Chicago PD on NBC season 13 premiere review

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…