One Chicago: Biggest takeaways from Feb. 10’s Fire, PD and Med episodes

Chicago PD: Is Intelligence cutting people too much slack?

This week’s Chicago PD was the second episode in a row where an Intelligence member actively helped someone potentially evade justice.

In last week’s “In Your Care” viewers saw Kim Burgess (Marina Squerciati) telling one suspect to lie to her, so that she could then feed that false information to the other agencies looking for the rest of his group and allow them to escape.

In “Equal Justice” there was Jay Halstead (Jesse Lee Soffer) arresting a grieving father for killing his son’s murderer—but not before telling him everything that Intelligence had on him, and then advising him not to speak to them and ask immediately for a lawyer.

As many One Chicago viewers have already pointed out, Halstead didn’t go “full Voight” here (that would’ve been framing somebody else for the murder entirely and the dad getting off scott-free), but it’s a bit concerning that we’re seeing more instances of Intelligence choosing when they should do their jobs or not.

These characters have always been morally flexible, but when it becomes a regular thing, these plot twists lose their impact. It’s also a head-scratcher that this one was on Halstead, who’s been the closest thing Chicago PD has to a moral compass since the exit of Antonio Dawson (Jon Seda). So who’s going to be the counterpoint to all this arbitrary enforcement? Or is this whole unit just going to keep doing whatever each individual character feels is best and then no one is going to be on the same page?

The show works best when there’s some push and pull between Voight’s system and reality, and that doesn’t exist anymore. We shouldn’t get to the point where viewers are wondering not only if Intelligence is going to catch the criminals, but if they’re going to bother holding them accountable at all.

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