‘Chicago Fire’ EP Andrea Newman on Stellaride’s Surprising Twist (Exclusive)

Major spoilers ahead for the Season 14 premiere of Chicago Fire.

Season 14 of Chicago Fire kicked off with some surprising news, and executive producer Andrea Newman spoke to PopCulture.com about how the show will move forward.

After finding out that they were expecting in the Season 13 finale, Lieutenants Kelly Severide (Taylor Kinney) and Stella Kidd (Miranda Rae Mayo) got some troubling news.

Wednesday’s premiere started off with Severide and Kidd in a doctor’s office, but unfortunately, it’s not to talk about the baby’s progress. After Kidd said that she just took a positive pregnancy test the previous week, the doctor said, “Losing a pregnancy this early on is fairly common.” Even though tests showed that there’s no reason why Kidd can’t have a full-term pregnancy in the future, it wasn’t news that they were expecting.

As if that wasn’t enough for them, social worker Terry Barot (Joe Daru) comes to the firehouse at the end of the episode to share that there is a teen who is in need of a new foster home and he was hoping that they would take him after they did so well with Natalie. Despite what Severide and Kidd went through with the adoption of a baby that fell through and now the pregnancy news, their lives have taken yet another unexpected turn. But it’s what Newman wanted to touch on the most.

“That’s kind of exactly what we wanted to explore in talking about parenthood and how all the best laid plans go out the window, that you can think you’ve got all these things lined up so that your life and your parenting will go exactly this way, but that’s just not how it works as a mother or a father,” she said. “So things don’t go as they planned, and it creates all sorts of dynamics between Severide and Kidd, like the way she reacts to finding out she’s not pregnant, the way he reacts to it. And then very quickly, suddenly, a tornado comes in.”

“It’s like right when you think you’re starting to get a handle on where you are emotionally, all of a sudden, in walks up our scary Terry, the adoption guy, with news about the fosters,” Newman continued. “So we really wanted to keep them on their toes, to throw them curves every way we could. And in this way, it really felt like what we built last year with the Natalie story of Kidd taking her under her wing and helping her out, that that was building to this moment, to a realization that maybe our destiny is not just having our baby and having an infant.”

“Maybe our destiny goes along with what we’ve seen before, which is Kidd running Girls on Fire and really being able to connect with girls of certain age and knowing that her experience as a teenager, when she lost her parents and was suddenly kind of out in the wild, is something that she’s carried and wants to help any other kid that’s going through that too,” she explained. “So a lot of this plays into our characters’ pasts. And just seeing them in a new way, seeing family in a new way for them.”

When Kidd told Severide she was pregnant, it was news that everyone was hoping for. But now that they’re no longer expecting and could now be foster parents to a teenager, this certainly changes everything. It’s the latest obstacle for the two, one that no one saw coming. Tune in on Wednesdays at 9 p.m. ET on NBC to see what happens for Severide and Kidd and how they move forward.