Criminal Minds Season 19 Premiere Review: Evolution Turns America’s Obsession With Violence Back on Us

I think we can all agree that Criminal Minds has never exactly been a warm hug of a television series.

But somewhere along the line, especially during the Evolution years, it crossed over from “dark procedural” into “existentially grim exploration of cultural rot.” 

After the first two episodes of Season 19, I’m not sure whether I’m impressed, exhausted, or quietly wondering if I’ve simply aged out of watching people livestream torture while somebody’s dying father cackles approvingly in the background. (Seriously, it’s in my notes.) Maybe all three? Humanity contains multitudes.

Criminal Minds Season 19 Episode 1 opened with what initially felt like familiar Criminal Minds territory: a dark road, isolated travelers, and tactical-gear psychos pretending to be authority figures.

And let’s not forget the poor kid who was way too high to realize that trying to reason with armed lunatics was not going to end with everybody laughing nervously and driving away into the night. 

Instead, Griffin got a shotgun blast to the chest almost immediately, and from there, the episodes become less about solving crimes and more about asking what prolonged exposure to violence, trauma, and spectacle is doing to literally everybody involved.

And really, that’s where the season starts getting interesting.

Because while people are understandably exhausted by Elias Voit, and believe me, I get it, these episodes actually justify his continued existence in a way the show really hasn’t managed before. 

Up until now, there’s been a growing sense that the series itself became too fascinated with him, almost trapped by him, like every road somehow had to lead back to Sicarius because the writers couldn’t figure out how to let him go. 

But these episodes shift the focus from Voit as mastermind killer to Voit as some sort of cultural contagion. That’s different.

The most fascinating thing about these episodes isn’t whether Voit kills again. It’s that his existence has become a myth. He may be human, but humanity treats him like he’s building his own mythology. 

There are podcasts spinning him into a criminal-genius folk legend. There are conspiracy theories claiming the BAU trained him. There are people consuming him like entertainment. Suddenly, the danger isn’t just the killer himself but the story people are building around him.

Frankly, that’s terrifying. And it feels far more real than another season of “serial killer helps FBI solve crimes while everyone pretends this is sustainable.” We have become a podcast nation, and it’s just random people putting their own spins on crimes that have taken lives. How is that not scary?

Brian Garrity may actually be one of the smartest additions the show has made in years because he represents something very recognizable about this phenomenon. 

He’s not interested in truth. He’s interested in narrative. He wants engagement, and he’s not afraid to use emotional manipulation to get it. 

He’s taking facts, wrapping them in conspiracy and personality, and turning them into consumable content for people who think that listening to podcasts somehow makes them informed rather than entertained.

That’s not a knock on podcasts specifically, before everyone starts clutching their AirPods. It’s a commentary on how people now experience crime stories as identity-building mythology rather than as events involving actual human suffering. 

Make no mistake. At the heart of all of these crimes, whether real or fictional, someone has suffered. Families have suffered. And they suffer every time they open Netflix or YouTube and see another podcast dragging their narratives into the open again.

In that regard, we can be shocked by Voit’s reaction. Because, at least initially, he seems horrified by it.

That podcast scene worked far better than I expected because, for once, the show stopped trying to convince us Voit is Hannibal Lecter and instead leaned into the pathetic reality of what he actually is. 

When he smashed Garrity’s ridiculous neon sign and called himself “an antisocial psychopath with nothing special about himself who kills people to make himself feel better,” Criminal Minds finally touched on something uncomfortable and smart at the same time.

Voit understands that people want him to be more interesting than he is. He’s also astute enough to know that is where the danger starts. He’s been there. He’s probably going there again. He knows the signs.

Because the killer at the end of Criminal Minds Season 19 Episode 2, pounding his steering wheel while listening to Garrity’s podcast, isn’t responding to facts. 

He’s responding to narrative identity, to the mythology being built around Voit. He’s feeling seen by the worst possible thing imaginable. Or she. All we see are black gloves. I have no idea of the gender underneath them.

But the show is essentially arguing that evil spreads socially now, through storytelling and spectacle and obsession, and honestly, that’s probably the most modern thing Criminal Minds has ever attempted. And possibly the most frightening, since we live amid it every single day.

It also explains why the BAU suddenly feels so exhausted this season.

Rossi doesn’t even seem angry anymore. He seems spiritually tired. When he says he’d die happy, never thinking about Voit again, it makes sense because the team itself appears trapped in the same cycle as the audience. 

They can’t move on because culture won’t let them. Every conversation circles back to Voit. Every case somehow reflects him. Even JJ, trying to move houses with Henry getting ready for college, feels haunted by the inability to escape accumulated trauma.

And then there’s Luke.

Honestly, the Luke material was the gut-punch of the premiere because it’s the only storyline rooted in genuine emotional sincerity rather than grotesque pageantry. 

Watching him break down in the elevator after visiting the cemetery was one of the few moments where the show slowed down long enough to let pain exist without turning it into entertainment.

The Roxy reveal absolutely destroyed me. I had a feeling it was going to be a dog, but the reality of Luke’s connection to it was so pure.

The “dog dies” theme isn’t some magical emotional cheat code, although television sure loves using it that way, but it reframed Luke’s entire behavior throughout the episodes. 

Suddenly, the nail-picking, the crying in the elevator, the inability to pull himself together, the fixation on broken veterans and unbearable pain all clicked into place. Roxy wasn’t just a dog. She was his tether to stability after returning from war. 

And when David asks Luke, “Are you going to be my buddy?” there’s the awful realization that both men are really asking the same question: what happens when the thing keeping you tethered to the world disappears?

That storyline also weirdly highlighted one of the season’s larger themes: people trying desperately to stop pain by destroying themselves or others.

The farm family tortured people for entertainment and legacy. David lobotomized victims because he’s consumed by his own suffering. Voit describes murder like an addict chasing a high. Even the victims were pushed toward violence when the brothers forced captives to fight each other for survival. 

These were dark, brutal episodes. I had a hard time watching the repeated lobotomies. Seriously, just shoot me in the head and be done with it. That kind of torture is everlasting and beyond depravity. 

And the woman who gave birth to twins had put that part of her life to rest long ago, only for it to be reawakened with the knowledge her children had been turned into murderous monsters. How do you survive that?

But the season does seem to be circling the same ugly question over and over: what do people do when pain becomes unbearable?

As expected, it’s different for everyone. Some people endure it, some externalize it, some monetize it, and some turn it into their very identity.

And somewhere in the middle of all this, the show also asks whether audiences themselves have become too comfortable with consuming suffering as entertainment. Because I genuinely found myself asking during the torture scenes, “Have I grown out of this shit?”

I didn’t ask myself that because Criminal Minds has suddenly become too violent. The series has always been violent. But there’s a tonal shift happening here. Older seasons often framed violence as puzzle-solving. 

These episodes frame it as a corrosion of our very existence. Our souls feel like they’re on the line. Everybody feels contaminated by the violence now, including the audience.

Even Tara’s scenes with Voit carry that energy. She wants to believe studying him has value, but the more time she spends with him, the murkier everything becomes. 

Voit himself almost feels like a recovering addict trying to convince himself he’s changed while Faux Rossi lurks in the background, reminding him who he really is. The “high” speech matters because it stripped away all the mythology and revealed compulsion underneath.

Which is why I suspect Voit will absolutely keep pushing to work with the BAU in the field again, even if it’s starting to make less and less sense logically.

It’s not that the show necessarily wants him physically involved in every case anymore, but because Voit’s real function now is thematic. He’s the embodiment of what happens when violence stops being isolated behavior and becomes culture. He’s the ghost haunting everything.

The problem, of course, is sustainability.

These first two episodes actually work precisely because they acknowledge the audience’s exhaustion with him. 

The series finally seems aware that viewers are sick of watching the world orbit around Sicarius. But if the answer to that exhaustion is simply “more Voit, but outside prison this time,” then I think the show risks collapsing under the weight of its own obsession again.

For now, though, I’ll admit it: these episodes were smarter than I expected them to be, even if I finished both feeling like I needed a shower, a nap, and maybe a less horrifying view of humanity. 

Which, to be fair, has kind of always been Criminal Minds’ thing. The difference now is that the show seems to understand that the monsters aren’t just the killers anymore.

They’re also the audiences watching them. And if that’s not enough to make your head spin, you and I will need to work on that as the season progresses.

This comes from someone who unwinds with true crime. I honestly don’t think it has bothered me enough that I’ve gone from a Hallmark addict to a true crime addict. My life hasn’t substantially changed, but the world around it has. It’s making an impression, and it scares me.

But what about you?

Let me know if this discussion eases your mind about Voit remaining with the show. There is the potential for some deep introspection if they play their cards right. Do you think they’re up for the challenge?