CIA Review: "Legacy" Brings Back Felix Vincente, Crosses Over Jeremy Sisto’s Jubal, and Pushes Bill to a Difficult Decision

Some episodes are cases. “Legacy” is a reckoning that happens to wear a case’s clothes. CBS’s official synopsis sets the sixth hour of Season 2 in motion with a bang: when a targeted explosion rocks the Upper East Side and kills an international arms dealer, the team learns the culprit is assassin Felix Vincente. Meanwhile, Bill makes a difficult decision in order to stop him before he turns the fight against the CIA. Written by Ken Woodruff and directed by Ken Girotti, the episode brings back the most dangerous name from the season premiere, adds a crossover guest from the show that airs right before it, and aims both of them straight at the question that has been quietly eating at this series all season — what did Bill Goodman’s father really leave behind?

The set-up is the strongest the show has built, because the threat is personal before it is procedural. Vincente, played by Sasha Roiz, is not a stranger of the week: he was introduced in the Season 2 premiere, and the season has since established — in the open, in the episodes leading into this one — that he was once an asset of Bill’s late father. So when his name surfaces again, the hunt is never just a hunt. For Colin, it is an operation. For the station, it is a threat turning its sights on the CIA itself. For Bill, it is the one living thread that might still lead back to the truth about his dad — and that triple meaning is why the hour moves the way it does. Every procedural beat carries a second, quieter charge underneath it.

The crossover earns its place, too. Jeremy Sisto guest stars as FBI Assistant Special Agent in Charge Jubal Valentine, repaying a visit after Necar Zadegan’s Nikki Reynard crossed over to help him in FBI’s season premiere — the kind of two-way traffic that makes CBS’s back-to-back Monday block feel like one living world instead of two shows sharing a timeslot fence. Jubal brings a different register into the station: an FBI commander’s authority, and a lighter touch that Sisto himself flagged ahead of the episode. Around him, the home team is used exactly right. Zadegan’s Nikki remains the professional center of gravity — the Deputy Chief of Station who has to run an operation while her people carry personal stakes into it — and Natalee Linez’s Gina Gosian, the station’s analyst, keeps the manhunt grounded in the work of actually finding a man who has built a life out of not being found. Angela Sarafyan’s Toni Napier is in the mix as well, and her presence alongside Colin in the episode’s fieldwork gives the hour one more unpredictable variable.

The Son and the Case Officer

At the center, the founding pairing gets its best material yet. Tom Ellis’s Colin Glass — the roguish CIA case officer who treats rules as an opening offer — is the partner built for a hunt like this one: improvisational, charming, and always three possible lies ahead of the room. Nick Gehlfuss’s Bill Goodman is the opposite instrument, and “Legacy” is his hour in the way the title promises. Gehlfuss has spent the season playing a by-the-book agent coming apart at exactly one seam — the father-shaped one — and an episode that puts the man who may hold the answers in front of him lets him tighten that performance instead of broadening it: the professional holds, the son presses, and you can watch both happen in the same scene. Roiz, for his part, understands that a returning assassin plays best at low volume. Vincente does not need to dominate the hour to dominate it; the threat of what he knows does the work.

The nitpick: an hour carrying a returning villain, a crossover guest, and the season’s deepest backstory has a lot of history to re-lay for anyone walking in cold, and the early going spends a beat or two on that orientation before the manhunt fully finds its stride. It is a small tax — and this episode, more than most, has earned the right to charge it.

The Verdict

“Legacy” is CIA’s biggest hour yet — a returning-assassin manhunt with a real crossover pulse, built on the season’s best fusion of case and character, and anchored by a central pairing that keeps finding new pressure to put itself under. Previously score: 9.0/10. And next Monday, November 16, the listings have Bill and Colin going deep undercover in “Inside Men,” against a group planning a violent attack to be streamed live to millions — with Jubal Valentine back again. If “Legacy” is the season tightening its grip, “Inside Men” sounds like it testing how far that grip can reach. Appointment kept.

Spoiler note: this review discusses the episode’s premise and themes only. Nothing about how the case — or the episode — ends.