Episode 7 of Season 12 of the American police procedural drama TV series “Criminal Minds” on CBS aired on November 2 and it has put Dr. Tara Lewis, played by Aisha Tyler, in the limelight as she dealt with an impostor who pretended to be her brother, Gabriel.
Tara was scheduled to meet her brother from a reunion that took a long time coming but when they meet, she noticed something different about him, details the iTech Post.
The impostor of her brother was played by Alimi Ballard, but he went by the name of Gabriel as well. Since Tara knows her brother so well, she immediately sensed that something was not right with the person she was talking to.
But ‘Gabriel’ continued to insist that he is actually her brother. He even recounted many details of their childhood and life together as siblings just to prove his point.
The episode saw how Tara, with the help of her colleagues from the Behavioral Analysis Unit (BAU) uncovered the truth about the man who claims to be Gabriel. Since he turned out to be an impostor, they would eventually learn from him where the real Gabriel is and the reason why the impostor pretended to be him.
The seventh episode of “Criminal Minds” Season 12 is entitled “Mirror Image” and also eventually showed the real Gabriel, played by Terrence Terrell, tied to a chair but very much alive, bolstering Tara’s notion that the person whom Tara was dealing with was an impostor. It has been discovered later that Gabriel has been kidnapped and the BAU eventually worked on finding the motive of the impostor UnSub for doing so.
Hitting Tara personally
In a recent interview, Aisha Tyler said that the seventh episode of “Criminal Minds” Season 12 was the first case on the show that has hit Tara personally.
She said that viewers saw how it affected her and how she went about not just solving the case but learning more about her and her relationships with her brother and her father, details News Everyday.
The actress said that the episode spent a good deal of time talking about who Tara is, what her experiences have been and what brought her to the FBI and generally with profiling, and a lot of that came together.
Meanwhile, when Penelope Garcia, played by Kirsten Vangsness, learned about Tara’s brother Gabriel and the impostor, she decided to keep it a secret because of a personal experiment as to how long she can keep a conversation private. She lasted for only 12 hours.
The end of the line for Hotch
Meanwhile, contrary to speculations that actor Thomas Gibson would return to “Criminal Minds” after being fired two episodes into Season 12, he shall no longer be coming back.
This became clear during the sixth episode of the TV series which aired on CBS on November 16. The episode explained that Aaron ‘Hotch’ Hotchner, the erstwhile Supervisory Special Agent of the BAU, has reportedly resigned from the unit and is not really on a special assignment as previously stated.
Hotch was supposed to have entered the protection program to protect himself from a known serial killer who is stalking him relentlessly. Obviously, it was the way for the showrunners to explain his permanent departure from the show.
Gibson had a run-in with one of the show producers and writer Virgil Williams that caused his firing from the TV series. He has been with “Criminal Minds” from the beginning more than 11 years ago and in fact appeared in 250 of its total 255 episodes.
But “Criminal Minds” is a type of show that simply does not kill off its main character even if the actors have decided to exit the show.
In a way, it is the show’s way of giving the characters and respective actors a graceful exit from the TV series. That’s in addition to the fact that it also leaves the door slightly ajar for the actors to come back and reprise their respective characters if there would be a chance in the future.
NO HOTCH, NO WATCH