One Chicago: Biggest takeaways from April 7’s Fire, PD and Med episodes

Chicago Fire: How many friends (and nemeses) does Boden have?

During “A Couple Thousand Degrees” we saw Kelly Severide (Taylor Kinney) get a shock when he found out that the struggling recruit he was teaching was the son of a battalion chief. Not only did that startle him, but Chief Mercer was an “old friend” of Chief Wallace Boden (Eamonn Walker)!

Now, Boden having been a firefighter for a long time and an officer for a long time, of course he’s going to know a lot of people—and many of those people will have moved up the ranks along with him over the years. But it is kind of amusing that a lot of the time if someone ranked higher than Lieutenant is involved, Boden is also involved.

Boden’s had to do battle with other battalion chiefs (as he almost did in this episode, wanting to stand up for Severide after Mercer threatened his job at the CFD academy), the fire commissioner and the fire commissioner’s lackey. Severide even worried that questioning Mercer’s son’s fitness would cause a problem for Boden, who’s had plenty of those over the years.

This is one of those TV show things that happens for less of a character reason and more of a big-picture reason; having the Chief mix with all these higher-ups is a way to give him things to do, as his job does entail dealing with the bureaucracy. But Severide’s also not wrong in implying that Boden’s got more than enough issues with the white shirts, and it wouldn’t be bad to see him with a few more friends who are, um, actually friends in the future.