SPOILER ALERT: The following contains spoilers for Chicago PD Season 13, Episode 1.

The Chicago PD Season 13 premiere has one goal: reinstate the Intelligence Unit. The unit was disbanded at the end of Season 12, but obviously without a unit, NBC doesn’t have a show. So “Consequences” has to undo the finale in a believable way—and it does so in a very Chicago PD way.

The latest bureaucratic adversary for Hank Voight and his team is Commander Devlin, portrayed by actor and comedian Joel Murray. (Audiences may have seen him on tour with Whose Live Anyway?) Although all of the claims against Intelligence have been dismissed, Devlin refuses to sign off on the unit’s reassembly, so Voight has to convince him. And by “convince,” he finds something to hold over Devlin’s head to strong-arm him into doing so. This approach is exactly what viewers expect of Hank Voight, and to be fair, he did attempt to talk it out first. But that would have been too easy for Chicago PD, and Jason Beghe (as always) nails the “gotcha” scene at the episode’s end.

Because the unit members have been scattered to various dead-end patrol jobs, the script by showrunner Gwen Sigan doesn’t have a lot of screen time for the rest of Intelligence. Kim Burgess has the biggest scene of anyone other than Voight, brawling with a suspect to protect another officer. It’s almost a shame that the fight ends with Voight walking in to save the day, because audiences know from numerous similar scenes over the years that Burgess is a much tougher fighter than she lets on.

She and Adam Ruzek step in to help Voight, and Sigan also opens the episode with a very much appreciated “tough love” talk by Trudy Platt. Hopefully there will be most of that in Season 13, especially since Platt points out that Nina Chapman isn’t speaking to Voight anymore. If not Chapman, somebody needs to be there to tell Voight what he doesn’t want to hear. Plus, any time Amy Morton says the quiet part out loud, it’s hilarious.

But the majority of the screen time in “Consequences” goes to The Night Agent alum Arienne Mandi, who is the latest actor to join Chicago PD. Her character Eva Imani is a tough-talking CPD officer working an ATF detail, and she enters into an alliance with Voight that gets her kicked off said detail, which opens the door for her to join Intelligence.

Audiences will likely be skeptical of her character only because the show has had a few short-lived additions. (The latest being Toya Turner, whose Kiana Cook is said to have taken a permanent position in another district rather than wait for Intelligence to return.) Mandi fits the tone of Chicago PD immediately and can hold her own with Beghe in their scene together. The question will be how Sigan and company develop her, because Eva’s tough exterior is par for the course on this series.

“Consequences” does everything that it needs to do. It brings the Intelligence Unit back together, introduces the new series regular, and makes several mentions of how things have changed in the month between Season 10 and Season 11. Whether it’s the mention of an absent Chapman or the close-ups on Ruzek and Burgess’ wedding rings, audiences get all the information they need. The only thing missing is any idea of what Season 13’s story or goals will be. There’s no bigger picture; it’s just about putting the existing one back together. But that’s also what viewers want, so this is a uniformly satisfying premiere.

Chicago PD airs Wednesdays at 10:00 p.m. ET/PT on NBC. Photo Credit: Courtesy of NBC.

Article content is (c)2020-2025 Brittany Frederick and may not be excerpted or reproduced without express written permission by the author. Follow me on Twitter at @BFTVTwtr and on Instagram at @BFTVGram. For story pitches, contact me at tvbrittanyf@yahoo.com.