The Intelligence Unit of Chicago P.D. has been missing a member ever since the debut of Season 11 in the 2024 TV schedule, but that's about to change with the return of Benjamin Levy Aguilar as Officer Dante Torres. Last seen in the shocking penultimate episode of Season 10 back in spring of 2023, the character has been on furlough off-screen for all of the eleventh season so far. His first case back won't be an easy one on February 7, and the actor spoke with CinemaBlend about how prepared Torres is (or isn't) for jumping back into the One Chicago deep end.
In the fourth episode of Season 11, called "Escape," Torres will go undercover in a drug trafficking case after his return from furlough. It's safe to say that he's not easing himself back into the job, if his first case back is undercover with drug traffickers! When I spoke with Benjamin Levy Aguilar about the episode, he previewed how high the stakes are for Torres:
When it picks up, it's a regular case that he thinks he can handle. But the stakes [are] high because of the type of people we're dealing with. But it gets really, really high, once he starts getting involved in more personal relationships.
Torres has had some experience with cases that overlap with his personal life, as the first big episode for his character after he became a series regular – which happened to be the fourth episode of Season 10 – involved a case on his home turf with people he loved, leading to what Aguilar described as a "transformation." This time, however, he'll be undercover, so it should be interesting to see how it affects his personal relationships.
But is Torres rusty as a cop after months of furlough away from the front lines of Intelligence investigations? I asked Benjamin Levy Aguilar that very question, and he explained:
Oh, he's ready. He's absolutely ready. It just seems like his past and those relationships that come with it always seem to haunt him. And the trauma, that other side that we saw in him in the 21st episode of last season, he thought it was gone, maybe. Because sometimes, it's kind of like when you feel like you're completely healed and then someone comes into your life and it challenges you and you're like, 'Oh, no, all these patterns are back,' or 'All these things are back.' It's kind of like that.
Viewers got a closer look at the traumas in Torres' past at the end of Season 10, when he came close to waterboarding a perp, which led to the reveal that he'd been waterboarded himself after getting out of the life of a gang enforcer. Benjamin Levy Aguilar pushed himself to deliver that performance of Torres going too far. Now, it appears that any catharsis the character felt at the end of Episode 21 (available streaming via Peacock Premium subscription) last year wasn't complete. The actor continued:
He thinks he's okay. He's done work. He focused on his mom. He was healthy, probably boxing, doing all these things and whatever. And then he comes back, it's like, 'I'm ready.' And he's not rusty, not in this skill set at all. But then relationships and all these human interactions come into play, and seeing things that trigger him not to allow people to get hurt or whatever, he starts seeing these compulsiveness patterns, compulsive patterns coming back. So I guess in that sense, I think he's gonna have to navigate for a long time.
Torres' is still as capable as ever as a cop; whether he's in the right emotional state for this undercover case remains to be seen. Hopefully he'll be able to rely on the rest of the Intelligence Unit for support; Halstead was originally his mentor on the team before Jesse Lee Soffer's departure. Atwater stepped up as a different kind of mentor in Season 10, and an early look at the new episode on February 7 shows a scene between Torres and Atwater:
Consider me officially excited to see Torres back with Atwater and the rest in the next new episode! There's a fun moment in the clip of Atwater updating the younger officer about Ruzek proposing to Burgess "again," and Torres' reaction makes me wonder if somebody filled him in on the full Burzek saga off-screen at some point. Of course, the larger point of the clip is the two officers teaming up for a car chase, and it's easy to see what Benjamin Levy Aguilar meant about his character's police skills not being rusty.
Tune in to NBC on Wednesday, February 7 at 10 p.m. ET for the "Escape" episode of Chicago P.D., featuring the long-awaited return of Torres. As always, P.D. finishes out a night of One Chicago action, with Chicago Fire at 9 p.m. and Chicago Med at 8 p.m.
