A Chicago P.D. era is ending with the upcoming Season 11 finale due to the departure of Tracy Spiridakos after seven seasons as Detective Hailey Upton, although Voight is the one in the hot seat after being kidnapped in the penultimate episode. As the wait continues to learn how One Chicago’s crime drama will handle Upton’s exit in the 2024 TV schedule, showrunner Gwen Sigan spoke with CinemaBlend about Spiridakos returning for one last season as well as the Special Victims detective who joined forces with Intelligence.

News broke back in October 2023 (shortly after the WGA writers strike ended) that Season 11 would be Tracy Spiridakos’ last as Hailey Upton, with some consolation for fans that she would return for the beginning of Season 11 rather than written off between seasons. The news got even better later with the confirmation that the actress was actually sticking around for the full eleventh season.

While Season 11 is shorter than the average season due to the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes, thirteen episodes is certainly more than the three of Jesse Lee Soffer as Jay Halstead in Season 10. When I spoke with the showrunner ahead of the eleventh season finale, she weighed in on Spiridakos returning for one full last season:

It was the best. I mean, she’s a class act. It was a very classy and kind thing to do to give us an entire season. It’s so rare that you get that. I mean, it’s a rare thing on either end, that you have that much time to prepare like that. And so it just made it such a nice season to be able to arc it out and to be able to talk with her and get to do the stories that I still wanted to do with her. It was very nice.

While not every episode of Season 11 has been Upton-centric, the big Upton episodes have felt like they’re building to something. Part of that is due to the arrival of Detective Jo Petrovic, played by Bojana Novakovic and possibly introduced as a replacement for Upton in the Intellgence Unit. Petrovic drinking on the job had Hailey flashing back to her dad, and the two formed a surprising connection.

It also made sense that Intelligence hadn’t encountered the Intelligence detective before; not only did she initially prefer working a desk, but she worked in the Special Victims Unit. (No, not the one in New York City.) I asked the showrunner why Petrovic was given the SVU background, and Gwen Sigan shared:

We knew from the beginning. We wanted it to obviously be tied into our serial killer case to justify having this character come in, and it made sense that she’s coming from an environment where there is a lot more profiling, and that’s something that made sense for us in the capacity of CPD and how they work. So that was part of it.

The twisted Season 11 serial killer became a nemesis of sorts for Voight back in the seventh episode, with Jason Beghe suggesting that his character would be “that much more determined to exact justice” after a young man he’d brought into his home was murdered. Gwen Sigan continued, explaining why Petrovic’s SVU background made her a fit for Voight and Upton’s investigation:

The other piece of it was character-wise, it is so who this character is that she’s drawn to [it]. We reference in Episode 10 her history and her background, which is that the first memory she has is of her mother actually trying to kill her. And so I think that she was always drawn to SVU because of that. It’s the unit that in the Chicago Police Department would be doing a lot of those cases that are sort of similar to what happened to her, or at least similar sort of emotionally to what happened to her, and so that’s why she was attracted to it. To try to make sense of this thing that’s been a part of her life all of these years.

There’s no confusing Petrovic with Olivia Benson or any of the other cops on Law & Order: SVU, but she had a personal reason to stick with a pretty difficult unit. It remains to be seen if she’ll permanently move from CPD’s Special Victims for Season 12 to replace Upton. Sigan continued:

Also for us as writers, it was because we wanted to use this character to help tell this story with Tracy, who is also trying to make sense of her own headspace and what’s happened to her and where she wants to go. It was all because of the theme and the fun of getting into those dark spaces internally for both of them.

Based on the promo, Upton definitely isn’t done going to dark spaces just because only one episode is left for Tracy Spiridakos. Her voice is heard over the footage of Voight looking distinctly worse for the wear, and all signs point towards an intense finale. Take a look:

The Season 11 finale of Chicago P.D. airs on Wednesday, May 22 at 10 p.m. ET on NBC, following the Season 12 finale of Chicago Fire with a fresh batch of cliffhangers at 9 p.m. ET and the Season 9 finale of Chicago Med with shocking news for one doctor at 8 p.m. ET. Check back with CinemaBlend for more from Gwen Sigan, and revisit earlier episodes of One Chicago streaming with a Peacock Premium subscription.