After an action-packed premiere, FBI Season 8 continues with an episode that gets pulled in a few directions it doesn’t need. “Captured” has an interesting idea at its core, but extraneous guest characters and a few bumps in the plot make it an hour that ultimately doesn’t reach its potential. A lot happens, but little is memorable.
The episode begins with a brief acknowledgement of the death of Dani Rhodes, when Maggie Bell checks in with Stuart Scola and Scola talks about focusing “on the day-to-day.” While Dani wasn’t Scola’s partner for that long, it still feels like there should be a little bit more in this moment; she was still part of the team. From then on, there’s a lot of action but things tend to get convoluted.
The gist of the case is that a pair of thieves break into an art gallery, allegedly to steal paintings on loan from various European countries. The team eventually discovers that the heist is part of a larger, grandiose escape plan. One of the paintings is returned to the Ukrainian consulate with a hidden device inside in order to spring a Russian warlord. There are a lot of steps in this plot, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. But it gets awkward in the moments where the audience is unintentionally ahead of the characters. It doesn’t take an FBI agent to deduce that when Maggie and OA Zidan find most of the paintings still in a storage locker, they were left there on purpose. Yet Maggie has to talk to an old acquaintance to get to that conclusion.
This leads to the bigger issue that “Captured” has: two guest characters who add very little to the story. It’s fun to see Zach Grenier in anything—both he and this episode’s director Carlos Bernard appeared in 24—but his character Peter’s contribution to the plot is saying what Maggie should be able to figure out on her own. What makes that scene even more awkward is that in the closing moments, Peter tells Maggie that she is a “natural profiler” and that he’d put in a word for her with the Behavioral Analysis Unit. But there’s nothing in this episode to support that claim. Is FBI just trying to set up another career dilemma for Maggie?
At least Peter is watchable, but Claire Coffee’s character Anna is a walking stereotype. FBI brings her in to fill the “agent from an outside organization that doesn’t actually help” role. The character is annoyingly flippant, too, which makes her come across with a “better than everyone” attitude. It’s no shock at all when she tells a stunned Jubal Valentine that the government won’t honor the promise he made to one of the suspects, and that he just doesn’t understand how the game is played. Everything about this character is eyeroll-inducing. The episode as a whole would have been much stronger to remove both of these guest characters, and let the core team stand on their own. They’re certainly capable of doing so.
There’s a version of “Captured” where Maggie doesn’t have to ask for help, or perhaps bounces ideas off OA, her actual partner. Or where Jubal may have to argue with a higher-up or even another member of the team about if he can promise anything to a suspect. FBI hasn’t necessarily missed the mark. It simply has too many pieces and parts to truly be effective. After the big action setpieces of the season premiere and now this, it’d be great to do an episode that is smaller in scale and focuses in on the main characters who are so constantly watchable.
