Chicago PD and FBI crossover: 3 things we need in the episode

2. A teaching moment

Okay, so from a Chicago PD point of view, Upton is supposed to learn from working with the FBI and come back walking the straight and narrow a little more closely. That’s fine—what originally made her interesting when she joined the show was her adherence to rules and being a sort of counterpoint to Voight’s tactics, rather than following in his footsteps enough to make him livid about it.

But we need to find somewhere in these 42 minutes to watch Hailey learn her lesson. One of the flaws of the One Chicago franchise is that it skips over extended character arcs; for example, when Upton’s partner Jay Halstead (Jesse Lee Soffer) went into therapy, we only saw two scenes of him in treatment. Antonio Dawson (Jon Seda) went to rehab almost entirely off-screen. We can’t do that for this crossover to be worthwhile; we need to see Upton learn from the FBI characters and feel she’s a different person when this is over.

Otherwise, it’s just going to come off as a gimmick. Especially since, given that these are two different shows, we haven’t really seen the PD characters react to Upton’s change either. (Is she going to be MIA from an upcoming episode to line up with her being in New York? Or is this going to be one of those cases where a One Chicago character pops up on one show and then there’s no acknowledgement of that on their own show—like Adam Ruzek in this week’s Chicago Fire?)