When Chicago PD returns this fall for its fourteenth season, the show will suffer one of its most devastating losses with the exit of LaRoyce Hawkins as Officer Kevin Atwater. Hawkins’ exit was announced weeks before filming on season 14 was set to begin, with the plan being for Hawkins to make a brief return at the top of the season for a guest arc designed to wrap up Atwater’s story.
The challenge with this approach is that season 13 introduced a perfect exit storyline for Hawkins, one that was so well-written that fans were convinced Atwater’s exit was imminent. Instead, the writers threw it away, meaning they’ll now have to reverse course in a manner that is sure to be jarring.
Early in season 13, Atwater discovered that he was to become a father after his one night with Tasha Fox led to an unexpected pregnancy. The biggest problem was that Tasha had recently taken a job with the Miami Police Department and left Chicago. Knowing that Atwater would want to be a part of his child’s life, many fans speculated that the storyline was introduced to write Atwater out of the show by having him move to Miami. Then came season 13, episode 18.
The eighteenth episode of the season welcomed the return of Tashato Chicago in an episode that focused on the future for the pair and how they could coparent when they live in different cities. Rather than Atwater offering to move to Miami by the episode’s end, the writers instead chose to have Tasha agree to return to Chicago after she admitted to Atwater that she wasn’t exactly a fan of the city. They made a plan to take things day by day, and it seemed like the plan heading into season 14 would be to explore the pair’s relationship as they got to better know each other and began readying for the arrival of their child.
That creates a difficult creative challenge for season 14: the writers now have to undo a storyline they spent much of season 13 carefully building. By the end of season 13, the show had committed to a future for Atwater and Tasha in Chicago, one that fans expected would play out in season 14 and give them the chance to see the pair adjusting to their new normal. The decision for Tasha to move back to Chicago even had fans excited that we would get to see more of Tasha in the new season following a smaller guest arc in season 13.
Instead, it seems the writers will undo months of carefully crafted storytelling and throw it all out the window, making us wonder what the point of investing in storylines is if they mean nothing in the end.
What we’re likely going to see happen is Tasha unexpectedly change her mind about moving back to Chicago, leaving Atwater to make the decision to leave town to join her in Miami so they can take a run at their original plan just in a reversed manner. We’ll be happy to see the pair get the promise of a happy ending, but we hate thinking about what could have been.
