How ‘Criminal Minds: Evolution’ Just Set up Season 18 Finale — Who Was Kidnapped?

[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for Criminal Minds: Evolution Season 18 Episode 9 “Col1ateRal.”]

The penultimate episode of Criminal Minds: Evolution ends with those three words that we both dread (and secretly love): “To Be Continued…”

The BAU continues to lose against this season’s iteration of Voit’s (Zach Gilford) network, this time with one of the orderlies on his floor — he kills the wife of one of the men the BAU caught in Episode 7 and kidnaps his kid and leaves one of the masks behind. It’s the disciple sending a reminder of the suicide pact of the network, and it works: that man, as well as the other one they caught at the same time, are both dead. Of the UnSubs left in custody, Ronald is brain-dead, and the BAU quickly gets to work on finding Kyle (Aaron Stanford) and securing his ex-wife and daughter, Lainey (Alicia Urizar McCallum) and Ava (Audrina Miranda). Taking a hostage (a kid, Andrew) isn’t something Voit would ever do, the once-serial killer who’s no longer a psychopath confirms. He wasn’t taken as collateral but rather because the UnSub is a pedophile.

The next loss: There’s no record of Kyle in the prison system and his ex-wife and daughter have disappeared. Then, another package is delivered to the BAU. On her way up to it, Tara (Aisha Tyler) asks Garcia (Kirsten Vangsness) to officiate her and Rebecca’s (Nicole Pacent) wedding (which feels like the only bright light this season) … once they set a date. As for that package, inside is Andrew, alive.

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The kid has a message for “agent JJ”: “Now I lay me down to sleep, your husband’s soul is God’s to keep, Lainey and Ava will be safe if you release the man who dug their graves.” JJ is, of course, angry that the network is using her dead husband, but Prentiss (Paget Brewster) points out they’ve made an error: They don’t have Lainey and Ava. That means they’re on the run because someone tipped them off. Plus, the use of JJ’s nickname, something that few people outside the team know, signals a leak, possibly at the hospital.

Then things start looking up, at least briefly. Kyle is in prison, just under a different name — he planned it because he knew the network would target him after he was arrested. He teases them about something called Project Checkmate, the last move that wins the game, but says he’ll only talk if they let him walk … until the BAU realizes Voit’s the one who tipped Lainey and Ava off. They arrest him for obstruction of justice, Rossi (Joe Mantegna) swears they’ll protect Lainey and Ava, and Voit helps bring them in. After Lainey talks to/threatens her ex-husband, he talks. Project Checkmate is killing any loose ends (UnSubs, the would-be victims the BAU rescued, etc.), Kyle says. “Bulls**t,” Prentiss insists. The BAU knows that the network leaks misinformation to scramble the profile and get away clean. Kyle then talks about the Engineer, who showed him how to rig the explosives in his coffins. He’s likely the leak and the last loose end, the most direct connection to the network. Kyle doesn’t know who he is but does offer up information about supplies he would have bought and skills he would need. Rossi sees this new information as putting them in the lead for the first time.

Meanwhile, Rossi has Tara stop by about a hunch, which he sees as a waste of time but makes her listen to after she catches him with a bottle of mediation and finds out that he’s taking Wellbutrin: A combination of a loose dose and therapy have made a difference on him seeing “weird stuff.” Tara dances in celebration. His hunch does seem to pay off: What if the disciple is a woman? The disciple did, after all, send back Andrew and made sure he wasn’t hurt — and masked her voice because he would’ve caught on otherwise. Back when Cyrus was a person of interest in the Herrera case, a woman answered the door and identified herself as his daughter, Tessa. Cyrus could have molded her into Voit 2.0 and she could be smart enough to be running the network. Voit doesn’t recognize the name.

But this Tessa is good enough to have framed Monica, Voit’s nurse, in the orderly John’s place. To try to get ahead, Garcia posts from Lainey’s account that Kyle is dead, and so therefore the disciple will go after the Engineer next. They have a lead, John Peters, but after a night of multiple stakeouts (John’s home as well as those of the victims they rescued and now have at the BAU), they discover that the property is registered to him but he lives in Miami and hasn’t been there in five years. “We got f**ked,” Prentiss puts it plainly. Kyle insists that the Engineer exists; he laughed about it, how he lived right outside their zip code and they didn’t know.

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That gets Prentiss thinking: In all their decades of experience, when have they ever had as many UnSubs — all the ones this season — this close to them? It’s how they checkmate them, splitting them in different directions and stretching them so thin they can’t respond in time for the final move: They left Voit exposed.

At the hospital, Ochoa (Aimee Garcia) confronts Voit about the phone he used to warn Lainey and Ava. He says he found it at the nurse’s station. As Ochoa sees it now, Voit’s not a psychopath anymore, but he’s not a good person either. She’s putting in for a transfer — for him, back to minimum security. As she goes to leave his room, however, he grabs her from behind, hand over her mouth, to stop her. It’s only this quiet, like it is outside the room, when he’s about to kill someone. And he’s right: Someone kills everyone in the hall then enters his room and turns the lights off before aiming a gun.

By the time JJ (A.J. Cook), Prentiss, and Rossi get to the hospital 37 minutes later, Voit’s hospital room is empty.

What are your predictions for the finale after this episode? Let us know in the comments section below.

Criminal Minds: Evolution, Season 18 Finale, Thursday, July 10, Paramount+