I love FBI, but I can’t stand when it’s more about car chases and shootouts than a coherent story.
FBI Season 8 Episode 12 committed the cardinal sin of offering a story that didn’t make much sense and relying on action sequences to keep the audience’s attention.
Unfortunately, that didn’t work for me, and the two minutes of OA’s subplot felt more compelling than most of the main story.
FBI Season 8 Episode 12’s Story Had Way Too Many Plot Holes
The New York Field Office going up against intelligent and cunning villains is one thing — that’s what they’re supposed to do.
But that’s not how Oslo was portrayed.
Not only did he somehow disguise himself convincingly enough as an agent he’d just killed to get access to a safe house and murder the occupants, but he also breached the supposedly extremely safe 26 Federal Plaza to kill two more witnesses and the cops that were guarding them.
If there was any explanation for how he did any of this, I blinked and missed it.
That sort of nonsense plays well on Days of Our Lives, where the genre demands that cops be incompetent and that villains can break into any place they want with an obvious disguise.
But FBI is supposed to be a serious procedural.
If a villain can get past FBI agents, there needs to be more of an explanation than “because the script said so.”
Unfortunately, FBI Season 8 Episode 12 didn’t give us that.
Instead, it tried to paper over these obvious plot questions with chase scenes after chase scenes and shootouts after shootouts.
I don’t enjoy these types of scenes in the first place, but I’ve accepted they’re part of FBI.
However, the unspoken agreement was that they were supposed to be part of an episode that also included solid investigative scenes, and there weren’t many of these here.
The thread about the female witness who was clearly laundering money was interesting, but it evaporated in favor of the big, exciting sequence where all the witnesses but her got killed thanks to Olso magically being able to breach the FBI.
The violence was compounded by my least favorite trope: tech failures that left the FBI hanging long enough for the bad guy to get away.
For the second week in a row, FBI featured Jubal saying that some agents were temporarily on their own after Oslo used a blowtorch to cut out all the security cameras.
A FBI unit that constantly puts agents in jeopardy because of tech failure does not inspire much confidence, especially since there was little to no screen time for the team’s computer experts on FBI Season 8 Episode 12.
This ridiculous obstacle contributed to the feeling that Oslo was a super villain rather than a bona fide fugitive that the FBI was chasing.
It Would Have Helped If I Remembered Who Oslo Was
FBI Season 8 Episode 12 made it clear that the audience was supposed to know exactly who this guy was.
Maggie warned the team that he was back, and it was clear that her news was terrifying — or at least concerning — to her colleagues, but Oslo didn’t make enough of an impression for me to recall what he did the first time around.
Since he was wanted by Interpol, I guess he had to do with that case that made me wish FBI: International was still on so that the Fly Team could consult on this one, but beyond that, I had no clue.
You could argue that fans should watch closely enough to be aware of major players like Oslo, but honestly, it’s the writers’ responsibility to remind us.
Many of us (myself included!) watch so many procedurals that storylines tend to blur in our minds, especially if it’s been months since a character was last mentioned.
If a show like FBI wants us to be excited about a big bad’s return, it needs to set things up in a way that reminds us of who that person is, period.
Not knowing made the implausible scenarios that Oslo caused even less logical or compelling.
About That Ridiculous Ending Twist…
The idea of Isobel discovering that Volpe was dirty, only for the State Department to protect Volpe, was compelling on paper, but it didn’t work.
It hadn’t been prepared for.
Isobel barely appeared, and it didn’t seem like she was investigating Volpe’s connections or much of anything else.
Instead, the twist came out of nowhere, followed instantly by the further revelation that Volpe is protected.
Come on! That’s not a story.
It’s a plot point meant to surprise us, although it could lead to something interesting if Isobel pursues this, hopefully with a story that makes more sense than this one did.
OA telling Maggie that he didn’t want to admit that Gemma was gone because it made it too real was far more compelling than any of this.
That demonstrates where FBI Season 8 Episode 12 went wrong. Cases not only need to make sense but also to up the stakes for the characters we love.
This one just felt random.
Did you enjoy FBI Season 8 Episode 12 more than I did?
I hope so, but whether you loved or hated it, I want to hear your thoughts!
Share them in the comments and share this article with your FBI fanatic friends so they can join in the conversation.
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