Did Criminal Minds: Evolution foreshadow the death of someone in the BAU?
![L-R: Kirsten Vangsness as Penelope Garcia, A.J. Cook as Jennifer ‘JJ’ Jareau, Joe Mantegna as David Rossi and Aisha Tyler as Dr. Tara Lewis in Criminal Minds: Evolution, episode 5, season 17 streaming on Paramount+, 2024. Photo Credit: Michael Yarish /Paramount+ L-R: Kirsten Vangsness as Penelope Garcia, A.J. Cook as Jennifer ‘JJ’ Jareau, Joe Mantegna as David Rossi and Aisha Tyler as Dr. Tara Lewis in Criminal Minds: Evolution, episode 5, season 17 streaming on Paramount+, 2024. Photo Credit: Michael Yarish /Paramount+](https://images2.minutemediacdn.com/image/upload/c_crop,w_5554,h_3124,x_0,y_426/c_fill,w_720,ar_16:9,f_auto,q_auto,g_auto/images/ImageExchange/mmsport/422/01j29kn7mc3547n0yfnp.jpg)
Criminal Minds: Evolution Season 2, Episode 6 opened with a nightmare for Rossi. He was stuck in a dream where Voit held Prentiss hostage and killed her. The hallucinations continued throughout the series, but the thoughts of the dreams kept coming up.
Is this more than just a view at Rossi’s psyche? Is it possible that this is some foreshadowing of a major death to come? Could we lose someone from the BAU?
Criminal Minds hasn’t killed a member of the BAU on-screen before
We haven’t seen a death within the BAY before. Prentiss has faked her death, which is something JJ brought up during the episode to encourage Prentiss not to quit. Gideon was killed off-screen, giving Gideon and the team something a little too personal to work on. Technically, Stephen Walker was killed, but I never really classed him as an official member of the BAU considering he was brought into help with the Scratch case and that was supposed to be it.
Other deaths have been connected to the BAU team members but not one of the actual members. We’ve seen team members quit, go onto other jobs, and choose family, but they haven’t been killed off. Criminal Minds: Evolution could change so much by bringing us an actual death.
Killing off a team member is huge for the team and for the fans. For us, it’s a reminder that this job is extremely dangerous. Characters have been put at risk in the past, but they’ve been saved. Even when we saw Voit trap Rossi or when we saw the explosion that put JJ and Luke at risk, the team members have always pulled out. We’re used to that, so it would certainly leave us wondering what we could see next.
Bringing a death like this leaves us wondering if anyone is safe in the future. Sometimes, you need to kill off a major character like this. Look at the way we questioned everything after the likes of Chicago Fire, NCIS, and Big Sky killed off major characters quickly.
It will also have a major affect on the BAU. Voit has won, in a way, especially if he was involved in some way. The idea of an UnSub winning like this always plays on the minds of the team members. It’s even harder if they believe they could have done something different. With Rossi’s current mental state, the death of someone like Prentiss would change everything for him, and therefore, the team.
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