Lines Crossed and Loyalties Tested: The Grit Behind Chicago’s Elite Police Unit”

The Chicago PD Season 12 premiere very clearly wants to shake things up for Hank Voight — but it winds up being proof of why the NBC show actually does need a creative overhaul. Season 12, Episode 1, “Ten Ninety-Nine,” seems disjointed and underdeveloped, while going to many of the same places the series has gone before. While there are moments of entertainment, it feels as tired as Voight himself seems to be.

“Ten Ninety-Nine” picks up somewhat over a month after the events of the Season 11 finale, in which Voight was abducted and nearly killed by a serial murderer, and Detective Hailey Upton resigned from the Intelligence Unit. The episode mostly serves as an exploration of Voight, with just a few hints about where Season 12 will take the series. Those hints suggest it could be a great season, but only if the show breaks the old habits that the premiere relies too much on.

The Chicago PD Premiere Is a Voight-Centric Episode

But Does Voight Actually Learn Anything?’

One quirk of Chicago P.D. is that it goes back and forth between being a show centered on Hank Voight, and a show about the Intelligence Unit that Voight leads. It’s an understandable dichotomy, because the writers have set up Intelligence as a unit that revolves around Voight; not only is he the boss, but everyone else looks up to him and on many occasions, they blame him — sometimes justifiably and sometimes not. Voight is the center of the universe in-show, so it’s not a shock that so much time is devoted to him. However, Chicago PD is at its best when the writers remember that the Intelligence Unit is a team, and the best Voight episodes are the ones where he gets to grow beyond the “badass cop” idea. “Ten Ninety-Nine” doesn’t have either of those things.

The gist of the episode is that Voight is coping with his near-death experience and, to a lesser extent, Upton’s departure by working constantly. “Lesser extent” because Upton is barely mentioned; any fan hoping for a clue as to where she ended up after that taxi cab took her away is out of luck. An opening montage shows Voight changing clothes in his office and jumping from one call to the next. He forms a sort of bond with a witness at the scene of a triple murder named Rabbit, and from that point on the episode gets into familiar territory. Voight goes off on his own without explaining much to his team. Voight does something (actually, several somethings) that are legally questionable. Voight refuses to admit that he has any kind of problem until someone else calls him out on it. An exchange between him and Rabbit kind of sums up the whole show:

The episode isn’t about police work; in fact, Assistant State’s Attorney Chapman points out how weak the case is. It’s about Voight working too much and too recklessly, and why. But that’s not anything that longtime Chicago PD fans haven’t seen before. Contrast that with episodes like Season 11, Episode 6, “Survival,” which shone a light on Voight’s vulnerabilities in a much more compelling way. It had a great plot that played right into Voight’s personality, and gave Jason Beghe a full range of emotions to portray. In contrast, the plot for “Ten Ninety-Nine” seems to be built around Voight brooding, with story beats skipped over as necessary. And Beghe, despite having the lion’s share of screen time, doesn’t do anything out of the ordinary — even in the penultimate scene when Chapman confronts Voight in his office. He’s done so much more, and there have been much better Voight episodes, too.