‘Criminal Minds: Evolution’ Stars Talk Voit’s Shocking Brain Scans and That ‘Dad?’

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

Voit, serial killer Sicarius, person running a whole network of people just like him … may actually no longer be a psychopath? That’s what the tests are telling the BAU (Behavioral Analysis Unit) about Zach Gilford‘s character in the Thursday, May 15, episode of Criminal Minds: Evolution.

After waking from a coma, Voit remembers nothing. In fact, when Rossi (Joe Mantegna) walks into the room, Voit’s first reaction is, “Dad?” It’s not played for comedy, but there is some humor in that moment knowing their history.

Aisha Tyler (Lewis) directed the episode. “I was like, you have to play this, every single person you’ve seen since you woke up is a stranger. You don’t know where you are, you don’t know who you are. You can remember nothing about your life. And then you see a face that you recognize, what would that do to you emotionally? And that was that beat,” she explained when she and Adam Rodriguez (Alvez) stopped by TV Insider’s office recently. (Watch the full video interview above for a breakdown of this episode.) “It also plays for comedy. You have been lost at sea and then land walks in your hospital room door. And so that beat was him just tearing up because he’s like, ‘Well, I don’t know who this is, but he must be my father. I don’t know anybody else. I know him. It must be my dad.’ And then Rossi’s just being like, ‘What the f**k?'”

By the end of the episode, in hopes that they can get Voit to remember anything about what he seems to have put in motion with his network of serial killers so they can stop them, Rossi decides to start playing “father knows best” with the man who kidnapped him and has haunted him. Prentiss is worried about him doing so, Paget Brewster confirmed.

Michael Yarish / Paramount+

“She’s worried about Dave Rossi’s mental state,” she told us. “She doesn’t want to force him to do something he’s not comfortable doing. He hates Voit. Voit kidnapped him and beat him up and called him old and killed people and we had to put his family and kids in witness protection. So Rossi has a very visceral hatred for Voit.”

According to Kirsten Vangsness, however, Garcia can understand where this Voit is coming from. “Garcia’s like, this guy never had a good dad,” she pointed out. “Garcia uses her imagination for everything in a different way than I think Rossi does. And I always love the Rossi-Garcia stuff. He’s so effortless to just to sit in a moment with, so she’s like, ‘Yes, who wouldn’t want him part of the family? I get it.'”

The Season 18 premiere revealed that Garcia had been sitting with Voit while he was in a coma because she wondered if there was something salvageable in him after looking into his eyes prior to his attack. According to Vangsness, she does think that’s possible, and that’s something she has in common with her character.

“I think that people are capable of reprehensible behavior, of condemnable behavior, and it’s behavior we have to focus on. It’s like a cop out when you say that person’s evil. You should have to be radically responsible for your behavior and behavior can always be transformed. It might not be easy,” Vangsness explained, pointing out Voit’s own history of childhood abuse. “If we’re talking about somebody that did something to my cat and enjoyed it, you’d be like, oh my God, they’re a bad person. But I think I would have to hold the tension, the cognitive dissonance of, they have the possibility to acknowledge what they did, take radical responsibility and figure out a way to transform that. You can’t fix the past, but how can you alchemize something to make the future better based on the mistakes you made?”

The team, of course, runs as many tests as they can think on Voit, and the shocking part? They’re saying he’s no longer a psychopath. How can they argue with science? Well, it depends on who you ask. The debate, however, does become, can people be redeemed?

Related

Did 'Criminal Minds: Evolution' Just Kill off [Spoiler]? Stars Tease What's Next

“Lewis is head, and Alvez is heart,” Tyler told us. “In a lot of ways, both of them are right. Alvez is like, ‘This guy’s a bad guy. You can’t believe anything he says. You can’t trust him.’ And he’s right. And Lewis is like, ‘You can’t beat science. You can’t fake science.’ The head and the heart are going to be at war in this season. Do we believe our eyes and ears? Do we believe the science?”

Added Rodriguez, “We’ve never faced anybody like [Voit]. I think it’s safe to say he’s the most intelligent, most planned, most well-prepared, and thought-out mind that we’ve battled in all the seasons I’ve been around for. And so, can you fake a brain scan? I don’t know who Voit has working for him. He could have somebody else in the hospital working for him. We’re dealing with somebody that’s so diabolical that you just can’t put anything past him. And so my instinct as the character is, ‘I don’t care. Either way, he’s done enough.'”

For Prentiss, “Now, suddenly, Voit is like Bambi, barely able to walk or talk with this memory loss. And we’re all calling bulls**t and saying, there’s no way. This guy is a monster serial killer. He’s bluffing us. He’s faking it. And then to slowly find out, that’s just not possible. You can’t beat a brain scan… Lewis is giving him two scans at the same time, two tests at the same time,” said Brewster. “That’s actually something that the FBI — a lot of serial killers have a problem with impulse control, and they can’t do two tests at the same time and fake something.” And so those scans seeming prove that Voit has changed.

It’s a storyline that excited Brewster. “You can’t have Voit never get away. You can’t be like, oh my God, we’re going to fight Voit for 16 more years,” she explained. “We are still after bad guys. He’s still set up a network that, but now there’s this huge wrench in the works where he’s lost his memory. So he’s not that same guy. So how do we get information out of him? How do we use him to stop the wheels he put in motion during the pandemic if he doesn’t remember anything? I thought the writers did an extraordinary job with that.”

That is where Rossi playing dad to Voit comes in. “Rossi will do whatever is necessary to bring bad guys to justice,” Tyler said. “Even though Voit has been haunting him for two seasons — literally and figuratively haunting him — he’ll put his body on the line to save lives. And I think that it is great emotional work for him. It’s going to be great emotional work for Zach. That relationship plays beautifully for the whole season. And God, there’s so much good stuff that’s going to happen with Voit, with Rossi, with the team that just speaks to the desperation of the human spirit when you have been treated badly. Voit has never had a healthy relationship and this is going to be the first healthy relationship he has.”

Michael Yarish / Paramount+

Looking ahead, based on what the brain scans are saying, Garcia would trust Voit. “We only watch characters that are flawed, and our baby girl is flawed. She has terrible boundaries. I mean, terrible. So I think she’d trust him,” Vangsness said. “I’m not saying she’s necessarily wrong, but I don’t think any amount of her getting burned — she gallops forth in earnest. That’s just what she’s going to do.”

And so any upcoming interactions between those two have a level of, “Huh, you’re good now? You’re better?” she continued. “They were weird. The whole thing was weird. Knowing what we know about Voit and then seeing what happens, I think that it will make people be like, wait a minute. But I like that about it because it does make you question internally, externally, other people’s choices, your choices. Is it OK to rely on people for help or for something that you appreciate when you’re supposed to demonize them?”

As for his network of killers still out there, “I would describe this season as a snowball of disturbing that piles on top of each other,” Vangsness teased. “I don’t think people will be disappointed in terms of the degree of gross.”

Watch the full video interview above for more from Tyler (including directing the Voit scenes) and Rodriguez about Season 18 Episode 2.

Criminal Minds: Evolution, Thursdays, Paramount+