Chicago PD season 12 returned with a Burgess-focused episode. Everyone supported her as she got to the bottom of a shooting at a diner in Chicago PD season 12, episode 16.
Caution: This post contains SPOILERS for Chicago PD season 12, episode 16.
After taking a two week break, the new episode brought us a story that focused on the overload of work that Burgess is under. Reid is constantly pushing more work onto her, and she has to get it all done right away. However, life at home is causing problems with the stress, so she decides to head to a diner down the street.
We get a montage of her deciding to head back to the diner each night. To be honest, I’d be knocking on the door of the house next door as I couldn’t live next to the Battle of the Bands rehearsal — there’s practicing and then there’s causing a noise nuisance. But Burgess is better than me, and she chooses to work at a diner instead.
That does lead to her getting to see the regulars in on a night. It means she is key to solving the case when there’s a shooting at that diner, claiming the lives of five people.
Not your typical gang shooting in Chicago PD season 12, episode 16
I worried at first that the episode would bring us the standard gang shooting at the diner. It certainly seemed that way at first, as Burgess remembered a little about a man who had gone to see one of the victims, who used to be part of a gang. Let’s normalize other types of crimes in Chicago, because there is a lot more than gang crime.
Plus, unless it was an initiation, it wouldn’t have made sense for a gang member to kill a bunch of people in a targeted way. Some sort of spray fire, sure, and there certainly could have been victims in this way, but Burgess made a point that people were shot at close range and like they were pleading for their lives. Nothing added up for the gang storyline, so I’m glad that was dropped partway through.
I’m also glad that Ruzek had Burgess’s back. She said that she turned her cop brain off, but that’s impossible to do. People see things without them realizing, and that’s something Burgess did throughout this episode. It shows why she worked her way up to detective. She definitely deserved it, especially after her work on this case.
It was a far more personal matter in Chicago PD
The case itself ended up being far more personal than it initially seemed. At first, Burgess remembered a man who would sit at the counter top, and he would always order the wrong thing — something that he didn’t like. Burgess knew that he was packing, but it turns out that he was never planning on shooting up the diner. He was a man grieving the loss of his wife, and he considered taking his own life.
He did give Burgess some ideas about what could have happened at the diner. The waitress and her husband were having marital problems. I do wish that we had seen this part of the interview play out on the screen. Burgess offered some empathy toward this man who initially seemed like a suspect, and I would have loved to see her then thank him for the information that he could provide. The storyline itself is a reminder that everyone is going through something.
Burgess learns that Marge’s husband was involved in an armed robbery, and Marge turned him in. Naturally, he was angry, and he decided to shoot her and the others in the diner at the same time.
In a way, the reveal that it was Marge’s husband can seem a little anticlimactic. We only met her husband once. However, it shows the realities of crime and how shocking and surprising some can be. Burgess needed to pay attention to some of the smaller parts of the nights at the diner, and everyone needs the reminder that things like this happen. There can seem to be no rhyme or reason to it at first, but there’s something deeply personal behind shootings.
Burgess realizes that she’s forgetting her relationship
The ending of the episode was a powerful moment in terms of personal dynamics, though. After a difficult and twisty case, Burgess thought back to the events that led to her going to the diner in the first place. That diner seemed to be the place for everyone to escape what was going on in their lives, and for Burgess, it was a chance to escape her busy family and home life.
However, she realized that she needed to take a step back from work. Her relationship with Ruzek would suffer if she continued to put work first. She thought about how she has to get her guest list in for the wedding, and just how much Ruzek has been doing with Makayla with homework — and I can completely understand Ruzek passing on fractions homework to someone else!
It’s so important to show what makes a relationship work. We can all get engrossed in our work, and it takes someone on the outside to remind us what’s really going on and how we need to change things. Ruzek doesn’t complain about Burgess stepping away each night to get the reports written, but it’s clear that some of it is taking a toll on him. Burgess recognizes that and decides to book a hotel stay for the two of them, making it clear that she does appreciate him and she wants to spend some time with him (and only him).
Overall, the case brought us something powerful in the reminder that not everything in Chicago is gang related. We also got the personal development for Burgess that we needed as she feels the weight of work piling on top of her. I’d like to see more like this.
Chicago PD airs on Wednesdays at 10/9c on NBC.
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