Chicago P.D.: "Survival" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired February 28, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Wednesday, February 28) I got so tired of the depressing news coverage on MS-NBC that at 10 p.m. I switched to the flagship NBC network for an episode of Chicago P.D. It’s a show I used to watch regularly when it first went on the air, largely because I wanted to support its star, Jason Beghe (playing Hank Voight, head of the Chicago Police Department’s intelligence unit), who had been a member of the Church of Scientology until he quit in disgust and went public with his hostility. Beghe was threatened by the Church (as is just about anybody who exits) and told that there were so many Scientologists in powerful positions in Hollywood it would be career suicide for him to leave. So I’m glad that he was not only able to survive career-wise as an actor but thrive, landing a long-term series lead that has so far lasted 10 seasons. I don’t think he’s that great as an actor – his hectoring, bullying style gets to be a bit much after a while – but he’s a good fit for the role he plays here (sort of like Christopher Meloni’s part in the first 12 seasons of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit but even cruder and more “edgy”). This episode, called “Survival,” turned out to be unexpectedly good, at least in part because it reflected the sensitivity with which Dick Wolf and his cadre of writers, producers and show runners depict the Queer community. The show opens with Hank Voight walking down one of those proverbial mean, dark streets that abound in noir stories both in films and on TV, when he spots some blood on the sidewalk. Naturally he wonders how it got there, and when he sees a convenience store that has an outboard video camera, he walks in and demands that the man at the counter show him the video footage. The footage shows a young man being clubbed by an unseen assailant with a jack handle and then stuffed into the back of an SUV.

The victim turns out to be Noah Gorman (Bobby Hogan), a 19-year-old who graduated from high school in Indiana two months earlier and moved to Chicago after he “came out” to his parents as Gay. His parents immediately declared him the “spawn of Satan” (which makes me wonder what they are) and not only threw him out of the house but disowned him. Hank learns this when he calls Noah’s family to tell them he’s been kidnapped, beaten and probably tortured, and Noah’s father tells Hank it serves him right and it’s Noah’s own fault for going against God’s divine will. The police immediately suspect Zach Jones (Colin Bates in a superb performance as a small-time crook with big pretensions; he’s the sort of person who doesn’t just demand an attorney but sings about it, loudly and obnoxiously), a drug dealer with a reputation for kidnapping and kneecapping people who stiff him on payment. The cops eventually find Noah, albeit near death and in terrible shape. Hank is working with an assistant district attorney, Nina Chapman (Sara Bues), who’s futilely tried to prosecute Zach twice before. Zach has escaped accountability both times on technicalities (a running theme on Dick Wolf’s shows generally) but Chapman thinks she has him dead to rights at long last. Noah Gorman actually identified Zach Jones as his assailant when shown a six-person photo line-up in the hospital, where he’s recovering from (among other things) his eyes having literally been stapled to keep them open. But that’s not good enough for Hank, who’s convinced Noah was lying about the I.D. because he was so stressed out by the police asking him questions he identified his drug dealer as his assailant just to get Hank to leave.

Hank believes that Noah was being stalked and followed by a sadistic maniac who, unlike Zach, had meticulously planned his crime and knew exactly what he was doing, including holding Noah in a factory that made pallets (Noah himself gave Hank the clue when he said he was held in a place with a lot of pieces of wood around) and fastening him to a wall with relatively sophisticated bondage devices. Alas, that’s about as much of a resolution as we got because, in accordance with modern TV producers’ worship for and reverence towards the Great God SERIAL, it ended with Noah being released from the hospital and Hank taking him in because he literally has nowhere else to go. It had already been established that he was homeless, though he spent a lot of his nights at a church-run shelter where he was known as a loner who had no friends. What’s more, the show is going on a weeks-long hiatus so we won’t find out how this turns out until March 20. I’m wondering if writer Matthew Browne is going to have Noah offer to have sex with Hank, not because he’s attracted to him but simply because he’ll think that is what Hank will expect in return for giving him a place to stay. But I quite liked the episode and in particular its social comment angle and its plea for parents of Queer children to be sympathetic to them instead of just tossing them out like so much garbage.