Chicago PD season 6 character review: Hank Voight

What it means

Hank Voight is an incredibly popular character, and the unquestioned core of Chicago PD. But this season confirmed what we were starting to suspect last season: that the character’s pretty much stuck, and as he goes (or doesn’t go), the show goes with him.

His arc once again dominated the entire season, and thematically it followed the same general path as the season before. It was Voight versus a powerful antagonist with Intelligence caught in the middle, and one of the other characters paying some kind of a price in the season finale. The only huge difference was that Kelton ended up dead, whereas Denny Woods just got arrested.

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Voight’s a fun character to watch and Jason Beghe is a great actor, but how many times can we tell this story? And how is this one supposed to resolve itself? Chicago PD has a tendency to find ways to get Voight off the hook for his behavior, but exonerating him of murder is on a whole other level and might stretch plausibility, depending on how they explain it. And he’s almost certainly going to get off the hook, because season 7 isn’t going to feature him in prison.

The other question is how his character can continue to evolve. Even if you set aside the way that this season ended, he hasn’t changed a whole lot in the last few years. But the world around him has, both on the show and in real life. So does Voight have to do anything different to reflect that, or is he just stuck the way he is and that’s the way he’ll always be?