'Chicago PD' Season 7: Pregnant Kim Burgess is assaulted violently by a culprit, but again, why such brutality?
The article contains spoilers for 'Chicago PD' Season 7 Episode 13 'I Was Here'. Reader discretion is advised for the description of onscreen violence
This week's episode of 'Chicago PD' on NBC would be quite defining for Kim Burgess and could indicate a change for the character. After responding to a 911 distress call, Kim follows up with the Intelligence Unit as they try to crack a sex trafficking ring and save the kidnapped girls -- some of them even juveniles.
The Unit was able to bust the ring, however, the girl who called 911 is not found. When Kim does reach through to her, she finds out where the girl is being held and calls for backup -- not only does she not have a partner on scene, but she is also pregnant.
However, the backup does not arrive in time and Kim has to go in to prevent the culprit from killing the girl. When she goes in, she is pushed to the wall and then slammed against the basin, her stomach hitting it.
She is then pushed to the floor and the culprit holds her down and repeatedly punches her stomach. The scuffle then results in the culprit holding Kim facedown and bashing her head against the floor again and again. This is until Kim regains access to her gun and shoots him.
However, the struggle does not end there. She moves his body off of her -- Kim's face is covered in blood and she wails as she clutches her stomach in pain. She then drags herself over to the bathtub where the victim is submerged in water. Kim slides in and lifts the victim.
This is when Detective Hailey Upton comes in and drags the victim from the bathtub to give her CPR. Kim is struggling to speak as she cries, "I don't know," and "help me," repeatedly while holding her stomach, while Adam Ruzek rushes to her.
The whole scene -- from the moment Kim busts into the room till when Adam rushes her outlasts less than two minutes but it certainly is a hard watch that feels much longer than it actually was.
This begs the question -- did the scene need to be as violent? The emphasis on the assault on Kim's stomach may have been dramatized to point out the inevitability of Kim losing her pregnancy to viewers-- something that has been hinted at over Kim's reluctance to get off the field.
Violence against women on TV is not new. Many shows have been called out for it, especially HBO's 'Game of Thrones' and 'Westworld'. Even procedural crime dramas like 'Law & Order: Special Victims Unit' and 'CSI' -- that incidentally have also been produced by Dick Wolf, who produces all shows in the 'Chicago' franchise -- have also been called out for skewed depictions of female assault victims.
Perhaps viewers might think that Kim should have known something like this would happen and the aggravating violence was meant to show that Kim really needed to stay out of the culprit's way. Kim's miscarriage seems to serve no purpose now -- except to cause pain for the character and a related plotline showing her deal with the trauma.
A similar incident occurred on 'Chicago PD' when Nadia's gruesome death (in Season 2) served to increase grief for Sophia Bush's Detective Erin Lindsay. The character was shown struggling as she dealt with the grief and quit the force by the end of the season as well as got addicted to drugs and alcohol to numb the pain.
When violence against women serves as a prop to advance a character's story in multiple instances, something feels off. Sure, 'Chicago PD' fares much better than most other shows. BBC's 'The Fall' starring Jamie Dornan and Gillian Anderson was also criticized for fetishizing what Dornan's serial killer character does to women.
The main question is why 'Chicago PD' had to depict such a traumatizing event in this manner? Was the pregnancy plotline just introduced to bring in the miscarriage? Did the miscarriage have to come out of such a violent encounter?
We also saw Kim struggling with choosing to reveal her pregnancy to her bosses for fear of being kept out of the field. She did tell them and she was assigned a desk job, but she still opted to go into an active crime scene based on the perspective given to the viewers. Another thing to wonder is why did Kim not have a partner with her when she was out on a crime scene -- as Trudy had accompanied her when they initially went to follow up on the 911 call.
Why is the conversation of 'career vs. family' always centered around female characters when there are very real discussions of stay-at-home fathers getting more popular? Would Ruzek -- the father of the lost child -- have been given the same treatment?
It further begs the question of whether the writers went the way they did for the shock factor--it most certainly looks that way. In doing so, they also take away from the stories of the victims of the sex trafficking ring. We also need to ask whether the writers rob Kim of her agency in deciding to pursue such a story.
'Chicago PD' airs on NBC on Wednesday nights.