Chicago PD Season 12 Continues A Very Tired & Boring Trend

Contains spoilers for "Chicago PD" Season 12, Episode 8 — "Penance" 

It's turning into an easy plot out, and it's frankly become tiresome. During "Penance," Season 12, Episode 8 of "Chicago PD," criminal informant and former suspect Gloria Perez (Yara Martinez) — whom Dante Torres (Benjamin Levy Aguilar) has been having a clandestine affair with while guarding her during Season 11 — meets her doom. Gloria's hands were, like many CI's, less than pristine — she was the widow of a heroin trafficker. But she's sadly emblematic of a big problem "Chicago PD" has: whenever it wants to escalate a situation, the show executes a CI for easy drama. Shot after being kidnapped by gang members, she dies in Dante's arms against a trail hitch after sacrificing herself to save his life.

The show, naturally, can't kill off main characters on a regular basis, which is probably why so many informants have bitten the dust over the show's long history. Criminals or mere witnesses have died violently on such a regular basis, however, that it's begun to mean less and less to the plotline, leaving audiences to wonder why they should bother investing in these characters in the first place.

Gloria Perez definitely isn't the first CI to die and she won't be the last, but "Chicago PD" has lost so many memorable figures over the years that it's easy enough to pinpoint a few memorable faces who will always be missed.

Anna Avalos (Carmela Zumbado, also familiar from "You" and others) is a classic example of a CI whom most "Chicago PD" fans love, and whose death reads as more of a punishment to Hank Voight (Jason Beghe) than anything. Yet another daughter figure who dies violently in front of him, Anna is shot to death in a friendly fire incident after killing the head of thee Los Temidos gang she'd been embedded with. Hailey Upton (Tracy Spirdakos) shoots her twice in the chest after she accidentally wounds Hank. That one of Hank's daughter figures manages to murder another is an alarming plot twist that never gets properly explored before Hailey Upton leaves the show after Season 11.

Other members of the team who are not CI's — Nadia Decotis (Stella Maeve), Julie "Jules" Willhite (Melissa Sagemiller), and Alvin "Al" Olinsky (Elias Koteas) — have died memorably if not violently at the hands of criminal forces. Those heartbreaking "Chicago PD" scenes will live with audiences forever. But it's those CI deaths that keep happening, and those lost witnesses who continue to leave a blood trail that besmirches the show's quality.