Criminal Minds: Evolutionseason 3 has finally concluded, and despite all the promise of the season’s compelling premise, the whole thing felt a bit anticlimactic. The Voit amnesia arc onCriminal Minds: Evolutionseason 3was intriguing and presented a complex moral dilemma for the audience and the members of BAU.
However, the show suffered from the truncated 10-episode count of theEvolutioncontinuation that tried to juggle a few too many plot threads, and couldn’t devote enough time to most of them. A prime example of this came when the season only revealed Tessa as the identity of thenewCriminal Minds: Evolutionseason 3 character, The Disciple, at the start of the finale episode.
One Episode Of Backstory For Tessa/The Disciple Wasn’t Enough To Make A Compelling Villain
A Chunk Of The Season Should Have Been Dedicated To Her Story
The problem with Tessa is that The Disciple was built up to be a formidable adversary, but only one episode was really spent revealing Tessa’s identity and giving her backstory. This made it difficult to paint her as an interesting and compelling villain, which is a real shame, because there were so many avenues the show could have gone down.
TheCriminal Minds: Evolutionseason 3 finalerevealed Tessa’s link to Voit through her association with his abusive uncle, Cyrus Lebrun, who had kidnapped Tessa and abused her into being Voit’s replacement. And these could have been interesting plot threads to flesh out and explore in more detail, perhaps even inCriminal Minds: Evolutionseason 4, especially as the finale showed her first encounter with Cyrus.
CatchCriminal Minds: Evolutionseason 3 on Paramount+.
Finding out more about her journey from that point to becoming The Disciple would have made for a far more interesting villain. But only having 10 episodes to work with meant that the show needed to cram a lot into a truncated episode count, and Tessa’s backstory was glossed over, never really getting the attention it needed to be properly compelling.
Criminal Minds: Evolution Season 3 Needed To Spend As Much Time As It Did On Elias Voit
Voit’s Arc Was Unexpected, Fresh & Original
Voit is one of the most captivating andmemorable unsubs inCriminal Minds, and the show’s fresh and unique story for him was great. It seemed like there were real stakes, and the moral implications presented with his character feeling remorse and empathy were one of the most original things the show has done in a long time.
The impact of this on such a long-running nemesis of BAU needed to be fleshed out, and time was rightly taken to explore what this meant and how it affected the characters. But theCriminal Minds: Evolutionseason 3 finale played it safeand robbed Voit of the ending that would have been most fitting of his character arc: sacrificing himself to save Dr. Ochoa.
Ultimately, the necessity of Voit’s story meant the vast majority of the season was taken up following this plot, and there wasn’t a huge amount of room to explore other things. The Disciple arc and Tessa’s story could have been spread across another season, soCriminal Minds: Evolutioncould have given it a more satisfactory conclusion alongside Voit’s story. The show is simply too complex for 10-season episodes.
