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When I saw Dr. Charles - not a trained investigator - going through the Reese's father's storage space (not wearing gloves BTW) I thought of evidence for a possible prosecution being compromised. Law & Order franchise veteran here.

It was a funny twist to see Dr. Latham playing subordinate to Dr. Rhodes in the makeshift surgery room, and it helped emphasize the desperate situation everyone was in. And typically deadpan professional of Dr. Latham to understand why it was happening and not have any resentment toward the junior doctor afterwards.

Admittedly I don't consider myself particularly fast on the uptake with these plot twists but I saw the Patty Hearst storyline with Hannah coming from a mile away. In a hostage/accomplice negotiation situation that led to the shootout I would think that procedure dictates that someone less emotionally involved be the lead negotiator.

So now it's Rhodes stepping out to deflect blame for a screw-up by Bekker when a few episodes back it was Halstead doing the same for Manning? How deep does this subsurface patronizing of women physicians run in this world?

I have to wonder if Al Olinsky's involvement is a rewrite to this story precipitated by the departure of Sophia Bush's Erin Lindsey character. If she were still in the picture we might see Brooks' machinations focused on her and Olinsky might not even be involved.

That was a really good CI that Ruzek had, LOL. I suppose there is always a risk with CIs and whether they are reliable or not, especially given that they're getting paid for information, but it seemed to me that Ruzek should have caught on earlier to the fact that something was amiss. So Voight is going to screw up the life of a witness to try and get Olinsky off. The whole thing stemming from a murder that Voight committed. And will the show really let them get away with their thickening plot of deception and then just go on as if nothing had happened? I liked Trudy's reaction when Voight told her he couldn't share anything with her.

Regarding the father whose son was going to Northwestern and who was constantly worried about the cost of treatment, I imagine the bean counters and paper pushers in a hospital would have jumped on the case right away to see how the hospital stay would be paid for. Not likely that the revelation about his skimpy insurance would come at the end when all the tests and such had already been conducted. Rhodes may have gone rogue and defied his own boss and the surgical team that was assigned to do the surgery separation, but how could the team just tell the parents that there was no choice but to kill the weaker twin to allow the other one to survive? Is that ethical?

It's a funny thing when recurring cast members who are not conceived of as being appealing characters - Drs. Latham, Stohl, and Abrams - are people who are refreshing to see in these episodes. I sympathized with Sharon Goodwin in this one. She clearly understood Maggie's situation and told her as much but her position left her no choice but to suspend her.

I thought that this story had the one really effective surprise in the episode, maybe in several episodes. I suppose post menopausal pregnancies are possible, although that far afterwards, I don't know. It was actually funny to see her introduce her grandchildren to their AUNT.

How can a transplant decision in a hospital ever come down to a manipulative tug-of-war between two doctors? Never mind the amazing coincidence that the two patients were both matched to the motorcycle accident victim, wouldn't there be candidates outside of the hospital vying for the heart?

This season I loved the way Monique Brown's Connie character pre-empted the conniving Hope and collected her things to kick her out before she could even set foot in the office. Supporting characters matter a lot. Just look at Amy Morton on Chicago P.D.

Yes, I was bothered by this move by Voight. He crossed a line by doing that. I can't believe he wouldn't be able to find some way to help Olinsky.

In my opinion Tracy Spiridakos has gotten somewhat better over the time she's been on this show but I still don't think she can carry an episode centered around her Haley Upton character. This show used to annoy me from time to time because it was too often about Erin Lindsey, but Sophia Bush could pull off the acting required.

Weren't Drs. Choi and Manning taking a huge liability risk delivering a baby for a homeless woman right on the street, so to speak? If something had gone wrong, probably she wouldn't have sued (assuming she were still alive), but if she had blood relatives - say her parents - who caught wind of it wouldn't the hospital be liable if they sued? And if it wasn't a private lawsuit, couldn't the hospital be in trouble with the Illinois Dept. of Child and Family Services? I can imagine both doctors being at risk of losing their licenses. And of course they'd first have to bear a chewing out from Sharon, maybe even a suspension? After all their efforts, wouldn't the new mother have to be admitted to a hospital anyway, given that they had to cut to widen the birth canal?

Woods is clearly trying to get Olinsky to turn on Voight but I don't see any way in the universe of this show that that would ever happen. As for Ruzek, Woods has figured out that his loyalty is to Voight and that any attempt to use Ruzek against Voight is going to get back to Ruzek's boss. I thought hard about whether I wanted to go back to watching this show the following fall after the finale "Start Digging" two years ago. The message seems to be that "old school" policing is good as long as you don't get caught. The methods they used - burning the face of Kevin's accomplice on the stove, shooting an unarmed guy in the knee, going to organized crime figures to capture Kevin (no doubt with some implied quid pro quo) goes against the whole idea of humane community policing, and it is improbable that Voight has gotten away with it all for so long.

This is one of the few times, maybe the only time this second season that I felt the togetherness between the present day Pearson siblings. I liked watching the teamwork between Randall and Kevin, I liked seeing Kevin truly let go his mindset that everything was about him. And yes, they were both there for their sister. While it's a long time to wait for this show to come back, I think the idea of limiting the seasons to 18 episodes is fine. I suspect that stretching it to 22 episodes would dilute the quality of the writing and add more filler than substance. Deja is a puzzle. A casual remark from a stranger setting off such an act of violence. She certainly has some inner anger issues to be explored.

Not being a linguist, I still suspect that wh is a lost consonant in the English language, at least in the USA. When most people in this country say "whale" as in animal, they pronounce it as though they were saying "Wales", as in part of the UK. On the other hand the word "whore" as in prostitute gets pronounced as one would say "hoary", as in old. A lot of common words such as "when", "why", "when", and so on are spelled with wh but often pronounced as if they were spelled with just a w, on the other hand "whose" might as well just be spelled with an h. Centuries ago, maybe there was a hybrid of the w and h consonants that was distinct from either by itself, but it isn't commonly heard now. Natalie was annoying enough whatever way she pronounced "whooping".

Well we've seen the great Gabby play police detective before so this plot didn't come as too much of surprise for me. That scene where the paramedics were distracting the guy while Ruzek cloned his computer's drive rang false and contrived for me. Operations like that can take a long time. More to the point, one never knows how much time they will take. How could they know how much was on his computer? And getting a copy of the drive doesn't guarantee access to emails and other protected stuff. So her boyfriend was ready to introduce Stella to his parents and he dumps her so quickly? It's TV and they have to keep moving the plots along but I get annoyed when the writers do stuff like this. I think he would have at least confronted her about what was going on. I've stopped watching Fire regularly because it feels like there's too much fluff and not enough procedural.

I think we'll see more of the angry guy in Pt. 2, and/or later on. I think the incident will be coming back to bite the intelligence squad. Interesting how Jay Halstead had sympathetic vibes for the guy almost from the beginning.

It would be ideal if they could bring back Sophia Bush to reprise her role on this show when the reckoning comes in the storyline of Voight's execution of that Kevin guy and Lindsey's part in not reporting it and helping him to cover it up. But given that she seems to have left the show on somewhat unfriendly terms I suppose it won't happen.

At the last scene with Bekker and Rhodes I was pleading "no please don't" and then they went mouth to mouth. Ugh. I can see why Natalie blew up at the anti-vaxxer but her behavior was still not that of a professional.

Well I liked seeing Deja's backstory but I was left a little puzzled. Did she start in the foster care system when the social worker removed her from her home when she cut her hand and there was no water, or had she had stints in the system before? How many foster homes has she had time to be in? Her foster care sister in the home with the father who was a drunk seemed to have been more of a veteran of the system. In real life I imagine she wouldn't be able to immediately go back into Beth and Randall's home even if her mother wants to bail and all the parties agree that's what she wants. The wheels of the state child care system have to turn.

The first time I saw Raul Esparza was indeed on Broadway in the revival of Stephen Sondheim's Company. He played the lead character of Bobby. I was happy to see him become a regular on L&O SVU and was disappointed to see his role decline over the seasons. But he has plenty of talent for the live stage which not all TV actors do. I wish him further success in that venue.

It seemed to me that yes, the child-wife had a family history of cancer and she was making a pre-emptive choice to have her uterus removed to not have to deal with ongoing treatment. But she was also making that choice to assert herself and break free of her husband and his church. I kept waiting for one of the doctors to talk to her about the possibility of extracting some of her egg cells and freezing them, to have embryos implanted in her uterus after curing the cancer, or have them carried by a surrogate mother if her uterus had to ultimately be removed. This is after all the second decade of the 21st Century...

Danny Woods knew the team was sending in the basketball player wearing a wire into the bar. If he knew his daughter well at all he might have anticipated she could go off the rails when she learned the truth about the deal her boyfriend was getting. I would think he would have put off telling her until after the operation went down.