'I promise, if you put down the gun, release the hostage and come with me, I'll ... comb my hair and get a shave. Honest.' Photos: Handout
Criminal Minds: Evolution, a revival/soft reboot of the beloved CBS crime procedural, could well be subtitled "Redemption" instead.
It is after all a shot at redemption, mainly for the pretty awful plotting and contrivances surrounding the 15th (and at the time final) season of Criminal Minds.
To this longtime viewer, that "closing year" arbitrarily wrote everyone off their game just to keep its central mass-murdering villain at large – even incidental characters were so bad at their law enforcement jobs that you had to really wonder about recruitment standards for TV cops.
Anyway, the series (seemingly) closed out with the bad guy burned to a crisp, and the members of the FBI's Behavioural Analysis Unit (BAU) looking forward to new cases... sans Penelope Garcia (Kirsten Vangsness), the "gal in the chair"/heart and soul of the show, who was leaving for other opportunities.
To longtime showrunner Erica Messner and her team, the series' cancellation in 2019 seemed premature since they had so many more stories to tell.
Long story short, some studio higher-ups agreed and here we are.
Dave was more than a little taken aback by JJ's choice of wallpaper design.
Most of our old friends are back in Evolution, sans Matthew Gray Gubler (the tousle-haired Dr Spencer Reid) and Daniel Henney (whose agent Matt Simmons joined the series from its spin-off Beyond Borders).
A bonus: now that the show is on a streaming platform (Paramount Plus in the United States, and Disney+ worldwide), each episode is 40-plus minutes, one even clocking in at 53 minutes – so we get considerably more than the 38-minute average network TV instalment.
Also, not that it's a bonus, but since swearing is allowed on streamers, we get more than a few F-bombs for extra, um, effect – none spewing forth more emphatically than those uttered by Joe Mantegna, whose veteran profiler David Rossi returns bearing the weight of a personal tragedy.
Also back for the hunt are Emily Prentiss (Paget Brewster), Jennifer "JJ" Jareau (AJ Cook), Dr Tara Lewis (Aisha Tyler) and Luke Alvez (Adam Rodriguez, who also gets to direct an episode, as do Mantegna and a few others).
'No, I honestly wasn't thinking of any Denis Villeneuve movies when I chose the handle Sicarius.'
As for Penelope... patience, peeps – she left the BAU, remember?
But-but-but, you say, she's in the trailer.
Oh all right, she will indeed return, although with significantly less speed and enthusiasm than a caffeinated cheetah riding a lightning bolt.
This is more than a reunion of characters, of course.
The Evolution here applies to serial killers, who as we have gathered from true crime documentaries and series like this one, love to stalk and study their prey before pouncing.
How would the Covid-19 pandemic and its accompanying lockdowns affect such activities, then?
The answer to that is at the centre of Evolution's 10-episode first season (or Season 16 if you refuse to interrupt the count), and our intrepid agents are baffled by a number of unrelated cases that turn out to have a sinister connection (excellently embodied by Midnight Mass' Zach Gilford as its complicated linchpin).
Mind you, it is hard getting to grips with the tone of the early episodes. Rossi's demeanour and snappishness alienate the show's well-regarded father figure from the viewer at first, and so does Penelope's blunt refusal to get involved again.
There are more than a few mysteries awaiting viewers in this revival, like ... why are there cookies?!
And not everything works. Someone's got a girlfriend, but it just feels so shoehorned into the script that even the actors involved seem terribly awkward about it. Please... make it stop.
Also, and it seems to happen nearly every season, the BAU is once again plagued by an ambitious bureaucrat who is out to undermine their efforts for personal advancement (the difference is that now Rossi can go tell him to, uh, flagellate himself).
But the cases are as intriguing as they are shocking and cruel, and if anything, the initial bumpiness just seems to be our team shaking off the rust.
That less-than-stellar 15th season? Forgiven, on the basis of this initial half of the revival.
New episodes of Criminal Minds: Evolution arrive every Thursday on Disney+ Hotstar (with the Christmas/New Year break, the next new episode arrives Jan 12)
Summary:
Still stylin' and profilin'.
