The great news for Chicago Fire is that Dermot Mulroney makes an immediate impression as Chief Dom Pascal — the question is whether or not fans are going to get tired of him. The character doesn’t win over many of his new colleagues in the premiere and is even shown to sort of be in trouble with his wife at the end of the episode, although it ends with her letting him back into their home after changing the locks. But even conceding that the point of Pascal is to shake things up around Firehouse 51, there’s just not a lot to embrace about this guy yet.
Episode 1 keeps Pascal fairly enigmatic, presumably because showrunner Andrea Newman (who penned the episode) doesn’t want to explore too much of his character right out of the gate. The antagonism he brings doesn’t work as well if the audience warms up to him too quickly. Yet what is revealed about Pascal has been done before. An ex-colleague of his appears in his new office and asks if he’s okay after “what happened in Miami.” Yet this series has already had the “character who may or may not have done something bad on a past call” storyline with Brett Dalton’s character Jason Pelham. And the scene with Pascal’s spouse, portrayed by Private Practice alum KaDee Strickland, raises more questions than it answers. Mulroney doesn’t really get to show much of Pascal’s humanity, and even just a little bit of that would have gone a long way to getting viewers on his side.
As it is, the majority of his screen time is making things difficult for the existing characters — and those scenes aren’t always successful. It’s a head-scratcher when Pascal presents Kelly Severide with the General Orders Manual and points out that there’s a rule that would prohibit him and his wife Stella Kidd from working on the same shift together. Pascal makes a comment about “keeping an eye on” their relationship as it relates to their work. However, if Pascal knew enough to know that Severide and Kidd are married, then wouldn’t he also be aware of the fact they’ve been working together while in a relationship for years, and therefore not a liability to 51? He doesn’t need to know the details of their relationship to figure out the timeline. That scene comes across as more of an attempt to make Stellaride’s lives more difficult, than any reasonable criticism. And that so far is the early hurdle for Pascal to clear. Of course he’s going to be different, and he can even be a pain, but he has to make the audience want to watch him.
