Criminal Minds: Evolution season 4 has been a lot of cold cases and familiar faces until the BAU landed two fresh new cases. The team is starting to shake off the year break, and we’re just getting started. After the “stretching the truth” crime podcast, we thought Voit’s time was wrapped up. The writers have chosen to give him a few more interesting storylines. Aside from being framed for a 2022 double murder, Voit receives some suspicious fan mail. His brief time on the podcast cracked open a new case and possibly a killer in the making.
As much as we love the team bonding and family moments within the BAU team, fans of hockey romance were thrilled for a certain season 4 storyline. Connor Storrie (Heated Rivarly) joined the season as Lance Kingston, who turns out to be a cover for Voit’s stalker/admirer. He’s mysterious but not quite what JJ and Tara expected when they interrogated him. After they release him, they lose him, and the stalker/admirer finds him. With a little IMDB search, we haven’t seen the last of Lance.
Training exercise gone wrong
FBI training exercise gone wrong. Agent Lowell shoots a live round, killing the instructor (Tom, from the previous military episode). Everyone is shocked. O’Connor puts the building on lockdown as other agents get the gun from the training agent. Three-man team: Lowell, Barlow, and Helm.
Prentiss meets with Rebecca at the training institute. They are trying to keep this situation under wraps. They meet with O’Connor to go over what happened. He lets them know that Tom spoke highly of the BAU team. He understands they need to determine if this was an accidental shooting or homicide. As hard as it is with the shooter (Billy Lowell) being known, they have to treat it like any other case. This situation could gut the department if not handled carefully.
Luke and JJ are on scene for the shooting. Tom was like family to Luke, another one of his family gone. Prentiss walks over to JJ and Luke as Tom’s body is being removed from the scene. Luke walks away to take a minute. JJ tells Prentiss she told Luke he may need to set this one out.
Back at the FBI, Penelope comforts Luke as Prentiss walks up. He instantly thinks she’s taking him off the case due to his friendship with Tom. She surprises him and says he’s on the case, but he must follow the evidence. No going off the trail based on knowledge of the victim. He agrees and heads off as Penelope smiles, knowing she helped a little bit, too.
Interrogation round 1
Luke walks into the interrogation room with Tyler and Lowell. He flips the laptop around and plays the training video. All Lowell can say (as he’s been saying since it happened): “I had the shot, I took the shot.” Tyler questions Agent Helm about this phrase, trying to understand what happened. Apparently, Tom was hammering that phrase into their head because the training exercise involved them not taking the criminal alive.
Before this exercise, Lowell was hesitating to pull the trigger, and Tom was getting more and more frustrated with him. He was trying to get the agents field-ready, so he made them repeat the exercise over and over so Lowell would stop freezing up. Barlow confirmed that each time they leveled up the exercise, Lowell still hesitated. Tom went so far as to put the gun to Lowell’s head to make him understand the action he needed to take in the training exercise. He even threatened Lowell with a DOR (Drop on Request) after getting onto him yet again about freezing up.
Lowell finally says he shot Tom, but he didn’t kill him. Luke isn’t convinced. Lowell adds new evidence to the confusion. Tom handed out the weapons and blank rounds from his own stash. The BAU can’t make the bullets from Lowell’s personal rounds because Tom handed them out, and then everyone double-checked them. To everyone’s knowledge, including Lowell’s, the blank rounds were the only ones loaded in the guns when the exercise started.
Tyler’s line of questioning to Lowell throws Luke for a loop when he mentions that Tom was taking antidepressant medicines just like the character he was playing. Luke accuses Tyler of looking for an accusation rather than a motive for why Tom was acting strangely. While Luke thinks it was homicide, Tyler thinks it was suicide due to misuse of prescriptions or something else. Prentiss confirms that the rounds came from Tom’s service weapons.
Theory number one: Tyler thinks Tom wanted Lowell to take the shot. Theory number two: Luke believes it was homicide because Tom wouldn’t take his own life when he helps so many vets. Prentiss tells them to get their theories down to one.
Interrogation round 2
After Luke emerges from his memories of Tom, JJ comes over to let him know they need to re-interview the trainees. She quickly notices he’s not okay. She reminds him that he has to let himself feel his grief. He can’t push it down. While he’s dealing with that, JJ and Tyler can take the lead on the case.
JJ and Tyler re-interview Barlow about Tom’s recent behavior. He says that outside of training, things started to get weird. Helm confirms Barlow’s memory about seeing Tom crying in his office, and they didn’t know why. Luke doesn’t like this and barges in and starts yelling at Helm about his connection to Tom and how he had never seen him cry. Helm says he heard a rumor that Tom’s wife, Cindy, was leaving him, but he doesn’t know if it was true.
Cindy meets with Luke to talk about Tom’s personal life struggles. She’s shocked to learn that Tom could have been suicidal and that she’s accused of possibly leaving Tom. She confirms that Tom's burying his feelings was destroying his marriage, but he got a new therapist and medicine. As long as he was doing the work, she was never going to leave him, and he knew that. She’s worried that Tom’s life was taken because he had to choose to be loved or feared. With this current class, he chose to be hard on them, so maybe he led to his death.
Luke meets with Prentiss. Lowell neither accidentally nor intentionally took Tom’s life, but it also wasn’t suicide. He was hard on his whole class, not just one person. If he was threatening DOR, he was threatening all of them. He thinks that one of the trainees slipped in a live round. With Lowell’s history with Tom, he was the perfect fall guy. They only have an hour before the news breaks to prove Luke’s theory.
O’Connor’s involvement revealed
JJ, Tyler, and Luke agree to do a cognitive interview on Lowell to draw out more evidence. His trauma is keeping him from sharing the whole picture. Luke goes in and apologizes to Lowell to get him to agree to the cognitive interview. Together, they are determined to find the truth. Turns out, Tom reminded Lowell of his father. His father’s voice made him shake, so Tom’s had the same effect. Even though he suffered panic attacks, he kept going because he had more to prove. Having more information about Lowell’s trauma, Luke starts the cognitive interview about the training exercise. We’re taken back to the beginning of the exercise when they checked that all the service weapons had only blank rounds.
The yelling Lowell endured made him vomit due to hearing his dad’s voice through Tom. O’Connor comforted Lowell as he was getting sick. He did a pat down and then handed him the rounds back. Without a second thought, Lowell loads them back and returns to the training exercise area. What Lowell doesn’t see is O’Connor slipping in different rounds in the magazine. Lowell thought O’Connor was trying to help him. Luke assures him that O’Connor was just looking for someone to pull the trigger and take the fall. Lowell worries about who is going to believe him over a higher-up agent.
Rebecca and JJ meet with O’Connor about Tom pulling the service weapon on Lowell during the training exercise before the incident became deadly. They think someone in high places erased that from the report.
JJ and Rebecca meet with O’Connor to open Tom’s safe. Not seeing a journal, he gets confused. He does see 9mm bullet boxes underneath case files. JJ tells him to step aside, and she nods to Rebecca about the bullets. They arrest him because Cindy confirmed that only one other person could open the safe, which had Tom’s bullets in it. He gave everything to Tom, and although they can see that, he couldn’t ignore the treatment that led to the suicide of Matthew O’Connor (his brother). O’Connor thinks Tom got what he deserved. I agree with JJ that Lowell didn’t deserve to take the fall or be traumatized.
The admirer reaches out
Brian calls Prentiss (immediately reminds him of no calls on Saturdays). This is urgent. The stalker/admirer sent Brian a new string of typed pages with new phrases on them: Some may call me a fan, but he must call me God." She finally tells him she’ll have a visitor pass waiting for him. Brian is greeted by Tara and Rossi when he steps off the elevator. Brian isn’t a fan of Prentiss not being the one to meet with him. But Rossi isn't having any of it and directs him to a spot to go talk. He got the mail yesterday but only opened it today. The postmark matches the ones Voit got. Brian connects the dots: they’ve seen this kind of thing before. They leave him alone to go talk elsewhere about the new evidence.
They come to the conclusion that they need to take the pages to Voit since they are essentially addressing him as “a god." This new killer wants to be crowned the new “God” by Voit in a way that is creepy (But who am I to judge?). Tara agrees to convince Brian that he has helped a lot and to send him home to keep him out of harm's way. She has to turn down his advances of asking her out before he finally agrees to call her if the unsub reaches out again.
Tara and Rossi bring the new phrases to Voit, who suggests that if not him, someone needs to go on Brian’s podcast. The admirer needs to hear someone else’s voice to be motivated to do something else. Voit suggests Rossi, who turns it down. Voit has a point that Voit read Rossi’s books, and the admirer wants to follow in Voit’s twisted footsteps. Rossi might be the only one to get the admirer to surrender.
Scripted Podcast
Brian and Rossi finally do the podcast (yes, the sign that Voit broke is there). They have a script for them, so they keep people from dying as they make podcast history. Brian removes the sign as Voit enters the room to observe. They warn him not to mention Voit, so the admirer doesn't know he’s listening. Penelope is ready to track as the podcast starts. Per the script, they go back to the beginning when Tara found the first kill kit. Then, we get an overview of all the callers as Penelope tracks the callers.
They receive another call; the deep voice says to call him God. As they are talking, Penelope nails down a trace, but this guy is definitely a student of Voit’s. Prentiss tells Penelope to keep the phone lines open and pause the podcast livestream as Brian continues talking to the godcaller. Tara recognizes the voice as Lance Kingston. He’s not their guy but the hostage.
We flash to the admirer, and Lance sets up. Lance is strapped to an odd chair, where a screen displays what he’s saying to Brian and Rossi. Our podcasters aren’t the only ones with a script. The admirer directly asks if they are trying to profile him, which shocks Rossi. He turns the tables on him and lets him in on his knowledge that he’s not speaking to him but to Lance. The man whom he is holding hostage. As Penelope is trying to get a ping on the admirer, Rossi keeps him talking about how Voit got arrested. Penelope gets a location: a stash-all storage building rented by Lance Kingston in Richmond, Virginia.
After Brian tells the admirer that Voit isn’t there, he hurts Lance, causing him to yell over the phone, alarming everyone in the room. Lance begs Brian to tell Voit the admirer is going to keep him. Rossi warns Brian not to, but he aborts the mission and tells the admirer that Voit is there. The call disconnects, leaving everyone stunned. To put it simply, Voit tells Brian he just caused a man’s death.
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