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[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for Chicago P.D. Season 12 Episode 5 “Water and Honey.”]
Welcome to Intelligence, Officer Kiana Cook (Toya Turner)!
In the latest Chicago P.D. episode, Cook is the one to bring the case—a murder that leads to the discovery of allegations of abuse—to Intelligence and leads the charge in the investigation. She impresses enough that Torres (Benjamin Levy Aguilar) suggests she join the unit.
Below, showrunner Gwen Sigan talks about Cook coming in, her past, the upcoming promotion, and more.
Is Cook full time with intelligence going forward?
Gwen Sigan: She is. She is our newest team member.
Does that play into why someone’s promoted?
Yeah, I think there’s a lot of things that play into it, right? The fact that we had Upton [Tracy Spiridakos] leave—she was the last higher-ranking officer in the unit, and so there’s sort of this vacuum of needing that thing—and then how the detective test usually works in the real world is it comes up every couple years. We’re playing that it’s come up and also we have this vacuum. It’s needed that there’s somebody at that level and one of our officers will take the chance, give it a shot.
Elizabeth Sisson / NBC
What else can you say about that promotion? Anything about who it is or how the team deals with it as a unit?
Yeah, I think the nice thing is that the team is all very supportive. After this many years of working together, I think they all want to support each other and also see it as somebody getting that level and doing well really just supports the whole team. And so in a nice way, everyone’s very supportive and it certainly changes some dynamics, but there’s no jealousy, there’s no bitterness, there’s no envy. It’s really, let’s all support and this is the best for the whole unit to have somebody backing them up.
I think that’s because you’ve done such a great job of building the different relationships between Burgess [Marina Squerciati], Ruzek [Patrick John Flueger], and Atwater [LaRoyce Hawkins].
Yeah, there’s so much love and loyalty between the three of them that even when there is conflict, they’re able to usually sort it out.
You’ve established this conflict between Cook and Montgomery, and she says that he demoted her after she called him out for running his tactical team poorly. But is there more to what happened between them that she’s not saying just yet?
I think what she’s not saying is all of the details of what that looks like and the specifics of it, and there’s a lot of pain and betrayal in that of what moves he made to demote her. But also in this episode, she references the fact that even her beat cop partner didn’t trust her. And so there’s a lot of information being given to the whole police department that maybe isn’t necessarily true and how that can affect your reputation. And then just emotionally, I don’t think she’s being honest about how much it has affected her. She’s got sort of this great resilience and this sense of self. I think this surety of self and this confidence, which is really nice, but no matter who you are, if somebody does that at a job that you really love, it’s going to affect your self-worth and it’s going to shake you some way. I think that she hasn’t been completely honest about that yet. And so it’ll be interesting to see, once you get to know her character more, how that could affect her and how that is a struggle to not let it affect her.
Is Montgomery going to be like a recurring thorn in her side, or is it more just about the emotional stuff that she’s dealing with?
More about the emotional, and then the sort of left behind consequences of that and how it affects her role within the department as a whole. Because certainly in Intelligence, we accept her for who she is and they kind of understand how that happens. Certainly, our detectives have had that happen to them. Our officers have had that. Atwater’s had that happen. And so we want to look at it a little bit more emotionally than just him as the villain who’s going to continuously come back. We’re not really planning for that element of it.
What’s coming up with Trudy (Amy Morton)?
Trudy! Trudy’s got some really emotional episodes, Episodes 10 and 14, where she plays a big role in it, and it’s sort of Ruzek and some family dynamics, and we see how Platt’s able to support him and the whole Ruzek family in a way. And it also says a lot of nice things about the relationship she has with Voight [Jason Beghe] and her fellow police after having been a police officer for so many years. So I’m excited for that one. And then she’s got some other things cooking that aren’t official yet, but I think will be really, really exciting if we can make ’em all happen.
Are there any crossovers coming up?
Not yet. They’re always in the ether. We’re always hoping to do one.
Will Val be back soon for Atwater? That was fun.
That was fun. We do hope to have her back. I thought they were great together. They had such a great chemistry. He needs some light in his life and he deserves that and he deserves to find a balance in a way that he hasn’t been able to yet. And I think she, in that episode, was a good representation of, there are other ways to do this job. There are ways to do it and maybe feel a little healthier, have a little more time for yourself, which is something he struggled with and I don’t think he’s ever been able to have. And so we’ll see if she is a part of that, continues to be a part of that growth for him.
Chicago P.D., Wednesdays, 10/9c, NBC