One Chicago: Biggest takeaways from Feb. 17th’s Fire, PD and Med episodes

Chicago PD: Did Ruzek make the right decision—either of them?

Adam Ruzek (Patrick John Flueger) took center stage in “Instinct” and like Jay Halstead (Jesse Lee Soffer) last week, now he has a decision he has to live with for the rest of his life. Actually, he has two of them.

Desperate to help his friend Tommy stay in one piece and make it through the rest of their case against a homicidal drug dealer, Ruzek reluctantly drove him someplace that Tommy could obtain more crystal meth—good for the case, terrible for Tommy and his family, and certainly in a hugely moral grey area.

Later in the episode, when said drug dealer had Tommy at gunpoint and Ruzek had a weapon trained on him, Adam hesitated because he saw several people filming them with their phones. Already having been warned by Hank Voight (Jason Beghe) that he’d been complained about for an earlier altercation caught on a security camera, Ruzek hesitated and the drug dealer shot Tommy.

Though Adam then killed the dealer, he lamented the death of his friend. It’s hard not to agree with him; chances are every One Chicago fan could guess how Chicago PD was going to make that moment turn out. It’s another scene where the show has depicted the downside to the increased scrutiny of police behavior.

If Ruzek had pulled the trigger first, his friend would still be alive, and as he pointed out to Voight afterward, it almost certainly would have been a justified shooting (the dealer was making it very clear what he was going to do). You’d like to think that if it became an issue, someone like Voight or Deputy Superintendent Samantha Miller (Nicole Ari Parker) would have come to his defense. Or will the series always depict change as an obstacle?

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