When Season 13 of Chicago P.D. premieres tonight, there is no Intelligence Unit. And Commander Devlin (Joel Murray) is in no hurry to sign it back into existence.
Voight (Jason Beghe) has been transferred to the Rapid Response Unit, where he’s allowed to handle ongoing crimes but do no investigations, Adam Ruzek (Patrick John Flueger) and Kevin Atwater (LaRoyce Hawkins) are back in uniform, Kiana Cook (Toya Turner) has transferred permanently to another unit, and Dante Torres (Benjamin Levy Aguilar) and Kim Burgess (Marina Squerciati) are without their badges and no longer police. It isn’t hard to imagine that everyone is taking the new circumstances hard.
“Both Burgess and Torres, they don’t have their badges, so they’re really feeling it,” showrunner and executive producer Gwen Sigan says. “Burgess really didn’t do anything, I’ll say [she is facing the heaviest fallout].”
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“Yeah, but Torres feels it’s all his fault,” series star Beghe disputes. “I think he’s got a guilty conscience.”
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“He definitely, I think, is believing when we find him that he deserves in some way to be punished because of what he did,” Sigan adds.
What Torres did was to develop a personal relationship with his CI, Gloria Perez (Yara Martinez). This relationship, considered official misconduct, was exposed by Deputy Chief Reid (Shawn Hatosy), who used it to blackmail Voight and the Intelligence Unit, and then bring them down.
Voight, of course, is fighting to get his unit back together since Reid’s assassination at the hand of Rennie Otero (Jason Sanchez) in the Season 12 finale, which was finagled by Voight so that Otero could get revenge for Reid’s having murdered his father and Voight could try to get the investigation into his unit dropped when it was discovered how corrupt Reid was.
Related: Meet the New Chicago P.D. Season 13 Cast Member Joining the NBC Drama in First Look (Exclusive)
In the meantime, while working with the Rapid Response unit, Voight comes across a crime that he feels compelled to investigate even though he’s told by Devlin to step down. Voight, being Voight, ignores the command and finds a way to finagle working the case by connecting with Naomi Kerr (Arienne Mandi), the newest addition to the Chicago P.D. cast.
Photo by: Elizabeth Sisson/NBC
“The character is really designed to, in many ways, become a bit like a partner for Voight,” Sigan says. “We wanted to explore this new side of him by allowing him to see it in somebody else. So, there are a lot of similarities between the two of them. And she’s also very different than some of our members in the unit as well, and so we get a lot of new dynamics. She’s somebody who has no idea who Hank Voight is, she doesn’t really care, you know? She’s coming in the first episode a bit not respecting authority, a bit thinking she knows the answers, a bit just very confident. And that doesn’t necessarily play well with others, which I think for Voight is really refreshing. It’s really just, I understand it, I see this person, I get her, so it’s been really fun and I think it adds a lot of new dynamics to the whole unit.”
Beghe also sees the similarities between Kerr and Voight. “It’s kind of like for me with my kids, I see them having similar impulses, and with the ones you love and care about, you try to help them not make the same mistakes that you feel you did. You don’t have to go through a wall of fire to learn a lesson every time. So, he sees himself in her and he doesn’t want her to learn the hard way, which he did.”
Related: Chicago P.D. Star Teases Major Trouble Ahead in Season 13 Set Photo
With everything going on, this is one of the times that Voight is most at risk of any that we’ve seen since Season 1, since the consequences don’t just fall on him, but on the entire unit. And he takes it to heart, because this is a changed Voight.
Photo by: Elizabeth Sisson/NBC
There was a line last season where Voight told ASA Chapman (Sara Bues) that “he doesn’t get more,” meaning happiness, and then, with his dying breath, Reid said to him, “You’re worse than me.”
“Hank Voight is developing, he’s evolving over 13 years. And Hank Voight experiencing that moment of, ‘I don’t get more,’ it would have been impossible in Season 1 because he really didn’t self-reflect,” Beghe tells Parade. “He has been able to now examine himself a lot more, and this not being able to get more, I think, though I’m not sure that he’s completely emotionally able to experience that, but he can see it as a fact and just accept it.
“That’s kind of how he copes, is that he has seen it for what it is, and that is, I don’t get more. I think that if I really pulled the string and he was in therapy or whatever, it might be because he, somewhere deep inside, feels he doesn’t deserve it, or he wouldn’t want to hurt or disappoint the ones he loves. Whether or not that’s true remains to be seen.”
Chicago P.D. premieres tonight at 10 p.m. ET/PT on NBC. Streams next day on Peacock.
Next,Chicago P.D. Adds New Series Regular for Season 13
