Criminal Minds: Evolution Season 3 Ending Explained: Who Is The Real Villain?

After the “previously on” recap, the Criminal Minds: Evolution season 3 finale opens with a flashback of a much younger Voit stealing Cyrus’ pictures and packing up with the intention of leaving, first having to confront Cyrus and strangle him almost to death before Cyrus gives up and allows Elias – then Lee – to leave.

We then jump to a bit later as Cyrus drinks in a bar, where he notices a morose young woman who seems to be having a bad day sitting next to him. Her name is Constance, but she goes by Tessa, and just like that, Criminal Minds: Evolution season 3’s mystery character is revealed. They strike up a conversation, and he gives her a sob story about his wife being dead and his “son” leaving him.

She tells him that she is working on her Ph.D. in mechanical engineering, but her professor tried to sexually assault her that night. Of course, this friendliness is all a ruse on Cyrus’ part: as she leaves the bar, he jumps her in the parking lot and kidnaps her.

Fast-forward to present day and we see the current Tessa, now fully revealed as The Disciple, in the abandoned plant with her minions where they’re holding Voit and Dr. Julia Ochoa captive. As the BAU tries to figure out what happened in the hospital massacre and where Voit and the doctor are, and Evan flips out about the PR nightmare Voit’s seeming escape has caused, Voit and Tessa come face-to-face for the first time.

Throughout the episode, Tessa makes it clear that she is desperate to trigger Sicarius and revert Voit to his old ways. She’s clocked that Voit cares about his doctor, so she starts there. She tries to force Voit to kill a bound Julia, but Voit turns on Tessa’s accomplice, Perry, whom we saw in the previous episode, and beats him to death to protect Julia. Either way, Tessa is okay with it – Voit still killed and admitted he felt like a god.

Meanwhile, the BAU figures out that Dr. Ochoa’s passwords had been compromised by Tessa in a phishing scam when she posed as a colleague from the UK, and that’s how she gained access to the doctor’s system – including her notes on Voit. They also piece together that Tessa was a young woman who had gone missing, and that Cyrus must have kidnapped her to become Voit’s replacement.

After he kills Perry, Voit is seemingly resurrected as Sicarius and on Tessa’s side, but it’s clearly telegraphed that he’s faking it. Indeed, he is. He gains Tessa’s trust enough to get a gun, where he fakes shooting Julia in order to make it seem as though she’s dead and thus protect her from Tessa.

He also sends out a message to his followers on the Sicarius Network telling them to lay low, but includes a decryption that gives the location of every single person on the Sicarius Network. It’s no accident; he knows Garcia will intercept and crack the code, and that’s exactly what she does. He secretly hands the BAU the means to bring down the entire network, unbeknownst to Tessa.

When the BAU shows up at the abandoned plant, they find Julia Ochoa, who frantically tells Rossi that Voit saved her and that he doesn’t want to hurt anyone – except maybe himself. Indeed, Voit drops the act and pulls a gun on Tessa before JJ and Tyler show up, and Tessa temporarily escapes.

Voit screams at JJ to kill him, threatening her with the gun, but she walks slowly toward him and tells him she knows he won’t pull the trigger on her. She’s right: he gives the gun up, unwilling to kill someone else.

In another section of the plant, Tessa and Prentiss engage in a brief standoff as Prentiss tells Tessa she knows her life should have been different, that she should have been building rockets to the stars but that her soul had been robbed of her by evil men. Like Elias, Tessa appears determined to die by suicide by cop, but the agents tackle her and take her away in cuffs.

In the aftermath, Julia Ochoa sits across from a handcuffed Voit and thanks him for saving her. He apologizes for everything he put her through, and she tells him, incredulously, that he saved her life and that he had a choice to choose the good and he did. “Don’t lose faith,” she implores him, to which a defeated Voit says, heartbreakingly, that he doesn’t have any faith to lose.

He then confesses to Rossi, desperate to be justly punished for his crimes. As the BAU team celebrates taking down the Sicarius Network for good – or so they hope – Evan reveals he’s off the case, but they go out for one last drink. The finale ends with a handcuffed Voit, back in an orange jumpsuit, being transported on a prison bus to maximum security prison – but not before he has a brief and violent daydream of murdering one of his fellow inmates on the bus.

Is Cyrus Really Voit’s Father – And Did He Set The Fire That Killed Voit’s Parents?

It Was All A Lie By Cyrus

Earlier in the episode, Tessa tells a captive Voit that Cyrus killed her parents in a house fire. “As he did yours,” she then says, prompting an understandably confused Voit to clarify that, no, he had been the one to set the fire and kill his abusive parents. Tessa, however, is adamant both that Cyrus is Voit’s father and that he was the one to set the fire that killed Voit’s alleged aunt and uncle.

Voit may be a reformed psychopath, but he’s not crazy, and he has clear memories of the fire. So it wasn’t surprising that he dismissed Tessa’s fervent insistence that Cyrus set the fire. Still, it was a confusing scene, especially considering the episode immediately dropped that thread of what would have been an enormous reveal had Cyrus really been Voit’s father.

Voit is certain that his parents were his parents and that he set the fire, but his mind has been messed with so much, even before the amnesia, that it wouldn’t have been surprising had it been a secret Cyrus had kept from him. It would certainly explain a lot about Voit’s development into a serial killer.

Still, the likeliest answer is the one Rossi offers up later: Voit definitely was the one to set the fire and kill his parents. But Cyrus really did set fire to Tessa’s parents’ house, knowing that his parents’ deaths were an important point of Voit’s origin story. It wasn’t perfect – after all, there’s a big difference between Voit (then Lee) killing his own abusive parents and Tessa’s seemingly normal parents being killed by someone else.

Still, it was better than nothing. By killing Tessa’s parents, Cyrus ensured, like he had with Voit before, that Tessa had no more connections to the world and nobody else to rely on than him. By taking away the last people who loved her, Cyrus made sure no one would come looking for her. Telling her that he was Voit’s father, and that he set the fire for Voit was a manipulation on his part.

From the start, Cyrus was sizing Tessa up as his next target, as the pictures she later shows Voit proved.

That’s certainly why he kept referring to Voit as his “son” from the very first moment he met Tessa in the dive bar. It’s entirely possible that, by that point, Voit did consider Voit/Lee to be his adoptive son. However, it’s equally likely that he simply used it as an excuse to generate sympathy and lower Tessa’s guard as he shared his own sob story. From the start, Cyrus was sizing Tessa up as his next target, as the pictures she later shows Voit proved.

Why Voit Was So Horrified When Tessa Showed Him The Pictures

He Realized That Cyrus Never Stopped His Abductions

As for those pictures, at one point, Tessa shows Voit the pictures of girls who were meant to be Cyrus’ targets, similar to the ones he’d stolen from Cyrus before leaving him. When Tessa shows him pictures of herself, Voit is confused, because he’d taken all the pictures Cyrus had at the time. “You didn’t steal all of them,” she says, putting heavy emphasis on “all” before continuing, “Cyrus didn’t have a physical type, but he sure did like his lost girls, didn’t he?”

It’s at that moment that a perplexing look of horror crosses Elias’ face before he whispers, “Jesus Christ.” It’s not immediately clear why, but there’s an easy answer to this one: It is at that moment that he realizes that Cyrus had kept abducting and torturing girls in his absence. Worse, he has seemingly come to the same realization Rossi does later in the episode: Tessa had possibly even been there when he killed Cyrus, but he never knew, and thus, never helped her escape.

Unintentionally, Voit had set in motion the events that led to the creation of The Disciple the first time he tried to break free of Cyrus.

Because Cyrus relied so much on Lee/Elias in his murderous schemes, Elias seemingly thought that once he left, Cyrus would stop killing. Tessa showing him her pictures killed that erroneous belief, leaving a horrified Voit to realize Cyrus had kidnapped and recruited Tessa as his replacement. Unintentionally, Voit had set in motion the events that led to the creation of The Disciple the first time he tried to break free of Cyrus.

Why Tessa Was So Obsessed With Voit

Belief In Him Held Her Fractured Psyche Together

Tessa is, to say the least, obsessed with Voit – or, at least, obsessed with Sicarius. She has no use for Elias as he is now – reformed, empathetic, full of self-loathing for the heinous things he did. She frames her obsession with getting Voit to regress back to being the Sicarius Killer as though she’s doing it for him, but in reality, she’s doing it for herself: it’s the only thing keeping her from snapping.

What Tessa endured in her life was so brutal, so beyond horrific, that she could not cope with the things she’d endured – and had likely done – at the hands of Cyrus. Once free from the hell of being Cyrus’ hostage as Lee’s replacement, she simply couldn’t cope with facing reality. There was literally no way for her to heal; the only option was to create a new philosophy to keep her sanity intact. Thus, she transferred all the horror in her fractured psyche into hero worship of Voit.

There was literally no way for her to heal; the only option was to create a new philosophy to keep her sanity intact.

It may not make much sense until you remember that Voit did what she couldn’t, and he did it twice: escape Cyrus. First, he chose to walk out on Cyrus of his own volition, escaping from his abuser after beating Cyrus in a fight and nearly killing him. Then, he returned to finish the job, killing Cyrus and finally setting himself free – or as free as he could be considering the monster Cyrus had made him.

To Tessa, someone who could not only escape Cyrus once, but twice, when she’d long since given up trying to escape and had allowed herself to be broken and compliant, must seem like a hero – like a god. Deep down, she wanted to escape, but, much like Voit, she never truly could after the permanent damage Cyrus had done to her psyche.

So she crafted a fantasy in her head that Cyrus had really given her a gift with all his abuse and rape, the same gift he’d given Voit. She wanted to be like him, the perfect manifestation of Cyrus’ manipulation and abuse. She simply could not handle a reformed Voit, because admitting that he was a monster meant she was also a monster. So, “saving” him became her new purpose. She literally had nothing else.

Why Elias Voit Finally Confessed To The Sicarius Killings

He’s Had Suicidal Ideations All Season

After so many months of Voit working with plea deals to help the BAU, he easily confesses to everything to Rossi when Rossi points out that the only way to get justice for all the people he killed – and Voit himself – is to confess. “Do you need a confession? Okay. I did it. I did all of it,” Voit sais, before adding in a quieter voice, “Just no more fucking deals.”

The reason he confesses so easily, desperate to be put away and slapped with a death penalty sentence, is that he can no longer trust himself. In the end, while Tessa’s plan as The Disciple didn’t work out, in a way, she still won. She got Voit to kill again, and while he didn’t kill Julia Ochoa as Tessa had intended, but killed Perry to protect Julia, he still killed – and he liked it. He felt like a god again.

It’s not as though killing Perry in defense of Julia suddenly made Elias a psychopath again. But the violent act of beating Perry to death makes Elias realize that tendency is still in him – he still has the ability to kill and to like it when he does. Much like the MCU’s Winter Soldier after Zemo triggered him with the activation words, Voit realizes Sicarius is still lurking deep inside him. And he doesn’t know if or when he might come out again.

That much is shown by his final fantasy sequence on the prison bus. For a moment, Voit has a brief daydream of the other prisoners recognizing him as Sicarius, before he jumps the convict in front of him and strangles him with his handcuffs as the other inmates cheer him on. He doesn’t do it, but the fact that he’s fantasizing about it shows he still has those dark urges – but it also shows how much he’s evolved in three seasons.

It’s been pretty clear this season that, despite his suicide attempt being thwarted, that’s still always been Elias Voit’s plan in the back of his mind. While he never openly said so, there were enough hints to glean that his always intended to help the BAU bring down his Sicarius network and catch the other killers, then die – though whether by his own hand again or suicide by cop is unclear. He doesn’t get his wish, but he may yet if he does indeed get hit with the death penalty.

Will Voit Return For Criminal Minds: Evolution Season 4?

His Story Is Done For Now, But The Door Isn’t Fully Closed

However, considering Voit is headed off to maximum security prison, the same place where the other inmates already jumped him and almost killed him once they found out he was Sicarius, he may not have to wait long to see his death wish fulfilled. Criminal Minds: Evolution season 3, fittingly, closes out with a shot of a trapped-looking Voit as he heads off to prison and an unknown fate.

Yet, he’s still alive for now. The Criminal Minds writers seem to have come to the same conclusion with Zach Gilford’s Elias Voit that the MCU did with Tom Hiddleston’s Loki: he’s too good an actor and his villain too much of a chameleon with unlimited potential to outright kill him off, even if would have been the most poetic ending for Voit this season.

It’s not entirely clear if Voit will return for Criminal Minds: Evolution season 4, or even if he’ll return at all, but it’s unlikely that his story is completely finished. He’s still alive and awaiting trial, and it’s unlikely that the show will allow that event to pass without comment as a storyline.

That said, his villain arc has all but run its course for now, and there’s not a lot more the show can do with him at the moment. While he certainly won’t be the main villain of season 4, it wouldn’t be a surprise to see him reappear, if only briefly to perhaps consult on a case or in passing. Regardless, Criminal Minds hasn’t completely shut the door on Elias Voit just yet.

How The Criminal Minds: Evolution Season 3 Ending Sets Up Season 4

The BAU Will Need A New Primary Villain

The Criminal Minds: Evolution season 3 finale seemingly brought to a close the long-running storyline of the first three seasons. Elias Voit, a.k.a. the Siciarus Killer, and his entire network of serial killer acoylates, has been taken down and all the killers captured. In that sense, it was crafted much more like a series finale than a Criminal Minds: Evolution season 3 finale setting up season 4.

The one big development, aside from the entire Sicarius Network being taken down, is that Tyler has officially been made a full-fledged member of the BAU team. That’s rather anticlimactic, however, as that was already a foregone conclusion and it’s not as though his role will change much.

Really, the Criminal Minds: Evolution season 3 finale felt like a big board wipe. Barring Elias Voit suddenly breaking bad again or Tessa escaping prison, season 4 will have to come up with a brand-new villain for the BAU to chase. Right now, there’s a vacuum in the story left by Elias Voit, and it will be interesting to see if the show can craft another villain who is equally as compelling.