Next Monday’s fall finale of FBI will show off a very different side of Assistant Special Agent in Charge Jubal Valentine.
The two-hour event begins at 8/7c on CBS, when intelligence analyst Kelly Moran follows up on a tip line call and discovers three deceased victims, but that’s just the start of a much bigger threat. “They come to find that the murderer has a larger plan in place. This particular group is a radical accelerationist movement that’s fixated on resetting society,” star Jeremy Sisto, who plays Jubal, tells Soaps.com.
While the actor acknowledges that the team has come up against anarchist-type characters before — the Season 8 premiere featured a pretty memorable outlaw society — this group makes their reach felt on a much grander scale. “Their plan is pretty intense, and one of the things that goes down is they disrupt the cell and internet connectivity emergency services, which, if you’re anything like me, being unable to connect can be its own nightmare. In this case, the nightmare is real,” Sisto previews.
This latest threat also leads to “a personal complication” for Jubal, whose family and professional worlds collide. “Something that’s always in the back of agents’ minds when there’s an active threat in the city is a family member in the vicinity, and Tyler, his son, is in the city with a friend,” Sisto shares, adding that the teen is “in a place in his life where he’s trying to prove to himself and maybe his father that he is cut out to follow in his father’s footsteps. And so, he tries to take a step towards his goal of being a hero. So that’s a bit of a complicated mess for for Jubal on this particular day.”
As the terrorist threat becomes more dangerous and horrifically unpredictable, Jubal makes some shocking choices. “Jubal is a little more unhinged than usual,” Sisto says, “and he is kind of encouraged to let his feelings of insecurity and sensitivity about what’s going on, [and] his feeling of vengeance and retribution, to kind of fuel his actions, which is not the way he usually operates in his job.”
“And just the attack itself is really big and really cinematic and scary and sort of reminiscent of some real horrors that have occurred in [New York City]. So it’s a pretty big episode,” Sisto concludes.