Chicago Fire: What's next for Dawson and Casey?

Despite the rocky road Dawson and Casey faced last season on Chicago Fire, the couple is on the way to reconciliation this year.

Though Casey (Jesse Spencer) had the chance to move on with political consultant Susan Weller (Lauren Stamile), he made the choice to return home to Dawson (Monica Raymund), despite his initial misgivings about being ready to be a father. “Casey made a very conscious decision at the end of last season to go back to Dawson and we want to explore the two of them as a couple,” EP Derek Haas tells EW. “Not as a married couple necessarily, but as a couple with a child in their lives, and also explore the challenges of being on a fire truck together with a child at home.”

That’s especially prevalent for Dawson as she faces the challenges of being a new mom “who is partnered with the father figure in the child’s life and they have a very dangerous job together,” Haas says. “She goes through some close calls. She has to make some decisions about what it is she wants in life and where her newfound priorities are in terms of being a firefighter or being a foster parent to Louie.”

Unfortunately, we haven’t seen the last of Susan, who made a move on Casey at the end of the season. “There are some unresolved issues with Susan,” Haas says. “She’ll be back in the first episode and she’s a political schemer, so I won’t say that she’s not going to affect the Dawson-Louie-Casey new family unit that was created at the end of the season.”

With that in mind, Haas says the show is dialing back on Casey’s role as an alderman as the season progresses. “We’ll use it the way that we used his construction jobs in the first few episodes,” Haas says. “It’s there and it’s present and we can use it as need-be, but it’s not going to be a huge part of the show. However, I will say that we’re looking to do an episode at some point this year that would really focus on Casey, the way we’ve done a couple of episodes that were Severide-specific, where he was off duty and got into helping rescue people.”

Chicago Fire returns Tuesday, Oct. 11 at 10 p.m. ET on NBC.

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