As the episode begins, and group of
teen girls drop one of their number off at home! She's worried about
having broken curfew, but she should be more worried about the bloody
curtains in the upstairs window! Is she about to get murdered, or did
being out late save her life?
The latter! When she goes upstairs she
hears an alarm going off - and when she investigates, discovers that
her entire family has been murdered, seemingly by being shot in the
head!
At the office, Garcia brings gifts for
Eric's dog, so they can bond! He is unimpressed by the flowery pink
dog sweater, and doesn't hide his disappointment at all!
The team goes over the details - happy
suburban family seemingly all killed for no reason. Could it have
been mob-related? Could the daughter have been involved, and that's
why she survived? We saw her reaction to finding the bodies, so we
know the answer is no, but they don't have that information!
Wow, this show is suffering from the
lack of Aaron. There's no leader to organize the team around, and
without him to say his catchphrase, we're left with Joe trying to be
the guy in charge by saying 'We good? We fly.'
It's even more cringe-inducing to hear
him say than it is for me to type.
Then it's over to the killer's basement
room, where they - we can't tell if it's a boy or a girl yet - puts
on some tragically loud music, takes a silenced pistol out of their
bag, and slashes up a picture of the teen girl with a box-cutter! I
guess she was the target, and got impossibly lucky?
On the plane, they go over the family
details! The husband has a pill addiction, and the wife was a
cheater! There was also an insurance policy that's going to net the
teen daughter 100K! There's worse reasons to get someone to kill your
family, I suppose.
Weird that the killer didn't just hang
around until the daughter got home, though.
The team recreates the murder, and
assumes that the killer was extremely familiar with the house, which
is how they were able to climb in through a second-story window, find
the parents and execute them first. Would you really have to be that
familiar with the place, tough? You could see that a window was open
from outside, and just watching order the windows black out at night
would let you know where all the bedrooms were.
Eric and Joe talk to the sheriff - the
daughter is currently sedated at the hospital - they can talk to her
soon! So Joe and Eric decide to go to talk to the wife's lover, who
was recently fired from his job as a trainer at the local gym! On the
way there, Joe talks to Eric about what it's like no longer being a
fugitive hunting specialist. Eric responds that it's weird working
with a team! He likes being out on the road, alone. Wait... they let
FBI agents work alone? Since when? Even undercover agents have
handlers.
When the lover sees FBI agents at his
door, he tries to flee! Why? Has he been counterfeitting movies or
something? He claims to have an alibi for the time of the shooting -
was in the hospital with a buddy who needed stitches! They don't ask
him why he ran, for some reason. People only run if they have
something to hide - so why did he?
It's almost like he ran just so that the show could have an action scene!
He claims that the daughter knew about
his affair, and had been blackmailing him for ages to keep her from
telling her father! The plot deepens!
JJ and Emily go to talk to the
daughter, who tells a story about how her mother sent a text saying
she was very disappointed in her! Oof. Then they ask her about the
blackmail, and she claims she just threatened the guy to get him to
keep him away from her mother, so as not to destroy the marriage any
further. Did she extort money, though? That's what the lover
suggested.
The daughter explains that the father
had recently kicked drugs, and the mother had broken up with her
lover, who had moved on! So what could have motivated the murders? I
mean, we know it's someone in the daughter's life, but for the team
this has to be frustrating.
The team talks about their complete
lack of suspects, and is generally baffled by the whole situation.
I'd ask why they haven't tried to track down the gun yet, but then I
remembered that this is America, so that would probably be a needle
in a haystack type of situation. JJ and Emily talk about how they
definitely think that the daughter is innocent, and then mention the
'disappointed in you' text that the daughter got, and how it would
haunt her. Weird thing to mention twice. So, is the daughter lying
about the text, and that's a clue, or was it sent after the parents
died, and it was from the killer?
If they don't do something with it, it
seems like that line was a waste.
Then Joe makes the observation that it
seems like he should have come up with ages ago, since he doesn't
know anything about the picture of the daughter that was scratched
up, that maybe the killer wasn't targeting that family at all, and
just wanted to kill any family. Given that your guys' whole thing is
serial crime, why is this just now occurring to you? There's just
three possibilities - the family was specifically targeted, the
daughter hired a killer, it's a psycho. They dismissed the second
theory but never even raised the third as an option.
That night, there's another killing!
The teenaged son hides in a closet and dials 911 - but before we get
into whether he survives or not, two things: One, we see that the
killer has once again sliced through a window screen to sneak inside,
despite the fact that this is November in Minnesota, and perhaps you
should be closing your windows, oh, and also the news was filled with
stories today about the family that was massacred when a killer snuck
in through an open widow. How did this not change your home security
behaviour?
Two, we get a look at the killer's
legs, and it seems like it's a kid yet again.
Now, for what happened - the teen
urinates in fear and the killer sees it, giving them a chance to
shoot him through the closet door. I'm not sure why the teen didn't
go out the window - he lives in a one-story house, after all, but
it's not my place to criticize the dead. This time.
Turns out he wasn't killed, though!
That was just a dick move by the people going to the commercial who
wanted us to think he was! Thanks for the emotional whiplash, show!
When Eric finds him in a the closet, he asks the obviously terrified
kid to show his hands, just in case this is a trick and he's the
killer. This is the kind of things cops actually do, and it's smart -
that's why the whole prison break could have never happened last
year.
Now that they know that the killer
pointedly left one child alive in both cases, the team realizes that
this whole thing may be directed at the surviving teen! But who could
hate them that much? Time for a profile, where the team once again
shows that it doesn't know what a 'family annihilator' is! They use
the term generically whenever they're talking about someone who kills
a whole family, when really it's a specific term meant to describe a
parent (usually the father) who murders his whole family, often
because he feels like a failure and can't accept their imagined
judgment. This was exactly the case with Mitch Pileggi back in Season
4.
It's not a term to throw around
whenever a family gets killed, no matter how cool the writers think
it sounds.
The team doesn't see a particular
connection between the high school and the killings, since the only
connection is that both teens go there. Here's the thing, though -
the two survivors share nothing in common other than the school they
go to. The killer had to pick both of them out somewhere, and isn't
the only thing they have in common the most likely way for that to
have happened?
We go over to the high school, where
there's a counseling session for students and teens. Like 20 of them,
because extras aren't cheap. It's led by an ineffectual counselor who
everyone derides! Could he be the killer? He's older than I guessed,
but he's a super-spindly guy, so who knows?
Okay, I guess he is the killer? He sees
a kid get tripped by a jerk, and glares at the jerk with madness in
his eyes. Is he killing the families of bullies to teach them a
lesson? Garcia finds evidence to back that up when she searching the
school files - both survivors were complete dicks!
This naturally leads to the assumption
that the killer is someone who works at the school and was
mercilessly bullied as a child! Probably the beanpole, I'm guessing.
But would that make him a red herring? Because he seems a little old
to be playing tragically loud music in a basement and attacking
photos.
The team asks Garcia to track down any
other school bullies, so they can be warned about their place on the
hit list! Then they bring in beanpole to talk to them! He says that
the school doesn't take bullying seriously, and so they talk about
the fact that he was bullied, which leads to Reid telling a sweet
story about turning childhood adversity into positive career
trajectory! How inspiring!
The counselor points out the six
biggest bullies in school, and while five are easy enough to get into
protective custody, I guess they couldn't get the sixth on the phone,
because JJ and Eric have to drive all the way out to their place!
When they get there, it's a reversal - the killer just dropped by and
shot the teen bully, rather than doing the whole family nonsense!
When JJ, Eric, and Reid see that the
bully's room was trashed, and he was beaten with a trophy, they
decide that the killer is so juvenile that they must be a fellow
teen! This is played like it's a revelation, but you only assumed
25-35 because you thought the crimes were sophisticated, and you
don't believe anyone under the age of 25 could manage that. This is
something Reid, of all people, thinks.
We see two teens driving home, and one
of them is into the murders, and the other one thinks that the killer
has gone too far! Can you guess who the killer is? Yeah, it's the
angry kid. Who was inspired by Donald Trump to commit his crimes!
That's not an exaggeration by me, BTW. He says that bullies are
terrorists, and according to 'some politicians', the only way to deal
with terrorists is to murder their families. So yeah, the show is
saying that Trump inspired this mass-murder!
Fun note: This episode aired one day
after he was elected president! Awkward.
The team discovers that the bullying
teens were such extreme bullies that they have a list of victims too
long to investigate! Fear not, though, the anti-bully club at the
school is having a meeting, where the anti-murdering kid is talking
about how angry teen is the killer! The other kids don't believe him,
and then the killer shows up!
Garcia finds out about the anti-bully
squad, and when they notice that all six of them are in the same room
in the school, the team runs over to check on them. But the killer
has already abducted everyone! They ask Garcia where the killer was
most viciously bullied and then have her lead them to the site!
In the basketball court, the kid is
planning to murder his friends! They aim guns at him, but tell him
that he doesn't have to remain violent just because of the way he was
bullied! He flashes back to the brutal assault he suffered, and it's
so violent that you'd think the kid would have been charged with a
crime, but I guess this town just sucks?
Long story short, Emily asks the guy to
put down the gun, and he does! Which isn't much of a twist, since he
doesn't actually want to kill his friends at all.
THE END
Back at Quantico, Garcia has more
treats for Eric's dog, who is named 'Roxie', and somehow no one
noticed that when Garcia says that name it soundly almost exactly
like it does when she says 'Rossi', making everything really
confusing.
1 - Was profiling in any way helpful in
solving the crime?
I don't know that it was? I mean, they
caught the killer, but didn't actually stop anything. What I mean to
say is, if they hadn't shown up at the school, the killer would have
tied up all of his friends and then killed himself in front of them.
They saved the killer's life, but that's not much of an
accomplishment.
2 - Could the crime have been solved
just as easily using conventional police methods given the known
facts of the case?
I feel like local cops would have been
more in tune with the bullying part of the plot, and focused on that
earlier?
So, on a scale of 1 (Dirty Harry) to 10
(Tony Hill), How Useful Was Profiling in Solving the Crime?
0/10 - I know this looks weird since
they caught the killer, but I reserve the score for when the team
doesn't affect the outcome, or the killer escapes. In this case, the
killer was taken down by his friends, who confronted him with his
madness. Whether he committed suicide or was arrested is not
super-relevant to the score, since the killing spree was over either
way, and it was the anti-bullying squad that got it done.
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