Chicago P.D. Season 13, Episode 7 ‘Impulse Control‘ is a pretty good midseason finale of the show. The episode does a great job of building on the figure of Raymond Bell, who was introduced a few episodes ago, and the hour is a good mix of suspense and thriller. But the lack of personal storylines leaves the episode feeling a little flat, particularly considering the reason we’re on the brink of 250 episodes is the characters.
Of all procedurals on TV, Chicago P.D. is perhaps one of the most inclined to do episodes that are just about the case and give us very little about the characters. And sometimes, it works. This isn’t a bad hour. The episode remains engaging all the way through, and we want Bell to be caught. We are on the team’s side, cheering them on.
It’s just that, in the end, we don’t watch procedurals because of case-heavy episodes, and particularly for a milestone episode, we expected the hour to be about something else. The team dynamics! One of the members of the team! Something, anything that provided us with actual depth. Instead, we get way too much of a creepy dude and very little depth for the characters we have to watch hour after hour.
As a rule, I have not been a fan of this show’s reliance on character hours instead of having an A plot, a B plot, and a C plot that involve different characters. I’ve always said Chicago Fire is a much better show because it’s way more balanced, and despite the fact that it rarely does character-heavy episodes, it still feels like we know those characters better than we do most people on Chicago P.D.
But this season, the show has done a much better job of integrating the team in everything, and of making Voight the kind of character he works best as. Not a saint, not a villain, but an antihero in that he’s very much willing to do whatever it takes for what he believes is right. He isn’t the character we’re meant to root for, but sometimes it’s also hard to root against him.
This hour, however, gives us very little in the way of that. We get more of a glimpse of Eva Imani’s dynamics with Voight, and how much she is like him in that she’s willing to break rules if it means helping people, but it feels more like reinforcing what we already knew than learning something new. The confirmation that the Voight episodes will apparently include her, because the show is banging the drum of how similar the two characters are, feels like something, but not much. All of that adds up to the cliffhanger feeling anticlimactic, as we know nothing will happen to her.
Even the Chapman mention is a tease at what could be but isn’t, at least not yet. Because this hour doesn’t care about who the characters are or what we can learn about them. It only wants us to engage with this case, right now. And that only works up to a point. Because we might engage now, but that doesn’t really build anything for the future.
Agree? Disagree? What did you think of Chicago P.D. Season 13, Episode 7 ‘Impulse Control’? Share with us in the comments below! And if you have your own opinion on the show, leave a review/rating on our Chicago P.D. hub!
Chicago P.D. airs on Wednesdays at 10/9c on NBC.
