As reported last week, longtime series regular Taylor Kinney is taking a leave of absence from his role as Lieutenant Kelly Severide to deal with a personal matter. The production was notified of Kinney’s news on Jan. 20, and given the unexpected turn of events, script rewrites will be required to account for why Severide is missing in action. (It’s not yet clear in which exact episode Kinney will take his leave, or for how long.) With a major forest fire raging in the Pacific Northwest, Casey rings up the best firefighter he knows for assistance in rescuing families trapped in a campground near the blaze. We can’t imagine Severide wouldn’t come running to help out his friend and take on a kind of fire challenge he’s never faced before.

Selected items are only available for delivery via the Royal Mail 48® service and other items are available for delivery using this service for a charge. Severide and his wife Stella have experienced some discord lately when it comes to balancing their personal and professional lives, even prompting Stella to suggest that maybe they shouldn’t work together. While the two seem to have ironed out their issues for now, that’s not to say they couldn’t resurface again, leading Severide to take a job at another firehouse for the sake of his marriage’s health. Hey, is Lieutenant Pelham in need of a rescue squad leader? This is where TVLine comes in, because even though the show’s creative team no doubt has a handle on the situation, we’ve also put on our thinking caps to come up with some reasonable scenarios that would take Severide away from Firehouse 51. And considering how important the character is to the series and how much he loves his job, we made sure that they justified Severide (temporarily!) leaving his crew.Chicago Fire will soon be operating without one of its best men — and we’ve got a couple of ideas for how the NBC drama could explain his sudden absence. Since his father Benny has already passed, one of Severide’s few remaining family connections is his mother Jennifer (played by Kim Delaney), who was last seen video chatting with her son during his wedding day. The conversation was surprisingly positive and meaningful, leaving us to believe that the duo are in a good place in their relationship. So if Jennifer were to need Severide to take a furlough and come stay with her for several weeks while she heals from a broken leg, we’d buy that.