‘Criminal Minds: Evolution’: Paget Brewster Explains Why Prentiss Won’t Quit & That Sister Line

[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for the Criminal Minds: Evolution Season 17 finale “Save the Children.”]

The bad news: Prentiss (Paget Brewster) is abducted, again. (And her previous ones were listed during her captivity, too, a nice callback.) The good news: Everyone except for Frank Church (Tuc Watkins), who’d been the ones to groom the teens into becoming the Gold Star killers, makes it out of the Criminal Minds: Evolution finale alive.

The final Gold Star is revealed to be Pete Bailey (Alex Saxon), and along with Jade (Liana Liberto), he holds Prentiss responsible for his brother’s (Nicholas D’Agosto) death. They have the door to where they’re keeping her rigged for when the team comes to rescue her—until the BAU is able to show them video proof of Voit (Zach Gilford) saying he (not the BAU, as Pete had been told) killed Bailey. The team celebrates (with a “Hooray, you’re alive” cake) at Garcia’s (Kirsten Vangsness) at the end, while Voit is attacked in prison.

Below, Brewster takes a look back at Prentiss’ rough season and ponders that. “sister” mention.

We saw Prentiss struggling with her survivor’s guilt this season when it came to Bailey, and then she’s full-on confronted with it with his brother. So how do you think she’s going to be processing that and everything else and the aftermath of all that going forward?

Paget Brewster: I believe in our writers so much. I have not—Okay. I did go by work [last week] and I asked them if they could tell us a little bit about what’s going on because I don’t know where we go. They’re writing the episodes for the next season. I feel like Prentiss really got hammered so hard this year that she might end up doing a lot of office work, just to even out some drama for other characters.

Michael Yarish / Paramount+

But yeah, there’s the guilt of also Doug’s little brother Pete now going to prison when he and Jade were both victims of this horrific conspiracy, grooming, dark operation. So I’m really curious to see if we get to see those young people again. Do we get to talk to them or testify on their behalf? I don’t know where we’re going, but our writers are incredible, so I’m not worried. I’m just super curious. So I don’t know if they’re going to—I don’t know. I begged them to tell all of the cast what’s coming up. I said, “Don’t just tell me because I’ll blow it and I’ll text everybody. I’ll call everybody and tell them.” So I think they’re going to tell us what’s coming for the next season and I’m excited to know what that is.

Do you think that Prentiss finally breathed for the first time when she got to Garcia’s and joined everyone at the end of the finale? It felt like the first time she could breathe all season is in that moment.

That’s really observant. I didn’t even think of that at the time, but I’m going to pretend that that’s what I was acting, because that’s a really good observation because knowing that—Prentiss wouldn’t know it, but me as an actress about to do the scene, knowing that Joe [Mantegna]‘s character, Rossi, is finally sort of closing the door on Voit is a big breath for all of us. So I thought that was a great end scene. And “Hooray, you’re alive” on the cake. [Laughs] I guarantee you that’s been done at some point by actual law enforcement, FBI agents or cops or first responders or something, that’s happened in a firehouse somewhere. “Hooray, you’re alive!”

Earlier this season, Prentiss did seem serious about quitting. And then in the finale, she talks about watching Bailey save people’s lives and the drive he had that she used to. Was she being honest there? How does Prentiss feel about the job now?

I think she will choose the job because she chooses the team. And in those moments where she just thought, “I’m going to quit, look what it does to all of us. It just destroys us,” she meant it in that moment, but it was because she thought she was going to be fired again. So it doesn’t take that many firings or being threatened with your job before you just go, “I’m going to walk first. I quit. I’m going to walk.” But I don’t think she’ll really ever be able to make that choice to leave the team.

What [what she told Pete] meant to me was [Bailey] was so optimistic and not naive, but he was young and he hadn’t been beaten down yet. And I’m telling you, Meredith, it’ll happen the older you get, as a woman, too, you get punched down. That’s just life, and how do you get back up? And I think in that moment, she was trying to express to Pete he was an innocent and he was optimism and belief and dedication to the right things all the time and was not compromised. And that was something she used to feel. But she’s been beaten down—and was zip-tied to a wheelchair being hit with a cattle prod. So she was definitely feeling it that day.

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What are your hopes for next season for Prentiss and the team?

I never think about that because I don’t think about what I want to do or what I want Prentiss to do. I want to see what our writers come up with because they’ll go places my imagination can’t because that’s their job. And so it’s more exciting to see not just where does Prentiss go, I want to see where JJ [A.J. Cook] goes. I want to see where Voit goes. I want to see where Garcia, where everybody goes after this season. Life goes on at the BAU, but what is that going to look like? And I don’t know.

I think I texted Erica [Messer] and Breen [Frazier] one night that I wanted Prentiss to do a John Woo-like action sequence where she’s trapped in a kitchen and has to set Sterno on fire because Prentiss is 55 years old and out in the field running around in those high-heeled boots, and I’d like to see her up against an adversary physically that would annihilate her. How does she use her brain to get out of a situation? But I never texted them that again because it was just silly. It was like, “I want to do an action sequence.” But I just want to know what they have planned.

We got that great Prentiss and Bailey flashback talking about siblings, but does Prentiss have a sister that I just don’t remember?

Yes. Listen, we didn’t remember either. We were all texting each other like, “Wait, does Prentiss have a sister?” And we were all trying to reach out to other departments and say, “Hey, do you remember Prentiss ever talking about having a sister or being an only child? What do we know?” And apparently, someone found somewhere that yes, either we’d never mentioned it or it’s possible that Prentis had a sister. So that’s where we went with it—which is cool for me because maybe at some point, my sister shows up. Who could that be? That would be exciting. Clearly, they have problems because in the elevator Prentiss is like, “Yeah, I have a sister,” clearly not happy with her. And I asked them, “Is it okay if that’s the spin I put on the sister that it’s not easy, it’s not rosy, it’s not perfect?” Clearly, they’re estranged because we’ve never met her. So I wanted to make the possibility of Prentiss’ sister come alive as a possible root in a story just so that if the writers choose to use it, they have somewhere to go. And now we know going in that, oh, Prentiss and her sister aren’t necessarily getting along. I don’t know, maybe that was a seed the writers can use or not.

Criminal Minds: Evolution, Season 18, TBA, Paramount+