Maybe one day, Jubal will come out of a spotlight episode feeling better than when it began.
But FBI Season 6 Episode 2 was not that exception.
Instead, the world was dumping on Jubal from the get-go.
Sam called him about Tyler’s getting suspended from school for drinking.
Tyler caving into peer pressure and drinking after complaining about not fitting in at his new school on FBI Season 6 Episode 1 really shouldn’t have been a surprise to anyone.
Jubal should have just been happy it wasn’t yet another possible relapse of Tyler’s cancer.
But being a workaholic absentee father, Jubal felt the need to blame himself for passing along his alcoholic gene to Tyler.
Not that Sam helped Jubal at all. After getting Tyler off with having to undergo more therapy, she felt compelled to have Jubal go with him “so that he won’t think you hate him.”
Jubal said the right thing about Tyler having to take responsibility for his actions, but deep inside, like many divorced parents, he feared he had caused Tyler’s situation.
Nope, sometimes it’s just kids being stupid kids. Testing of the new guy will happen even to the most well-adjusted teen.
Hopefully, the therapist will make that point to them. At least they were able to hug and make up before their session.
Although Tyler’s setback threw Jubal a bit off-balance, it turned out to be the lesser of his problems, as locating the killer of a vital banking official resulted in a bad case of deja vu for him.
When Jubal looked at the dead woman the team had been searching for, it was apparent that she reminded him of something.
Still, it took the discovery of evidence of a second female prisoner in Hopkins’ apartment for all of the pieces to come together for Jubal when he realized that the captives were two sisters he had pronounced dead eight years prior.
Give Jubal credit for telling their father, Steve, the bad news himself. The girls weren’t victims of a serial killer but instead had been abducted and kept by a mentally disturbed man for the past eight years, and no one had been looking for them.
Of course, he had to tell Steve because he had Isobel with him, and emoting isn’t her thing.
Jubal and the team had one advantage: Hopkins, the shooter, was endlessly predictable.
He’ll need money to leave town and use his debit card. Since that card was frozen, he’ll hit up a friend or relative for cash.
Then, he chooses to escape in an antique bright red yacht. While that’s impossible to track electronically, it will appear well on surveillance.
So before long, the FBI and NYPD had an opportunity to do a horrible job of surrounding Hopkins, allowing him to escape into a store and take hostages. Indeed, they had the bodies for a proper pincer movement.
But if they had done that, there wouldn’t have been an opportunity for high drama as Gabby struggled to decide who to believe.
That gave Jubal a chance to right what he perceived as his wrong by charging into a dangerous situation armed with a throw phone.
And Gabby eventually came around, opting to believe her father over the man who had held her captive and killed her sister. That should have been a simple choice, but her head was pretty screwed up by that point.
You have to feel bad for Steve. He had made his peace with losing his daughters to a serial killer eight years ago. Now, he loses one daughter for a second time, and the other is too overwhelmed to appreciate her good fortune at being rescued.
Two people deserve the blame for keeping Jubal in such a bad head space in the middle of such a complex case.
First would be Sam for her impulse to dump the Tyler problem in Jubal’s lap. That’s saying, “This is your fault,” without coming out and saying it.
She’s the one who took their kids away to the suburbs. So, she should deal with the issue and loop in Jubal after the fact.
Jubal does essential work, so allow for that. He’s doing his best to be involved in his children’s lives from afar.
Then there’s Isobel, who should know how to read her essential lieutenant by now. She interrogates people for a living. So you’d think she could draw out what’s bothering her agents.
She did try to console him when he was beating himself up after their visit to the Martinez home went so off the rails. But she’s just so bad at dealing with human emotions.
Things would run so much smoother in that office if she could only relate to her agents as people.
Only Maggie got it right. She used her Midwestern charm to help Jubal understand that he wasn’t perfect and would make mistakes, a message he relayed to Tyler.
The good news was that Jubal got through a rough day without resorting to drinking for the first time since FBI Season 5 Episode 11.
Was Jubal too hard on himself?
Did you feel any sympathy for Hopkins?
Does Jubal need a hobby, and what should it be?
Comment below.
Dale McGarrigle is a staff writer for TV Fanatic. Follow him on X.