“The BAU is always winning. I’m looking forward to seeing that turn into a meme,” Aisha Tyler says. But let’s be honest: Things are tough for the team of profilers on Criminal Minds: Evolution as Season 17 continues, with the hunt for Gold Star, having to work with serial killer Elias Voit (Zach Gilford), the discovery of a dark web site targeting JJ (A.J. Cook), and now conspiracy theorist Brian Garrity (Paul F. Tompkins) telling cops that Prentiss (Paget Brewster) attacked him.
The team continues to investigate Gold Star with the June 20 episode, “Kingdom of the Blind,” with more victims showing up with the same gruesome M.O., but it’s not going to be easy to catch this person. “This season is like an Escher painting. It is the coolest, biggest, dopest puzzle,” Tyler (who plays Dr. Tara Lewis) shares, as you can see in the video interview above from when she recently stopped by TV Insider to discuss this season.
“It surprised all of us, and it’s very much connected to what’s going on in the real world right now with disinformation, with the internet, with the manipulation of perception and ideas, with the pursuit of what’s true and the difficulty that people are having right now trying to parse the real from the false,” she continues. “I think it’s a really important conversation to have because we’re being manipulated all the time and you really have to pay close attention to the information that you’re taking in and make sure that it’s real and not just take everything at face value.”
The BAU must work with Voit, who claims to have information about Gold Star, and in doing so, he’s having fun pushing their buttons, like he did by sharing that aforementioned website with Luke (Adam Rodriguez), who then found out that Prentiss already knew about it. “I’m a little bit partial, obviously biased, but Dr. Lewis, I think, is best equipped to talk to him because that was her work before she came to the BAU,” says Tyler. “Her actual work was doing forensic interviews of serial killers, building the kind of the touch points and the concepts behind a profile of a serial killer by understanding who they were, where they came from, how they were raised, what their traumas were.”
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But she also knows that Tara can’t just ignore what’s going on outside of work. “She’s going through an emotional time and she might be a little touchy, so we’ll see if she’s kind of in the right mental space to do it right now,” Tyler teases. It does seem like her ex-girlfriend, Rebecca (Nicole Pacent), is just the type of button Voit would push.
“Voit’s an asshole,” Tyler says with a laugh. “I love Zach Gilford, he’s a champion. But [Voit’s] smart, he’s cunning, he is in every way a match for the mental acuity of the BAU.”
Tyler got behind the camera again, directing her fourth episode of Criminal Minds, this season. Episode 7 does feature a standalone UnSub, separate from the Gold Star episode—”a side mission, if you’re a gamer,” says the star. “What’s really great about it is we really get to delve into the psychiatry, the psychology, the inner makeup of a serial killer, and it’s a super complex episode.”
Watch the full video interview above for more from Tyler about this season, what’s coming up for Tara and Rebecca, and whether she trusts Tyler (Ryan-James Hatanaka) after he snuck away during that stakeout. Then, watch an exclusive sneak peek of the June 20 episode, of the BAU’s investigation into what happened to Brian.
Criminal Minds: Evolution, Thursdays, Paramount+
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