‘Criminal Minds: Evolution’: Aisha Tyler Reveals Why Tara’s ‘Thriving’ in Season 19

The good news: Expect some joy from Criminal Minds: Evolution Season 19 after the BAU suffered a lot of loss this past year. For example, Tara and Rebecca (Nicole Pacent), who ended Season 18 engaged, are happy, Aisha Tyler told TV Insider.

But that doesn’t mean that the BAU isn’t still going to have to deal with their Voit problem. Zach Gilford debuted as the serial killer Elias Voit (a.k.a. Sicarius) in Season 16, with a network of like-minded individuals. Before the end of that season, he’d kidnapped and trapped Rossi (Joe Mantegna) in a storage unit. Then, in Season 17, he had knowledge of Gold Star, the next Big Bad. At the end of that season, he was attacked in prison. Season 18 began with Voit in a coma as a result, then when he woke, he was changed. He had amnesia and brain scans showed he was no longer a psychopath. In fact, he helped the BAU throughout the season, including to stop the person who had taken over his network and to locate all the killers on it still around. Now, he’s back in prison.

There’s going to be a year time jump between seasons, showrunner Erica Messer told TV Insider after the finale. She said in that time, there’s been healing. And so when we caught up with Aisha Tyler for her Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? appearance, we had to find out what that means for Tara, who was shot in Season 18 and still recovering when she returned to work for its final two episodes. She’s going to have a significant role to play with the show diving into something the BAU does in the real world: interview serial killers in prison.

With that year time jump, “the team is really, I think, in some ways, riding high on the fact that we were able to put Voit’s network away and also put Voit finally behind bars, where he belongs. We’ve built this symbiosis with him. And I think the relationship between the BAU and Voit is a real-world relationship, you know, the way that the BAU was built. And you might have people out there might know a little bit about this in terms of the history of the real profilers in the FBI, or from watching a show called Mindhunter, that they built their profiling system based on interviews with real serial killers,” Tyler shared.

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“So in a lot of ways, the criminal and the law officer, they rely on each other. One cannot exist without the other. And I think you’re seeing a little bit of that symbiosis and reliance, both in [Season] 18 and especially in 19; we need Voit because we want to understand how he works, so that we can stop other people like him. And so that’s been a big theme of the season,” she continued. “My character, Dr. Tara Lewis, she’s a forensic psychiatrist. She leans into the mechanics and the structure of how sociopaths are built and how they move through the world, and she uses that, those analytic tools, to help her team stop these guys.”

Because of that, “Tara is thriving. She loves to pick apart the brains of bad guys, and so she’s getting to do a lot of that this season, which is really great,” Tyler said.

She also revealed that they’re about halfway through filming Season 19 now. “It’s a really smart season,” she previewed. “It’s a really intellectual season. It’s super dynamic. It’s super emotional this year. There’s great explosive turns for all our characters, Voit is being very Voit-y. So it’s gonna be a really juicy one.”

What are you hoping to see in Season 19? Let us know in the comments section below.

Criminal Minds: Evolution, Season 19, TBA, Paramount+

—Additional reporting by Brittany Sims

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