One of the traits common to Dick Wolf’s popular TV franchises is their incorporating timely events into fictional narratives. This works better in some shows and episodes than others. FBI Season 6, Episode 5, “Sacrifice” is an example of this idea, because it starts off by discussing the growing dislike of and violence toward migrants in the United States. However, that turns out to have relatively little to do with the real plot, as the episode turns into a general hostage story that audiences will largely have seen before.
Timely storytelling does have its place and can be done incredibly well, but “Sacrifice” essentially uses the migrant discussion as the red herring that’s typical of many TV crime dramas. Savvy viewers know that the first idea — and the first suspect — are almost never correct. While there’s a decent story that gets told once the storyline pivots in its actual direction, FBI would have been much better to leave out the twist, and a plot angle it never utilizes anyway.
How FBI Convolutes Its Own Story
Season 5, Episode 6 Throws in Too Many Wrenches
The most successful crime dramas keep the audience guessing — but that’s led every TV crime show to throw in twists for the sake of having them, and that can sometimes be to the detriment of story.FBI Season 6, Episode 5 has that problem from its very first scene. The show offers up two different ideas for Robert Sawyer’s abduction in a matter of minutes. At first, Sawyer is approached on the street by a New York Post reporter who wants to question him about problems at his Brooklyn migrant shelter — that could be a whole episode in and of itself, with Sawyer’s alleged mismanagement being exposed. But just moments later, he’s thrown into a van by another assailant, and the show turns to the idea of an ex-Army veteran who’s vocally against migrants following the murder of his girlfriend.
The latter would be a little too thematically similar to the previous episode; FBI Season 6, Episode 4, “Creating a Monster” discussed prejudice, although it was in relation to Muslims. It therefore makes sense “Sacrifice” wouldn’t go that route, and of course the show doesn’t need to reveal the real suspect immediately. But the introduction of the timely topic muddles the waters a bit, because there’s actual story potential there that is largely ignored. It comes out that the real perpetrator is Hector Ramirez, who came to the United States with his daughter Maria, and is worried that law enforcement won’t solve her abduction because they’re migrants. That’s as far as the angle goes — Hector constantly reminding the FBI agents (and the audience) that they’ll be overlooked. It never legitimately affects the plot; there’s no proof that his fears are justified, no local detective or other agency who has blown off Maria’s case because of her ethnicity or immigration status. In fact, because the main characters have to identify the real kidnapper relatively quickly in order to give the episode proper resolution, Hector’s accusations lose all credibility.
That means this point could easily be removed and allow FBI to tell a stronger, more straightforward version of its actual mystery: a desperate father resorting to extreme measures to save his daughter. That parent-child bond has formed the basis of many TV show episodes, and with good reason: it’s something every viewer can understand. Perhaps the writers of “Sacrifice” felt that their version of it would be too common without some point of difference, but that’s not true. Audiences don’t need a unique angle or a plot twist in every episode. It’s enough to simply tell an entertaining story, and “Sacrifice” could have done that if it wasn’t limited by its own plot devices.
FBI Puts Maggie in Peril Yet Again
Missy Peregrym’s Character Ends up in a Hostage Situation
Maggie Bell has been through a lot — some of it written in due to Missy Peregrym’s absences from FBI, but a lot all the same. “Sacrifice” has Maggie get in the middle of a hostage situation, first as the negotiator and then as a hostage. The former comes off more awkward than it ought to, as if Maggie — who’s a veteran agent — has zero confidence in her negotiating skills. The latter is another time when the show gets a little too tricky for its own good. The moment that the episode reveals one of the hostages is pregnant with health complications, viewers know that Maggie will end up taking her place, which negates any shock value. This isn’t a fatal flaw; there could still be plenty of drama in how Maggie gets out of Hector’s clutches.
Maggie: I don’t think you’re crazy. I think you’re frustrated because no one’s been listening to you.
However, much like Season 6, Episode 5 forgets the migrant angle, it doesn’t develop the interactions between Maggie and Hector as much as it could. Hector is established as an ex-cop, who claims to have previously worked sex trafficking cases — but he doesn’t act like one, and he even acknowledges it toward the episode’s end, saying that when someone’s child is in danger, “you don’t think. You just act.” FBI never utilizes Hector’s police background to raise the degree of difficulty for Maggie. He just yells and makes threats and claims the agents are lying the same way that any other suspect would do. It’s another idea that may as well not be in the story, and that missed depth then softens the ending. The writers want Maggie to be sympathetic to Hector, and the audience to feel for both of them, but the characters never make a genuine connection.
And there are moments where that could have happened. For example, once Maggie is taken hostage, Hector releases both Sawyer and his wife in relatively short order, but viewers never see him make those decisions. Seeing Maggie appeal to Hector for their freedom, the back-and-forth that presumably happened, would have been dramatic and given him more emotions than just anger. It would’ve also created a rapport between Maggie and Hector. “Sacrifice” does deserve props for avoiding the dark plot twists common to Law & Order: SVU, as Maria is found alive. On another show, she’d have been killed off. There’s a downbeat because she can’t be reunited with her father, yet she is at least treated as a person and not cannon fodder.
But what the episode wants to do is so much more than it actually accomplishes. It wants to create layers of a story — there’s the point about migrants being overlooked by the justice system, there’s the angle of the suspect being an ex-cop, there’s the concept of Hector’s plight as it relates to Maggie starting to think about parenting. Yet it can’t serve all of these ideas in 42 minutes, so everything feels half-done, character beats stuck in between action sequences. “Sacrifice” could have picked any one of its lanes and been a great Maggie-centric episode, but by stumbling into both genre and franchise pitfalls, it winds up being unremarkable.
FBI airs Tuesdays at 8:00 p.m. on CBS.
