That was one difficult case for Maggie.

The team's having to track down a terrorist killing people with ricin on FBI Season 6 Episode 6 brought back bad memories for her.

In addition, her old friend Jessica, who just came back into her life, got caught up in this case as well, to her ultimate detriment.

We should have seen this coming. The signs were there.

Her Quantico classmate appearing out of the blue. Maggie suddenly hearing her biological clock ticking.

Still, how things broke in this episode indeed constitutes an unexpected path to parenthood.

Let's face it. Maggie has needed some change in her life, either professionally or personally.

Her relationship with Nestor ended up back on FBI Season 3 Episode 6. Since then, Maggie has been at risk of becoming one of those boring, aging workaholics.

She has shown zero interest in moving up into management. Besides, saving OA from himself is a full-time job (case in point: rich party girl Gemma).

Then Jess re-entered her life on FBI Season 6 Episode 4. Here was someone she knew who was killing it at work and who still had a fulfilling life outside the job ... without a man.

Jessica's situation was bound to appeal to Maggie, who has yet to find a man who meets her standards. A working woman can have it all.

Despite Jessica's effort to present a well-rounded picture of single motherhood, Maggie was still considering the idea of IVF.

It was evident she was serious about it when she mentioned the possibility to Isobel at her annual performance review, with Isobel giving her wholehearted support.

(Ask Scola how Isobel will bend when an agent's professional and personal lives conflict. Amazingly, he's still working for her after she hid the fact that pregnant Nina got shot during the FBI crossover. At least Nina changed teams.)

Possible trouble for Jess was foreshadowed when Maggie asked her if she was feeling all right. She just had the exhausted parent look, so it was easy not to give it a second thought.

However, there were further signs after that, such as when Jessica went charging into a bioweapon chemist's lab. Any agent should have known to wait for a hazmat team to clear the scene.

But she looked OK in the ambulance and even better when she called Maggie from the hospital. So, it was just another false alarm.

But the hits kept coming, first dehydration or a drop in blood pressure, followed by an aneurysm that required surgery.

But the kiss of death for Jess was when she appointed Maggie as Ella's temporary guardian. That's when you knew her arc was nearly over.

Maggie was properly dumbfounded when the surgeon told her the bad news about Jessica. She and that little girl are about to become much closer as they mourn Jess, one's friend and the other's mother.

This was an unexpected way for Maggie to become a mother but the best method for the series. No months of Maggie complaining about shots and unsuccessful attempts. It's also the most likely path for a woman of Maggie's age to gain a child.

This assumes that Ella ends up with Maggie. But does Jess naming Maggie Ella's guardian trump any rights that, say, Maggie's parents might have to the girl? There's still plenty to unpack on this storyline.

The case of the week was an intriguing twist, focusing on domestic terrorists who were working toward a better environmental future instead of wanting to bring back the good ole days of white nationalism.

Not that the extremist "better death through chemistry" crusade deserved approval. But their hearts, if not their brains, were in the right place.

That a chemistry professor and a couple of her students would go to this extreme shows how radicalized people can become for things they believe in, for better or worse.

The diversity of the eco-terrorist cell's victims did illustrate how long the reach of Big Oil is and why it took a little while for the JOC to connect the dots.

The three eco-terrorists were willing to throw away their careers and even lives to bring this insidious fact to light, although their approach was sure to turn off much of the public they had hoped to sway.

Having terrorists involved was a pretty slick way to bring Jessica back to the JOC for one last time for her counterterrorism expertise.

The cell wasn't all that slick at covering its tracks, as its members, other than the professor, proved relatively simple to identify and locate.

Shouldn't the team have dug deeper into the woman who ordered the beans necessary to produce the ricin rather than return to her late in the episode?

It's hard to believe that her zealotry hadn't sometimes leaked into her academic writings or talks. Also, it was obvious that Landon and Anthony were followers, not the brains of the operation.

There was a whole lot of reacting rather than acting. But that's going to be the case while there's an exotic serial killer on the streets.

The best part was Maggie's reaction to the ricin, recalling her experience with sarin on FBI Season 4 Episode 18. She didn't want to come close to a bioweapon again.

Will Maggie end up as Ella's mother?

If so, how will that affect her behavior as an agent?

Are you sorry to see Jessica go?

Comment below.

Dale McGarrigle is a staff writer for TV Fanatic. Follow him on X.