Chicago P.D. Review: Burgess Goes Undercover in "Dark Imaginings"

CHICAGO · THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 5, 2026

The best P.D. hours are the ones that pick a single member of Intelligence and take the walls down. “Dark Imaginings” is a Kim Burgess hour, and it has been a while — too long — since the show built one around her. According to NBC’s official synopsis, as listed by CarterMatt and TVmaze, Burgess takes on a risky undercover assignment while struggling to feel settled in her new house. Two sentences, and the whole episode is in them: a cop going underground at exactly the moment her own life above ground has not quite come together yet.

That pairing is the set-up, and it is a smart one. Undercover work on this show has never been an action gimmick — it is the job’s most intimate danger, the slow cost of pretending to be someone else while the real life waits at home. Burgess, of all people, knows that cost; fourteen seasons of viewers know she knows it. Setting that assignment against a house that does not feel like hers yet — the newest chapter of the life she has built with Ruzek and Makayla — gives the hour a double exposure effect: the woman with no settled home, moving into a borrowed one for the job. Seat42F’s episode stills put the unit around her — Voight, Ruzek, Torres and the district’s newest officer — but the premise belongs to Burgess, and so does the episode.

What worked

P.D. understands something most procedurals forget: jeopardy is more interesting than gunfire. A “risky undercover assignment” in the hands of this show means the risk is watched, not just fired — the small choices, the rooms Burgess has to be believed in, the version of herself she has to sell. And the domestic thread is not decoration. A detective who cannot feel settled at home walking into a cover life gives every scene a second meaning, and the show trusts its audience to hold both. That trust — in the viewers, and in its lead — is what separates a Burgess showcase from a case of the week.

The title helps. “Dark Imaginings” promises unease rather than explosions, and the episode’s premise delivers on that promise in both directions: whatever Burgess is imagining at home, and whatever she has to imagine herself into at work. It is the most psychologically framed hour of P.D.’s young season, and it suits a series that has been quietly getting more interior season by season.

The performances

Marina Squerciati has been one of the great slow-burn performances in this franchise — Burgess has grown from patrol officer to one of Intelligence’s essential detectives across fourteen seasons, and Squerciati has charted every step of it in her face. A showcase hour asks her to play two registers at once, the cop performing a cover and the woman underneath it who cannot quite settle, and it is exactly the assignment she is best at. Patrick John Flueger’s Ruzek remains her essential counterweight — the home front of this episode lives in their scenes — and Jason Beghe’s Voight, as ever, is most interesting in the moments where the unit’s hardest man has to decide how much protection to offer and how much rope to give.

One small nitpick: a true single-focus hour always parks some of the ensemble, and viewers who come to P.D. for the whole unit working a case in lockstep get a leaner version of that here. It is the right trade for this episode — but it is a trade.

Next week, per CarterMatt’s listing of NBC’s synopsis, P.D. returns Wednesday, November 11 with “The Thin Grey Line”: Intelligence adapts to a different style of community policing while working a kidnapping case in Chicago’s Chinatown. A unit that just watched one of its own go it alone, learning to police a neighborhood on that neighborhood’s terms — Season 14 keeps choosing interesting problems.

The verdict: "Dark Imaginings" is P.D. remembering that jeopardy beats gunfire — a Burgess showcase that trusts its lead and its audience in equal measure. Score: 8.9/10.

Spoiler note: this review discusses the episode's premise and themes only. Nothing about how the case — or the episode — ends.