When we first met Dom Pascal, he was in the midst of marital troubles, and he wasn’t taking it well.
Is it any surprise that Chicago Fire Season 13 Episode 16 found him struggling to cope in the wake of his wife’s death?
Coping with death is never easy, but when your job involves literally saving the lives of others, you can’t afford to ride it out like the Lone Ranger.
This was one of those episodes where it seemed like nothing really happened because the emotional weight of someone’s experience was overbearing.
That’s what makes great television, and it’s been a while since we’ve seen a truly great episode of Chicago Fire.
What this crew does best (and often gets them in trouble when viewed from the outside) is how they care for each other.
This is especially true when one of them is hurting emotionally. Each member of the team will bend over backwards to figure out how they can help.
Everyone finds a way to get on board, whether someone is sick or struggling with a loss.
While the episode was mostly heavy with the weight of Monica’s death on Pascal, there were some lighthearted moments, too.
Cruz, always good for a chuckle, didn’t know how to react to such a tragedy.
This is a guy who has gone through so much himself and in support of others, but he still couldn’t figure out that all he needed to do was be present.
He even had a hard time understanding what that meant. I get that it was played for laughs and maybe to represent how some viewers feel under the same circumstances, but I don’t believe that Cruz would be so lost for a second.
He’s one of the first people to step up every time. Maybe playing dumb was to him what going through the investigation again was to Pascal. He had to do something, and for Cruz, it’s going for laughs.
Violet was particularly touched by Pascal’s situation because it hadn’t been that long since she had experienced it herself.
It was an excellent idea to use her past as a way to help us process what Pascal was going through during the episode.
Through a letter she wrote to Carver, her voiceover guided viewers through the experience of loss, from how you push forward, digging yourself out of the rubble, to how you look for reasons for what happened, so you can try to make sense of it.
But anybody who has suffered such a loss knows those things are merely coping mechanisms that don’t provide answers.
Sometimes, they help you get to a safe place to grieve, but other times, they can make things worse.
When you’re in that kind of pain, you’re not thinking about those around you, and Pascal could have made things much worse for himself and everyone around him.
When Pascal rushed up a scissor lift at the rescue without a harness, it put everyone else in danger, too. If he had fallen, the team would have been split in two, trying to rescue him and the man who necessitated the call.
Later, he embarrassed the driver of the other vehicle, Franklin, by shouting in public that he had killed his wife.
Pasacal didn’t even consider that this could be one of the worst days of that guy’s life, too. Franklin will feel responsible for Monica’s death for the rest of his life, and in his case, it was only an accident.
If Pascal had allowed himself to step back and feel, he might have realized that. But pain does that to you. You lose sight of the things that matter.
If you’re strong enough, you allow those around you to lift you up. That can sometimes be the hardest part of your journey through tragedy.
Every cast member pulled their weight during this episode, but Dermot Mulroney was really on point.
When Pascal demanded they return to the scene to rehash the investigation, his pain was so evident and raw that it actually hurt to watch.
It was crushing when he insinuated that someone must have missed something, but they’ve been through this before and responded with so much compassion and respect.
Mulroney has been incredible as the quick-to-anger Pascal, but his skills were on full display as Pascal cracked and tried to hold himself together in front of his crew.
But Pascal’s the chief, and they simply cannot afford for him to crack under the weight of his pain like that. Kelly, who has the most even keel of anyone in the firehouse, took it upon himself to call Pascal out on it.
Pascal was crossing a line by stalking Franklin, and Kelly knew that if he hadn’t spoken up, his chief could have sealed his fate with a fatal error in judgment driven by his emotional state.
We still don’t know exactly who Pascal was in the past. We don’t know what kind of relationships he had with other crews or how they regarded him.
But Firehouse 51 stands up for each other whether they like it or not. Pascal may have wanted to sink into a hole of despair, hiding his pain from everyone around him, but that’s not how 51 operates.
And when he entered the funeral home to see his entire crew standing there, ready to support him on the worst day of his life, Dom Pascal finally understood that.
As for Violet and her letter? She did what she needed to do. She got her thoughts on paper. She worked it out, and she’ll save them and reassess when Carver is in a better place.
In the meantime, we can rest assured that Novak will take full advantage of Damon’s permanent reassignment to 51.
Life goes on, the world keeps turning, and the first responders of 51 will be there for each other and the city when they’re most needed.
