SPOILER ALERT: The following contains spoilers for FBI Season 8, Episode 20.
FBI Season 8, Episode 20, “Roleplay” feels like several different ideas that were combined together to make one episode, instead of one cohesive plotline. It does get the CBS show’s audience from Point A to Point B, but it feels like it wants to be several different things. And the irony is, most of those things are good; they just don’t really go together.
From the opening scene that gives the episode its title, viewers can tell that something’s off about this one. At first, it starts out as a high-profile murder that might be connected to a labor dispute. But then it gets weird again as the head of the labor union privately confesses that he and murder victim Susan Granwell were actually in love and engaged to be married. The first suspect in any procedural is usually not the actual killer, yet the whole bit is still awkward to watch. And that’s an example of the bigger issue: most of the guest characters in this FBI episode don’t have anything about them to hook the audience beyond the “good guys vs. bad guys” baseline.
The sole exception is in the second half, when “Roleplay” pivots to being a Jubal Valentine backstory episode. It’s revealed that the new head of the Russian mob is Jubal’s old school friend, Andrei Ovechkin, and so, of course, Jubal winds up working with Andrei to catch the real villains—a pair of wannabe gangsters who abducted the sister of Susan’s son’s tutor because the tutor stole over $300,000 in bitcoin. (That sentence proves how many hoops the plot has to jump through.)
Jeremy Sisto is solid, as he always is when Jubal gets to step out of the JOC. It’s also appreciated that Jubal and Andrei end up on the same side, however briefly, instead of the script just making him an out-and-out villain. That differentiates “Roleplay” from the standard procedural formula, although the episode’s final scene seems to be a hint that audiences haven’t seen the last of Andrei.
If FBI had committed to fully doing this as a Jubal-focused episode, with the mob angle being introduced right off the top, that would be one coherent narrative with even more for Sisto to do. The “someone from a good guy’s past comes back” episode is a tried-and-true one in this genre for a reason; it usually works. But then there’s also another interesting idea when FBI also pushes two of its supporting characters, Kelly Moran and Ian Lim, into the forefront before Jubal takes over.
It’s this show’s equivalent of the Build Team getting the spotlight in Mythbusters. Kelly and Ian are great characters who are always reliable in every sense of that word, and it’s fantastic that they get a little more screen time (especially in Kelly’s case, since this doesn’t involve him being a victim again). It would’ve been rewarding in a different way to do a whole episode with the supporting cast taking the lead.
And then on top of that is the real case of the week, involving cryptocurrency and alleged “white hat” hackers and a hostage situation. This is where FBI gets really muddled, not only in terms of navigating the crypto world, but in just connecting its own dots. The aforementioned hacker running a public doxxing forum shows up as a possible suspect for about one scene. Meanwhile, the real kidnappers are identified by Andrei off-screen, like the show has realized it’s running out of time and needs to get to the point. By working with so many different plot elements, a few of them are shortchanged.
There are still the FBI staples here, like a good foot chase and a shootout. And the audience still gets the satisfaction of arrests being made, and the hostage saved. People watching “Roleplay” will definitely be entertained. But it’s hard not to watch this one and not see two or three episodes that could have come out of it. Maybe fans will get lucky, and Andrei will resurface, as have a few other characters in FBI Season 8, and at least one of those ideas will completely flourish.
FBI airs Mondays at 9:00 p.m. ET/PT on CBS. Photo Credit: Courtesy of CBS.
