Chicago PD season 7 character review: Vanessa Rojas

Our Chicago PD season 8 prognosis for Vanessa Rojas

Rojas is definitely the weakest link in the Chicago PD ensemble at the moment, but that can all change in season 8 with more experience for Lisseth Chavez and more unique ideas for how Rojas is written.

Chavez has to settle into the character a bit more and be able to hold her ground with the bigger personalities on the show. She feels like as much of a wide-eyed newbie as her character, but that will change with time. Any actor is a little bit rough around the edges when they first start playing a character, and Chicago PD is a particular challenge because of its tone, too.

The bigger issue is with the writers. They need to dig deeper into Rojas and find things that make her stand out. There are tough, streetwise cops on every TV crime drama, many of them with their own troubled pasts, and there are plenty of tough cops on this series. Instead of showing us Rojas as the hero and thinking we’ll like her because she broke a case or is the center of an episode, they can get the audience to embrace her more by fleshing her out to make her different.

There are lots of things about her that could be really cool. She mentioned in one episode that she’s biracial; why not explore that? Chicago PD has given Atwater almost all of the racism-type stories, but Rojas could also address some of those issues, too. What if she has to learn from her mistakes beyond just getting scolded by her colleagues? What about gender issues?

There are angles that would not only open up new stories, but also show more about who she is and what she believes in—and this is the time to take those next steps and cement her place on the show.

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