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What happens in “The Good Shepherd”
In Season 12, Episode 12, Intelligence makes a gruesome discovery that leads Torres to go undercover at Maron, the juvenile detention center where he was held as a teenager. The case therefore arrives with a personal complication: Torres has to investigate the facility while confronting the place and history that shaped him. Rotten Tomatoes’ episode listing identifies the episode as “The Good Shepherd,” directed by Brenna Malloy and written by Mellori Velasquez.
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According to Precinct TV’s recap, the dead teenager is Kai. The recap describes a lockdown that leaves Torres confined with an inmate, stirring a panic response linked to his own past. It also reports that he eventually speaks candidly with the teenagers he is trying to help. These events turn the investigation into more than a puzzle about what happened at Maron: they make Torres’s relationship with the institution part of the case’s emotional stakes.
Why the case matters to Torres
The episode’s strongest idea is the tension between Torres’s present role as a police officer and the young person he was at Maron. Lara Rosales, reviewing the episode for Tell-Tale TV, reads that tension through guilt and unworthiness: Torres still judges himself by his history, rather than treating it as one part of who he has become.
#1 Best Overall
That reading gives the undercover assignment a useful purpose. Torres’s past is not simply background information attached to a case; it affects how he sees the teenagers and how readily he can imagine himself as someone who might help them. His eventual candor, as described in the recap, offers a moment of connection that a routine investigation would not provide.
Does the episode develop Torres or repeat familiar beats?
The reviews disagree, and the disagreement gets to the episode’s central limitation. Rosales sees a revealing character study of Torres’s past and present, including the support his team offers when he feels isolated. That support matters because it puts other people beside him at a moment when his own history threatens to close him off.
Rank #2
Lissete Lanuza Sáenz’s Fangirlish review is more cautious. She calls the episode good but familiar, arguing that the show returns to a narrow, trauma-defined version of Torres: “This episode is hard, and it does give us a glimpse of who Torres is, his fears, and the experiences that made him who he is. We just kinda wished there was room to be surprised in that regard.”
That criticism is persuasive even if the emotional material works. Maron, confinement, panic and guilt all point toward the same established wound. The episode supplies context and feeling, but a character study can feel repetitive when it revisits pain without revealing enough that is new about the person living with it. The open question is whether Torres’s candor and the team’s support meaningfully alter how he understands himself, or mainly underline how isolated he still feels.
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Rank #3
Rotten Tomatoes’ critics listing reflects this range of response rather than a single consensus: it reproduces Sáenz’s criticism, lists CBR’s Brittany Frederick at 5/10 for elements she found borrowed from other crime stories, and gives Rosales’s character-study review 4/5. Those are individual critics’ judgments, not audience ratings.
Episode details
| Detail | Information |
|---|---|
| Series and episode | Chicago P.D., Season 12, Episode 12 |
| Title | “The Good Shepherd” |
| Director | Brenna Malloy, according to Rotten Tomatoes |
| Writer | Mellori Velasquez, according to Rotten Tomatoes |
| Network and rating | NBC; TV-14 (V|D|L), according to Rotten Tomatoes |
Verdict
“The Good Shepherd” connects its case to Torres’s history in a way that gives the hour emotional weight and lets his concern for the teenagers feel personal. Its weakness is that the same trauma-centered framing can make that insight feel like a return to familiar territory. The episode offers a worthwhile look at the gap between who Torres was and who he is, but whether that look feels like development or repetition depends on how much new dimension the viewer finds in his response.
Quick Recap
Best Value
Rank #4
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