'Chicago Med' Season 6: Is Tehmina Sunny's Sabeena Virani going to shake things up in Will Halstead's life?
'Chicago Med', like its sister shows from NBC's 'Chicago' franchise, is set to make a late return this year due to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic which also ended the previous seasons for all three shows earlier than expected in April 2020. 'Chicago Fire', 'Chicago PD' and 'Chicago Med' will all return with new seasons in November and things are set to look very different in the new seasons for each of the shows. For one thing, all three shows have confirmed new characters.
The new character in the upcoming sixth season of 'Chicago Med' will be Dr Sabeena Virani played by Tehmina Sunny. Sunny is an English actress of Indian origin known for her roles in 'NCIS', 'Mistresses', 'Extant' and 'Training Day'. Sunny also portrays Regan Fried in the CW sci-fi series 'Pandora' as a series regular, so it is likely that her arrival on 'Chicago Med' might be short-lived.
Nevertheless, Sunny's Sabeena Virani will be working with a 'Chicago Med' character who is regularly paired up with new characters. Dr Will Halstead (Nick Gehlfuss) may have gotten into a lot of trouble on his six years on the show, but Gehlfuss' chemistry with even guest stars make him an easy choice when the show wants to introduce new characters and it has been that way since we were introduced to him before 'Chicago Med' premiered through a backdoor pilot on 'Chicago PD'.
According to Deadline, Virani will be supervising a clinical trial for a new unspecified medication and she will be approaching Halstead to head the project. This is not the first time that Halstead has been involved in medically charged storylines. During last year's 'One Chicago' crossover event during which a manmade bacterial infection spread through Chicago, Halstead worked with a CDC doctor to come up with a treatment. We also saw him working at an illegal safe injection site after a former patient of his got addicted to drugs and overdosed.
That storyline brought him in contact with Dr Hannah Asher (Jessy Schram) who he first encountered as an overdosing addict at the injection site and later learned was a gynecologist at the hospital he worked at. Eventually, Halstead and Asher began dating and when Season 5 ended, it looked like they were going strong. It is only a matter of time, however, before we wonder whether their relationship might crumble since it has a very unstable foundation.
Now, the question is whether Sunny's Sabeena Virani will just shake up Halstead's professional life or whether she will have a role in his personal life as well. While we were not big fans of the whole Halstead-Asher situation, we hope that Virani won't just be another romantic interest for him. Halstead has sort of been flailing about since his split with Dr Natalie Manning (Torrey DeVitto) and while they still need time apart, Manning was still Halstead's best romantic partner on the show and vice versa.
We need the new season of 'Chicago Med' to focus more on Halstead's professional life. The previous season had started to do that with the safe injection site plotline, but it was quickly pushed aside when we were introduced to Asher. With Connor Rhodes (Colin Donnell) no longer a part of the hospital, it has to be Halstead who takes up that mantle of being the go-to doctor at the hospital for complicated cases.
'Chicago Med' Season 6 will premiere on NBC on Wednesday, November 11, at 9/8c.
