The following contains spoilers from the Season 9 premiere of “FBI”!
It’s been a long three months for the agents of “FBI.” Since OA’s firing in last season’s finale, he’s been under deep cover in Anna Vorpe’s strike team, while Maggie has been issued a new partner in ADIC Lawrence Green’s nephew. But in the CBS procedural’s Season 9 premiere, the two agents are finally reunited, only OA quickly learns that his time in the shadows isn’t quite finished just yet.
The case-of-the-week involves a young woman who is found dead after witnessing the execution of someone involved in a top-secret government-sponsored project. Thanks to information from CIA head Nikki Reynard, Jubal learns about Project Jehovah, a special program financed by the Department of Defense’s black budget. It’s a nuclear forensics and attribution program, the strongest nuclear deterrent the U.S. operates. And the men being killed are some of the top nuclear scientists working on the project.
The case reaches a crossroads that puts the FBI directly in the strike team’s path. The two factions bump heads at project director Cameron Koleo’s research facility. Although the strike team isn’t the group responsible for the murders, Anna thinks the director is responsible for leaking information to North Korea. So after they abduct Koleo out from under the FBI, they torture him to make him talk — a move that OA is visibly against.
“There’s nobody watching over you on the strike team, and we get to show that,” Zeeko Zaki tells TVLine. “You can push the limits. But at the end of the day, what’s wrong is wrong.”
Zaki assures us that OA “just wants to get back to business as usual.” He misses his old job, and misses his partner Maggie even more.
“He’s definitely over it and is trying so hard,” the actor says. “He just wants to get back to what he knows and get back to the FBI. He’s been stuck with these guys for a few months and I don’t think they’ve slowed down on bending the law and breaking the rules, which is what [the FBI’s] whole mission is, to bring down this team that seems to answer to nobody.”
Maggie forces OA to punch her in the face (so she can sell the fact that the mystery team got away), but even in those quick few moments, we feel their connection which Zaki calls “incredible.”
“It’s been built over these nine years, in real life and in fake life,” he says. “It’s so strong and so tangible. Getting to play that bit, all those moments like that, that’s just real. That was our first hug after summer. There’s not that much acting when me and Missy get to work together because we are so connected in that sense.”