‘Criminal Minds: Evolution’ Team Talks Rossi & Voit, Why Tyler’s Hiding Key Info & More

[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for Criminal Minds: Evolution Season 17 Episodes 1 “Gold Star” and 2 “Contagion.”]

The BAU has a new UnSub to track down in Criminal Minds: Evolution Season 17, and the really bad news is they have to work with a previous one, serial killer Elias Voit (Zach Gilford), to do it.

But maybe, just maybe, the profilers can use this to their advantage. After all, if they can find Gold Star without Voit’s help, the deal he made with the FBI director (Clark Gregg) is null and void, and if they can get him to confess to a crime that proves he’s Sicarius, even better! That’s easier said than done, especially as he manages to get under at least one profiler’s skin (Adam Rodriguez‘s Luke, with a whisper of something). Plus, after the events of Season 16, Rossi (Joe Mantegna) is hallucinating his own version of Voit.

Below, the cast and showrunner Erica Messer break down the key moments from the first two episodes of the new season. Plus, for scoop about JJ (A.J. Cook) and Luke’s visits with Voit and what the serial killer whispered, watch the video here.

When Will the BAU Get a Win Over Voit?

Unfortunately, Voit manages to thwart their attempts in the second episode (directed by Cook), first by filing a petition declaring JJ untrustworthy and refusing to communicate with her, then visibly shaking Luke with whatever he whispers to him. But they have to keep going to him, something new for the show 17 seasons in. So what will it take for them to get the upper hand?

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“It’s the long game, in terms of him incriminating himself,” Messer tells TV Insider. “He’s so smart that he’s not going to fall for that, but the more they talk to him, the more they get him talking. He might say something that trips him up, but he’s so good. He’s weirdly just as dangerous being locked up to me because his most dangerous weapon is his mind. Now, he’s going up against our heroes. It truly is the battle of the criminal mind because he’s learned so much over the years about being a killer. He’s studied David Rossi’s books. This is the worst-case scenario of what could happen if somebody reads your book.”

Rossi’s Voit Hallucination

While working the cases in the first two episodes, Rossi keeps seeing and hearing a version of Voit. “It’s a bit of a different dynamic,” Mantegna says, “but he and I have danced this dance for a while and it’s gone from the ridiculous to the sublime and everything else. We’ve run the gamut in terms of that relationship. So it is fun and interesting to explore that because there are so many aspects to, as I’ve discovered, this character of Voit.”

Gilford points out that in those “ghost Voit” scenes, as he calls them, he’s in the same clothes that Rossi last saw him wearing. “Voit had an aloofness around him at the end of last season, and that’s sort of the vibe that he’s playing whenever he is in his head because that’s what Rossi knows of him,” he shares. Whereas with the real Voit, “there’s a whole other side of him where he is even more of a s***head than he was. I think his approach now is just getting under people’s skin and manipulating them in any way he can. And it’s almost more playful, which is fun. It’s cool to play those two different aspects of him.”

For now, Rossi’s not telling anyone about his hallucination, though he does share with Prentiss (Paget Brewster) he’s seeing something. As Mantegna points out, this is something that does happen to people. “I think it’s refreshing to see that even with somebody who obviously is a professional, has been in this business as long as Rossi has,” he says. “As I was thinking about this, I was even thinking the way that [last] season ended and I was in that bunker, the fact that Zach’s character had a tendency, when you went in that bunker or places like that, you never came out. But he put me in a situation where you kind of have to wonder, maybe he could have just killed me. It could have ended it right there, but he didn’t.”

He continues, “So I thought to myself, maybe there’s something even more to that. Even within his mind, he figures, let’s just see how clever this guy is. He did read all my books. So there’s almost like there’s been a mutual admiration in some ways, maybe his admiration for me in some way and my admiration based on this fear or what it’s doing to me. It’s kind of a clash of two people, basically at the top of each of their games in a way.”

When Will Rossi & the Real Voit Come Face-to-Face?

While Rossi’s seeing his version of Voit, the real versions of the two are being kept apart. That will be true for about five episodes. “We felt like Rossi’s got a lot of unprocessed trauma after being abducted by Voit, and so he’s not quite ready to see him for real, but these conversations that he keeps having in his head are really telling, right? God, this guy’s so arrogant. He’s winning right now. I feel like he is such a weasel and he is getting what he wants and all that,” explains Messer. “So it’s just as compelling when Rossi sees him and talks to him as it is when Rossi actually gets to talk to him.”

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When that face-to-face comes, “what I like about it is I think it runs the gamut of the intellectual and the emotional aspect of it,” according to Mantegna. “And then also there are moments where it gets physical, too.”

Adds Gilford, “You get close enough to someone, you’re either going to kiss ’em or hit ’em.”

Why Tyler’s Hiding Key Information From the Team

Rossi brings in Tyler (Ryan-James Hatanaka) as a consultant. After Gold Star takes out the strike team that was meant to kill him, Tyler’s friend finds a connection to an office. Tara (Aisha Tyler), Tyler, and Rebecca (Nicole Pacent) stake it out, and he leaves behind the exes with an excuse before snooping inside himself. Inside, he finds paperwork for the tenant, Sebastian Gasper, from May 16, 2021, as well as passports in that name. But he doesn’t share any of that with Tara or Rebecca.

“Remember what Rossi says to him in the beginning: ‘Don’t do this on your own kid. I used to be like you,’ all that kind of stuff,” Messer says. “He just hasn’t learned the lesson yet. He feels like this lead is something he could probably gain more traction with if he does it by himself, which is not the point of working with the team. But at the same time, if he feels like, actually it’s better if I just go pursue this by myself because it could go sideways and I don’t want to get the BAU in trouble, then he’s actually being protective of the BAU, right?”

She adds, “We’re still sort of not sure how to think about Tyler. We want to believe that he means it and he’s going to be better and work with the team and not go rogue. But this is that first sign of, I don’t know what’s he going to do.”

As Hatanaka sees it, “Tyler makes mistakes sometimes. He’s not used to working in a team, and I think that rears its head this season a couple times in terms of, he has this skillset and he’s constantly torn as to what pieces of his past he should lean on to get things done and the person he’s now trying to be watching this amazing team work together in such an effective way. So I think getting out of there and getting those documents, we’ll see what he does with those. And it’s not always the most advised thing, but that’s part of the fun of Tyler Green and his evolution throughout the year.”

As Cook and Tyler see it, “he’ll learn.”

There’s also the matter of Garcia (Kirsten Vangsness) having to work with her ex; she’s already torn when Tyler texts her before he comes on board as a consultant.

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“She’s not feeling well about it, and she’s mad at her friends because, ‘You have to pick the one guy… I know where all of his secret moles are,'” Vangsness says. “I don’t think she trusts him. And she knows that he’s the best person for the job and all of that, but it’s tricky and it’s cool. I think it adds a neat foil in it.”

On Tyler’s side, “despite the relationship ending due to his mistake, there’s a lot of good that came from it, and he holds her, I think, in the highest regard. And so coming into this environment, he’s a little bit off kilter because of the team atmosphere, because he’s not exactly sure what his place is in the dynamic with all these rich characters, but he is very happy to see her. I think that that plays out beautifully throughout the season, that kind of push and pull between them. He’s hell-bent on trying to recreate the trust that they had very briefly, and we’ll see where he gets to.”

Is There Hope for Tara & Rebecca?

By sneaking off, Tyler does escape the awkward tension between exes Tara and Rebecca on the stakeout; the time alone allows both to admit that they were worried for each other.

“Obviously there’s a lot of tension there and angst and hurt feelings, but I don’t think that Tara would apologize, and I know that I don’t apologize for her in the fact that she decided that between her relationship and saving lives, saving lives is more important,” says Tyler. “She’s incredibly driven and she’s ambitious, but she’s ambitious, I think, for the right reasons. Literally, the job that she does is life and death.”

She continues, “It’s not particularly fun to be stuck on a stakeout with your ex-girlfriend who’s also kind of your boss, super uncomfortable. And Tara, she’s prickly, she’s pissed off, she’s defensive, which I think we all have been in that emotional state after a breakup. I think it’ll be great to see how these two characters align as the season goes on—if they are able to align—because they are both in pursuit of a loftier and more important goal, which is protecting people’s lives. And I think what you’re going to get out of that relationship is a lot of really uncomfortable moments, some humor, some stuff that people can probably recognize in their own lives. Everybody’s had a weird workplace crush or potentially ill-advised workplace romance.”

Voit’s Gold Star Profile

When it’s Luke’s turn to talk to Voit, the serial killer tells him the profile is wrong and they’ll get people killed. He tells Luke about the term social contagion: It used to be difficult to convince someone to take a life, but that’s changed. All you have to do is go on the internet and tell a lie so big that some people don’t know it’s a lie. Imagine a man, he says, a soldier who was groomed by an abusive upbringing and indoctrinated by training to believe this lie. That man would be so dangerous he would have to be killed before he could spread it. The BAU will get people killed because they don’t understand how conspiracy theories work, Voit explains. But how much of that is true about Gold Star?

“There is truth in what he’s saying, but this is the problem. It’s like, how much do you want to believe Voit and how much of what he’s saying could be true to a degree, but not all the way true, right?” Messer points out. “It’s definitely a season of living in that gray of every conspiracy theory can start with a kernel of truth, but it’s where it goes. The season becomes a little bit about that, what Voit says about their social contagion and conspiracies. And it’s like, yeah, those are true, but depending on how deep down the rabbit hole you go could depend on what you believe on the other side of it. So there is a lot that dives into that social contagion that he plants in Episode 2, and a lot of that will become an investigative path for us to figure out Gold Star.”

Criminal Minds: Evolution, Thursdays, Paramount+