CBS’ FBI has one serious cliffhanger to contend with when the procedural returns to screens Monday, Oct. 13 at 9/8c.
When we last left the team, Maggie, OA and co. thwarted another attack by Forefront after the terrorist group infiltrated the FBI using cell phones as explosive devices. But not everyone escaped the attack scot-free. Isobel came face to face with one of the explosions in last season’s finale. While she was able to finish the day’s work helping the team take down their adversaries, she collapsed while debriefing her staff, leaving viewers seriously worried about the Special Agent in Charge’s life as the screen turned black and the credits began to roll.
According to executive producer and showrunner Mike Weiss, we may have to wait a bit before we learn more about Isobel’s life-threatening condition. “We wanted you to feel very real fallout from her horrible, life-threatening injuries, and also the kind of existential threat that was posed to the New York Field Office,” he tells TVLine.
Below, Weiss teases what viewers can expect from FBI’s “big” season-opening case, Jubal’s new acting leadership role and a crossover he hopes materializes by Season 8’s end.
TVLINE | How much time has passed since the events of the finale?
MIKE WEISS | That’s a great question, and we answer it in dialogue in the premiere — three days. We wanted it to feel like, in TV parlance, a direct pick-up.
TVLINE | How far into the episode will you leave us wondering about Isobel’s fate?
You might not know for a long time. You’ll have to watch!
TVLINE | There’s two ways that writers tend to play it — either we find out right away, or sometimes they’ll be fiendish and make us sweat it out until the last act of the episode.
I might not be a total fiend, but I do employ some fiendish writers… We wanted you to feel very real fallout from her horrible, life-threatening injuries, and also the kind of existential threat that was posed to the New York Field Office. We did, after all, survive kind of a coup that took place.
TVLINE | That was such a fun episode.
Oh, thank you. I’m really proud of it. We all went back and rewatched our favorite ‘70s paranoid thrillers — classics like Parallax View, Three Days of the Condor — and we were inspired by those types of stories which feel very authentic right now. I think they feel authentic because people feel like they don’t know where threats or bad actors can come from at any moment. Be it in your real life, or if you stay abreast of geopolitics, it just feels like the bad guys can be coming from anywhere and we wanted to really kind of inject that paranoia into our Tuesday night audience.
TVLINE | Will there be a season-opening case?
There’s a big season-opening case. The idea was to not tell the same story twice, but to see what the fallout of that type of paranoia looks like, so we see our agents wrestle with what it’s like to have people hidden in plain sight with really bad plans. The other thing that we wanted to do, which is very different from the finale, which was very much about the FBI, was see what it looks like to be a citizen in a community that is also very wary about these new kinds of threats that feel like they can come from anywhere, to see what it looks like to be a community that for various reasons might not fully trust law enforcement and have our agents have to overcome that skepticism to bring safety and order.
TVLINE | What can you share about the character being played by SVU’s Juliana Aidén Martinez?
No, I don’t want to spoil anything. There are going to be other really exciting changes coming to the show. Audiences are going to have to wait a couple weeks to figure out exactly who they’re going to be rooting for, but I think they will be really excited by some of the changes that are coming. I’m happy to talk to you [about Martinez’s role] when the time is right, once we can speak openly about how and why she enters the team.
TVLINE | Any personal runners for any of the characters?
Jubal is going to be dealing with all of a sudden stepping up in Isobel’s absence, and we’re going to see the intensity that that’s going to cause him to have to deal with, with Isobel not running the day-to-day. We are going to deal with OA and his girlfriend Gemma; we didn’t see them a ton last season, but they survived “Die Hard on a train,” which I think was one of our best episodes, and they’re still dealing with, “What is it like to be an uptown girl who’s dating a guy who is constantly, fearlessly placing himself in these incredibly dangerous situations?” Can those two people survive that very strange and specific dynamic?
We hope to see Nina and touch on Scola and Nina’s relationship. That’s a storyline that we don’t want to abandon just because [Most Wanted] is no longer on. We’re hoping to see Nina in a couple of different ways, but if I’m being totally honest, [Shantel] is an in-demand actress and we’re still trying to figure everything out.
TVLINE | Any “higher concept” episodes like “Die Hard on a Train”?
I’m very excited about our season premiere. Maggie and OA get stranded on an island in New York Harbor that has declared martial law. It’s pretty cool and it’s based on some very spooky near misses with martial law that have been attempted in various municipalities around the country over the last few years. It’s an intense episode; maybe we’ll need to rescue them from the water! We’ll see.
We are going to solve a locked room murder mystery that takes place on a plane, in Episode 4. We are going to get trapped inside a prison that is threatening to devolve into a chaotic riot, in Episode 7. We’ve got other episodes that I’m excited about, but those are some of our more high-concept pitches.
TVLINE | With a passing line of dialogue last season, you established that Maggie is or was bisexual. Will there be any pickup of that this season?
Oh, I think that was just two partners joking around. We’re not going to lean heavily into that, at all. I think that for Maggie the big question is going to be, “Is there anyone out there who understands her as well as the members of her team clearly do?” We play her as an incredibly empathetic person, and there is some lucky guy out there who deserves all of her love and attention, and the question is, for her, “Who can she rely on the way she relies on the rest of her team?”
TVLINE | I thought the EMT would last longer, but… it is what it is.
It is what it is, yeah. We thought we had found someone who on some level vibrated at that right frequency, but the search continues.
TVLINE | Is Nina the only Most Wanted/FBI: International character you foresee popping up on your show? Or are there other options available to you?
Back when both shows were on the air, we loved doing what would have been called crossovers. We would love to bring any of those characters over. I’d say that Nina is one we’ve circled, she’s at the top of our list for obvious reasons, but we would love to bring any of those characters over to help us chase bad guys wherever they run.
