Chicago Fire season 8 character review: Stella Kidd

Our prognosis

Chicago Fire season 8 answered the question of who Stella Kidd is other than Kelly Severide’s girlfriend. We saw her as a potential leader, as a teacher, and even a little bit of a Firehouse 51 morale officer. She tried to cheer up Blake Gallo (Alberto Rosende) and Joe Cruz (Joe Minoso) in separate episodes this season, and she was pretty good at it.

So what role do the writers see for her going forward? These are all good things, but they also meant that Stella was kind of everywhere this season, and didn’t make a significant impact in the overall story arc. She had great individual moments, but wasn’t one of the major players in the big picture. And considering that she’s the show’s only female firefighter, you can’t have her bouncing around between a bunch of smaller stories for too long.

The most obvious arc would be to keep moving her up the career ladder toward promotion, but the firehouse already has four officers. There’s no place for Stella to go in that sense. The writers did leave one plot thread dangling with her looking for her missing Girls on Fire recruit, but is that a big enough story that it’s worth going back to in season 9? Or do they just start fresh and come up with a whole new challenge?

We’ll have to wait and see, but this is worth saying one more time: how about exploring Stella’s troubled past that the show dangled when her ex-husband returned, and hasn’t seriously gone into since? Fans don’t care about Tyler’s fun high school anecdotes; there’s a lot about Stella Kidd that we don’t know, and as she moves forward in her life, this would be the time to get into it.

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