Warning: GIANT SPOILERS ARE AHEAD for the Season 8 finale of Chicago P.D., called "The Other Side."
The eighth season of Chicago P.D. was intense from start to finish, and "The Other Side" proves that P.D. still knows how to end a season with a bang. In fact, the Season 8 finale ended on several bangs, with gunshots guaranteeing some cliffhangers that will leave fans wondering about the aftermath all summer. With Burgess' life still in the balance, Voight breaking bad all over again, Atwater and Ruzek coming to blows, and Upton proposing to Halstead for all the wrong reasons, there are a lot of questions that need answers, and showrunner Rick Eid has dropped a tease about where Season 9 currently stands.
First things first: the #1 thing that fans probably should worry about at this point is Burgess' fate. In case viewers somehow had any doubts that Burgess doesn't break no matter what she goes through, she was brutally attacked multiple times before being shot twice in the abdomen, only to pull the keys off the corpse of one of her former captors, drag herself to a car, and hold onto life long enough for Halstead and Atwater to find her and rush her to Med. The episode didn't confirm her fate one way or the other, but the odds seem pretty good that she'll survive. Even if she does, however, there's no guarantee that she won't be changed by her latest of multiple traumas.
The rest of Intelligence pulled out all the stops to try and save her, although pulling out all the stops meant something different to different members of the team. Atwater and Halstead wanted to keep doing things by the book even though it was one of their own who had been taken, while Ruzek and Upton were more on board with Voight on bending the rules to try and find her ASAP. The conflict resulted in a pretty ugly fistfight between Atwater and Ruzek that Upton and Halstead had to break up.
Upton ultimately talked Ruzek out of continuing his crazed search by sending him to care for Makayla, as he'd promised Burgess he would, and Upton tracked down Voight, who had tried to throw her and Ruzek off by feeding them dummy info so he could do what he considered needed to be done. To Upton's credit, she made an impassioned plea to Voight to take the perp in rather than kill him and hide the body, and it even would have worked if the bad guy hadn't gotten his hands on Voight's gun, prompting Upton to shoot and kill him.
Voight sent her home so that he could take care of the body, and poor Upton was a mess by the time she got back to her apartment to find Halstead. Shaken up by her encounter with Voight and the fact that she killed a man, Upton was nearly in tears as she told Halstead that maybe they should get married.
And honestly, even the most diehard of Upstead shippers might find it hard to rejoice at the twist, considering how much of an emotional wreck Upton was when she kinda sorta popped the question, and I for one am actually hoping that Halstead proves yet again how well he knows her and doesn't immediately agree to what she proposed. She's clearly not in the right emotional place.
So, will Burgess survive? If so, how different will she be or not be? Will there be a time jump? Can Atwater find some more balance in Season 9? Will Upton and Halstead get married, or engaged to be married? Would marriage stop Halstead from theoretically having to testify against her? Why couldn't Upton and Voight call in the body, since her shoot was good? Is Voight plummeting down a slippery slope now that he has disposed of a body, when he seemed to be getting used to taking the higher road with Miller in the mix?
Chicago P.D. raised a lot of questions that haven't gotten answers and will need to be addressed in the ninth season. When I spoke with showrunner Rick Eid just a couple of days before the finale aired on May 26, he revealed how far ahead he's planning Season 9:
Not very far. We just finished writing the finale like two weeks ago, so we're trying to let our brains rest for a little while. And we will start up very soon and figure out hopefully, what happens next season. But a lot of things happened at the end of this finale that give us a good place to start, puts us in a good position to create some storylines. The finale is definitely intense and eventful.
"Intense and eventful" are definitely accurate descriptors when it comes to the Season 8 finale of Chicago P.D., and even the showrunner and writers aren't very far into planning what will happen for Intelligence in the aftermath, so answers may be a ways off for fans already eager to find out what happens next. Unfortunately, Chicago P.D. is now officially out of episodes in the 2020-2021 TV season, but the show will be back in the fall with Season 9.
Like Chicago Med and Chicago Fire, P.D. has already been renewed for another two seasons, so no matter what showrunner Rick Eid will have in store to kick off Season 9, the stories of the Intelligence Unit aren't ending any time soon, even if fans are now heading into hiatus. The good news? The summer TV premiere schedule has plenty of primetime options for the coming months.
