YMMV / Chicago Fire

• Anvilicious: Hermann becomes furious when his eldest son, Lee-Henry, is suspended from school for refusing to say the Pledge of Allegiance to protest what he perceives to be injustice endemic to American society. But, rather than open up a discussion or even have either Hermann or Lee-Henry present their case on camera, the plot simply has Hermann angrily yell about how America is great and that refusing to say the Pledge in unpatriotic while Lee-Henry sullenly and silently glares. Hermann doesn't do much to help his own case when he later browbeats Lee-Henry's principal into undoing the suspension by completely reversing his opinion and loudly yelling about American values and the freedom of speech. The episode closes with Hermann taking Lee-Henry to a VFW and having the kid meet with injured veterans and reciting the Pledge of Allegiance with them.
• Broken Base: Fans are divided over the Fire-PD-SVU event episodes, especially because Chicago Fire is only ever tangentially involved in the stories by setting up the plot in the final minutes of Tuesday's episode while the proper story is explored in a Wednesday two-parter. There are still others who dislike having Chicago shows connected to Law & Order at all, preferring that a unique Chicago-verse be developed.
• Creator's Pet: Gabby Dawson is a terrible paramedic riding a wave of Protagonist-Centered Morality. Even if we skip the series' frequent use of Artistic License – Medicine, she still commits insubordination repeatedly (that's literally the only offense that can get a fire department employee fired on the spot), performs medical procedures that are outside of her Scope of Practice (but ends up doing more good than harm), is openly carrying on an inappropriate relationship with her company officer, on one occasion casually destroyed a social worker's cell phone, the list goes on. One episode had her ignoring the expressed wishes of a conscious & oriented elderly woman and taking her to the hospital against her will, which is not just kidnapping, but kidnapping under color of authority, a severe violation of the woman's civil rights. She gets presented as heroic for doing this, because "it's for her own good (never mind that the elderly woman happens to be black), when she would (and quite frankly should) have been arrested and convicted. She continued to get away with this due to her position of being one of the star characters until she left to go help with the reconstruction efforts in Puerto Rico.
• Diagnosed by the Audience: Some fans wonder if paramedic Chili Chilton might be slightly bi-polar, although we haven't seen her depressed. We find out later she is trying to deal with the death of her sister, Jelly Bean.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Jeff Hephner, as Jeff Clarke, proved to be fairly popular with fans. Enough so that Clarke stuck around after his initial storyline as a Red Herring Mole played out and he got more character development than some of the show's regular recurring characters along with his own story arc involving his ex-wife. Shame that he was written out without a proper farewell, although it did fit in with his loner-type characterization^note Hephner was reluctant to stay in Chicago long term as it meant either spending months away from his family or uproot them from their home. Someone even put together a Facebook community dedicated to Hephner's performance. He was so popular, in fact, that the character is being brought back on a recurring basis on Chicago Med.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • One episode has the firefighters attempting to rescue someone while being shot at. They all survive. Tragically, the same couldn't be said two months later when a gunman fired on firefighters responding to a house fire in Webster, New York. Four were hit, two fatally.
  • Hallie in the pilot says to Casey that she 'doesn't have the time to start a family'. Less than a year later, she's killed.
• Hate Sink: Gail McLeod from season 2 has the unenviable duty of cutting the Chicago firefighter budget by 10%. Somehow she interprets this as "attempt destroy the careers and lives of Firehouse 51", going to morally and legally dubious methods like spying and manipulation to get any excuse she can to shut them down because Boden disagreed with her on the matter. It says a lot that the most humanizing trait she gets is in her introduction, by fully admitting that she doesn't understand what the firefighters go through in their dangerous lives, and all that does is really explain her ignorant contempt for not getting her way.
• Moral Event Horizon: If Detective Voight didn't cross it right off the bat when he attempted to frame a father for a devastating car crash to protect his drunk son, he certainly did with his ongoing campaign of harassment against Casey and his girlfriend, up to planting cocaine in their house. It's later Hand Waved away in Chicago P.D. with Voight explaining that he was driven to frustration by his son's actions and was lashing out in a misguided attempt to protect Justin.
• Nightmare Fuel: Fires are already a nightmare scenario, but firefighters don't just respond to fires. How about a woman caught in her hair on an escalator as part of her scalp is torn open, or a guy getting in a car accident who has rebar speared through his face? The rescues the crew have to deal with can be downright gruesome, and the fighters do not take it well in some of the nastier cases.
  • One perfect example is in Season 5, where Borelli disregarded orders with a potentially explosive truck and got to close right as it detonated. As the camera pans around his head showing one injured side of his face, we then see the left half bloodied and melted, his eye lost by nature of the entire side turned to mush. He lives through this, albeit crippled for life.
• Replacement Scrappy: Chili, who took over the paramedic slot vacated by Peter Mills, wasn't very well-received but, instead of settling in like Sylvie did, was constantly kept distant from most of the cast and plunged into a dramatic breakdown storyline without the show ever bothering to explain why until the very end, thus making her seem, for several weeks, merely prone to histrionics. She was eventually written out.
• Romantic Plot Tumor: The writers really seem to like pairing off male firefighters and female paramedics. Aside from Casey and Dawson's romantic arc (that started from Day One and can occasionally become annoyingly prominent), there's also been Mills and Dawson, Cruz and Brett, Borelli and Chili, and an aborted attempt at Otis and Brett before the plot device was largely abandoned (apart from the ongoing Casey-Dawson thing). It remains by far the most glaringly unrealistic aspect of the show, as such behavior would never be tolerated in a real-life firehouse.
  • Casey/Dawson deserves its own spotlight. The pairing dominates the romantic storyline of the first five seasons, and it's clear the two are into each other. However, Casey starts the series in another relationship, which makes Dawson jealous. Casey ends up breaking up with her, but by that point Dawson is in a relationship with Mills, who's heavily into her. The two would eventually break up with Mills saw how much Dawson pines over Casey, but instead of getting together, the two continue to play cat and mouse with each other. And when they do get together, they end up keeping secrets and treating each other with kid gloves. Many rejoiced when Dawson left in Season 8, despite the reasoning why she left, simply because they wouldn't have to deal with the painful pairing again. Casey/Brett was much more welcomed due to the relationship being much healthier.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Given that the Office of Fire Investigations (OFI) is a critical part of any fire department, you’d think it would be an equally critical part of the show. Nevertheless, they only ever appear when they need Severide's help. Many episodes have the firefighters themselves investigate on their own time.