Elias Voit Has a 'Criminal Minds Evolution' Problem

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https://www.pajiba.com/tv_reviews/el...on-problem.php

By Dustin Rowles | TV | May 29, 2026

Last year around this time, I suggested that Criminal Minds, now in its 19th season and going by Criminal Minds: Evolution, should do itself a favor and cut Elias Voit loose. I was wrong.

The Zach Gilford character has been an unusual addition to the series, to say the least.

In seasons prior to Evolution, Criminal Minds was a case-of-the-week procedural. Now on Paramount+, there’s a serialized arc — but that serialized arc is now in its fourth season, and it’s still orbiting one character: Elias Voit. In the first season, he was a suburban family man who secretly ran a dark-web network of serial killers. Then he got caught. In the second season, he came in as a sort of Hannibal Lecter type, helping the BAU dismantle his own network. At the end of that season, he was attacked and beaten by fellow prisoners, suffering a head injury that led — in the third season — to amnesia and something stranger: the brain injury made the empathy center of his brain functional again. In other words, Elias Voit was no longer a psychopath.

As his memories slowly returned, so did remorse. He became a sympathetic serial killer — one who would eventually fake his own death, confess to his crimes, and help bring down the resurfaced killer network he’d built.

Now in the fourth season, which kicked off this week, Gilford returns as the serial killer with the best head of hair in any federal prison. And now? He seeks redemption. It’s a real Negan arc. He agrees to apologize to a family member of one of his victims. He goes on a podcast to tell an audience of true-crime enthusiasts that he’s not special — that he’s pathetic, and that only a small, pathetic man would resort to killing people just to get his heart rate up. (He also continues to interact with hallucinations of David Rossi, keeping the audience guessing: is he genuinely trying to redeem himself, or is this all preamble to an escape plan and another killing spree?)

Here’s the thing about Elias Voit that gradually revealed itself over the course of the third season and has become completely obvious to anyone still watching: he’s the best thing about this show. By a mile. I thought Criminal Minds was buckling under the weight of this long-running storyline. But now I see it clearly — the long-running storyline is the show. That’s never more apparent than when Criminal Minds retreats to its cases of the week.

Those cases are a formulaic drag. A killer takes a victim. The BAU investigates. Someone else dies. The BAU tracks down the killer and stops him seconds before he can claim another. Rinse, repeat, forever. Some of the cast members remain entertaining enough — give Aisha Tyler and Paget Brewster their own spinoff, please and thank you — but Rossi? I’m kind of done with him. I’m over most of the show, honestly, except for Voit. The problem is that Criminal Minds and the BAU have become essentially a vehicle for his story, but Voit has long since outgrown the vehicle. He should be a standalone story, not the B-plot you suffer through the rest of the episode to reach.

And now that he’s no longer a psychopath — now that he has a full range of emotions and even a dry sense of humor — it’s a genuinely compelling redemption arc with one elegant wrinkle: it might not be genuine.

The only real problem is that it’s no longer the main story. Voit has been bumped to the backseat in favor of, for instance, the death of Luke Alvez’s dog and a vet with PTSD who lobotomizes people. The profiling has become predictable. The guy they’ve already profiled exhaustively has not.