With three episodes left to air in Season 6, CBS’ FBI appears to be taking a veteran team member out of the field.
The April 23 episode, “Family Affair,” revolves around the abduction of a pregnant woman, Denise, by her cult leader father. With a begrudging OK from the ATF (which had been keeping eyes on the cult’s well-armed commune), the FBI team launched a plan to find and rescue Denise. Scola posed as the weekly food delivery driver, with Maggie and OA hiding in the back of his truck. After Scola pulled up to the commune’s main house, Maggie and OA slipped out and stealthily searched the premises for Denise.
Just as Maggie found Denise chained to a bed in an upstairs bedroom, some brainwashed little cult member rugrat saw her, then ran outside and snitched to one of the guards. That guard raced to the room, saw and shot Maggie, who slumped to the floor. But as the guard stood over the fallen fed, Maggie cleverly slipped her pistol out from beneath her, and popped the guy.
The commune swung into “Outside intruder!!!” mode, with alarms blaring and the women and children protecting the armed menfolk by standing in the LEOs’ line of fire. Scola finds Maggie, who’d been saved by her vest, and they hunkered down in the bedroom with Denise, barricading the door and then waiting with pistols drawn, while a guard whacked at the door with a sledgehammer.
OA temporarily chased down and shot the elusive “prophet” cult leader, and forced him to make his guards — including those about to bust through the bedroom door — stand down.
Sitting with OA in the car afterwards, a shocked Maggie regarded the bullet that had been stopped by her Kevlar vest.
“It was a close call,” OA noted.
“Too close,” Maggie exclaimed. “An inch down or to the left and I would’ve… It would have been over.
“I worry about Ella,” Maggie continued, referring to the young daughter of her recently passed friend Jessica, to whom she has been serving as a mother figure. “I mean, how can I not? If something were to happen to me, that poor girl would have to start over? Again? She needs me.”
That night at the office, OA stayed behind to handle the paperwork — and also picked up a conversation he’d had earlier, with a concerning Isobel.
“I think today really shocked [Maggie],” he shared. “Is there any way that you could, I don’t know, demand that she take some time off…? I just know she’s never going to ask for it.”
“Yeah, I can,” Isobel nodded. “Is that what you feel needs to happen…?”
Giving the situation — including, I assume, the fact that he was asking his partner to be benched — careful thought, OA affirmed, “Yeah. I do. She almost made that little girl an orphan all over agin. So, yes.”
Do you think Isobel will in fact order Special Agent Bell (played by original FBI cast member Missy Peregrym) to take the bereavement leave her thus far has rejected? If so, how will Maggie respond? And even if she agrees to “temporary” leave, at what point would the surrogate mother ever be “OK” returning to her dangerous line of work?