The Chicago Code: "Mike Royko's Revenge"

Season 1, Episode 13

A convoluted finale wrecks the show’s reputation

Is anybody really going to miss The Chicago Code? That’s the question I kept asking myself all throughout tonight’s finale. If somebody had asked me a week ago, after the whiz-bang excitement of “Greylord & Gambat” I would have been definite in my affirmative answer. Yet after tonight, I can’t say that I’m so sure. While tonight’s finale answered all of the questions that have driven this season along, as well as provide a few threads that would have started off a hypothetical second season, it’s the way that all of this ended that has me questioning if the show could have kept going creatively.

My problem is this: I don’t care about Vincent Wysocki. I understand that he holds great importance for both Jarek and Vonda, that he is one of the main reasons that they do what they do, but none of that changes the fact that I don’t know him as a character. The upshot of this is that scenes like the one where Jarek confronted Killian only half-worked; as much as cared about watching Jarek go off the rails trying to find the truth about his brother, I didn’t give two shits whether or not Vincent was dirty or not, and that took a lot of wind out of the proceedings.

That same mentality gets extended to the conclusion of the Gibbons narrative, as it was Vincent’s old evidence files that end up landing Gibbons in jail. Now, I’m not generally against “plot twists” where some surprise plot point ends up solving everything; done right, it can actually make for a nicely told story. But it’s a dangerous tight-rope to walk, and the show stumbled trying to do it. First off, since we heard so little about Vincent throughout these thirteen episodes, since he has been presented as tangential to the master plot, having his evidence put Gibbons away feels more like a example of deus ex machina than a well performed Chekov’s Gun. Secondly, by making Vincent’s files – and not the hard work the CPD has done – the reason for Gibbon’s downfall, this means that a)all of these past episodes technically hold no importance to the storyline and b) we are supposed to believe that for years nobody bothered to check on why Karen was suddenly able to pay off her mortgage after Vincent’s death. That’s a large leap in logic to make, and it feels like the show

Finally, there was all of this emotional fallout that seemed to follow, and on the eve of the show’s finale (even if when it was made, the producers were trying to leave things open for a second season), it just felt like too much. All of this “moral debate” about whether or not Jarek should sell out his brother for the sake of justice felt like a bunch of manufactured drama, and his dad getting mad at Jarek for essentially doing the right thing made the elder Wysocki come off as a real dick. All those years as a police officer, and that man cares more about family reputation that wider-reaching justice? Give me a break. (But hey, at least Vonda understood. Awww….)

And while we’re at it, I also didn’t like: how the show felt the need to bring back Jarek’s ex and have the two get back together, the little unnecessary moments between Isaac and Vonda, any of the stuff involving Colvin’s lack of a dating life, and the fact that the episode felt the need to send time on the Elizabeth Killian angle so close to the reveal that none of that stuff mattered. It wasn’t just that none of this stuff mattered in the “long run” now that the show’s cancelled; it’s that none of it really mattered in the terms of this episode. Instead, I think some of those minutes should have been relegated over to the Vincent plot, as the jump from Jarek talking to Karen to suddenly going through Vincent’s files made it seems as if we were missing a bit of information, even if I can figure out how he got to that point.

Yet there were moments of this episode that I liked, as soured as the ending has made me. I liked watching Gibbons work to prevent Colvin’s investigation from reaching him, both by smearing her good name and by using less than legal means to plug the leak. And while I didn’t like what it represented in terms of plot, I like that Lily was the one to kill Killian, as it helped to illustrate just how maniacal Gibbons is that he would ask his lover to commit such an overt crime for him. (It of course helped that the scene was so well done, despite the route nature of it all.) I also found the scene where they arrested Gibbons to be pretty badass, all things considered, and despite the fact that this was a suddenly new plot point, I liked seeing Liam/Chris finally be able to tell his parents about how good of a cop he is. Finally, and most importantly, I liked that Evers chose of his own accord to fabricate a story for Jarek, as it not only served as a testament to how far this partnership has come, but it also means that at least something from the last twelve weeks didn’t get erased  by tonight’s events.

And so we are back to that original question: Is anybody going to miss The Chicago Code? At this point, I’m not even sure that people are going to remember it. Sure, critics will most likely name check it from time to time over the next few years, but they will mostly remember it terms of how it was the second Shawn Ryan show in under a year to get cancelled, or how it was part of the Great FOX Bloodbath of 2011. Or maybe they will talk about how much potential it had, or how the finale essentially rendered everything moot. And for a show like this – a show that had such grand ambitions, that seemed so poised to become the Next Great Television Series – to be barely remembered, to get to the point where few people talk about the substance of it all, well that’s just going to be the show’s greatest tragedy, greater than any of its faults or missteps.

Quotes, Etc.:

How many pollacks does it take to screw in a light bulb? Just two.

You know what’s in those mercury light bulbs? Mercury.

“There’s something about justice being served that makes me crave a steak.”