Chicago Fire is shaking things up on April 16. Not only is the series bringing back Wallace Boden (Eamonn Walker), but it's employing storytelling techniques and trickery that we haven't seen in over a decade! "Post-Mortem" will revolve around a firefighting incident gone awry, and Boden comes back to his old stomping ground in an effort to determine what really happened.
It's a great premise for an episode, and one that the cast has already hyped up for its intensity, but we are more intrigued by the fact that "Post-Mortem" is going to employ flashbacks as Boden questions the firefighters involved in the aforementioned incident. Chicago Fire has been an aggressively linear show for the bulk of its time on the air. So linear, in fact, that the one time it used flashbacks was after the death of a beloved character.
Chicago Fire will bring back flashbacks
The season 3 premiere, "Always," contended with the loss of Leslie Shay (Lauren German). The character perished in the season 2 finale, and she returned in a bittersweet flashback detailing her interaction with another fallen firefighter, Andy Darden (Corey Sorenson). It was shocking as it was effective, giving fans to see Shay (and Darden) one last time.
The flashbacks in the upcoming episode are going to be a bit different. Instead of giving fans a payoff in terms of sentiment, they will serve to illuminate the inconsistency of memory in a tense situation. It is the same approach that's been taken in films like Rashomon (1950) and Memento (2000). But there is more to "Post-Mortem" than flashbacks.
Chicago Fire showrunner Andrea Newman told Hello! Magazine that there will be other POV tricks used to communicate the chaos of what went actually happened. "Told with flashbacks and unique POVs," she explained. "Chief Boden leads our team on a search to discover the how, who, and why of a fierce firefight that ended in disaster."
"Post-Mortem" will also include "unique POVs"
We may have actually seen some of these unique POVs in the promo. We watch as footage from the emergency situation is played in reverse. Now this is something we have never seen on Chicago Fire, and if implemented in the episode, will represent some exciting possibilities.
"'Post-Mortem,' is a thrill ride unlike any we've done before," the showrunner told TV Insider, before fleshing out the long term implications of Boden's return. "Wallace Boden grilling Pascal about his every decision, and how things went as wrong as they did," she noted. "That episode will define the relationship in some pretty emotional and complex ways."
It sounds like we're in for an absolute treat in terms of both form and narrative, and we cannot wait for Chicago Fire to return on April 16.