Spoilers below for the first two episodes of Criminal Minds: Evolution, so be warned if you haven’t yet checked them out. (But really, why haven’t you?)
Of all the big reveals that played out during the doubled-up streaming premiere for the revival season Criminal Minds: Evolution — including Rossi being a widower while the new UnSub Elias Voit has a wife and kids — arguably the least expected discovery came in the form of another relationship, only this time for Tara Lewis. And star Aisha Tyler talked to CinemaBlend about being happy to give her character some happiness in that realm, even if it won’t all be so positive. Get it, girl!
Not only did Lewis finally land herself a new romantic counterpart, as viewers learned along with Paget Brewster’s Prentiss, but it’s with a woman! And it’s not the first time she’s gone that route! (No more exclamation points…for now.) Lewis confessed she’d been seeing the DOJ’s Rebecca Wilson (Nicole Pacent) for a couple of months, and told Prentiss that while she’d dated women before, she’d never been that happy. Nobody knows who deserves this life update more than Aisha Tyler herself, and as seen above, she talked about being excited to take on her character’s first on-screen romance in more than half a decade. In her words:
Yeah, you know, it's great. Lewis hasn't had a relationship since my first season, which was Season 11. And I get it. We work a lot with people who really do this work in the real world, and relationships are hard to sustain with this work. It's dark work. The people who do this work are sin-eaters, right? They carry a lot of darkness. So it's great to see her happy, and in a healthy relationship.
To the longtime Archer star, it’s not necessarily a major fictional sin that Lewis went without any steady relationships for so long, because it’s not exactly atypical for those in the fields of criminal profiling and behavior analysis. The nature of the job can be both a mental and physical hurdle for romance, whether it’s the long and unpredictable hours or the emotional toil that comes from dealing with such dark and disturbing cases.
But then those who deal with that darkness on a daily basis can often be the ones most in need of outside-the-job relief, so it only makes sense that Lewis was able to finally come back around to connecting with someone else in lasting ways. Lucky Rebecca, I say. But even though things are all peachy keen at the moment, Aisha Tyler did slip some ominousness into the mix by saying the show will still explore the couple-centric complications that come with BAU relationships. (And not in the way that Alvez being Alvez made it hard for Garcia to keep their mini-tryst going longer than one date.) Here’s how she put it:
But I also think we're going to explore what kind of pressure this work puts on a relationship, puts on a family. It's tough work, and it takes a specific kind of person, and also a specific kind of loved one to be able to tolerate it. So I think we're really going to take a look at that this season. But it has been great exploring this relationship, and I'm really excited for people to see it.
To be sure, Tyler didn’t specifically say that Lewis’ relationship would be heading for doom or anything, and it’s only natural for any relationship, new or old, to go through growing pains. And it’s certainly possible that her BAU headaches and Rebecca’s DOJ issues are completely different, despite both being governmentally related, which could create its own unique problems. Two wrongs don’t make a right, but hopefully there are already more than enough rights between them to survive any rough waters.
New episodes of Criminal Minds: Evolution are available to stream every Thursday with a Paramount+ subscription, with more dark and deadly shocks coming in the next eight weeks. Check out what star Kirsten Vangsness told us about Garcia’s pink Post-It, and then head to our 2023 TV premiere schedule to see what shows fans can look forward to when the BAU is back on hiatus.
