‘CIA’ Boss Explains Bill’s Real Assignment — What It Means for Partnership With Colin

[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for the CIA series premiere, “Directed Energy.”]

CIA, the newest entry in Dick Wolf‘s ever-expanding universe kicks off with an FBI crossover, new partners Colin Glass (Tom Ellis) and Bill Goodman (Nick Gehlfuss) getting off on the wrong foot, and the major reveal that there’s much more to the FBI agent’s assignment than he originally thinks when he is put on the fusion cell.

Ostensibly, Bill is brought in because the CIA needs an FBI agent to operate on U.S. soil. “I need someone, anyone, as long as they have a badge and a pulse,” Colin tells his boss, Deputy Chief of Station Nikki Reynard (Necar Zadegan). The last one, Chuck, let him do what he wanted. That’s not what Nikki wants this time, as she tells Jubal Valentine (FBI‘s Jeremy Sisto). And as becomes clear quite quickly, that’s not going to be the case with Bill, who pushes back at every turn. But it’s in the final scene that Jubal clues Bill in on the other part of his assignment: FBI counterintelligence believes there’s a mole in the CIA’s New York operation, and it’s his job to find him or her. Someone up there likes him for it.

That’s the arc for the season, showrunner Mike Weiss tells TV Insider. It will “thread throughout, sometimes in tiny little portions, and then by the end of the season we’re going to fully embrace that storyline.”

As for why Bill’s the person for the job, he’s “true blue and hard to manipulate. Bill is a great interrogator and investigator and he’s dogged. He will not stop until he gets an answer no matter how uncomfortable that answer might be,” Weiss explains.

Zach Dilgard/CBS

This comes as Colin and Bill are just starting to accept they’ll be working together, after a case in which the FBI agent calls the CIA case officer out for lying to him from the beginning (he pretended to be DoD at crime scene) and keeping things from him (to protect his asset and his asset’s romantic partner) but also backs using his asset as well as his plan. As Bill explains near the end, he’s been burned before, so he doesn’t really trust anyone (making him someone Colin thinks worth trusting). He also wonders if they might have been friends, if things had been different. Bill then tells Jubal Colin is a liar, liability, and effective and that he can handle him — which he’ll need to do since he’s now permanently assigned there and with his secret assignment of finding that mole.

Weiss agrees that with Colin CIA, it’s not surprising that he has secrets, “but you don’t necessarily expect Bill to be carrying this big secret forward. And he doesn’t appear to be a guy who has a deep well of secrets kind of rippling below the surface, but he’s capable of undercover work.”

This plays into “the goal of the first season, which is “to have them work together, learn to trust each other, have that trust challenged and then emerge on the other side of that on equal footing as friends and colleagues,” the showrunner explains. “But testing that trust part of it is a big part of the story, and I think the audience might suspect that Colin is the mole and if Colin is the mole, is there a good reason for him to be leaking information?”

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It’s a storyline that thrilled Zadegan when she read it. “They’re always playing with suspicion, these characters, they’re always sleeping with one eye open, let’s say. I got really excited when I found out there was a mole,” she tells us. “I was like, what if Nikki’s the mole?  I don’t know who the mole is yet, but we’ll find out. But there’s a lot of just fun story stuff we can do with that.”

Natalee Linez, who plays CIA analyst Gina Gosian, thinks that if her character were to find out about Bill’s assignment, “she would hate it. She would be like, this is why I didn’t like you from [the start]. She definitely doesn’t fully trust Bill yet, so maybe there’s a dynamic there. I’m not exactly sure. But yeah, she would be not OK with it and it would take a really long time to earn any sort of trust back.”

What did you think of the CIA series premiere and that twist at the end? Let us know in the comments section below.

CIA, Mondays, 10/9c, CBS