The long wait to find out the fates of several major Chicago Med characters is nearly at an end, with the Season 8 premiere of NBC’s hit medical drama quickly approaching in the fall TV schedule. Season 7 ended with Will Halstead and Dylan Scott trapped in a burning apartment building, with both stairwells engulfed in flames. Hannah Asher seemingly escaped, but Jo was seriously wounded in the scuffle with a shooter. Now, showrunners Andrew Schneider and Diane Frolov have opened up to CinemaBlend about that fiery cliffhanger, the VasCom storyline, and the ongoing conflict on the way.
Since the infernos of One Chicago tend to happen on Chicago Fire rather than Chicago Med, Will and Dylan’s lives were in serious jeopardy as of the end of the Season 7 finale. After all, they're doctors, not firefighters! While the showrunners didn’t spoil exactly what will happen when Season 8 kicks off, Andrew Schneider confirmed that the resolution was planned back when the cliffhanger was written:
We try not to paint ourselves in the corner. We did have ideas on how it would resolve for each of the characters.
It sounds like fans shouldn’t expect each of the characters to receive the same resolution, which may or may not be a good thing. Hopefully at least nobody else will be shot, as what seems to have happened to Jo! Will and Dylan have enough problems to deal with thanks to the fire engulfing the building that Will had so recently purchased. Diane Frolov revealed that Med “had help from Fire” in making the fiery cliffhanger happen, and Andrew Schneider elaborated:
[Help] from our partners at CFD! We used their consultants and maybe some of their characters.
It makes sense that the Chicago Fire team would lend a hand for Chicago Med raising the temperatures. Since the cliffhanger at the end of Fire Season 10 only involved two characters who were well outside of the city, some of the rest of the Firehouse 51 crew were presumably available to lend a hand earlier than usual on Wednesday nights. The showrunners didn’t specify just which characters might be crossing over to help out Will and Dylan, so fans will have to tune in to find out!
Unfortunately for Will, the fire seemed extreme enough that his use of the VasCom payment to buy the building has already gone to waste. Hopefully he hadn’t moved all of his personal belongings into the apartment already, or he may have lost a lot more than just his VasCom money. As for whether or not that storyline ended at the conclusion of Season 7, Schneider previewed:
It's pretty much put to bed at this point. In terms of the actual VasCom trial, at this point, we're not gonna deal with it in the courtroom. We may see how it turned out for Dr. Cooper and others but we're not going to be in the courtroom.
Dr. Cooper’s fate wasn’t entirely resolved by the end of the seventh season, although he pretty much carried himself past the point of no return when he did cocaine in front of Will back in November. It’s probably safe to say that he won’t be reinstated as a doctor at the hospital, and we won’t be seeing how the trial goes from within the courtroom (which tracks after the cancellation of Chicago Justice), but there may be some answers on the way.
But what about the conflicts that are surely on the way once Chicago Med resolves the fiery cliffhanger and moves forward? When I asked what the showrunners were looking forward to fans finally getting to see from Season 8, Diane Frolov shared:
Well, one of our overarching themes, at least at the beginning of the season, is we're going to deal a lot with hospital shortages and how that impacts the interactions between the doctors, the kind of conflicts where they have to come together on jerry-rigging things. It's a serious problem in the hospital.
Hospital shortages are real-life issues facing the medical community, ranging from staff to supplies to resources. This certainly isn’t the first time that Chicago Med has touched on issues in the real world, as when it included COVID in the story, and the shortages will evidently be an ongoing issue in Season 8. Andrew Schneider continued:
They'll be arguing with each other over scarce items, which Goodwin will have to get in the middle of and make determinations of who should get something. So it causes a lot of dramatic situations.
“Dramatic situations” are part of the fun of One Chicago, and it sounds like fans have a lot to look forward to with the resolution of the potentially deadly cliffhanger as well as what comes next. Let’s just hope that no other parts of Will’s life (and livelihood) quite literally go up in flames in the foreseeable future!
The Season 8 premiere of Chicago Med airs on Wednesday, September 21 at 8 p.m. ET on NBC, which opens a full night of One Chicago action. Fire Season 11 debuts at 9 p.m., with P.D. Season 10 premiering at 10 p.m. If you want a refresher on how the 2021-2022 TV season ended for the three shows, you can do so streaming with a Peacock subscription and check out our breakdown of where we left off for Fire, P.D., and Med.
