Chicago Fire season 8 character review: Christopher Herrmann

What Chicago Fire season 8 means for Christopher Herrmann

When it comes to Christopher Herrmann, Chicago Fire fans generally know what to expect. He’s a character who fills a very specific spot on the show and doesn’t change much; he’s the supporting player who occasionally comes out of the woodwork with a vengeance.

And that works—because David Eigenberg is a wonderfully versatile actor who can play pretty much anything that gets thrown at him. If this were baseball, he’d be a utility player. Viewers saw that again this season, with another healthy balance of Herrmann doing funny things and then Herrmann having some incredibly poignant moments. He’s great at comic relief, but he’s not just on the show to be funny, either. He can fill any necessary spot in the script.

Eigenberg had the season’s best moment when Herrmann confronted the CEO of Arnow Mattress Company about Otis’s death (in a scene you can watch again above). He was angry, emotional and also desperate for the other man to understand. That was the scene where audiences got the full impact of losing Otis; not that we hadn’t felt it before, but that scene was the biggest gut punch and the reason why it succeeded so well was because of Eigenberg’s performance.

There’s not much to say about Herrmann’s overall arc as a character, because he tends to swim in the same lanes every season. He’s not going to have a massive plot twist or a character shift the way that some of the other characters might. But what fans saw in season 8 was that he remains one of Chicago Fire‘s most memorable characters, and he hasn’t lost any of his bite, or his heart.