[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for the Criminal Minds: Evolution Season 18 premiere “Swimmer’s Calculus.”]
Oh, Elias Voit (Zach Gilford). The serial killer known as Sicarius remains at the center of so many of the questions of Criminal Minds: Evolution, which premiered its 18th season on Thursday, May 8, on Paramount+. Now, there’s the matter of who attacked him in prison — Internal Affairs is questioning David Rossi (Joe Mantegna) — as well as what that ending means going forward.
When the drama picks up, it’s been six months and Voit is in a coma after being stabbed multiple times (and fighting back, killing his attackers). The good news? Rossi’s no longer hallucinating him, and he doesn’t want to risk that starting again. But he and Emily Prentiss (Paget Brewster) still dig into what happened the day of his attack and realize the spilled bleach on the floor was from him reaching for something he hid: his own weapon. Rossi finds it — a shank made from the wire cover of the fan he had in one of his cells — but there’s still the matter of who knew that Voit was Voit, since he was in prison under his birth name, Lee Duval. Furthermore, the UnSub of the premiere is part of Voit’s network (he uses the same tech).
Then, the premiere ends with Voit waking from his coma and the alarm installed should he move his arm off the bed sounding as he gets his hand around a nurse’s throat. But how will this Voit be different from the one the team’s been dealing with for the past two seasons?
“That’s what we’re not sure of either,” Adam Rodriguez (who plays Luke Alvez) tells TV Insider. “It’s a great question. It’s exactly the question we’re asking ourselves: How is this Voit different from the Voit before the coma? And to tell you the truth, that’s kind of the crux of the whole season, is us trying to figure that out.”
Adds Aisha Tyler (Dr. Tara Lewis), “He’s a master manipulator.”
Rodriguez agrees. “How much can you trust Voit is the question. Can you trust him? Is he sincere in his effort to try and help himself and help you? Or is he willing to sacrifice himself for the goal that we think he’s always been after? And that is causing as much damage as he possibly can.”
It turns out that Penelope Garcia (Kirsten Vangsness) has been visiting Voit in the hospital while he’s in a coma. He’s so non-psychopathic, she tells Prentiss. An MRI indicated a traumatic brain injury to his prefrontal and occipital lobes (involved in the personality, behavior, language and intellect and visual processing areas of the brain, respectively). He has complex cerebral scarring, going back decades.
Alvez, of course, is not too happy about Garcia visiting him. She brings up when she looked into Voit’s eyes when they were in the field together. She saw “stuff,” she admits, like a soul. She knows he’s a psychopath, but she saw an ember of something. Alvez believes she believes it, but wonders what she’s getting from sitting with him now. She’s hoping she can see something salvageable in him. Now that Voit’s awake, is Alvez worried that Garcia will continue to go see him?
Michael Yarish / Paramount+
“Alvez is always worried about Garcia for everything because he feels like it’s his responsibility in some way to look after her like that,” explains Rodriguez. “I mean, loves her the way that we all love each other on the show. Obviously they have their thing, but I think he feels like he’s very much her protector. He knows how sensitive she is and cares for her in a way that he wants to look out for her. Plus, the fact that he also feels very strongly that Voit is not a redeemable soul, and so any effort that’s made to try and give him that opportunity doesn’t ring true for Alvez. I think that he would push back on anybody that’s taking that route, and that also becomes something interesting this season. We’ve all got differing opinions about how redeemable somebody could possibly be.”
