‘Chicago P.D.’ Recap: Season 10 Episode 9 — Upton, Sean Showdown

Warning: The following contains spoilers from Wednesday’s episode of Chicago P.D. Proceed accordingly. 

After months and months of obsessing, Upton finally got her guy.

Chicago P.D.‘s fall finale on Wednesday saw the Intelligence cop rescue a van full of missing girls — irrefutable evidence that Sean was a child trafficker. But when Upton and Voight went to make the arrest, they found Chief O’Neal dead and his son barely alive after what appeared to be a scuffle between the two.

As Voight tried to save Sean’s life, Upton just stood by and watched. According to showrunner Gwen Sigan, Upton’s decision not to help was a culmination of the journey she’d been on, with Halstead leaving and her focusing on this sensitive case.

“She’s just found that truck that had 12 young girls inside of it… She’s sat in interview room after interview room listening to these girls tell her what’s happened to them, and she has allowed herself to get so close with this man and understand how his mind works and knows that he is not ever going to change, that he has made this justifiable in his mind,” the P.D. boss explains.

Upton was ready to let him die — Sean ultimately survived — and Voight only interfered to save the detective’s conscience. “For Voight, it was knowing that she couldn’t live with that,” Sigan notes. “That might be a momentary decision and an instinctual decision, but [she] wakes up in the morning and she’s going to regret that and she’s not going to be able to stomach it. We’ve seen that before.”

Now that the case is over, Upton will have to confront feelings she’d been ignoring thus far. “She does have a difficult path ahead, and the reality of that path is that with the distraction gone, you are left with the state that your life is in, and it hasn’t changed,” Sigan says.

“Her husband’s gone, her partner’s gone. She’s living in the house they shared together. She can’t get a hold of him. She doesn’t know when he’s coming back,” she adds. “There are all of these things that she has to deal with now, and there’s nothing to distract her from it. So that’s really the path for her moving forward. Can she look it in the eye? When will she look it in the eye, and what will it actually mean for her going forward when she does?”

What did you think of Chicago P.D.‘s midseason finale?