‘Criminal Minds: Evolution’ Stars Talk Shocking Death & Tease [Spoiler]’s Grief (VIDEO)

[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for Criminal Minds: Evolution Season 18 Episode 2 “The Zookeeper.”]

The profilers of Criminal Minds: Evolution‘s Behavioral Analysis Unit (BAU) have dangerous jobs. They end up in life-or-death situations quite often. But it’s off the clock that one of them suffers a tragic loss in the Thursday, May 15, episode.

It comes after they’ve wrapped the case involving the latest serial killer, the Zookeeper (Elden Henson), of Voit’s (Zach Gilford) network, and JJ (A.J. Cook) is at home. It seems that her main concern will be her son Henry’s (Mekhai Andersen) friend showing him something involving her online; her mind obviously flashes to BAU-Gate, the dark website with deep-faked pornography focusing on her. But it’s about her being a badass at work. When she goes inside, however, her husband, Will (Josh Stewart), complains of a headache before collapsing.

He suffered an aneurysm, the team learns as they wait at the hospital for JJ. Remember his thyroid problem that was supposedly taken care of? There was a sign of a spontaneous rupture of the inferior thyroid artery. When JJ steps out into the waiting room, she tells them, “He’s gone. Will’s dead.” The episode ends with a shot of her in shock.

Michael Yarish / Paramount+

Aisha Tyler (Tara) directed the episode and shares that the cast, especially Adam Rodriguez (Luke), struggled with not going up to Cook in that final scene. (Watch the full video above for a breakdown of this episode and what’s to come with Tyler and Rodriguez from a recent visit to TV Insider’s office.)

“The hospital scene was interesting because the way it was scripted was we really wanted to end that episode on JJ, on JJ’s emotion, and showing that AJ’s a really tough cookie and that she’s trying to hold back this emotion. She’s trying to hold back. She doesn’t want to fall apart. For so many reasons, she doesn’t want to explode. And so she’s doing this beautiful job of all this emotion,” Tyler said. “We were going to show the team kind of looking at her with compassion, and then that last beat is just on her really holding this emotion back, and we shoot it and Adam goes, ‘Are we not going to go hug her? What the hell’s wrong with us?'”

Rodriguez added, “It felt so unnatural to me,” though he understood why.

This isn’t the first time the BAU has lost someone. As Kirsten Vangsness pointed out when TV Insider spoke with her, Gideon was killed off years after Mandy Patinkin left (his last episode was the Season 3 premiere, and “Nelson’s Sparrow” was Season 10 Episode 13).

“We’ve all been doing this for such a long time. The only way I know we’ve been doing it such a long time is stuff where you’re like, wait, no, they’re always there. And in my mind, they are always there because that’s the weird thing about being on a show that has so many seasons is the reruns. So you’re like at any moment wherever you’re dropped in in time, there’s that person,” Vangsness said.

“But of course it’s horribly sad. When we have things happen, whether we want them to be happening or not, there’s a delicious kind of alchemy that the writers do is they make something cool from that thing, and that’s what you’re supposed to do with writing or with acting,” she continued. “It’s fun [and] it sucks because you always want the people that are so great there, but [you’re] excited for their next adventures. It’s a mixed bag.”

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According to Tyler, what was important was showing the impact this has and will continue to have on JJ.

“It was really important that it be something that impacted her character in a way that she got to really grow and delve into some deep emotion,” she said. “I was gratified to see that JJ was going to get this really meaningful arc this season that I think represents what a lot of people go through when they lose a loved one and they become a single parent. And she absolutely knocks it out of the park.”

As for how JJ will be grieving, don’t expect her to let the others be there for her too much.

“JJ, if you know the character, is a really intensely strong person who understands loss, who is a wife and mother and law enforcement, and she’s great at her job and she doesn’t want to let that grief in. She wants to keep it all together to take care of her boys and do her job, and she won’t let herself grieve,” Paget Brewster noted. “And so it’s not just Prentiss, it’s the whole team trying to care for this person who doesn’t want to be cared for. And I think we’ve seen that with Rossi [Joe Mantegna], too.”

She continued, “That may be a character trait that is a component of people who do an extremely difficult job and face pain and terror and risk all the time. ‘I’m good, I got it. I don’t need your support.’ But we all need each other’s support. So that is where the writers went with it and where we all go with it. How do you support this person at the worst moment in their lives if they don’t want to let you? I think they did a beautiful job with it, and I hope we honored it. I remember all that. It was hard. There’s some hard emotional scenes coming up.”

Vangsness echoed that: “When big pain like this happens, my experience of JJ has been for her to get very insular. And so with a friend like that, really the best thing you can do is kind of be available, just be like, ‘I’m right here,’ but not super engaged. She’s not the kind of person you want to be like, ‘Are you okay?’ And pet them. That would not go well. Ultimately, this show is about a group of workaholics who then have nonsense happen and then insist upon going back to work. So you know that’s going to happen and you know that we’re all going to be like, go take a yoga class. But I imagine there’ll be a lot of tea. I think I’ll make her a lot of tea.”

Watch the full video interview with Aisha Tyler and Adam Rodriguez for more about this episode and the season.

Criminal Minds: Evolution, Thursdays, Paramount+