Editor’s note: The below recap contains spoilers for Criminal Minds: Evolution Season 3 Episode 5It’s time to go to therapy on Criminal Minds: Evolution! Honestly, it’s a relief to see J.J. (A.J. Cook) going to a therapist and one outside of her team after the emotional roller coaster she’s had in the past few episodes. The weird thing is that she went to Voit’s (Zach Gilford) doctor, Julia Ochoa (Aimee Garcia). It’s good to see J.J. talking to a professional, but this is a strange choice considering how entangled Voit is with everything going on with J.J. The episode opens with J.J. joining the Cleveland police department in a tactical takedown of another unsub in Voit’s network. J.J. is successfully able to apprehend the unsub, a middle-aged woman who appears to have killed two teenagers. The woman begs for J.J. to shoot her before we realize that J.J. is recounting the event in her therapy session. This episode is playing with time, and we may not have the most reliable narrator telling us how everything went down. Ochoa presses her on why she signed up for this therapy session. The doctor also agrees it’s a good idea since J.J. has been through so much in recent weeks, but she needs J.J. to be honest with her. She wants to understand why J.J. would put herself at risk for this unsub, and whether it has anything to do with J.J. stepping in to revive Voit at the end of last week’s episode. J.J reveals that she “got it wrong” after Voit was revived, and that sends us back to the beginning of the case to figure out what actually happened.
A Troubled Loner Targets Families in the Latest ‘Criminal Minds: Evolution’

Image via Paramount+

Surprise! The woman that J.J. confronted at the scene wasn’t actually the unsub. The real unsub goes by the moniker “Brutal Man,” and he hates families. His trigger is the stick figure drawings depicting a nuclear family that are very popular on suburban vehicles. His day job is a locksmith, so he targets families that hire him to change the house locks. Once he selects his victims, he hides out in the house until everyone is home. Then he subdues them with a baton, ties them to chairs in a circle, and forces them to choose members to sacrifice. When they can’t do it, he kills all of them but a lone survivor. Amy, the woman that J.J. found in the opening scene, was the lone survivor in her family. He’s the unsub from the video J.J. discovered on BAU gate, not Voit, and he’s on a hot streak when the team departs for Cleveland. J.J. convinces Prentiss (Paget Brewster) that she needs to come along. It’s J.J. who figures out the car sticker and that the unsub must have a key to the houses he attacks. Garcia (Kirsten Vangsness) does the rest and figures out the locksmith key to the puzzle. The intel arrives just in time for the team to catch Ronald Graber in the act of tormenting his next victims. Unlike the other Voit disciples, Ronald doesn’t kill himself before being taken into handcuffs. He offers to talk as long as the FBI gives him one thing – the chance to talk to Voit.
The BAU Brings Voit on Board

There’s something fishy about J.J.’s appointment with Ochoa from the very beginning. She tells her story out of order. She picks and chooses what details she wants to share and what she doesn’t, with no clear explanation for why she’s choosing to share what she does. There’s a lot of talk about religion and praying from Ochoa even though J.J. isn’t religious. The praying finally becomes relevant when Ochoa brings up a medieval prayer that she loves that reminds her of her father saying, “Get off the cross, we could use the wood.” Basically, the doctor says that J.J. isn’t in a position to help herself, she could be in a position to help other people. That is sound advice, but J.J. wasn’t the person it was being given to. The camera pans wide and reveals that Voit is also in the session. This whole thing is a set up to convince him to talk to Ronald so that the BAU team can figure out how and when the two first connected. They can then use Ronald to track down the remaining members of Voit’s serial killer network. The ploy works, and Voit agrees to talk to Ronald if only to distract himself from overdosing on his own guilt. The team brings him to the office where Ronald is being held. They show him Ronald’s mask and the weapon of choice, and even Ronald’s mugshot, but it doesn’t jog his memory. Any memory recovery requires Voit to be in the physical presence of someone from his past, so they send him into the interrogation room to declare that he is Sicarius and to see what Ronald will reveal. This is a very risky game for the BAU to play. It requires full trust that Voit is still struggling with his memories and is a changed man. It also requires Ronald to believe that Voit is actually his serial killer mentor because Voit never met with his disciples in person. It’s hard to believe that everything could work in the BAU’s favor without there being a twist. It’s also strange how Voit has glommed onto J.J. in this episode. He was obsessed with her before he lost his memories, but amnesiac Voit also has an intense affinity for J.J., even though she threatened him at the end of the last episode. He hugs her before he goes into the interrogation room, which is as unexpected for the special agent as it was for the audience. Voit is definitely up to something, but it is still very unclear what that could be. The journey to take down his network continues with new episodes of Criminal Minds: Evolution every Thursday on Paramount+.

Criminal Minds

J.J. and Voit go to therapy as a network unsub is finally brought in

Release Date

September 22, 2005

Network

CBS, Paramount+

Showrunner

Erica Messer

Directors

Félix Enríquez Alcalá, Rob Bailey, Matthew Gray Gubler, Joe Mantegna, John Gallagher, Douglas Aarniokoski, Guy Norman Bee, Larry Teng, Nelson McCormick, Alec Smight, Charles S. Carroll, Rob Spera, Charles Haid, Diana Valentine, Rob Hardy, Tawnia McKiernan, Bethany Rooney, Karen Gaviola, Sharat Raju, Thomas Gibson, Aisha Tyler, Anna Foerster, Gloria Muzio, John Terlesky

Pros & Cons

Getting to see Voit interact with his network again is thrilling
Prentiss’ threesome story was a nice moment of levity

The structure of the episode was unnecessarily confusing
If Voit is up to something, we need to be told soooooooon
Ochoa felt like she was having a girl chat rather than a conversation with a patient