Chicago P.D. Season 14, Episode 3 ‘Under the Surface‘ brings the focus back to Voight, but it does so in a way that does a really good job of showcasing how much Voight has actually grown. He would probably scoff at being told he’s a better man now than he was ten years ago, but the truth is that despite all the questionable things Voight has done, all the people he’s pushed away, and all the things he’s gotten wrong, he is undoubtedly a better man these days.
And he’s also a more self-aware man, which makes him a more interesting character. Is Hank Voight a good guy? He would probably tell you he isn’t. Which doesn’t mean that he doesn’t feel he was justified in a lot of the wrong decisions he made in the past. That’s the dichotomy of Hank Voight. He can have complicated feelings about some of the things he’s done, but he still probably wouldn’t take them back.
‘Under the Surface’ puts that Voight on a collision course with the new face in Season 15: FBI agent Charlie. And Charlie so far is just playing by the rules. He’s doing an audit. He wants information. Some files are missing. We know why they’re missing, and Charlie sounds like he has his own suspicions. But he doesn’t have anything actionable, and he also doesn’t have a unit that will cooperate with him in his search for answers.
You can say whatever you want about Intelligence, and whatever you want about Voight, but this has never been a team that will turn on Voight. And why should they? Of all the bad things this man has done, a fair bit of them have been in the name of saving or protecting someone on his team. So what’s Charlie’s angle? Does he even have one?
Not to mention, is he really as clean as Trudy says? I hate to take Hank Voight’s side, but everyone’s got skeletons in their closet. And I tend to believe anyone who ends up with this particular job auditing Intelligence, and who is so quick to bring up the idea of private donors, certainly does. Even if he seems to be almost too good to be true.
This is a storyline that will surely carry over, so we don’t have to figure it out now. He doesn’t have to figure it out now. But we’ve seen enough to say we’re intrigued about where this could go, and the kind of growth it could mean for not just Voight, but other members of the team.
“What do you want?” Voight asks Charlie. “Your trust,” he says. Voight makes it clear that’s not on the table. But is it? Is there a storyline when we get there? And is that what Charlie really wants? We see clearly in this episode that it isn’t impossible to get Voight’s trust; Imani got it really fast. But that doesn’t mean we see a path forward for the FBI agent auditing Intelligence to get there.
The dynamics are very different in Season 14. So far, that’s interesting. But there’s still a long way to go to land this storyline.
MORE: Chicago P.D. Showrunner Gwen Sigan On Imani’s Future And Atwater’s ‘Great Sendoff’
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Chicago P.D. airs Wednesdays at 10/9c on NBC.
