After tensions between Chief Wallace Boden (Eammon Walker) and Candidate Jimmy Borrelli (Steven R. McQueen) were bubbling to the surface after Borrelli blamed Boden for his older brother’s death, fans of NBC’s Chicago Fire saw what happened to the grief-stricken firefighter in Tuesday’s episode.
This post does contain spoilers for season five, episode two of Chicago Fire, so read at your own risk.
Towards the end of the episode, Firehouse 51 is responding to a call where a motorcycle is trapped underneath a truck. Borrelli thought his fellow Truck 81 members weren’t doing enough to try and save the woman who was stuck in the truck and walked towards the truck to try and save her. Instead, the truck exploded and Borrelli was caught in the crossfire.
The team gathered at the hospital, where Will Halstead, one of the doctors on Chicago Med, tells the team that Borrelli lost his left eye, effectively ending his firefighting career.
After the episode, Michael Brandt, co-creator of the show, spoke to The Hollywood Reporter, confirming the latest exit while previewing what’s to come this season, including the 100th episode, which will serve as the show’s winter finale.
Brandt said they’d been working on the exit since midway through the fourth season since they work on the seasons in halves. “You start to think about how are you going to mix things up, how are you going to change characters around, and so it was about this time last year when we were starting to break the second half of the season,” he said.
Brandt said that they knew they had to have something happen to Borrelli, since not all of the characters can have happy endings. “For us, Jimmy felt like the kind of character who would do something fairly brash. Given that he was young; given that he was emotional … Ultimately, it comes down to creative in terms of who might be leaving the show and what we liked about this was Jimmy’s repairing of his relationship with his brother and then ultimately that being the downfall of the character on the show. It wasn’t out of the blue.”
Meanwhile, Brandt previewed the 100th episode, which airs on Dec. 8, saying that it’s a big episode for Gabby Dawson and Matt Casey, whom fans have affectionately dubbed Dawsey. “We know the audience loves them as a couple, we love them as a couple. We’ve had them engaged, almost married, we’ve really bounced around quite a bit with them and made their relationship as difficult as possible so I think the 100th episode is a time to solidify some things between the two of them, but that does not mean at all that they just go quietly into the night as a couple. There’s a twist that comes at the end of the 100th episode that throws everything into a tailspin in terms of them and their family dynamics,” Brandt said.
Tuesday’s episode of Chicago Fire scored a 1.7 rating in the 18-49 demographic and was watched by 7.41 million viewers, according to TV by the Numbers.
Chicago Fire airs Tuesday nights at 10 p.m. on NBC.