Patrick John Flueger explains Ruzek’s ending

(Warning: The following contains MAJOR spoilers for Chicago PD Season 12, Episode 2 “Blood Bleeds Blue.”)

For most of the latest Chicago PD In the episode, Officer Adam Ruzek (Patrick John Flueger) is dazed and obviously affected by the death of Detective Emily Martel (Victoria Cartagena) – at first he doesn’t even want to believe she’s dead because he’s known her for a long time – and then he tries , to stop the man responsible, a father who has put his family in danger.

The man shoots his wife, kidnaps one son and pursues the other – who arms himself with his uncle’s gun and has plans to go after his father. In the end, the children are safe, and then Ruzek finally takes a moment and sits on the curb. Next to him sits patrol officer Kiana Cook (Toya Turner), who accompanies him every step of the way in this episode. The only words they exchange are his “Well done, officer” and her “You too, officer.”

“Brian Luce, one of our producers and our technician, who has been a police officer for 21 years, told me that the curb was the police officer’s park bench. And when you see an officer sitting down like that to try to take the burden off themselves, it’s like everyone knows what’s going on,” Flueger tells TV Insider. “You can just arrive at the scene and if you see someone sitting on the stairs like that, not moving, not walking around, doing their job, there’s a reason for it. And he called it the cop’s park bench. That made my eyes moist when he said it. So it was an important part of the episode.”

Lori Allen/NBC

Ruzek needed someone like Cook, who was calm, collected and very focused throughout the episode. “She rocked it, didn’t she? How good is she? “It’s only present for days,” enthuses Flueger. “As an actress and a character, I am happy that I got her as an accomplice in this film. She rocked it. Her strength was shown because he is not a very good listener. He doesn’t like being told what to do. And so I think Toya, with all her strength and her solid nature, led her to believe that he would listen to what she had to say.”

However, before that moment on the side of the road, Ruzek engaged in hand-to-hand combat with the father in a car after an accident to save the youngest son. He succeeded and got the child out Only before the car exploded.

“That was awkward,” Flueger remembers. “Since it was a child, I was very afraid of running into him. (Ruzek’s) is somehow running out of time. He has to get the little kid out of there, and he makes some moves that I don’t believe – it was pretty difficult just because we can’t put the gun away. We always clear weapons. We always make sure the threat is eliminated before doing something like this, but time is of the essence. So it was a little different in terms of the moves I did.”

The nature of procedural dramas like Chicago PD Isn’t there always time to reflect on certain storylines or losses, like the one the Secret Service suffered with Martel’s death? While we’d only seen her with the unit in one episode, by the start of the season she had already been working with them for about a month and had a history with Ruzek and Burgess (Marina Squerciati); Since they had been friends for a long time, he couldn’t answer his fiancée’s call and deal with it in the middle of the manhunt. But the show will keep Martel’s memory alive, which Flueger was happy about.

“Usually we go by the storylines, but they’ve kind of serialized it, which is cool, where she kind of keeps popping up and you see her photo or there’s an episode – I think Episode 3 – that goes by and she’s standing in the police bar around a bucket to donate to her family and things like that,” he says. “So her memory is very vivid in the show, which is cool. We haven’t been able to do this often in the past. So I’m happy. And I think that’s a testament to Victoria, who played Martel, how likeable she jumped off the screen.”

What do you think about the last episode? Let us know in the comments section below.

Chicago PDWednesdays, 10/9c, NBC