Heading into the third episode of Chicago PD, we knew that the Intelligence Unit would be down a member. The second episode of the season served as the final episode for LaRoyce Hawkins, whose character, Kevin Atwater, chose to leave the Intelligence Unit in order to take a job in Atlanta, which would allow him to be there for his son and not put his life on the line every day.
With Atwater leaving town, we were curious to see how the dynamics on the show would shift in Chicago PD’s first episode without him. What we did not expect was that the show would choose to randomly sideline another member of the team, resulting in the Intelligence Unit working with a skeleton crew of just four members.
Benjamin Levy Aguilar failed to appear in Chicago PD season 14 episode 3
Benjamin Levy Aguilar’s Dante Torres was unexpectedly MIA in Chicago PD season 14, episode 3, leaving Voight with a team of three officers to work the unit’s latest case. There was no mention of what Torres was up to or why he did not appear in the episode; the team just went about their day, working the case with limited resources as Burgess, Ruzek, and Imani did everything they could to bring down the man responsible for killing and dismembering the body of a young woman.
It’s not at all unusual for actors in the One Chicago franchise to miss a few episodes throughout the season. This is by design, as series regulars no longer appear in every episode as part of cost-cutting measures, which results in characters being unexpectedly sidelined from time to time throughout the season. Sometimes we’re lucky enough to get an explanation as to where they are; other times the shows opt not to explain why a character is not present and hope fans won’t notice—which is wild, as they always do.
However, it certainly felt like an interesting choice to sideline Aguilar in the show’s very first episode without Hawkins.
With Atwater walking away from the Intelligence Unit, the team is now composed of five key members, making it one of the smallest Intelligence Unit teams we’ve seen in years. You would think that it would be all hands on deck for the show’s first outing without Atwater, but instead the writers quietly sidelined Torres, which left Burgess, Ruzek, Voight, and Imani to do the heavy lifting. This definitely worked out, especially for Voight fans, as the episode was a very Voight-focused episode.
We got to see Voight leading the investigation and working in the field with each of the three members of the unit on duty, which was fun. It’s been a bit since we’ve gotten to see Voight pairing off with multiple members of the Intelligence Unit in a single episode, but the reduced cast allowed the writers to give fans standout moments between Voight and Ruzek, Voight and Burgess, and Voight and Imani.
The writers were also able to dedicate some time to weaving FBI agent Charlie Boyden into the central storyline, giving us the chance to get to better know the man tasked with auditing the Intelligence Unit as Voight sized him up. It was definitely nice to get more intel on his origins and see him hold his own in scenes with Voight, with the episode setting Boyden up to take a bigger role in the episodes ahead.
As for Torres? Well, our hope is that he’ll be back on the job next week in episode 4, but it is concerning that we didn’t see him in the promo for the episode. Hopefully, this isn’t going to be an unexpected multi-episode break for the character, but we’ll have to wait until NBC releases episodic stills from the episode to get a better sense of whether Torres will return or if he’ll remain sidelined for another week.
Chicago PD airs Wednesdays at 10/9c on NBC!
Add us as a preferred source on Google