FBI: Jeremy Sisto and John Boyd Tease Vargas’ Personal Threats Against the Team

Things are going well for Rina (Kathleen Munroe) and Jubal (Jeremy Sisto) in “Unfinished Business,” the Tuesday, December 14 episode of FBI—until, out of nowhere, Rina gets shot.

“What happens is very traumatic for anyone,” Sisto acknowledges. “Being in the FBI, Jubal has been through traumatizing events, but he…stays out of the line of fire, most of the time, in his position. And this, of course, goes beyond the job, because someone very close to him gets hurt. I think it’s an added psychological emotional disruption for Jubal, because he’s a recovering alcoholic, and it’s really is first effort putting himself out there.” 

With Rina fighting for her life, Jubal jumps straight into work to figure out who targeted her…and why.

“It’s pretty post-trauma for him,” Sisto says. “He doesn’t have any time to process it. He’s also just on guard for his own life—he was nearly killed, as well, presumably. And he and the team find out that danger to them and their families…because of Vargas having them in his crosshairs. There’s a lot going on.”

Vargas (David Zayas) first made his presence known in season 3’s “Liar’s Poker,” as Elise (Vedette Lim) was used as a pawn (thanks to Vargas’ men putting a bomb on her) to get the cartel leader out of custody. But the FBI team was able to get the upper hand in the season 3 finale, “Straight Flush,” and captured him. Now? Well, he’s pissed.

“What’s pretty interesting about how they wrote this recurrence of Vargas is that he’s able to pull strings from within the prison to create personalized attacks against our team and our family members,” John Boyd, who plays Scola, says. “That was something that was really interesting to play, because there’s [normally] so much anonymity in this work. When we do interrogation room scenes, we put our badges that have our names inside our pockets, right? There’s sort of the safety of when you go home, this job is done. The work is really the work and you don’t carry it home with you.”

“In this one, when you have this supervillain that’s now found a way to target, personally, agents outside of work and their families, it takes on a whole different level of a threat,” he continues. “It’s really a cool convention that they found to bring Vargas back and use it. For Scola, it’s just this new intense sort of personal threat level that we’ve never had on this show before. I think that’s what really makes it such an interesting dynamic. Even the team is [thinking], is this a little scary? No one wants to really say, ‘I’m terrified,’ but it’s like, ‘I don’t know if I signed up for this here. This is getting a little personal.'”

To get at the agents, Vargas has to be especially sneaky—even down to the weapons deployed against them.

“When I heard about [what is he using to attack them], I was like, ‘Oh, yeah, I guess that would be possible,'” Sisto teases. “But I’m not that dark of a person [to have known about it before]. I’m also not in the business of making weapons, but it makes sense. Technology, spying, assassination, all this stuff becomes a much more complex and scary concept. And this is a particularly…it’s almost lo-fi, in a way, that you can really understand how somebody can put a machine like this together to get whatever job complete that you’re going for.”

“It’s definitely one of the less than comforting things to know that is in the world, but apparently it is,” he continues. “And when it’s aimed towards our characters, it’s something that makes the entire world a frightening place, a place that you’re on guard the whole time. So as a device, in a story like this, it’s pretty intense.”

“Whenever you put anyone away, I think that’s personally always been an element of being a prosecutor or law enforcement of any kind. For me, how do you then go on with your life knowing that there are these already pretty dangerous people now locked in a cage and just imagining your demise?” Sisto says. “And then [possibly] getting out and continuing to hold whatever level of resentment they have for you—that’s scary. My stepbrother is a cop. My brother-in-law is a cop. And I am always impressed that [they] can sleep at night, honestly.”

“[Vargas] is a very, very powerful man, even behind bars,” he continues. “And what we find out is that the resentment is not just the fact that we were successful in putting him away…there’s something even more personal. And so some of our teams’ past actions come back to haunt us in a way that will continue this danger into the characters’ lives beyond this episode.”

FBI, Tuesdays, 8/7c, CBS

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