Missy Peregrym as Special Agent Maggie Bell, Zeeko Zaki as Special Agent Omar Adom ‘OA’ Zidan, and Alana De La Garza as Special Agent in Charge Isobel Castille — ‘FBI’ Season 8 Finale “Defector” – Bennett Raglin/CBS

FBI, going into its ninth season, is shaking things up in a major way: One of the team isn’t going to be at 26 Fed! TV Insider spoke with showrunner Mike Weiss about that and more. Warning: Spoilers for the FBI Season 8 finale ahead!

Maggie (Missy Peregrym), OA (Zeeko Zaki), Scola (John Boyd), and Eva (Juliana Aidén Martinez) find themselves forced to work alongside the shady Anna (Claire Coffee) and her strike team after a very dangerous bioweapon is stolen — and released in a bus full of civilians. There is a serum out there that could help … but each team has a very different reason for wanting to get it. For the FBI, it’s about trying to save those people. But, as they discover once they do track it down, Anna’s side has a different plan — and no qualms about brutally fighting Maggie and OA to make sure they walk away with it.

ADIC Green (Curtiss Cook) insists they move on, too, even going so far as to say there was no bus or contamination. OA keeps pushing back until he’s fired, shocking everyone. He says his goodbyes, including to Maggie, who tells him she can’t lose him, too, after this year. Then, OA goes to a bar where Anna approaches him. They’re going to use the serum they got their hands on to replicate it at scale, so that no one in the future will die — but there’s not enough to help those on the bus and do that. She also offers him a spot on her strike team. And once she’s gone, OA calls Maggie and Isobel (Alana De La Garza) to let them know that Anna made her move and he’s in.

Below, showrunner Mike Weiss breaks down what OA’s new job means and more.

First of all, Zeeko is still going to be a series regular and this new assignment for OA isn’t going to change how much we see him in Season 9, right?

Mike Weiss: No, but we might see him standing in some different rooms at the beginning of Season 9, which I think will be really exciting. Letting him and the show shake things up at the top of Season 9. We’re really excited to see him deep undercover in a different way.

John Boyd as Special Agent Stuart Scola, Juliana Aidén Martinez as Eva Ramos, Missy Peregrym as Special Agent Maggie Bell, and Zeeko Zaki as Special Agent Omar Adom ‘OA’ Zidan — ‘FBI’ Season 8 Finale “Defector”
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So we know that Maggie and Isobel know what he’s doing. What can you say about who else does and how you decided who would know and who wouldn’t know?

We wanted to go with the notion that this was so sensitive and taking down the strike team was so top secret that in the moment, the only people who knew were his partner and his boss. By the time we start Season 9, I think the rest of the team will have been read in on the assignment. And I think it’ll be fun to see Scola eventually be like, “Hey man, that really sucked how you didn’t trust me enough to tell me where you were going.” And it’s like, “Hey, it was happening fast and I’m sorry, I hope you can still trust me. ” And we know that Scola, Eva, Jubal [Jeremy Sisto], the JOCulars, they’re all going to trust OA, but I do think that it’ll be interesting to see a little bit of the fallout of this secret ripple over the course of the first section of Season 9.

So, that means Maggie and Isobel took advantage of Green not liking OA and wanting to fire him, or is Green in on it?

Green was not in on it. And I think that getting to see Isobel read Green in on it at a certain point will be delightful and I can’t wait. Curtiss is such a fantastic and fun actor and he’ll be able to make a meal out of that.

Speaking of, because he has not been making it easy for Isobel, has she regretted not taking the position herself at all?

No. I think that this undercover assignment is a perfect illustration of her actually being exactly where she’s supposed to be. She’s somewhere in-between management and casework. And I think that she loves being able to get the bad guys and not just be the bureaucrat who might slow down a team that for various reasons sometimes needs to keep speeding to the end of an investigation.

Talk about the character of Anna. Why had you wanted to bring someone in like her and why did you want her to be the team’s new major target?

The Anna character was an opportunity for our characters to reflect on what it is that they do for a living. Anna believes that she keeps Americans safe. Without a doubt, she believes that. Our characters would say, “You can’t keep Americans safe if you don’t also abide by the Constitution.” There’s no point. Those aren’t the values that our team holds dear. And so for the show and for the characters, it’s an opportunity for the FBI agents to double down on what they do, which is out in the open, by the book, law enforcement.

Claire Coffee as Anna Vorpe — ‘FBI’ Season 8 Episode 2 “Captured”

Bennett Raglin/CBS

If you’re not playing by the rules, what’s the point of any of it, is what our FBI agents would say to Anna and they’re going to get a chance to bring her and her strike team down in Season 9, even if there were some moments going into this case where OA has been questioning his role as a member of the team. We’ve seen OA struggle with civilians and members of his community, the Muslim community, New Yorkers in general, who have, for various reasons, given up on law enforcement or started to distrust law enforcement. And so for OA, he’s right in the middle of this whole debate and we’re going to get to see him remind himself of why he took this job in the first place.

You put Maggie through it this season with killing her sister, but then also you’re taking OA from her and at least for a bit. She knows what’s going on, but those emotions from her and that goodbye were real, right?

They were real. She is for real going to be separated from her partner. He’s going to be undercover. He’s going to be unreachable. And we want to see all of that play out. I mean, deep undercover work is hard. And when we talk to the tech advisors who work on our show on both FBI and CIA, it’s incredibly exhausting and it takes a toll. Yeah, even though they’re play acting for ADIC Green, and even though this is all a bit of a ruse, when she’s saying goodbye to him, she is going to say goodbye to him and not see him for several months potentially. And it’s coming at a really tough time for her. But I mean, that’s TV, right?

I admittedly was surprised by how long OA and Gemma (Comfort Clinton) lasted, and now you’ve introduced Zara (Pardis Saremi) as a new love interest, and I already love OA and Zara together. What do you want to do with that relationship and is that something that will continue into Season 9 considering that he’s now on this long undercover assignment? It’s not really coming at the best time for a new relationship to start…

It’s not. I mean, I think the big question is going to be, does Zara wait around for OA to come back up to the surface. I love that actress. I worked with Pardis on a show that I created for Hulu a few years ago [Death and Other Details], and she’s a really special actress and she and Zeeko are so fun together. They’re both just really silly, great people. I think their chemistry on screen is great.

I think that giving him a Muslim FBI agent who knows where he is coming from and can call him out and see him for who he really is, as compared to Gemma, who was always the uptown girl who just crossed paths with OA at this one crazy moment in her life, this is a very different type of relationship. I think she’s going to be able to call him out and also be able to really appreciate who he is. And that was an important part of Episode 21. She saw his loyalty and his dedication to the job, which is why she sacrificed herself to make sure that he was able to stay where he needs to be in her mind, which is on the job, keeping New Yorkers safe. I don’t know. It’s a sweet, sarcastic, patriotic relationship with the two of them in everything they say to each other.

Will everyone else be back for Season 9?

All of our key characters will be back. Jubal will be running the JOC. Isobel will be in a new politically delicate role working for a politically ambitious boss. Scola is going to be back as a now married member of our team, worried about his family at home every time he gets out of a vehicle and chases a bad guy. Eva will be there trying to prove herself as a veteran member of the team instead of the new girl from New Jersey — I mean, she’s really a New Yorker, but she found herself working in New Jersey — but people are skeptical. So I think everyone is going to be back with their own journey that they need to travel both by themselves and then as a team.

FBI, Season 9, Fall 2026, Mondays, 8/7c, CBS