One Chicago Showrunners Preview All Three Emotional, Game-Changing Finales

This week, all three shows in the One Chicago universe will air their season finales, and you know what that means: life-and-death situations, a wedding, and some goodbyes as cast members leave. Chicago Fire closes out Season 13 with "It Had to End This Way," Chicago P.D. concludes its 12th season with "Vows," and Chicago Med will finish off Season 10 with "…Don't You Cry." The three episodes, which will air on Wednesday, May 21, starting at 8/7c with Chicago Med, are not only meant to wrap up each show's storylines for their respective seasons, but also set up the upcoming season of NBC's strongest franchise.

But before we look ahead to next season, there are many questions each show will have to answer in their final hours. Chicago Med will pick up after the bombshell revelation that Hannah Asher (Jessy Schram) cannot actually be her sister Lizzie's surrogate, as she's already pregnant. Meanwhile, Dr. Frost (Darren Barnet) will be caught in a tense situation between two fathers fighting for a life-saving transplant for their respective kids, Sharon Goodwin (S. Epatha Merkerson) is facing budget cuts and possible relationship issues, and Dr. Charles' (Oliver Platt) daughter gets involved in a serious car accident.

Chicago Med showrunner Allen MacDonald teased what to expect in the upcoming finale, including Asher's "stunned" reaction to her pregnancy news. "The irony, of course, being that she is an OBGYN, so you would think that she would have known the clues of a pregnancy." However, MacDonald shared that "denial can affect everybody," and that the show has been leaving subtle clues about this storyline for a few episodes. Case in point? Asher wasn't in Episode 20 of the show because she was sick. "That was done on purpose."

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And now, "she's stunned and was not expecting this to happen. And she's trying to wrap her mind around it," MacDonald tells TV Guide. But is she happy or unhappy about it? "I don't look at it as whether she is happy or unhappy. I just think she's in shock," and thinking about what comes next. "The first thing she's dealing with is how am I going to tell Lizzie? And how am I going to tell the father?" 

These are the beats MacDonald was interested in, going into the finale. "We start with the emotional stories of the characters. We always start with that." Whether that's Asher's pregnancy, the father's possible reaction, Dr. Charles and his daughter, or Goodwin and her relationship. "We build the medical stories around that. So, a lot of these storylines for all the different characters were things we had decided to discuss months before. And we, for the most part, stuck to our plan, although we made adjustments as we went along."

What does that mean? Well, that "everything has been building for each character toward the events that they're about to see."

Over on Chicago Fire, showrunner Andrea Newman discussed a finale that will see Chief Dom Pascal (Dermot Mulroney) fighting possible murder charges, the exit of two firefighters, Sam Carver (Jake Lockett) and Darren Ritter (Daniel Kyri), and Kelly Severide (Taylor Kinney) and Stella Kidd (Miranda Rae Mayo) contemplating what the next step for them is. 

Rregarding the exits, Newman confirmed they "didn't have a lot of time for planning," but had "a lot of story for both of them." And though the Chicago Fire showrunner said that they "don't know exactly how it's all going to shake out and exactly who's going to be able to come back next season and not," she said that the show will "make sure we play stories that at least address them leaving."

What does that mean for the future? "If we get them back for some [episodes next season], all the better." For now, she had no definitive answers. "That's a little bit up in the air right now, but we love those actors, and those characters obviously are central to the show."

As for Stella Kidd and Kelly Severide, Newman said the show wanted to tackle both the idea of what family is and how their relationship might change as they're taking this step together. "When they got married, they had this moment of like, 'What are we doing? Neither of us has good role models, with our parents in terms of marriage,'" Newman shared, adding that at the time, the two characters both thought, "are we crazy to even do this?"

Newman said back then, "[their] decision was like, 'No, we're going to make our own path and we're going to do it our own way. And we're going to do it together. And that's how we'll survive it and make it great.'" This extends to starting a family, too, "because they both wanted it. Severide especially wanted it, but in a way, they wanted it really badly in comparison to the childhood they had had. So they didn't have, again, a map for this."

They also both had their issues with it. "And this season was very much about confronting those issues and kind of getting past that," Newman told TV Guide. "For Kidd, that had to do with her cousin showing up and talking about the difficulties that Kidd had, and her aunt had had with pregnancy and depression. Kind of talking that out, which she had never done before, and coming to understand that a little better."

"Plus, there was also the adoption journey, especially Episode 20, where they came together, and it was so heartbreaking, but for these little glimpses, they saw how each other would be as a mom and a dad. And, you know, when the baby was actually there and taking care of the pregnant young woman. And I think even though that was a heartbreaker for them at the end of it, it really brought them closer together."

For Newman, that was particularly important for Stella Kidd. "It put her in this headspace of like, 'I can do this.' I think she felt empowered by it in a way that, if she could survive that, and she had felt the emotions, and they were the right emotions, about like, oh, this is the baby, I want the baby, and taking care of it and being in a family with Severide." So, in that moment "that's when she kind of left it to the fates."

Where does Stella Kidd stand now? Now she knows what she wants. "I want a family, whether I get pregnant, whether it's an adoption, I can handle this, and Severide and I can handle this together."

Finally, on Chicago P.D., Kim Burgess (Marina Squerciati) and Adam Ruzek (Patrick Flueger) are finally getting married, but first they have to deal with the Intelligence Unit being disbanded by Deputy Chief Reid (Shawn Hatosy) and Voight's (Jason Beghe) quest to take him down, no matter the cost. Showrunner Gwen Sigan discussed what we can expect of the finale, teasing that, "we wanted Reid to be, in our minds, hopefully, one of the most formidable opponents that Voight has gone up against. And we wanted to get Voight to a point where we were testing him on every sort of change he's made, every sort of evolution he's made, every sort of bit of good that's come into him."

For Sigan, that's an interesting point for the character. "We wanted to test him and test him on, is this truly who he is? Or is he still that man we met in Season 1, who would do anything for the unit and the city, and sort of at his own moral cost? And to do that, we did need to take it to the highest stakes we could take it to. And Reid was the perfect vehicle to do that."

As for the wedding at a courthouse between Jay Halstead (Jesse Lee Soffer) and Hailey Upton (Tracy Spiridakos), which looks very different from the last Chicago P.D. wedding we saw, Sigan shared that this is what made sense for the two characters involved. "I think the fact that they've been a couple for so long, and they've obviously had their ups and downs, and they've broken up along the way, but it's been 12 years of the two of them, and three engagements."

"It felt like it's just been so hard that I think those two characters would want a day," Sigan said. "They would want to be able to stand up in front of all of their friends and family and to have Makayla, their daughter, there with them, and to have his [Ruzek's] father and Atwater and the whole team there. It just felt like they would want that in a bit more traditional [way]."

She added, "It's our first church wedding, which I also felt like, you know, in our heads, as writers, that was the church that Ruzek would have gone to as a little boy in Canaryville. And so it just, it felt like them, it felt traditional, yet not stuffy, and just sort of simple and loving and really beautiful."

Sounds like at least one of the One Chicago shows will leave us on a good note.

The Chicago Med, Chicago Fire, and Chicago P.D. season finales air Wednesday, May 21, beginning at 8/7c on NBC.