The Season 13 finale of Chicago P.D. ended on a suspenseful note as Sgt. Hank Voight (Jason Beghe) took matters into his own bloodied hands.
Voight cares deeply for each member of his Intelligence Unit, and he’s formed a unique bond with a Season 13 recruit with whom he shares some uncanny similarities, Officer Eva Imani (Ari Mandi). Both stubborn and full of fight, they’ve become quick comrades, so as soon as Voight caught wind of Imani’s multi-decade search for her kidnapped sister, Shari, he offered his help.
Soon enough, Voight and Imani tracked down Shari, but her longtime captor, Russ Kirby, managed to evade authorities. As Imani made efforts to reconnect with Shari, who couldn’t remember her sister or family, Voight commanded the Intelligence Unit to track down Kirby and end the human trafficker’s tyrannical reign once and for all.
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Amid the emotional turmoil of addressing Shari’s Stockholm syndrome, Imani was lured into a trap, forcing the Intelligence Unit to rush to her whereabouts in hopes of saving her life. And needless to say, once Voight arrived on the scene, Kirby didn’t stand a chance.
P.D.’s showrunner opens up about Voight “stepping back” into violence
Chicago P.D.‘s Season 13 finale “Born or Made” ended with a fever pitch. Right after Imani narrowly dodged her sister’s bullet, Shari’s captor attempted to flee the scene before being intercepted by Voight and the Intelligence Unit.
After noticing Kirby was armed and intended to fire, Voight slammed Kirby into the door to disarm him. As Kirby tumbled to the ground, Voight slammed the door into his skull repeatedly, going berserk in his fury. Burgess (Marina Squerciati) had to tear a blood-splattered Voight away before he stopped and made eye contact with Imani, who seemed to completely understand Voight’s compulsion. The man who sex trafficked dozens of women was now dead.
But it’s not the first time Voight has twisted the law to deliver his unique brand of justice, a theme that P.D. showrunner Gwen Sigan wanted to explore in Season 13.
“So much of this season has been about Voight’s relationship to violence and where that came from,” Sigan told NBC Insider. “Right at the beginning of the season, we talked a lot about his father and this idea of, ‘Was that hereditary?’ Did he grow up in some sort of abusive household? And then we revealed that no, he did not. His father was actually the thing that kept him sane.”
“[Violence] has just always been in Voight, and we played a lot with the idea that it’s inside Amani, too,” Sigan shared. “We wanted to lean into that as much as we could. And what we see is Voight stepping back into that place, right? Into that thing that’s very easy for him to step into.”
“It’s natural, I think, you see him lose himself in it,” she said. “It’s less than a minute, right? But he’s able to do that much destruction, and at the end of it, be perfectly fine and perfectly steady. And I loved the look between him and Imani at the end of that scene.”
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Sigan continued, “There isn’t really a breath of relief at the end of it. Instead, what you hear is just Shari screaming, and I loved that there wasn’t like a catharsis to it. The pain just continued. So, that’s what the moment meant as far as on the page.”
While the scene is brutal for any Chihard to watch, the emotions were just as high behind the scenes between Mandi and Beghe.
“Shooting it, it was so visceral. I think it was felt by everybody on set,” Mandi said, recalling the P.D. crew reacting strongly to the powerful scene. “It was those days that were really heavy and like back-to-back a lot of pain… I think we see that Voight and Imani are very, very much cut from the same cloth, very much made the same way.”
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