Criminal Minds EW SPOILER for the Season 6 finale

‘CRIMINAL MINDS’ FINALE WILL TACKLE BAU’s UNCERTAIN FUTURE

With some key cast members of Criminal Minds still without contracts for next season (i.e., Shemar Moore and the beloved Thomas Gibson), exec producer Erica Messer has penned a cliffhanger for the May 18 finale that will nod to the team’s shaky future — but not with guns and explosions. It will tackle the financial realities of crime fighting — and possible cutbacks in BAU. “It’s a more authentic version of ‘Our team is in jeopardy,’ ” she says. “This instead is, ‘There could be big trouble here, hopefully not,’ but we need to at least acknowledge that it’s on the horizon.”

One thing that’s not uncertain? The team is going to face an extremely unsettling case about a domestic trafficking ring in the finale. “There’s a quote that sort of kicks off the episode, and it’s by a British novelist named Thomas Hardy, and it’s ‘And yet for every bad there’s a worst.’ That quote sort of sums up the episode and the kind of bad guys we deal with all the time,” says Messer. “[The victims] are sort of taken for a multi-purpose thing — when their time is done in this [trafficking] ring, they’re sort of killed in a spectator sport kind of way, which is really disturbing”