[Editor’s note: The following contains major spoilers for the Season 18 finale of Criminal Minds: Evolution.]
The Season 18 finale ofCriminal Minds: Evolution, which streams onParamount+, finally revealed the story behind the creation of The Disciple and pushed Elias Voit (Zach Gilford) to finally admit the truth to himself and everyone else. At the start of the season, when the BAU learned that the Sicarius network, an online community of serial killers who learn from each other, was back up and running, they knew someone else had to be behind it, as the Sicarius Killer, aka Voit, was in the hospital with amnesia after a prison attack. After they realized he wasn’t faking, the team worked with Voit to get answers, uncover the mole, learn the true identity of The Disciple and shut down the Sicarius network once and for all. And now, you’ll have to stay tuned until Season 19 to learn what’s next.
During this one-on-one interview with Collider, showrunnerErica Messertalked about the Season 18 story arc, giving JJ (A.J. Cook) the space to grieve for her husband, what led to that story decision and how emotional it was for the cast,Matthew Gray Gubler’s return appearance in that episode, balancing a season of loss with growth and exploration, how that creepy mask made its way into the show, the emotional journey that got Voit to a place of remorse, the reveal of The Disciple, what Voit’s moment of brutal violence meant, Tessa’s fate, and what’s to come in Season 19.
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Collider: You’ve had this overarching story this season with Elias Voit losing his memory and The Disciple. How hard was it to carve out a space for the death of JJ’s husband, and to allow her to have room to grieve and figure out who she is now? I thought her grieving was so well handled, but it must have been difficult to figure out how to give that the time and space that it needed without also slowing down the momentum of everything else.
ERICA MESSER: It was. It was definitely a challenge for all of us. I think that’s one of the reasons we were drawn to it. It not only gave the team this big emotional episode in three, but it didn’t stop after the funeral.It’s moving on without someone, and what does that look like for JJ, who’s used to being superwomanand having her work/life balance pretty good. Now what? With Will gone, both her mom and his mom are helping with the boys, so she’s like, “I need to be helpful somewhere because I can’t sit at home.” We knew we wanted to give a little time between the funeral episode and the next episode, so that we could understand that it’s been a couple of weeks, but she can’t sit in a quiet house. That’s not good for her. She wants to be helpful. And then, the anger when Voit tries to overdose in that episode and she’s like, “I’m saving his life, but I couldn’t save my husband’s life,” is just gut-wrenching. You’re seeing a little bit of those stages of grief play out for JJ, and the rest of the team, and what it is to lose someone and have to keep moving on after that. She was brilliant, but it was a balance. It was definitely a conversation that we had, over and over, about, “How does this feel? Does this feel authentic to that loss and the comeback after that?”
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“Grief looks different on everyone.”
How did all of that come about? Is that something you’d been thinking about? Did that actor want to leave the show and that was how you decided to handle it, or was that just a character decision?
MESSER: We went down this road in Season 16 with JJ and Will having a health scare, and it was put to rest. And then, in Season 17, we weren’t able to get Josh [Stewart] and the team was so busy with the Gold Star investigation and everything else that we didn’t really explore what was going on in many home lives in that season. And then, by the time we got to Season 18, it felt like we had a breath to figure out what we wanted to do with that. If Josh wasn’t going to be on the show anymore, we were just never going to deal with that fact, or was that a story that we should tell?After a lot of conversations, creatively, we landed on telling the story.I always feel like, when our team experiences things like loss, and especially sudden loss, it can almost be a therapeutic discovery for them. And then, for any audience members who have ever lost somebody unexpectedly, it’s a devastating thing to go through and it brings this sense of, “I’m not alone in that loss, even though it was mine.” Other people have that happen to them all the time, and grief looks different on everyone.
It just felt like it was an important loss for us to go through, as a team and as a family, so that we could explore those things that, frankly, I don’t think we’ve explored since the hundredth episode when we lost Haley. Here we are, all these episodes later, and that was the last big sudden loss that we had. Strauss also passed, but we didn’t know Strauss the way we know JJ you know and her home life. We see her in every single episode, so it felt like it had a bigger impact and was something that we wanted to explore in a season that really helped shape the whole season, with that loss and grief. And then, we were even able to explore that on Voit’s side, which was really exciting for us. He has the loss of memories, and the loss of power and control, which is something that his character always needed, and then we took all of that away from him.
You also had Joe Mantegna direct the funeral episode and you had Matthew Gray Gubler back for that episode, which made it even more impactful. What was it like for you to see how all that played out? Was it much more emotional than you expected it to be?
MESSER: It really was, especially at that church when we had the bittersweetness of having our friend Matthew there, but we all had to sit there and watch actors that we love, get up and cry. It felt very much like we were at a funeral mourning the loss of a character who had been with us for a very long time.He had been a part of this series for a long time, so the loss is real. We are sad about that. Behind the scenes, it was heavy because we all felt the loss, but it was also very realistic, in that there was still things to smile about, which happens a lot. The drama with Linda Lavin’s character and JJ was so real. No one is their best selves in times of stress like that, so to be able to explore the family drama and how the morning of the funeral, there’s a big fight, that feels pretty shitty, but it’s also real.
When you have such an impactful moment like that, do you have to weigh how in peril you may make everyone else during the season, You had a lot of victims, you had UnSubs dying, there were suicides happening, and Tara’s life was hanging in the balance. Did you think a lot about how dark you could go?
MESSER: It was a season of so much loss, for all the reasons you just said, but there was also growth and exploration in that. Tara was shot, but she’s not just in a hospital bed or in surgery. We’re exploring her unresolved issues. It’s all the stuff her mom said to her like, “You have thrown yourself into this because of some unprocessed grief, and let’s work through that so that you can move on.” For her to then learn from that and grow from that and say, “You know what? I’ve been a commitment phobe and now I’m seeing the other side of it and I don’t want to do that anymore. Will you marry me?” Even though some weeks have gone by, you get that satisfaction of “Lesson learned. Thank you, mom.” There was levity, by the time we got to the end of episode eight, seeing all of them happy and smiling and celebrating love. That just felt like it set the meter back in a good way. It was like, “Okay, clean slate. Now what?”
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What made you decide on a mask and why did you pick the specific mask that you did? Does it feel like a big deal when you’re deciding on the look of a mask that will be such a focal point of the season?
MESSER: It is a big deal. There are a lot of decision makers in that. In the early days of Covid, when the kids were still home from school and none of us knew what was happening, my daughter was 13. She was pulling things out of her room and doing crafts and doing really funny things. I was in my room upstairs and I walked down the hallway, and she came out of her room and had this scary mask on that was a blank mask, and I had a jump scare. There was nobody coming in or out of our house. It was Covid. She was coming out of her room. But it scared me and I was like, “I need a picture of this.” So, in the writers’ room when we started talking about a mask, I showed them what she did that had scared me.We rolled with the idea that it’s a faceless mask because that just felt compelling to us.And then, we tied it into the theater with how The Disciple was using Shakespearean quotes, so it felt on brand for them. yeah. It all started because my daughter pulled a prank during Covid.
Did you always know that the arc for Elias Voit would get here? Did you always have this plan to make your bad guy a good guy, or at least a remorseful guy?
MESSER: I’ve got to say, I didn’t know that when we met him. In Season 16, I really thought he would have his beginning, middle, and end. And then, we had so much fun with Zach [Gilford] and with Voit. We really loved having this character and we loved what he did to the team. He just challenged them in a way that we didn’t normally get to do. So, keeping him around in Season 17 because he had his Gold Star info. felt accurate. And then, when he got beat up at the end of that season, I was like, “What if he had a traumatic brain injury and can’t remember who he is?” It wasn’t from jump, but the minute he got beat up, it was like, “Oh, I think we have a new way to play him next year.” Everything is seen through the lens of challenging our team to explore the things they’ve never had to do before, and they’ve never had to consult with a killer like they did in Season 17, and they never had to rely on someone like him to solve everything for Season 18.The network is done by the time we get to Season 19, but there is a new threat.
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What can you say to tease Season 19?
MESSER: In Season 16, he had been getting away with murder forever. In Season 17, he was our dirty little secret because of the Gold Star conspiracy. They knew about this Sicarius guy, but they didn’t really know Elias Voit was Lee Duval. That was still something we were protecting. We were protecting his secret. And then, by Season 18, he’s a patient who’s under federal custody, but it’s not really clear who he is or what he is. As Dr. Ochoa and everybody else figured out, and he gets his memories back,he’s a killer and he confesses to his crimes. Now, he’s a bit of a media spectacle. Between Seasons 18 and 19, he confessed to the kills, he got sentenced to life in prison, and now all of that darkness and all of those secrets are out in the light. What that does is that it makes him into a bit of a celebrity, and this is a character who wants nothing to do with that because he’s now a changed man and doesn’t want to be known for the darkness that is inside him. But that brings up all new challenges for Season 19.
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For the finale, did you want to very purposely get Tessa and Elias into a face-off with each other to show the parallels of what he was and how different he is now? Did you also want to juxtapose him having to kill someone with him saving the life of Dr. Ochoa?
MESSER: Yeah. It was our intent to say, “This is what could have been for him if he had stayed under the House of Cyrus.” Also, left to his own devices, if he didn’t get that brain injury, he would have enjoyed killing.He probably could have run off with Tessa, and they could have escaped federal custody. But he doesn’t want to do that anymore.Is there enough therapy in the world to change her from wanting to do that? That’s the question. It took a traumatic brain injury to change his instincts.
It was so interesting that you chose to show him brutally kill someone because it reminds him that he still has that capability inside of him.
MESSER: That’s right. The skill set is very much at expert level. He doesn’t want to use it, but he has it.
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“She ran into the devil and lived in hell all those years.”
Did you also weigh Tessa’s fate? After everything she was responsible for, did you want her to suffer for her crimes?
MESSER: At the end of the day, even though she’d done some horrible things, including the Sicarius spider, we see her origin story in the finale, of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, meeting Cyrus when she did and how she did, and then she became a victim for all those years. You can’t help but feel sorry for her too, even though she’s done awful things. That was never going to be her path, but she ran into the devil and lived in hell all those years. It’s pretty awful.
Criminal Minds
Criminal Minds follows the elite team of FBI profilers in the Behavioral Analysis Unit (BAU) as they analyze and track down the country’s most dangerous serial killers and criminals. Led by experienced agents like Jason Gideon, Aaron Hotchner, and later David Rossi, the team delves into the minds of the perpetrators, using psychological profiling and investigative techniques to anticipate their next moves. Each episode features intense and often chilling cases, while also exploring the personal lives and challenges faced by the team members.
Criminal Minds: Evolutionis available to stream on Paramount+. Check out the Season 18 trailer:
