‘Chicago Fire’ season 5, episode 9 review: Severide’s arrest; Dawson, Casey’s latest Louie drama

NBC promoted the “Chicago Fire” – “Chicago PD” crossover on Tuesday night heavily surrounding the arrest of Kelly Severide, but what you may not have realized entering this episode was precisely how emotional part of the story around the character was going to be before that.

Kelly was trying his best to do the right thing, and put his neck out for someone else. You even started to feel like Anna, a bone-marrow patient who was getting a transplant from him, a good Samaritan, was someone who could be more than just a casual friend to him. Did anyone notice sparks? Seeing Severide try so hard to get redemption from his past mistakes made it all the more heartbreaking when he eventually ended up succumbing to his old vices when he learned that the transplant was on hold due to a decline in Anna’s condition. He drank away his woes, and eventually the PD found his car at the scene of a crime without him in it. Unfortunately, it was pretty easy to determine from here where the story was going to go.

This will be picked up further in the second part of the crossover, but at the time of this episode ending, it really doesn’t look good for Severide. We know that he likes to drink a little too much, just as we also know that he was heartbroken over not being able to help here in the way that he wanted.

Casey and Dawson’s drama – Meanwhile, the newlyweds had to deal with a rather massive problem of their own: Louie’s biological father showing up out of the blue and demanding to be around his son. While there were several legal hurdles that they would have to jump through, eventually they decided that kindness would be better in this situation than rage — especially after realizing that the father was a veteran, and not someone who even knew he had a child at one point in his life. While it was not easy (and we saw Casey taking out his anger in a ton of places), eventually at the end of the episode Casey and Dawson met up with him and agreed to let him see Louie.

The twist? When the two of them showed up with the kid at the designated meeting place, he did not turn up. To us, that seems like a chance to move forward, knowing that this man was not quite ready to be in this place in his life just yet.

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There were several other interesting little odds and ends in the episode, especially when it comes to the random ping-pong sideplot where we learned that apparently Herrmann has some seriously mad skills. Plus, anytime we see Otis in this sort of fun environment we’re going to be rather happy. This was the perfect way to bring “Chicago Fire” back in the new year, though we’re not going to pretend like it was easy to watch Severide go down the hole. Grade: A-.

Part 2 – We’ll post a review here for that a little bit later.

Next week – To get some additional news regarding what is coming up next on “Chicago Fire,” head over to the link here! We will be back a little bit later with an exclusive postmortem from Derek Haas and Matt Olmstead about what you saw over the course of tonight’s episodes. (Photo: NBC.)