Chicago P.D. Review: Denny Discovers Voight’s Crime

The revenge of a parent on those who killed their child is a tale as old as time. It’s only in the last century that we’ve gone with taking the high road. The 2,000 and more years before that, revenge was the name of the game. Voight saw no reason to change that tradition when his son was killed nearly two years ago. Given Voight’s extensive knowledge of the city, it wasn’t too hard to bury this Chicago P.D. crime. No one wanted to pry too hard into the truth, until now. As Intelligence walked unsuspectingly into a case of revenge, Denny Woods upped his attack on his enemy in a major way. Chicago P.D. makes a game of towing the ethical line, but this time an outside force is taking it way too far.

We begin with the case of the week, which already hits too close. A local shopkeeper is killed, one that not even the local gangs usually mess with. This mean that a new gang has raided the neighborhood. What’s striking is that these kids came hard and fast out of nowhere, and caught the attention of Marcella Gomez, a visiting detective from El Salvador. She recognizes the gang’s motto and markers as that of the Salvadorian gang, SS11. Because she is so familiar with the gang, she sticks around to help with the case and catch it’s leader, Raul Martinez, also known as ‘El Lobo’. She even knows the gang’s communication methods. This comes in handy, until it doesn’t, and Burgess quickly suspects that their next dead end isn’t an accident.

Marcella gets Dawson on her side, and I don’t think I need to explain how. So when Burgess brings up all of the inconsistencies in this new girl’s story, her partner brushes her aside. This forces Burgess to conducts her own side investigation, while Marcella continues to help the team catch one of the gang’s runners. Lucky for Intelligence, the fish they catch is a guppy. Barely initiated into the gang, he pours out El Lobo’s location after just a few minutes.

Burgess was already halfway to suspecting that Marcella came to Chicago on her own mission. A little more digging, and Burgess finds out that Marcella is in town hunting El Lobo since he killed her son. She actually called the Chicago gang unit two months prior when she was first tipped off that El Lobo was in Chicago. From then on, all Marcella cared about was revenge. Which is why she calls in her own vigilantes, and when that doesn’t work, finishes the job herself. No amount of talking could convince Marcella that she wasn’t just in her actions, and nothing could have stopped Dawson from shooting her in self-defense.

Life works in a sequence of horrible ironies. As he watches a woman shoot her son’s killer point-blank in the head, Voight comes up against the one problem he didn’t want Denny to bring to his door: the body of the man who murdered Voight’s son. I no longer have absolutely no more patience for Denny Woods. Maybe if this was about one man trying to bring down a cop he sees as crooked; but it’s not. Denny is worse because he could care less about the victims, including Voight’s son. Denny is happy to use the memory of Justin Voight to tear down Hank Voight. No loyalty, not a shred of understanding. Just a pawn in a game. The worst part is that if he can trace the murder weapon back to Voight, it really will be game over.

Was this week’s Chicago P.D. just a little too on-the-nose with its correlation?