Time to Say Goodbye: Criminal Minds Honors Will’s Death with Heart and Grace
Criminal Minds: Evolution Season 3 Episode 3 slowed its pace but deepened its pulse.
“Time to Say Goodbye” isn’t a standard episode. It’s a meditation on grief, guilt, and how loss ripples through the people left behind.
Where other shows might fast-forward through mourning, Evolution lingers. It lets JJ — and us — feel every beat of the aftershock.
From the start, it’s clear this episode will hit differently.
JJ sits on the couch, lost in the memory of her wedding to Will, only to be yanked back to the present by the sound of her boys.
It’s a simple moment, but it captures the disorientation of grief: one minute you’re in the past, the next you’re drowning in the now.
Meanwhile, the rest of the team is trying to hold the fort.
Tara asks Rebecca to stay close (yes, Rebecca — not Monica, which none of you seemed to catch me calling her during Criminal Minds Season 18 Episode 2), while Tyler reflects that they’re all ticking time bombs. It’s been five days since Will’s death. A blink and a lifetime.
Tara pushes forward with testing Voit using psychological inventories usually reserved for children with behavioral issues. Unsurprisingly, Voit scores as harmless.
Luke rolls his eyes, Rossi seethes. Yet, it’s convincing.
Voit seems like a man trying to put the pieces of himself together. He’s innocent in the worst possible way: a monster who doesn’t remember what he did.
Rossi’s resistance to playing “Major Dad” to Voit is real, but Voit keeps calling him in — triggering memories and forging strange bonds.
He remembers names. He recalls Second Street. He’s confused, vulnerable, and maybe even afraid. And Rossi? Rossi keeps walking away.
Back at JJ’s, the emotional labor of grief is piling up. JJ is barely eating or sleeping.
She’s obsessed with finding the gift Will bought Michael for his birthday. Prentiss and Garcia try to offer comfort, but JJ is in survival mode. It’s all she can do to function.
Enter Connie LaMontagne. Played by Linda Lavin with biting precision, Connie is every unfiltered, grief-stricken mother-in-law who doesn’t know when to quit.
She lashes out at JJ for keeping Will’s illness a secret. She’s not just mourning her son — she’s drowning in regret, shame, and bitterness.
And when she accuses JJ of the unthinkable — suggesting she won’t understand this loss until her own sons die before her — it’s unforgivable. JJ, understandably, tells her to grow the hell up or get out.
Elsewhere, Ramona — the only survivor of Voit’s network — is reluctantly pulled back in. At first, she refuses to help. But after a dream in which Voit reaches out to her, she chooses to face him, not for him, but for herself.
She wants to be the voice for everyone he silenced. Her interaction with Voit is chilling.
He remembers her perfume. He wonders if they were married. He remembers Sydney, his wife. He thinks his daughters died in a fire. The memories flood in — and with them, an overwhelming grief that even he can’t fake.
All of it makes sense. When he kidnapped Ramona during Criminal Minds Season 16 Episode 8, he did it under the guise of using Ramona as a stand-in for Sydney. He was practicing his confession, something she would never accept, but for which he was hopeful, nonetheless.
Finally, Rossi lets his walls crack. When Voit breaks down, Rossi instinctively comforts him. It’s a human moment from a man who’s spent his life hunting monsters — and it leaves us wondering who he’s comforting: Voit or himself?
The funeral itself is handled with quiet grace.
Spencer Reid returns — because of course he does — and his embrace of JJ and the boys is everything it needed to be. Floral arrangements from Hotch, Derek, and Reid remind us that the BAU family is still intact, even if not always on screen.
JJ’s eulogy is a heartbreaker. She reads Will’s daily notes — the little slips of paper he wrote every morning, except the morning he died.
That missing note haunts her. It’s the sign she missed. The warning she couldn’t hear. And now she’s left shouldering guilt she doesn’t deserve, trying to explain to her boys why their dad is gone.
There’s also something quietly remarkable about the fact that JJ’s sons are played by A.J. Cook’s real-life children.
That layer of authenticity — the shared history, the real emotional stakes — adds a powerful, unspoken depth to every scene. It must have been gut-wrenching for them as a family to film these moments, but maybe that’s also why it worked so well.
There’s nothing false in these performances.
And eventually, healing begins. Connie and JJ reach a fragile truce. Connie wants to be part of her grandsons’ lives. JJ welcomes it. Henry finds the birthday gift — a homemade LaMontagne “How-To” guide.
It’s full of life advice from Will: how to shave, how to fish, how to make the frittata. It’s beautiful. And yes, it’s Will’s way of staying present.
Tara, Tyler, and Garcia reflect on what comes next. Garcia wants the guys to help JJ with the rough-and-tumble moments of parenting. Tara reminds JJ that grief comes in waves and that the best thing she can do is let it hit.
Rossi echoes this with warmth: Say what you feel when you feel it because it tells the boys it’s okay to feel, too.
This wasn’t just a good episode — it was a necessary one. It honored Will, it respected JJ, and it reminded us why this show works. It’s not just about monsters. It’s about what we do after the monster is gone, about how we hold each other up, even when we can barely stand.
“Time to Say Goodbye” may have started with loss, but it ends with love. Messy, painful, healing love.
This may not have been how we wanted Matthew Gray Gubler to return to Criminal Minds, but it speaks perfectly to the show’s history. The best returns aren’t stunts — they’re earned. This wasn’t fan service. It was a quiet, necessary part of a meaningful friendship, woven into a story that deserved it.
And it was a much-needed reminder that real stakes still exist in a show that often walks the line between justice and horror. Sometimes, the hardest goodbyes are also the most honest ones.
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