Jeremy Sisto delivers an outstanding performance in the FBI Season 8 two-part fall finale as a man who puts the fact that he’s an agent aside to be a father whose son (Caleb Reese Paul) is caught in a horrific explosion in New York City. And that means Jubal, in taking off his badge, is ready to cross the line to get to the man responsible for what’s happened.

Tyler is in the middle of the danger because he sees something and says something amidst the team investigating potential attacks in the city. Upon realizing that, Jubal rushes out of 26 Fed and to the scene, where he finds his son bloody and unconscious. The first part of the fall finale ends with him pleading with his son to wake up.

In the second part, with his son in the hospital and his prognosis uncertain and even though Isobel (Alana De La Garza) tells him to stand down, Jubal goes after one of the people who might know where the person in charge of this group is — and has no qualms about pushing hard into his bullet wound to try to get him to talk. Maggie (Missy Peregrym) and OA (Zeeko Zaki) find him and pull him back from the edge. And it’s Jubal who, when confronted with the choice of whether to leave the man responsible to die from being exposed to his own cyanide gas, saves his life. The episodes, fortunately, end with good news: Tyler’s going to be OK, and he even wrote in his college essay about his dad being a hero and wanting to be like him.

Below, Jeremy Sisto breaks down the fall finale and teases what’s ahead.

It is a rough one for Jule. He just can’t catch a break when it comes to Tyler, it seems…

Jeremy Sisto: I know, parenting is an ever-changing and increasingly frustrating and also at times rewarding chore. And Tyler is now in a very different phase than he has been before. Ever since last season, there’s been a new side of him, which is something that I’m dealing with with my children, too, which is what they want to do with their lives. And fortunately or unfortunately, Tyler is starting to come to the conclusion that he wants to be more like his father than perhaps his father would like. And so he’s anxious to get his hero shoes worn in.

Something that stands out is that even when Jubal goes off on his own, goes a bit rogue, he’s also restrained in those moments. There’s this restrained anger to him. Yes, he doesn’t call it in. Yes, he pushes on that guy’s gunshot wound, but he’s still Jubal in a way. Would you agree? And how far do you think he would’ve gone if Maggie and OA hadn’t shown up when they did?

Yeah, it’s an interesting thing. As we know, vengeance can be a very satisfying feeling, but ultimately does nothing to heal a wound. And so yeah, Jubal allows himself to, spurned on or encouraged by his wife [Mara Davi], put his feelings of uncertainty and sadness and fear about the well-being of Tyler into making these guys pay. And so yeah, he finds himself in a situation where he has a real ability to siphon all of that emotion into one of the culprits. And I think ultimately, he wants the big fish here. He knows that there’s a lot of different cogs in this wheel. And so he’s after something bigger, but at the end of the day, sometimes emotion can overtake. And so I think he is fighting with that the whole time.

And yeah, you’re right. He is still Jubal. He’s not somebody who allows himself to become somebody different, and maybe he’s unable to do that. Perhaps that’s part of his addictive personality is that alcohol allowed him to be somebody different in some way. But he is a very self-aware person. So he definitely goes out of his comfort zone in this situation. But it’s also the threat is huge. The threat is big. I mean, obviously, it’s very personal to him because of his son’s being at the heart of that explosion. But yeah, I mean, it was a fun episode to shoot, and a scene like that is something you hope you can pull off and fortunately, I had our great director/producer, Alex Chapple, with me on it, and we had a great guest star, and we were able to find different balances of it. We wanted a certain stillness there. We thought that was kind of cool. But then a level of losing himself a little bit and then pulling back, and yeah, ultimately getting to a point where at least there is the possibility of him going way too far. He already goes too far for an agent, but going way too far if Maggie and OA hadn’t happened into the room.

The good news is the Tyler is going to be OK. Do you know if Tyler dying was ever a possibility?

I mean, I can’t imagine they would go there. Jubal’s already suffered enough. I can’t imagine they would kill his son, but that’s the fun of being an actor on a show that you are not the writer of is all of this is a possibility. And though we have conversations, my largest thing with the writers is, I always tell them the kind of stories I love to do is when they come from something personal within the writers’, within whoever’s writing it, lives. And so you never know what they’re going to go. But Mike Weiss and the whole writing team is doing a great job. And this was a really fun episode to do.

Something that’s noticeable is that both Jubal and Sam are wearing wedding rings. There was that episode last season where they seemed to be on the path to reconciliation, but we haven’t really gotten an update onscreen. So what is going on there?

Well, I think no news is good news. Again, it’s kind of in the writers’ hands as far as I decide some things on my own, but I’ve got to be flexible with them because you never know what they’re going to come up with. And so I kept the wedding ring on myself without even discussing with the writers because I was wearing the wedding ring for the purposes of a case I was on. And then at the end of that episode, me and Sam kissed and consecrated our reemerging relationship. And I just thought, well, now it would be awkward if I took the ring off, and I feel like that scene would’ve been in there. So I just kept the ring on and I don’t know, to me it feels like maybe it’s something we haven’t discussed. I’m living there. Now I’m staying in the bedroom. The kids love it and life is moving forward.

But knowing Jubal and knowing human beings in general, there’s stuff that needs to be discussed, and complications are there. And of course, there’s a big history, and Sam put up with a lot of Jubal’s demons in his past. And those demons are always just beneath the surface, though Jubal does have a good handle on them. So we’ll see. I’ve discussed a lot with Mike, what it is about Jubal that makes him a special character in this show and where that line is. The audience has seen Jubal go through a lot. So it’s not a soap opera. We don’t want to see Jubal’s constantly — it gets a little bit exhausting.

But at that same time, the bigger story that we’re telling, which is these are real people with complicated lives to do a very intense job and balance their own personal situations. Jubal is a great character for that and has been utilized by our previous writer, Rick [Eid], and his team, and Mike and his team to really tell those stories. So I was happy to see that this new stage of complication within parenting, which is, OK, now you’re an adult, and what are you going to do in this life and how is that going to affect my job, and me and our relationship, is kind of a new discussion.

Also noticeable is the absence of — because you said kids, Jubal has a daughter, she’s not mentioned or at the hospital with Tyler. Do you know anything coming up there?

No. I don’t know why the daughter — she doesn’t create a lot of problems for the family, is my thinking. I would love to see her come into the play. It opens up a whole new level, but I think there is maybe some uncertainty about whether or not that would — because she hasn’t been mentioned very much at all, if that would be a bit of a hard turn, zigzag to make. But we’ll see. I mean, listen, I hope this show goes on for a long time and these are real people and the more possibilities of drama, conflict that can occur in their lives is good for us.

What can you preview about the midseason return? Because there was a mention of possible consequences for Jubal with what he did, but that was kind of put aside because of everything understandably going on. Are we going to see the consequences? Because we’ve already heard the higher-ups didn’t want him for Isobel’s job…

Yeah, I think Isobel pretty much covers my tracks on this one. It’s such a big event and such a big save to stop this attack from these accelerationists who were fixated on resetting society that the overzealous heroics of Jubal, especially with the one bad guy is probably not going to come back into play, but we have some really, really great episodes coming up. But some ones that we’re about to start shooting one next couple of days that I think is really great. We’re on a fun roll. This last episode that aired, I thought was great in the prison and a lot of great set pieces this season, a lot of great worlds that we’re jumping into.

Talk about filming the explosion site scene because Jubal is so emotional. He goes from focus on the job to just straight being a father, running to that scene, then finding Tyler…

Well, I had no idea that they had built such an elaborate post-explosion street, and it really reminded me of being on Ridley Scott sets. I did a movie with Ridley Scott when I was younger, these big movies that I used to do early in my career. I mean, just the level of preparation and the degree of realism and also horror that that imagery brings up, especially since I was in New York during 9/11, although not down in lower Manhattan, but I think all of us experienced that in our own way. But to be suddenly running into a situation where it feels otherworldly, it feels end of times, it feels like another level of emergency… And so yeah, walking on set was really emotional just to experience that, to run down from our office and run into a situation where you’re running into mist, into smoke, people are covered in ash, and running away, their faces awash with horror and then finding the son there. Yeah, it’s always impressive when I go outside of the JOC because I realize how hard our team works and how much they put into it. Every department is so thoughtful in their creation of these worlds, but they went above and beyond for this one.