“Startup” begins with a bomb detonating in the penthouse of a car company CEO, killing him, his wife and their live-in nanny. But what starts out as a straightforward story of taking down the one percent warps into a whole spiel against artificial intelligence. And the plot turns out to be almost secondary to the performances, from both the main and guest casts, because the emotion is more powerful than the diatribes.

How FBI Season 7, Episode 12 Almost Takes the Entire Series Down

A Major Character Death Feels Like an Actual Possibility

The most important moment in FBI Season 7, Episode 20 is the one that comes a heartbeat away from changing the series forever. A drone chases Maggie Bell, OA Zidan and the woman they’re protecting into a subterranean parking garage. The drone slams into the side of the garage, causing a massive explosion that initially appears to have killed Maggie. OA discovers that his partner isn’t breathing and has no pulse — and the writers leave the audience in suspense for a few minutes, letting the viewer live in the shocked, anxious reactions of both OA and the team back in the office.

Normally, such situations would fall under the category of “false jeopardy,” because viewers would know there’s no way a main character is being killed off a TV show without it being announced on multiple news sites first. But because that character is Maggie, the moment actually feels real. Audiences know that Maggie has left FBI numerous times before for various reasons, and that her life has been threatened more than once across seven seasons — so it wouldn’t be implausible for her to die if actor Missy Peregrym had decided to move on. Yet the loss of Maggie would absolutely doom FBI as a series.

The entire cast is solid, but the partnership between Maggie and OA is the core of FBI. The incredibly supportive, well-balanced bond between the characters is what every other detective pairing on TV wants to be, and Peregrym and co-star Zeeko Zaki have that same strong rapport between them. And the subplot about finding Stuart Scola a new partner is example number one of how hard it is to locate someone else who can step into this ensemble. Peregrym just isn’t replaceable, both on her own and in what Maggie provides as a part of the show overall. That real fear of losing her almost makes up for this episode’s baffling decision to toss her romance with Joel away so easily, as if the writers just got bored with it. To ask the audience to invest multiple episodes in whether or not Maggie could open up to Joel, only to drop him, feels like the fans wasted their time.

FBI Season 7, Episode 12 Benefits From Its Gotham Connection

Robin Lord Taylor Makes His Antagonist Convincing

Viewers will likely recognize the main guest star in this FBI episode: Scott Collins is played by Gotham star Robin Lord Taylor. While it’s a very different role from Oswald Cobblepot, Taylor imbues Scott with the same kind of restless energy. His performance helps to smooth over some of the awkwardness in the plot. The scene in which Maggie and OA track Scott down at Cyclone’s original headquarters is a prime example of the villain monologue — where the bad guy stands there and delivers their entire manifesto. But Taylor puts enough desperation into that, that the audience is able to ignore the fact that he’s being asked to do a giant information dump.

FBI Season 7, Episode 12 does have a few soapbox moments, most notably that monologue and the closing scene. After being arrested, Scott stops to ask Jubal Valentine if Cyclone’s remaining board members have decided to reinstate the AI safeguards in the wake of his actions. Jubal tells him they didn’t. It’s an on the nose moment implicitly pushing a message about the dangers of unchecked AI. Those instances of heavy-handedness undercut the episode somewhat, but the strong acting from Taylor and the series regulars pushes past that. This episode could have easily fallen down a rabbit hole of moralizing and overly dramatic choices, but it avoids most of them and most importantly, it saves Maggie Bell from yet another close call.