FBI 1×06 Review: “Family Man” Gave Us Hope

With procedural dramas, we typically get the doom and gloom episode after episode. That seemed to be the direction the first season of FBI had been going as well. That is, until “Family Man.” Six episodes in and we get an episode that followed a basic enough storyline, and one we’ve seen on television for decades, but FBI finally prove there’s some depth to its writing and, in the end, “Family Man” sends a message of forgiveness, caring, and love.

A senator’s 2-year-old daughter is kidnapped while he and his wife are campaigning. Maggie and OA are on the hunt and end up finding the couple’s nanny, who has unfortunately been murdered in the back of a stolen van used to kidnap the child.
Through some digging, the duo learns about a woman named Nicole. The senator had had a short affair with her four years earlier. While at her house, they learn she is dealing with ALS and also find a young boy. The boy, they learn, is the senator’s child, a child he knows nothing about.

Following their visit, they return to Nicole’s later on only to find that she has overdosed on oxycodone and has placed crushed pills in Nathan’s pudding. After finding the little boy barely breathing, OA is able to save the boy’s life.

After tracking the gun in a photo with the abducted child to Nicole, the team learns that fingerprints taken from her apartment matched a man named Joe, one of the senator’s former associates who had paid Nicole off years earlier before the senator went into politics. When Maggie and OA first speak to him, he says he hasn’t spoken to Nicole since he threatened her years ago.

After search warrants and confrontations with Joe, Maggie and OA are able to locate the child and reunite her with her parents. What’s great about this story is that when the wife learns about Nathan, she isn’t angry about the fact her husband has an illegitimate child. Instead, she finds compassion for the boy.

On Maggie’s way out of the office, the senator’s wife asks Maggie if there is a way they can adopt Nathan. She doen’t want him to have to go into the system after his mother passed away. It’s one of the moments you would assume she would shun the child, like many storylines have played out before, but instead she wants to welcome the boy into her family like he was her own.

This is one of the better episodes of FBI, not just because there is a captivating storyline, but because it has a happy ending that we don’t always get to see. Sometimes, we just need to see that.