The 8th season was the first season of the show post-covid lockdown. So, the season had to finish up the storyline that was ending season seven, involving Kevin and the shooting involving the racist cop, and the fallout from that. Of course, while the show was off the air, the George Floyd killing and all of the protests that resulted from it occurred, so the show made that, and the whole BLM movement a focus of the show (at least early on). Once they were a few episodes in and the storyline involving Kevin was resolved, that started to be pushed more into the background, but was still a theme throughout the rest of the season. The good thing is that the show presented the issue from both the protestor's perspective and the police's perspective so it was not force-feeding any particular viewpoint.
This season only had 16 episodes because they started shooting later in the year than normal, and there was no big "One Chicago" crossover with the other shows, although characters from Fire and Med did appear in a couple of episodes as has usually been the case. The show follows the same kind of format that it has from the beginning, mixing the "case of the week" stories with larger arcs. The show continues to do great character development with all of the characters. A big focus this season was Upton continuing to spiral toward becoming the next Voight, and Voight trying to prevent that. There is no life or death cliffhanger ending this season, but the season ends with more sketchy conduct that will have repercussions going into next season.
The DVD set does not have any extras this season. It is just a MOD set that has captions. In the past handful of seasons, the only extras on the DVDs have been the crossover episodes from the other shows, but since there was no crossover this year, this just has the 16 episodes and nothing else. So, the only reason to get this over streaming it is if you have an existing collection you want to maintain or you just prefer the physical discs to streaming.
Overall, the show continues to be very good. The writing and acting are great. Most of the characters (aside from Platt) got at least one centric episode during the season. There was more cast turnover this year as the character of Rojas was not brought back and was not really replaced with a new team member. I do think it helps the show to have a slightly smaller ensemble cast, however, and there was no significant drop-off because of it.
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