Critic’s Rating: 3.8 / 5.0
3.8
Everything’s coming up Imani.
Chicago PD Season 13 Episode 12 was a quieter hour that mostly served as a character study for Intelligence’s newest addition to the series.
And we finally have more pieces to the puzzle regarding Imani and her sister.
In many ways, “Missing” is an hour of Chicago PD that leaves you wanting, but mostly because of how simplistic it was compared to many of the other cases this season.
It marks what, perhaps, is the fourth installment that centers on or prominently features Imani during PD’s widely discussed and often polarizing character-centric cycle.
Many of Imani’s cases tend to reference the same general thing, and this one did as well, leaning into the customary formula these days: Intelligence members happen across cases off duty and lure the rest of the team into the fray when there’s a mystery to figure out.
For Imani, we had her start the hour of renting a very nice apartment with a great view, and wanting to settle in. And this was revealing in itself.
When we met her, she was pretty open about never sticking around anywhere for long and not exactly playing well with others. Bouncing around would naturally mean that she doesn’t plant roots much, including with homes.
But it speaks volumes that she actually put the down payment down on an apartment. It implies that she’s making Chicago her home, at least for a bit, or that she can at least envision staying there longer than she normally does.
It suggests she feels she has found a place in Intelligence, that maybe there’s some longevity for this wanderer after all.
Her lack of real items to her name speaks volumes, too. She has this big apartment and virtually nothing in it. She travels light, and that makes you feel sad for someone who doesn’t really have anywhere to feel at home.
Apparently, she hasn’t felt like she’s had a home since her sister’s disappearance.
We also learned that Imani works with a Missing Persons organization. She’s a woman who spends her free time combing through whatever she can to find her sister, trafficking sites, missing persons flyers, the works.
So when she got that call about a family, she was right there, trying to resolve the tension that arose because a mother who had been missing her son, Ben, for 20 years thought she had met him again and was terrified that if she didn’t give him money or find him help, something terrible could happen.
Of course, things played out about as one would’ve expected. It wasn’t really Ben but rather some imposter who wanted money and took full advantage of a grieving mother desperate to find her son.
Instead, we had a more disturbing thing at play. We learned that Eddie was the man who took Ben all those years ago, and that the man pretending to be Ben was actually Eddie’s brother.
And boy was he a piece of crap. How do you figure out your brother is a full-blown pedophile and then take advantage of that by targeting the mother of one of his victims to get money? What garbage!
Imani not finding a way to kick this man’s ass was a miracle within itself.
But they could at least use him to get to the truth of where Ben was or what happened to him, and that resulted in Imani and the guys at that station after talking Grady, Jemma’s other son, into posing as bait for Eddie, the pedophile.
My problem, and the most heartbreaking part of this whole case, was Grady.
It was frustrating that Imani tried to get this poor teen to put his life on the line for a brother he had never known. But worse yet, we learned about how he even came into existence.
He told Imani that the only reason he exists at all was that his mother begged his father for another child because it hurt so much that she had lost Ben.
Grady was basically a replacement or filler child, and that still didn’t work because he obviously could never fill the void that Ben left behind. So his entire existence felt like that of an unloved child in the shadow of a brother he had never known.
And he’s the only one there to take care of his mother after all of this.
So to further ask him to put his life on the line for a shot at giving his mother closure felt like asking more of him than he should have had to give. Hasn’t Grady given enough? Hell, hasn’t he suffered enough?
Everything was taken from him, so what did he have to gain anymore?
Imani was trying to reason with him by drawing on her own experience with her sister, which was so frustrating and misguided. They have two totally different experiences.
I understood her point, but she was undermining his experience and pain and doing exactly what everyone else has been asking of him his entire life: prioritizing the pain of his mother ahead of his own.
And then he did that, even when he didn’t want to, after Imani guilted him into it. It was all so his mother could finally get some closure.
Yet, Imani and Voight told her the truth, and Jemma didn’t believe it anyway.
Unfortunately, Imani had to kill Eddie, but they learned from another kid he was grooming about what really happened to Ben because it was a cautionary tale for them.
He kidnapped Ben, unplanned, hurt him by accident, an injury to the head, and Ben died that same day, nearly 20 years ago.
There was nothing to hold out for or hold onto. Ben died the day he went missing, and there was never a shot at saving him.
But without a body, Jemma clung to denial because it allowed her to still hope. And without acceptance, there was no closure.
And Grady never gets peace or the mother he deserved. His actions — help didn’t even matter in the end. My heart broke for him. All I want is for that kid to move on and create the life he deserves.
But that case felt like a reality check for Imani by hitting too close to home. Her entire life is devoted to finding out what happened to her sister and maybe finding her.
He parents died without knowing the truth, and now she carries on that mission. But will an answer be enough for her if it’s one she doesn’t like?
We’ve already seen how it influences her in cases, and her dogged approach to helping and saving people, especially younger people.
The hour gave us that peek beyond the veil for Imani. As usual, Voight was there to soak it all in. And I’ll be having one of my favorite Billie Eilish songs stuck in my head for a while now. Go figure.
Chicago PD will return after the Olympics with an exciting crossover event. But for now, sound off below about this one. Did you like it?
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