FBI Season 7 Narrowly Avoids Making a Huge Mistake That Would End the Series

FBI Season 7, Episode 20, “Startup” wants to be a massive episode — and it almost is for the wrong reasons. The CBS show sets up yet another epic-level emergency (not even its first of the season) involving fatal drone strikes on American soil. But what makes the story work isn’t those dramatically inflated stakes. It’s a choice that happens near the end of the hour, which comes very close to torpedoing the entire series.

“Startup” begins with a bomb detonating in the penthouse of a car company CEO, killing him, his wife and their live-in nanny. But what starts out as a straightforward story of taking down the one percent warps into a whole spiel against artificial intelligence. And the plot turns out to be almost secondary to the performances, from both the main and guest casts, because the emotion is more powerful than the diatribes.

FBI Season 7, Episode 12 Veers Away From a Prototypical Bad Business Story

The Stakes Are Once Again Set Astronomically High

When the police detective at the initial crime scene makes reference to “that healthcare CEO” being killed, it’s hard not to think of how Law & Order fictionalized the Luigi Mangione case — and it didn’t turn out well. That anxiousness only grows when FBI follows up Peter Minskoff’s death with the murder of another executive, Edwin Archer. It seems like the CBS series is likewise going to do its version of a “taking down the rich” vigilante drama. Luckily, “Startup” adds enough to the story to avoid what’s become a frankly tiring premise, although it comes from a very strange place.

Eventually, the real dilemma revolves around an AI company named Cyclone. Both Minskoff and Archer were on the organization’s private board, so the Bureau begins to drag out all of the company’s secrets. In a nutshell, the co-founder Perry Hinton was ousted from the group two weeks earlier for railing against the board’s decision to turf its AI safeguards. Perry becomes the prime suspect, until it’s revealed that he took his own life before the drone strikes. The real perpetrator is the other co-founder, Scott Collins, who has decided to “honor” his former partner and friend by forcing the board to change their minds through violence. It’s weird and somewhat awkward to combine an AI debate with a more straightforward crime story… but at least it keeps the episode from being too predictable.

It’s interesting that this episode of FBI comes days after Tracker did its own story about one business partner seeing another ousted from their company. Tracker Season 2, Episode 19, “Rules of the Game” put a darker spin on the same concept, though, with one partner pushing the other one out. In FBI, the remaining partner not only has remorse, but the fallout drives him to become a killer. That added layer gives the plot some emotional stakes, which are important in telling stories in this space, so that the audience can identify with characters who might otherwise just be seen as soulless rich people.

How FBI Season 7, Episode 12 Almost Takes the Entire Series Down

A Major Character Death Feels Like an Actual Possibili

The most important moment in FBI Season 7, Episode 20 is the one that comes a heartbeat away from changing the series forever. A drone chases Maggie Bell, OA Zidan and the woman they’re protecting into a subterranean parking garage. The drone slams into the side of the garage, causing a massive explosion that initially appears to have killed Maggie. OA discovers that his partner isn’t breathing and has no pulse — and the writers leave the audience in suspense for a few minutes, letting the viewer live in the shocked, anxious reactions of both OA and the team back in the office.

Normally, such situations would fall under the category of “false jeopardy,” because viewers would know there’s no way a main character is being killed off a TV show without it being announced on multiple news sites first. But because that character is Maggie, the moment actually feels real. Audiences know that Maggie has left FBI numerous times before for various reasons, and that her life has been threatened more than once across seven seasons — so it wouldn’t be implausible for her to die if actor Missy Peregrym had decided to move on. Yet the loss of Maggie would absolutely doom FBI as a series.

The entire cast is solid, but the partnership between Maggie and OA is the core of FBI. The incredibly supportive, well-balanced bond between the characters is what every other detective pairing on TV wants to be, and Peregrym and co-star Zeeko Zaki have that same strong rapport between them. And the subplot about finding Stuart Scola a new partner is example number one of how hard it is to locate someone else who can step into this ensemble. Peregrym just isn’t replaceable, both on her own and in what Maggie provides as a part of the show overall. That real fear of losing her almost makes up for this episode’s baffling decision to toss her romance with Joel away so easily, as if the writers just got bored with it. To ask the audience to invest multiple episodes in whether or not Maggie could open up to Joel, only to drop him, feels like the fans wasted their time.

FBI Season 7, Episode 12 Benefits From Its Gotham Connection

Robin Lord Taylor Makes His Antagonist Convincing

Viewers will likely recognize the main guest star in this FBI episode: Scott Collins is played by Gotham star Robin Lord Taylor. While it’s a very different role from Oswald Cobblepot, Taylor imbues Scott with the same kind of restless energy. His performance helps to smooth over some of the awkwardness in the plot. The scene in which Maggie and OA track Scott down at Cyclone’s original headquarters is a prime example of the villain monologue — where the bad guy stands there and delivers their entire manifesto. But Taylor puts enough desperation into that, that the audience is able to ignore the fact that he’s being asked to do a giant information dump.

FBI Season 7, Episode 12 does have a few soapbox moments, most notably that monologue and the closing scene. After being arrested, Scott stops to ask Jubal Valentine if Cyclone’s remaining board members have decided to reinstate the AI safeguards in the wake of his actions. Jubal tells him they didn’t. It’s an on the nose moment implicitly pushing a message about the dangers of unchecked AI. Those instances of heavy-handedness undercut the episode somewhat, but the strong acting from Taylor and the series regulars pushes past that. This episode could have easily fallen down a rabbit hole of moralizing and overly dramatic choices, but it avoids most of them and most importantly, it saves Maggie Bell from yet another close call.