Chicago PD questions likely to be unanswered in season 7

With Chicago PD season 7 likely to be cut short due to the coronavirus pandemic, these major questions will probably be left unanswered until season 8.

One Chicago fans are bracing themselves for an early end to Chicago PD season 7. Production on all three One Chicago series, as well as dozens of other TV shows, was shut down in March because of current events, and many of the series that stopped filming are having to end their seasons ahead of schedule.

While NBC has not made any official announcement as to when the PD season is ending, next week will already be the season’s 19th episode, which is most of the way through the season anyway. Given that there would be only a handful of episodes left, and then we won’t see some of those, odds are very good that some major questions fans have this season won’t be answered.

The good news is that Chicago PD has already been renewed for season 8, so the show will return (there’s also no indication yet that a new season won’t air this fall) and answers will hopefully get revealed then. But here are the biggest uncertainities unlikely to get resolved this season, leaving viewers to speculate about them:

1. Will Upstead get together?

Many Chicago PD fans want to know what will happen with Upstead. Will they get together romantically, as the show seems to be teasing? And what will become of their professional partnership now that Hailey Upton (Tracy Spiridakos) is on loan to the FBI (as in Dick Wolf‘s other series FBI)?

We saw what happened to Jay Halstead (Jesse Lee Soffer) after his last partner—and his most serious love interest—left for New York. What will his reaction be to Upton doing the exact same thing? Will we even get to see how Halstead feels about it, since the storyline is on a whole other show?

Speaking of feelings, One Chicago fans have been waiting for either Halstead or Upton to confess their romantic feelings to no avail. Hailey almost told Jay how she felt about him in the Chicago PD midseason premiere, but she got cold feet at the last minute.

Of course, if you want to get really technical, Jay almost said something important to Hailey during the season 6 finale “Reckoning” after she told him he would “forget about her just fine.”

There’s just too much uncertainty to expect any kind of answer about Upstead before Chicago PD season 7 ends. We don’t know how the show is going to handle Upton being in New York; it could work that into canon and have her absent for an episode or two, or it could totally ignore it and she ends up being in all the remaining episodes. That depends on several different behind the scenes factors that fans have no way of knowing.

And even if Upton doesn’t leave on screen, the writers don’t seem in any particular hurry to get clarity about their relationship. They could continue to drop hints, or even be building toward some other big event that forces the issue, such as how Halstead was shot earlier this season. But they would be more apt to continue to slow-play the subject than clear it up, especially since that’s the kind of thing most shows would save for a season finale.