[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for Chicago P.D. Season 10 Episode 16 “Deadlocked.”]
Only so much can fit into 42 minutes, and as it turned out, one of the scenes that Jesse Lee Soffer found the most challenging to direct in his Chicago P.D. episode ended up being cut.
Soffer, who exited the NBC drama earlier this season, returned to step behind the camera for “Deadlocked,” which brought back the case from “The Ghost in You.” As Sergeant Hank Voight (Jason Beghe) took the stand for ASA Chapman (Sara Bues) in the murder trial against notorious drug kingpin Arturo Morales (Robby Ramos), he noticed something off about one of the jurors, Christopher Eagan. And so he and Detective Hailey Upton (Tracy Spiridakos) went to his house; there, they learned that his wife had been kidnapped. If he didn’t vote not guilty, they’d kill her.
Intelligence immediately got to work, and it was Voight who was the one to check on Eagan’s wife when they found her and took care of the men holding her. She was unresponsive and had suffered a head trauma and massive blood loss, but she did stir a bit. Voight then met with Eagan to update him and gave him his wife’s bracelet, assuring him that she was stable (but being held for observation for the brain bleed) and the men who hurt her were gone. Voight offered to take him to the hospital immediately, but Eagan decided to stay to vote in the verdict. “I’m going to send that man to prison for the rest of his life,” he said, thanking Voight.
Lori Allen/NBC
But there was a moment cut right before that scene, Soffer reveals. “It’s funny because you would think that some action scene would be really challenging, but it’s not. It’s the nuances, it’s the subtleties. There’s a scene — it actually ended up getting cut from the episode — where Voight takes the bracelet from the victim to show her husband, to show Eagan,” he tells TV Insider. “And just the trickiness of tagging a moment that is part of the story you need to tell but making it organic and not leaving Voight’s perspective… It’s the things that you wouldn’t expect.”
And while a 60-page script does have to be condensed into a 42-minute episode, so “bits and pieces, chunks here or there get lifted to tighten it and make the story streamlined,” that was the only major moment cut, the director says.
Chicago P.D., Wednesdays, 10/9c, NBC