Warning: Spoilers ahead for the Season 6 premiere of Chicago P.D. Please come back once you've had a chance to watch the episode!
Chicago P.D. delivered a huge blow to fans last season when Alvin Olinsky, a major character who'd been around since the beginning, was killed off in a very dramatic fashion. Well, the Season 6 premiere picked the action up shortly after Voight had killed the man who ordered the hit on Olinsky while he was in prison, and now we know why. I had the opportunity to speak with showrunner Rick Eid at One Chicago Day a couple of weeks ago, and he told me that the depth of emotion in the finale basically demanded that this season continue to explore the immediate aftermath of Olinsky's death.
I think, given where the show ended last year and how emotional everyone was in the finale, that we felt we needed to just explore, 'and then what happened?' You know what I mean? What happened that night, that day and the next morning? So, it felt natural to start right where we left off.
As Rick Eid noted, Chicago P.D. does follow that exact tack in the premiere by having us follow a shattered Voight as he wallows a bit after Olinsky's murder and then gets suspended by his new boss for what she believes might be the unnecessary shooting of the man who ordered Olinsky's murder. Once Voight is suspended, he sets Antonio as the lead on the case Intelligence is working, but Ruzek's desire to use Voight's connections to try to solve the case as quickly as possible have him meeting secretly with his suspended boss to work all the angles possible. This puts Ruzek in direct violation of Antonio's earlier order to stay away from Voight while he's out. The episode tracks the team in the days leading up to Olinsky's funeral, meaning it probably covers up to a week immediately following his murder.
As you can imagine, tensions within Intelligence are running at an all time high. Everyone is still reeling from Olinsky's death, and Ruzek has major beef with Antonio, because Antonio refuses to back Voight up and say his shooting was good because he didn't actually see what happened. The two butt heads throughout the episode, with everyone else on the team trying to either keep the peace or simply do their jobs and stay out of it, and Antonio finally getting tired of Ruzek questioning or outright disobeying orders, which leads to them coming to blows.
So, as if it weren't enough to have recently lost a team member, they'll all have to deal with internal squabbles, while Voight continues to figure out how to bear the burden of the part he played in Olinsky's death. Without the wisdom of Rick Eid and the rest of the behind-the-scenes Chicago P.D. team, we might have missed out on all the good drama that came directly from the events of the finale, and that would have been a real shame.
You can watch Voight, Antonio and the rest of Intelligence deal with the fallout as Chicago P.D. airs Wednesdays on NBC at 10 p.m. EST. To see what else you can catch in the new season, check out our 2018 fall premiere guide.
