It’s time to say goodbye to the cast of Criminal Minds for the final time!
After 15 seasons and more than 300 episodes of the beloved crime drama series, Criminal Minds will close its last case for the final time with a two-part series finale on Wednesday, February 19.
The series spawned two spinoffs – Suspect Behavior and Beyond Borders – during its peak, as well as a South Korean adaption and two video games. Criminal Minds also became one of the longest-running primetime dramas but bested by the likes of Grey’s Anatomy, NCIS, Law & Order, Gunsmoke, and Law & Order: SVU.
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The Criminal Minds two-part series finale will see the team come together to capture elusive unsub The Chameleon before celebrating Rossi’s (Joe Mantegna) retirement. Along the way, Reid (Matthew Gray Gubler) will suffer from a brain injury that will cause a few visits from ghosts from his past.
According to executive producer Erica Messer, the Criminal Minds series finale will be major.
“We wanted to write this finale as fans of the show and also as a thank you to all the fans who had been watching. And so, the most important thing was to get our tone right, to not go completely off-book and do something that doesn’t feel like the 325 hours of TV that people had been watching,” Messer told Entertainment Tonight of co-writing the final hour with Kirsten Vangsness. “In doing that, we really wanted to explore how far we’ve all come in the last 15 seasons.”
She added: “That was one of many little winks we gave to the audience of, ‘We remember because we were here too. We remember the team before the amazing eight-member team that we have today. It started like this.’ Honoring that history of the series was a really important thing for us to do and then being able to have a roller-coaster ride for our last hour of TV was really important as well.”
The two-hour series finale of Criminal Minds airs Wednesday, February 19, at 9 p.m. ET/PT on CBS.