Chicago Fire season 8, episode 13 takeaways: A Chicago Welcome

2. The guest appearance we didn’t get

The scene: Kelly Severide (Taylor Kinney) and Chief Wallace Boden (Eamonn Walker) are asked by Jerry Gorsch to approach Commissioner Carl Grissom about approving the purchase of additional fire gear. Grissom has put a freeze on the department’s budget, but Gorsch believes that Severide and Boden can convince him to lift it. Boden and Severide meet with Grissom and indeed, they’re able to have him approve the purchase order, but that’s never shown on screen.

The takeaway: We’re absolutely not holding the show responsible for this, but Chicago Fire did feel weird without actually seeing Grissom on screen. How exactly did Severide and Boden get him to change his mind? Or what about seeing him react to Gorsch being fired for those illegal kickbacks to his buddy? In fact, he could have even been the one to fire Gorsch! But we didn’t get to enjoy any of that, because Grissom was much talked about but never appeared.

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The script was clearly writing around him, and though we can’t say for sure, we’re going to guess that Gary Cole was too busy with one of his many other projects (he’s currently a series regular on the Black-ish spinoff Mixed-ish, to name one) to make another guest appearance. So this isn’t anyone’s fault, but it’s something that One Chicago fans should be more aware of. Sometimes we don’t get what we want on screen—but there can be very good reasons for that. Storytelling can often be shaped by off-screen logistics.

That being said, it would have been nice to see more of Boden’s reaction to what Ritter uncovered about Gorsch rather than just cutting away as Boden read the file. That was a writearound that we could have avoided.