Poor Colin (Tom Ellis). By the end of the CIA Season 1 finale, the case officer has had to face the fact that his former partner, Toni (Angela Sarafyan), is alive and that it seems like he’s not going to be done with her just yet. TV Insider spoke with showrunner Mike Weiss about what that means going forward. Warning: Spoilers for the CIA Season 1 finale ahead!
Toni, it turns out, was trying to clean up the mess that was a whole network of moles throughout Pyramid Security, but her way of going about it was a bit murderous. In the end, she was in CIA custody again … and as Colin’s new partner, FBI Special Agent Bill Goodman (Nick Gehlfuss) knew, the agency was right to use her; after all, Colin taught him that some assets are more valuable in the field than prison.
Bill, meanwhile, gets the job offer he’d wanted — an ASAC position in Cleveland — from Jubal (FBI‘s Jeremy Sisto) but he turns it down. Jubal warns him that he can only do that so many times.
Below, Mike Weiss breaks down the finale and looks ahead to Season 2.
Was it always the plan from the start that Toni would be alive and come back in this way?
Mike Weiss: It was my plan. Yeah, I had a secret plan from the beginning. People were read in on the plan on a need-to-know basis. But yeah, I thought it’s a great way to take a veteran intelligence officer, Colin, and shake him to his core. A spy is only as good and as safe as his or her gut instincts can keep them. And so the idea was the woman that he loved was murdered a year ago in Mindanao in the Philippines and he spent the last year on a self-directed top-secret mission to find out who killed her and why. And then when we reveal that she’s alive and she could have picked up a phone and called him at any point, I think he spins out and all of a sudden he can’t trust his instincts. Lucky for him, he’s got a new partner in Bill Goodman who is there to stabilize him at a moment when he’s absolutely lost. And so I think the Toni storyline was fun spycraft, but it was also a way to shake up a character who thought he knew exactly who he was on a really deep level.
So how does Colin feel about his agency keeping Toni in play at the end there? Because he’s looking in that room and now it’s the time that he can say what he wants without being in the middle of all the action and danger. But what does he want to say to her?
Well, it is tough, right? He knows that what Bill says at the end of the episode is true. If he’s taught Bill one thing, it’s that the CIA works with complicated people and Toni is nothing if not complicated. I think he kind of said everything that he wanted to say to her into that bug that he finds in his apartment. I think that what he’d like to say to her going forward might be as simple as, “I don’t trust you and I’ll never trust you no matter what you do.” And so her storyline for Season 2, because we do want to fold her into the show, weave her into Season 2, she now needs to prove herself to the CIA and then on a human level to Colin.
Would she be recurring or series regular?
Recurring. We would weave her into some stories. We haven’t fully figured out how many episodes we would see her in, but we love the actress and she is a dream to work with. So why not write for her as often as we can?
Was Bill seriously tempted to take that ASAC position or was he surprised perhaps that he wasn’t? Because he’s really settled in at that fusion cell and working with Colin.
It’s interesting when all of a sudden that original path that you were walking down, that FBI path, all of a sudden someone comes calling from the institution that you thought you were going to dedicate your life to and reminds you, “Hey, you’re still an FBI agent.” And he is still an FBI agent. And so Bill’s path for Season 2 is, am I a career fusion cell member? Am I going to live in the shadows? And if I do live in the shadows, how do I maintain my humanity in a world that is being revealed to me to be a lot spookier and a lot scarier than I had realized?
So with that in mind, what’s Bill and Colin’s path in Season 2 as partners now? Now that they do trust each other?
Our goal for Season 2 is to shake up Bill. In Season 1, we shook Colin to the core, and in Season 2, we’re going to take Bill’s perfectly ordered, buttoned up life where he wears a little American flag lapel pin every day and shake it up and see what he’s made of when that happens.
Mark Schafer/CBS
And then see how Colin is there for him like we saw Bill being there for Colin?
We know that Colin is going to be able to be there for him, but we also know that Colin is a purveyor of tough love. And so I think it’ll be really interesting to see Colin’s version of being there when Bill finds it all coming unglued.
Switching over to their love lives for a minute, because Colin was forced to be honest with Sarah (Sarah Diamond), whereas Bill’s still keeping quite a bit about his job from Katie (Caroline Pluta). So is that the last we’ll see of Sarah in Colin’s life and how much longer can Bill maintain the relationship he has with Katie while lying to her?
I don’t know yet. It’s early days. We’re just getting started on Season 2. We love Bill and Katie together, but she didn’t get engaged to an intelligence officer who has to keep big parts of his life secret from her. You wouldn’t blame her for saying, “That’s not what I signed up for.”
As for Colin and Sarah, I think Sarah meant it when she said, “I never want to see you again,” after Colin was revealed to be who he truly is, but it’s television and maybe fate will place them in each other’s orbits again and this go around they’re going to be able to have a much more honest conversation about who they are. And if they do, in fact, still have feelings for each other, it’ll be a totally different version of their relationship now that she has been clued in to Colin’s incredibly complicated truth.
Will everyone be back for Season 2 and are you going to be adding any major new characters?
We want to expand the world of the CIA. We only made 12 episodes in Season 1. We’re going to be making 22 episodes in Season 2 and there are a lot of desks and experts and analysts and intelligence officers that work in the building that we haven’t introduced you to yet. And we’d love to keep building out the world of the show as we move forward.
CIA, Season 2, Fall 2026, Mondays, 9/8c, CBS
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