FBI Post-Mortem: Jeremy Sisto Breaks Down Jubal’s Impulsive Decision and What Comes Next

[Warning: This post contains spoilers for the Tuesday, December 14 episode of FBI.]

Vargas (David Zayas) may have been locked up, but he was still able to cause mayhem on the Tuesday, December 14 hour of FBI, “Unfinished Business.”

After Rina (Kathleen Munroe) was shot, the team scrambled to figure out how and why she was attacked. After a lot of sleuthing–and Maggie (Missy Peregrym) also getting shot, albeit with the safety of a bulletproof vest on—they were able to figure out their suspects had ties to former cartel leader Vargas.

When Jubal (Jeremy Sisto) and Isobel (Alana De La Garza) went to visit Vargas, he revealed he was angry they played dirty. Because he cared enough about his family to be locked up, it also meant they were unprotected…after Vargas went to jail, his wife and son were killed. As such, Vargas wanted to make sure the people responsible for him being in prison had to fear for their own loved ones.

With Rina fighting for her life, Jubal proposed a solution to Isobel: He could make a few calls and get Vargas released into general population; Vargas would never make it out alive. Isobel shot him down and insisted they needed to find another way to deal with their problem.

“In that moment in this episode, he, I think, was thinking in a way that he wouldn’t ordinarily think,” Sisto admits of Jubal’s mindset. “He’s a rule follower. You kind of have to be if you’re in the FBI; he trusts the system. He can’t think vigilante style in this job; you can’t be within a system and want to do things that corrupts the system that you support.”

“So he had a moment fantasizing about how to take care of this problem that does go against the system that he works within,” he continues. “I think he comes to his senses…partially because of his friend and boss Isobel says, you can’t do that; you have to be better than that.”

But despite being talked down, Jubal’s frustration doesn’t exactly go away. “It comes up again that he is just incredibly angry at this man for doing what he did,” Sisto previews. “And he takes it out on another situation, on another case. It’s a pretty interesting storyline, where he is misguided, actually, in how he’s going about the case. Not nuts, not to a level that is that necessarily betrays who he is, to his core, but it definitely creates a situation that is not what he was intending. The writers did a pretty great job at showing these feelings of revenge.”

Jubal did get a bit of unexpected closure, when he came face-to-face with Rina’s ex-husband while they were waiting for word on how she was doing post-shooting. Despite the awkwardness, Jubal worked up the courage to apologize to the man for his role in the affair.

“That was not in the script originally,” Sisto shares. “It was a surprise that they put the ex-husband in there; it was really an interesting turn. For Jubal to be able to kind of apologize to somebody who he hadn’t obviously done before—sure, he’d gone through all the steps, but we’re playing it as if he had not done that step of alcoholism [recovery] with the ex-husband and apologizing to him. But that’s kind of what happens during the moment.”

“It’s just being able to do something that was separate from this horrible event that’s occurring in front of us,” he continues. “And so it almost feels a little selfish to do, and, in a way, utilizing the situation for his own [needs]…it’s not planned, it’s just sort of comes out. And it just felt really honest. And so that, to me, sort of shows that despite what’s going on right now, he’s still fully embedded in his recovery, doing what he needs to do to stay conscious of his own sort of emotional strength.”

FBI, Tuesdays, 8/7c, CBS

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