Editor’s Note: The following are spoilers for Criminal Minds: Evolution.
On Criminal Minds: EvolutionIn a dark revival of the CBS drama on Paramount+, profilers have been tasked with tracking down the most elusive serial killer they’ve ever seen: Elias Voight (Zach Gilford). Active since 2005, though this is the earliest we’ve seen him in flashbacks, Voight has racked up a high number of casualties across the country, and the pandemic has only made him more lethal. Although he gave up killing because of his family, he used his time and technical skills to create a secret web of serial killers on the Internet. Now that the pandemic is over on the show, they use their newly acquired skills thanks to his mentorship and the assassination kits created by Voight to provide the essentials for their crimes to kill their targets. And in the mid-season finale, two of our profilers find themselves in a life-threatening situation because of this.
After tracking down Voight (although they still don’t know his identity) and the assassins he inspired, Jennifer “JJ” Jaro (AJ Cook) and Luke Alves (Adam Rodriguez) head to the location where another Voight shipping container is waiting for them. As we remember, Tara Lewis (Aisha Tyler) found the first shipping container in Yakima, Washington, where Voight kept the remains of his bodies and the trophies that represent them, so the team knows it’s connected to him. However, they are unaware that this is a ruse and Voight has hidden a bomb inside, which explodes in the final moments of the episode. This leaves the fates of JJ and Luke up in the air with the rest of the team - Tara, Emily Prentiss (Paget Brewster), David Rossi (Joe Mantegna) and Penelope Garcia (Kirsten Vangsness) are watching helplessly from Quantico with the knowledge that their friends may not have survived.
NDEs mean nothing in “Criminal Minds”
Of course, as we have seen many once in the original series, the real harm would almost certainly not be the result of that explosion, nor would their lives. Indeed on the line? For many seasons criminal minds, near-death experiences were constant for the Behavioral Analysis Unit agents. Death looked in the eye, then always got away with impunity, although sometimes other injuries like Hotchner came across (Thomas Gibson) lost his ex-wife.
After all, there’s so much harm to be done to the regulars of the show that the show isn’t going to write it off, especially since the show always needs characters to move on quickly. Procedure rarely told serialized stories, as we see in the revival, so the character’s trauma and/or grief didn’t fit well into the story after a couple of episodes.
Criminal Minds: Evolution Needs to Change the Pattern
After all, there’s no point in these kind of cliffhangers when they mean absolutely nothing in the grand scheme of things. The result of the explosion will most likely be that JJ and Luke walk away relatively unscathed, experiencing a few minor effects in the next episode, and then all but forgetting it when they move on to the next life-threatening situation.
Maybe this will cause a little family trouble for JJ and Will (Josh Stewart), as they just discussed in the same episode, that JJ needed to start letting him know when she was in dangerous situations at work, which she had never done in over a decade of their relationship. It’s possible Luke will get off with an injury, but it looks like it will change the playful relationship between him and Garcia in the first place. Otherwise, nothing real that will forever change the characters, despite the fact that they almost lost their lives.
In procedural games, characters consistently dismiss these situations as simply “part of the job.” While it can certainly be part of the job, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have lasting effects on someone physically, mentally, and/or emotionally. This has always been a mistake, but the current path of rebirth will make her a much bigger mistake than ever before. They almost die, close to losing everything and everyone they love, and that’s should be a big deal. There should be consequences for agents for getting into such situations. While we obviously don’t want any of our favorite characters to die, there are other possible outcomes. For example, Will could be happy that JJ survived, but he could still be mad at her for not telling him the truth again and nearly dying, causing real conflict in their marriage. Or Luke could suffer a physical injury that sends him - the fastest member of the team in their weekly UnSub runs - out of the field for a few episodes while he recovers. In the end, it’s time to stop ironing out the characters’ trauma and how terrible their job can be.
Criminal Minds: Evolution has so far given a darker and more realistic take on this line of work than a series ever made on CBS—the freedom to join the streamers. The characters were more open about their feelings, what was bothering them, and interacted more harshly both with each other and with suspects. When the characters went through something that changed their lives in the original, viewers barely noticed how it affected them, especially since the series usually included some kind of time jump where the team was forced to stay at home to recover, like this was after Mr. ScratchBodhi Elfman) killed one of their own and kidnapped Prentiss in the thirteenth season premiere.
If Evolution really wants to be darker and more character oriented, which seems to be the plan, learning our profilers at that level is exactly the path they need to take. NDEs have to mean something, even if they don’t lead to death, for them to have any impact on the audience. At this point, it’s a waste of time for cheap shock value that doesn’t satisfy the audience and doesn’t add anything to the story. It’s not what Evolution a must do if he wants to reinvent himself at Paramount+ for years to come.
Criminal Minds: Evolution returns on January 12 for the second half of the first season on Paramount+.
Source: Collider
