What Criminal Minds: Evolution Got Right About Voit’s Latest Storyline

Criminal Minds fans know how the story goes. An unsub is attacking, the BAU is contacted to help, and they solve the case. While it is repetitive, no one gets bored because that is what we signed up for.

However, because the unsub is different every (most of the) time, chances are the story will be different, the characters will explore other venues, and the viewer will experience different feelings. That is where the secret lies to the series having so many seasons.

When the show returned as Criminal Minds: Evolution, fans were excited to see their favorite characters back in action. But as the seasons went on and the show focused solely on Voit’s character, the show became quite repetitive.

What Criminal Minds had been able to avoid for over a decade, this new version achieved in a few episodes. While there were different victims and unsubs, it all came back to Voit to the point that every episode became predictable.

Even when Rossi was kidnapped by Voit on Criminal Minds: Evolution Season 1 Episode 8, “Forget Me Knots,” it felt predictable. Rossi was struggling with the loss of his wife, and that came into play as he was taken.

After that, Voit became a hallucination that Rossi saw wherever he went. While that added to the intensity of the seasons and to Rossi’s storyline, it didn’t feel as if the show was giving fans anything new.

Nevertheless, because loyalty had been there for decades, the show returned for Seasons 2 and 3. But it wasn’t until Criminal Minds: Evolution Season 2 Episode 10, “Save the Children,” that the rules of the game changed and the show began to feel renewed.

By the time Criminal Minds: Evolution Season 3 came around, Voit was a different man. His encounter with two other inmates who tried to kill him left him in a coma. When he woke up, he couldn’t remember a single thing from his past.

Funny enough, all he believed he could remember was that David Rossi was his father. This added a comical element to the hateful and tense relationship the two characters have had since the beginning of the show. That is when things began to turn around.

Voit became a different person. All his sociopathic tendencies seemed to have disappeared after the incident.

One of the things Criminal Minds: Evolution did right this season was to make Voit’s neurologist a key character. With her came the medical explanations of what was happening in his brain. By allowing fans to see that, we could better comprehend why the change was real and not just a plot in Voit’s game.

While it was easy for Tara to trust Voit because it made sense professionally for her, the rest of the team and the viewers needed the proof and the facts to guarantee that he wasn’t just playing with them. His interactions with the doctors and the team, as well as the scans of his brain, were exactly what the show needed to change things around.

As Voit’s medical history slowly proved his amnesia was real, he became one of the team. Without the knowledge that slowly started coming back to him, the BAU wouldn’t have been able to get to the center of the new network.

But it was also the connection he had with the BAU that made his knowledge return, and this information available. That weird, toxic bond all of them have had since the beginning of the show ended up working in their favor.

In the past, the characters have had to cooperate with unsubs in order to get to the bottom of a case. However, this time around, Voit became one of them. Indirectly, he was another team member who was irreplaceable in solving the case.

Just as every single one of them brings something special to the table, Voit brought his thing. What had once seemed repetitive and boring turned into a storyline that kept viewers engaged.

As Criminal Minds: Evolution Season 3 came to an end, it left us wondering if Voit’s change could last, if he’d go to prison again and finally pay for what he did, or if he would once again become the villain of the show.

If we’re honest, it would be way more meaningful to just watch him go to jail and pay for what he did. His comeback as the villain wouldn’t be as surprising or as entertaining as a bad guy turned good, taking responsibility for his actions.

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Criminal Minds: Evolution is available to stream on Paramount+.

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