Spoilers are ahead for Episode 18 of FBI Season 7 on CBS, called “Blkpill” and available streaming next day with a Paramount+ subscription.
Fans could safely guess from the first few minutes of “Blkpill” in the 2025 TV schedule that FBI was getting particularly gruesome with the murders of the week. Women were being doused with napalm and then burned alive, and the investigation led Maggie and OA to a dating site. The victims were being targeted by men they’d rejected, and CBS’ hit drama didn’t hold back from showing how horrifying it was. After everything started bad and then just got worse, my fingers were crossed that Maggie’s awkward date with Joel at the start of the episode wasn’t going to result in an unhappy ending.
The date with Joel wasn’t awkward because of my original suspicions that he was a secret bad guy, but actually incorporated some nice continuity into the serialized show. After they bantered a bit about why Joel pours so much sugar into his coffee before going to his job as a 911 dispatcher, he pointed out that he had no idea what was going on with her while she was undercover in a recent episode.
That episode had really served to introduce S.W.A.T. alum Emily Alabi as Agent Dani Rhodes to seemingly replace Katherine Renee Kane‘s TIff, but it came with another near-death experience for Maggie. In true Maggie style, she was composed by the time she was chatting with Joel over coffee, and insisted that she had been fine.
He pointed out that he had no way of knowing that, and the two went their separate ways for the day with a big unresolved issue. Maggie tends to be fairly unlucky in love, and “Blkpill” was heavy enough that I could imagine it ending on an official split from Joel. Instead, she realized that she wanted to make the effort with Joel, and told him as much over dinner shortly before the final credits rolled. She said:
I haven’t dated very much since my husband. And I don’t wanna sound like my parents, but dating really isn’t what it used to be. And I think that when you find somebody you connect with, you gotta make it work. Now, I don’t have any advice for you in terms of how you wrap your head around what I do for a living. But how do you feel about figuring it out together?
Joel responded by saying that he’d “like that,” and the episode ended with the FBI leading lady smiling at somebody she cares about rather than thinking about women being burned alive with napalm as an accelerant. Does this mean that Maggie and Joel are going to fall in love and become as solid as OA and Gemma are, the occasional action movie-esque train hijacking aside? Of course not, but it was a relief to see a happy ending for Maggie, complete with a nod to her origin with the death of her husband.
See what’s next for Maggie and Co. with new episodes of FBI on Tuesdays at 8 p.m. ET on CBS, ahead of FBI: International at 9 p.m. ET and FBI: Most Wanted at 10 p.m. ET… for the rest of the 2024-2025 TV season anyway. Both International and Most Wanted have been cancelled, but you can stream the latest episodes on Paramount+.
