It’s Christmas time on Chicago Fire tonight and everything on the midseason finale is about the holiday, including a falling, giant Christmas tree that traps holiday shoppers under its branches and the Winterfest festival, where Gallo (Alberto Rosende), Violet (Hanako Greensmith) and Ritter (Daniel Kyri) debut their microbrewery business with some good news and some bad news.
“All the accidents are holiday related as is Winterfest with the microbrew contest where our millennial trio is going to get to try and establish their beer brand,” executive producer/showrunner Derek Haas tells Parade.com. “Then we’re also like, ‘Do we do a giant cliffhanger?’ ‘No, we just did one [for the 200th episode].’ ‘Well, let’s do a personal cliffhanger.’ That was the thought process that went into making this episode.”
The personal cliffhanger is a big one involving Severide (Taylor Kinney) and his relationship with Stella Kidd (Miranda Rae Mayo), which is on the skids because he hasn’t heard from her in weeks. Now, it isn’t just Chief Boden (Eamonn Walker) that she is ghosting in the episode, but also her fiancé, so the wedding could be off!
“She has been gone a lot longer than she let anyone, including those closest to her, know,” Haas teased. “And then she goes even a little bit more silent on the two people who mean the most to her: Boden and Severide. So, this is a lot of problems for her that she’s going to come back to.”
That is, if she comes back. But it looks to be January before we actually find out what, if anything, has been up with Stella.
Haas talks more about the microbrewery, the pending love triangle between Blake, Violet and Chief Hawkins (Jimmy Nicholas), what to look forward to with Sylvie Brett (Kara Killmer) and more. Read on!
The microbrewery is a big part of this episode. Blake reminds me a little bit of Herrmann (David Eigenberg) when the show first began, who kept trying to find a successful business. Like Herrmann, Blake makes a lot of mistakes. Do you think the two have something in common?
Yes, for sure. Gallo, he definitely merits the Herrmann-it’s-not-going-so-well vibe of season 1. The get rich quick vibe. But it’s also his own undoing is usually how it happens. Things that start off as good ideas, don’t always become good ideas. And so, when these three—I call them the Brew Crew—when they decided they were going to make their microbrewery, it was already funny to me because putting Violet, Gallo and Ritter in scenes is funny to me.
Especially because Gallo and Violet have this on again, off again, unrequited love thing, and Ritter is stuck in the middle of it and is trying to start a business. All of those things just sounded like fun, and then to make them all come to a head at Winterfest, I always love those kind of things.
