‘Criminal Minds: Evolution’: Joe Mantegna & Felicity Huffman on Tense Reunion Amidst BAU’s ‘Mistake’

[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for Criminal Minds: Evolution Season 17 Episode 7 “Piranha.”]

Rossi (Joe Mantegna) gets the blast from the past he tried so hard to avoid in the final moments of the latest Criminal Minds: Evolution episode. But offscreen, it’s a different story.

Mantegna reunited with Felicity Huffman and Rossi with her character, Gideon’s ex-wife Jill, with whom he has history, when he walked into his office at the end of “Piranha” and found her looking at the boxes gathered. But for Mantegna, it led to him recalling “lovely memories.”

While he hadn’t yet watched the episode (“I like to watch [them] as the public sees them”), he did remember filming it when he and Huffman talked to TV Insider about this episode. “Felicity and I go way back, so it was exciting. I looked at her at the moment, memories flashback-ed to, God, some years ago doing films together back in the ’90s I guess,” he shared. “Here we were, dancing together once again. It’s no surprise that so many people like to work with friends over their careers in terms of the film business, especially directors tend to hire a lot of times the same people over and over again. And I get it. Why wouldn’t you?”

Before that, however, after the reveal that what led to the beginning of the Gold Star program and how it found its candidates (Season 17’s UnSubs) was a paper Rossi and Gideon wrote, Prentiss (Paget Brewster) approached Rossi about bringing in Dr. Jill Gideon, who helped them out. He forbade Prentiss from reaching out to her, arguing that it cost her more than the both of them combined (which is saying a lot).

Because of how true that is, even though, as we’ve already seen just in this one episode, Jill is good at what she does, she didn’t miss the work at all, according to Huffman. “I think she left it behind as a dumpster fire as it was. I think she folded it into a failed marriage and then her husband was murdered,” she explained. “And I think she was fine to be like, ‘I’ve got to get out of that.’ And I think it’s only a sense of responsibility that brought her back in. I think she’s trying to clean up the mess that she helped to create.”

Still, while “she doesn’t want to deal with the organization as a whole, she loves these people personally. “I think it’s that classic sort of grotesque experience where you’re attracted and repelled at the same time,” Huffman shared.

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Given what Prentiss knows of Jill—even after their split, she was the only therapist Gideon trusted—she thinks she helped write the paper since her specialty is biological psychology, a field that studies how genes and physiology shape our psychology. Prentiss brought Tyler (Ryan-James Hatanaka) along for his skills; he thought she meant torture, and she meant politeness.

At first, Jill only spoke to Prentiss through the door, asking about the team members she knew. Hotch? Left the unit a couple years ago. Morgan? Also left. Reid? Sabbatical. But when Prentiss told her that someone got their hands on that paper, Jill let her in with a “f**k me.”

Jill had processed her grief and moved on, but she refused to come to Quantico “because of a certain agent I’m fearful you are still working with,” she said. He “has a goatee he thinks makes him look very distinguished.” Prentiss was confused, since Jason could be melodramatic and Rossi is the opposite, but then Jill revealed that he left the BAU in 1997 because she broke his heart. Prentiss tried to convince her to change her mind by telling her that Rossi forbade her. She argued it proved her point, that Rossi can be dramatic, melodramatic, and histrionic with the best of them. Then Tyler found out why Prentiss really wanted him to come once Jill saw him: He has similar facial structure to her son. And in the end, Prentiss successfully manipulated her into returning to Quantico.

And so Jill walked back into the BAU, greeting Garcia (Kirsten Vangsness) with a hug, stopping at Reid’s desk, and finally entering what used to be Gideon’s office (and is now Rossi’s). Prentiss left her to have a moment, and it was then, as Jill walked around the office and looked at the old BAU boxes, that Rossi walked in. “Hello, David,” she said, and he stared at her.

Both Mantegna and Huffman liken their characters’ relationship to that at the center of the 1952 film Pat and Mike. “It’s the way actually interesting relationships are built in life and in the movies and television and all that,” Mantegna said. “It’s always going to be the yin and the yang. You’re seeing a lot of the yin. Let’s see where the yang goes.”

Added Huffman, “it’s complicated, estranged, a lot of blame going back and forth, so they’re going to have to figure out how to work that out. But it’s quite charged and it’s Pat and Mike, in that they love each other and hate each other.”

It’s a backstory that Mantegna is glad has been introduced, especially with the show in its 17th (soon to be 18th!) season. “The fans, we all know there’s going to be a crime. We all get all that. But bottom line is I always like when the storylines go into the personal aspects of the characters’ lives, and this particular one really digs deep and bringing it back to the character Jason Gideon and here was the former wife that had been referred to over the seasons, but we never knew who that was going to be, and here she is,” shared the actor, recalling the show bringing their son, Stephen (James Lentzsch) on in the original run, in Season 10’s “Nelson’s Sparrow” (which was the episode in which Gideon was revealed to be dead). “I love it when these little bits and pieces kind of raise their heads and appear and to see where it takes us.”

Because of that history, might Rossi need Jill around, even if he doesn’t want to admit it, considering what he’s going through this season? (He’s been hallucinating a version of Zach Gilford‘s Voit and just admitted to Aisha Tyler‘s Tara that he has PTSD, from Voit’s abduction.)

“We’ll find out, won’t we?” Mantegna remained coy. But Huffman had no qualms about answering that herself: “Yes, he needs me around.”

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Looking at that paper and the North Star reveal, “this stuff is pretty thick,” said Mantegna. “It’s pretty deep. “That’s been kind of the benefit in a way of being streaming as opposed to doing what we used to do on network, CBS, where you kind of have a beginning, middle of an end and then move on every week. We start to stir things up and because of it, we’re able to delve into personal relationships at a whole greater level.”

Huffman agreed. “I do think it’s cool, as Joey said, because it’s streaming now, that it doesn’t have to be the chapter’s closed on each episode and things take a really long time to percolate. If you look around in this country, I know that we’re very like, everything’s got to be fast, but things take time to gestate. We wrote [this paper] years ago, and here it comes around haunting us and causing huge problems,” she noted. “[It’s like when] the good guys try and go in and do something good and then you’re like, oh wait, that really went sideways. That was a bad mistake.”

What did you think of Huffman’s debut as Jill? What are you hoping to see from her and Rossi going forward?

Criminal Minds: Evolution, Thursdays, Paramount+