This fall, all three One Chicago shows quietly dropped an episode that reminded fans why this universe still hits harder than almost anything else on network TV. Chicago Med leaned into messy personal fallout, Chicago Fire burned down a cornerstone of 51, and Chicago PD delivered a slow-burn horror story that might haunt Voight for the rest of the season.
We used IMDB ratings and fan chatter to pick the highest rated episode of each Chicago franchise, and then we ranked them against each other.
No. 3. Chicago Med – “A Game of Inches” (Season 11, Episode 2)
If you like your medical drama with a side of soap, “A Game of Inches” is your kind of hour. On paper, it’s about a cosmetic leg-lengthening surgery gone sideways. In reality, it’s about the emotional fallout of Dr. Asher’s surprise pregnancy and the very complicated triangle she’s now orbiting.
Asher walks into work carrying two secrets at once: she’s pregnant, and the father is Dean Archer, not Dr. Ripley, the man she just broke up with. Med being Med, the gossip spreads faster than a trauma page. Archer has everyone cracking “older dad” jokes. Ripley’s trying to act okay while clearly not okay. Even Dr. Frost ends up serving as a sounding board for Ripley’s bruised ego.
Their main case is a guy who used his life savings to surgically get taller so he could impress the woman he met online. I mean, that feels absurd until it doesn’t. When an infection threatens his legs, Archer just wants to save his life and pull the rods. Ripley sees the terror behind the bravado: a man convinced his height is the only thing that’s ever made him visible. Their clash in the OR isn’t just about medicine; it’s about Asher, resentment and who gets to decide what “quality of life” means.
Meanwhile, Will Halstead pops back into town for a Bears trip with his stepson, Owen, and immediately stumbles into another crisis: a teenager named Jasper being used as a drug mule. The storyline escalates into a gun-toting attempt to recover the swallowed balloons and ends with Owen being shot, forcing Sharon Goodwin to call Natalie as Will refuses to leave his son’s side.
By the end of the hour, Asher and Ripley are forced to operate together, Archer gets a genuinely sweet moment of support from his ex, and the episode quietly resets a bunch of relationships without ever feeling like pure melodrama. It’s busy, it’s messy, and it’s exactly the kind of ensemble chaos that makes Med work when it’s humming.
No. 2 Chicago Fire – “Mercy” (Season 14, Episode 4)
Chicago Fire has threatened the stability of Firehouse 51 plenty of times, but “Mercy” goes after something even more personal: Herrmann’s family home.
The episode opens with Cindy taking a job now that the kids are older, Annabelle conveniently “sick” on a test day, and Herrmann heading into what he thinks will be a normal shift. Then a house fire call comes in, and the address knocks the wind out of him. It’s his.
What follows is a nightmare any firefighter parent has imagined. Herrmann is in full panic, trying to get his daughter on the phone while 51 barrels toward the blaze. Severide ignores district lines to take the call, the whole house converges on the scene, and for a few agonizing minutes, no one knows where Annabelle is. Cindy finally arrives with the best possible news: Annabelle went to school after all. She’s safe. The house is not.
Herrmann throws himself into the burning structure anyway, desperately grabbing photo frames and keepsakes until Vasquez physically drags him out. Moments later, an explosion finishes off what was left. The rest of the hour tracks Herrmann as he ricochets between shock, guilt, and that hollow feeling of realizing your home is now a pile of ash and twisted beams.
He’s convinced it might be his fault; he rewired some outlets himself, and the idea that cutting corners to save money could have killed his family eats at him. Severide and Van Meter dig into the origin point and eventually clear him. It was a leak near the stove ignition caused the fire, but that doesn’t magically fix the grief.
Around that central gut punch, the show weaves in Violet and Novak’s paramedic pilot program with Capp as the temporary third on Ambo. It should be a disaster, for obvious reasons: Capp has a thing about needles. But he steps up on a call involving a patient mid-acupuncture and later he winds up with a needle stuck in his own neck back at the house.
The episode closes on a signature Fire grace note: Mouch helping Herrmann sift through the remains of his home and somehow finding Cindy’s mom’s ring in the rubble. Herrmann can’t get the house back, but he gets a piece of his family history back, and that’s enough to keep him moving forward.
“Mercy” works because it’s not about a big stunt fire. It’s about what happens after the flames are out and the cameras go away.
No. 1: Chicago PD – “Impulse Control” (Season 13, Episode 7)
If “Mercy” punches you in the gut, “Impulse Control” takes a slow, twisting knife to Voight’s psyche.
The episode drops us into the middle of a mystery that’s already under his skin: someone is sending Voight old photos of himself as a battered kid in a hospital bed, along with messages telling him to retire or be exposed. It’s personal, it’s invasive, and it drags him back into a past he’s spent decades burying.
At the same time, Voight is laser-focused on another man whose family history is poisoning the present: Raymond Bell. Bell’s son went on a violent spree before dying, and in his final moments he implied his father was even worse. Bell now has custody of his young granddaughter, Julie, and Voight cannot stomach the idea that she might be living with a monster.
When a male sex worker named Michael Murray ends up dead after being chased through Bell’s neighborhood, the unit starts pulling threads. Michael was a user, a hustler and had just fought with his pimp; on paper, it’s easy to chalk his death up to the life he was living. But his injuries echo the way Bell’s son used to attack his own victims. It feels learned, not random.
The investigation leads them to Aaron, a mentally ill gardener who used to work for Bell. Aaron claims Bell punished him for stealing by cutting off two of his fingers and talks about a “wine cellar” where people go in and never come back out. It sounds like paranoid rambling until Julie, the granddaughter, casually refers to “ghosts” down there and mentions the name Aurelia, a nurse with a drug problem who’s been missing for years.
The more they dig, the clearer the pattern becomes: Bell isn’t just an abusive father. He’s likely a serial killer operating along a stretch of highway, with a body count that could easily crack double digits. The wine cellar is not a metaphor. It’s a tomb.
All of this is playing out while Voight is still being blackmailed with his own childhood trauma, and that’s what makes “Impulse Control” land so hard. He’s staring at a man who may have created a generational cycle of violence and wondering if he’s doing enough to break his own.
By the time Imani goes rogue, racing to Bell’s house after a terrified call from Julie and confronting him without waiting for backup, the tension is unbearable. It’s not just about catching a bad guy anymore; it’s about whether the unit can save a little girl before history repeats itself in the worst possible way.
“Impulse Control” is PD at its best: no big car chases, no flashy shootouts, just a relentless, suffocating sense of dread wrapped around a character study of a man who has spent his life trying to make sure kids don’t go through what he did.
It’s easy to see why fans have it at the top of the fall rankings. It lingers.