Chicago Fire season 8 character review: Sylvie Brett

What Chicago Fire season 8 means for Sylvie Brett

Thanks to both on- and off-screen changes, Sylvie Brett is in a terrible lurch after this season. She has suffered an incredible amount of loss, and she’s never been great with change.

Brett broke up with her fiance, is about to lose her second partner (because Annie Ilonzeh will not be returning to Chicago Fire next season), had her birth mother die, and her half-sibling is moving back out of Chicago. All she has at the moment is her job and the rest of the Firehouse 51 team.

That means first, the writers will have to decide how she navigates these emotional hurdles. Brett spent a lot of time crying at the end of last season as she constantly got hit with different reveals and most of them weren’t good. How will she react when it becomes official that Foster is leaving? (Unless the show does a time jump forward and just says she’s over it already.)

But after that, there’s basically a blank slate for the character. She doesn’t have a romance, she’s about to lose a good friend, and she will have to get a new partner. It’s a great opportunity from a writing standpoint to build new relationships and new directions for Brett. Why not explore some of the interactions we don’t commonly see on the show, like doing a Brett and Herrmann story? Or a Brett and Boden story?

And if Derek Haas and his team are serious about pairing her with Casey, this is the time to do it. It has been two seasons of “will they or won’t they,” and that’s enough for everybody, including Brett herself. She deserves to move forward—and to get some good news somewhere.