Contains spoilers for “Chicago Fire” Season 12, Episode 11
It’s frustrating to be a Kelly Severide (Taylor Kinney) fan. After the character missed much of Season 11 of “Chicago Fire,” when Kinney took a leave of absence for personal reasons, he returns to the firehouse for Season 12. But then Severide disappears again, frustrating his wife, Stella Kidd (Miranda Rae Mayo), as well as viewers at home. And now it looks like the character is set to pull a third vanishing act in Episode 11.
TVLine reports that in the upcoming episode, Severide will disappear in the middle of the night along with one of the company’s engines, forcing his spouse to give chase. “Kidd walks out to the apparatus floor in the middle of the night to see one of the rigs is missing, and Severide’s phone sits alone on the squad table. No one else is in sight. What the hell is going on?” teases the drama’s showrunner, Andrea Newman. She described the episode as a self-contained thriller and Stella as a warrior woman on a mission to track her husband down.
Since the words ‘self-contained’ pop up in this description, don’t expect Severide’s disappearance to be permanent — which is a good thing when one considers how many “Chicago Fire” actors have left the program recently. Hopefully, Stella and Kelly will get to spend more time together after this incident, because they haven’t been doing much of that over the past few years.
Both Stella and Kelly have had frustratingly long absences
“Chicago Fire” fans are all too aware of the fact that Stella Kidd and Kelly Severide haven’t spent a lot of time on screen in recent seasons, either together or apart, despite the fact that the characters married fairly recently. The wedding was preceded by Kidd (and Miranda Rae Mayo) taking a long leave of absence during a large chunk of Season 10, which forced the show’s writers to rework existing scripts to explain her absence. As a result, Stella’s storyline has her setting up her Girls on Fire mentorship program out of town, leaving Kelly frustrated when she becomes less available and drops out of contact with him.
Stella returns to town just in time for their wedding, but the tables turn during Season 11 when Kelly takes off to help work with the CFD. Though she gives her husband her blessing to leave Chicago to follow his dream, Stella feels alone and frustrated. Relations between the couple become even more strained when Kelly takes on an undercover assignment with the ATF that extends his time away from her and the city. And he’s still not done with the organization, as seen during Season 12, Episode 4, when he works another case for them.
Despite that, Season 12 seems to finally have the couple on the same page. But while it currently seems reasonably sure that Kelly, and therefore Severide, won’t be leaving “Chicago Fire” again on a long-term basis in the near future, one never knows what the future might bring.
