as much as i love P.D. i was also all the more disappointed and stunned how badly they implemented the influence of Vo*ght on Jay from 9x09 😱 the "worst" thing Jay did was to blackmail Paco with his "Secret Family" in 9x12 😂 very, very badly implemented i think.. how do you see it?
I was confused about what the writers were trying to do with the Halstead/Voight dynamic. In 8x16, Jay was against bending the rules to find Burgess, and he had the same belief in 9x01 when the team was looking for Roy. He wanted to issue warrants and do things the right way. And then the Roy aftermath happened, Agent North started going after Hailey, and Jay was hesitant but still did some unethical stuff to blackmail North. I understood why he did it; he was trying to protect the love of his life.
The Roy/North stuff all came to a peaceful end, but it's also the start of the "deal". From my understanding of the "deal", Jay is asking Voight to come to him whenever he wants to break the rules so that Jay can find a more ethical solution to the problem. And that's what happened in 9x12. Voight wanted to kill Paco so he could protect Anna's identity, but Jay interferes and instead gets Paco to keep his mouth shut by blackmailing. And like you said, none of this is very extreme. In fact, we have seen all the members of Intelligence threaten a suspect at some point in their careers.
But what really confuses me is what Jay did in 9x22. After everything that happened with Roy/North and the "deal" he made with Voight, he is still willing to break a bunch of rules to protect a CI and to please Voight. I don't know if the writers were trying to show Voight's influence on Jay, but whatever they tried to do was very confusing to me. Jay has been working with Voight and has a front-row seat to Voight's policing for the past 10 years. It wouldn't make sense to me if 10 years later is when Jay is affected by Voight's influence. 🤷🏻♀️
