Fire, Chicago PD and Chicago Med’s fall finales all left viewers hanging, so which One Chicago cliffhanger was the best?
When the One Chicago franchise signed off Wednesday, every single show left things open-ended. Chicago Med, Chicago Fire and Chicago PD all featured cliffhangers at the end of their midseason finales.
That probably didn’t come as a surprise to fans; many TV shows now use cliffhangers in all of their finales, and particularly the One Chicago series seem to love them. They’re an easy way to entice audiences to come back next year, if only to get the answer to who broke up, who got together, or who didn’t actually die in that fire.
But each one of the shows had something in their final moments this season that left the viewer either upset, confused, or some mixture of both. Each one wanted to create massive stakes and make it seem like the entire series was going to change. Did they really alter that much? Were they worth the wait?
Which of the midseason cliffhangers was the best? That’s the question we’re trying to answer by analyzing all three of them, starting with:
Chicago Med
What happened: Dr. Will Halstead (Nick Gehlfuss) became the only witness against gangster Ray Price when the FBI’s other informant died at the hospital. That meant Will was taken by the task force into protective custody, still without telling his fiancee Dr. Natalie Manning (Torrey DeVitto) the truth—and leaving her sobbing outside the church where they were supposed to be married.
What we think: It was a no-brainer that something was going to ruin Will and Natalie’s wedding day. The One Chicago shows love their relationship drama, and relationship drama doesn’t get a lot bigger than screwing up a wedding.
The protective custody part was definitely a surprise; it seemed more likely that Natalie and Will would have some kind of a fight over his undercover work, and she would decide not to marry him. But when you start to think about it seriously for a few minutes, it’s sort of a lame duck ending.
Nick Gehlfuss is not leaving Chicago Med, so Will isn’t going to move to Alabama and change his name to Cranjis McBasketball. He has to come back at some point. Hopefully that’s not right away with the show handwaving this somehow (i.e. a time jump) and sucking all the suspense out of it, but he’ll be back.
The one big plus for this ending is that Natalie still doesn’t understand what’s been happening, so even when Will resurfaces, there’s still going to be a lot of explaining to do. And presumably a lot of conflict between them. But there’s another wedding planned before the end of the season, and it wouldn’t be a surprise if that’s Manstead, part two.
How we’d grade it: A solid 2nd place out of 3, for ultimately not being a huge shocker but being creative and preserving more tension for when Chicago Med returns.