The episode kicks off in 1983, of all
times! Some kids in Delaware are practicing rock-skipping well after
dark! Their older brother shows up to collect them. They don't want
to go to their dad's place for his custody weekend, but the brother
says they have to! The kids decide to race home, with the younger
ones cutting across a wheat field while the older one rides a bike on
the roads. Which of them will disappear into the night?
The little girl and boy, apparently?
They check out something 'hurt' in the cornfield, and then a bright
light shines on them from above. Could it be aliens? Probably not,
but that's certainly why the soundtrack tried to ape ET's theme at
the opening of the episode.
Suddenly we're back in the present,
where it turns out it was just a story being told by a local teen
about the urban legend of the missing kids. Although it's obviously
not, since no urban legend telling would include the stuff about
custody fights. The three kids go into the cornfield to try and
experience a bit of the terror for themselves, as kids are wont to
do!
At the office, the team finds out that
Aaron isn't coming back, because he's on the run from Mr. Scratch!
Now, one would think that he could come back once Scratch was
captured, but no, Aaron has decided to retire from the FBI! Which he
would never do, but that's beside the point, right? They need an
explanation for where he went!
So, does this mean they're never going
to get around to catching Scratch? Are they just abandoning that
story? They couldn't be, right?
Anyhoo, now Emily is in charge. The
person that I literally named an award about saying dumb things
after. Is in charge.
This should go great!
Oh, and Garcia tells them that the
three kids have been abducted, and one of them wakes up in crawlspace
or basement somewhere! He spots his friend lying, possibly dead, in
the corner, and then he's rushed by a bald dude in tattered clothes!
We only see it for a moment though, so could he be an alien? No. Of
course not.
Only demons are real in the world of
Criminal Minds.
Garcia fills them in on the case! The
three boys disappeared, leaving their phones behind so no one could
track them! Except they were planning to pretend to all go over to
one of their houses. So wouldn't not having your phone be a terrible
way to keep that ruse going? I mean, think about it - if one parent
calls the phone of their kid and find out that the kid left his
phone, they'll immediately call the house they're supposed to be at
to check on them.
By not bringing their phones along,
these guys have massively upped the chance that they were going to
get caught by their parents. I know that the producers want the team
to have a hard time figuring out where the kids are, but they've got
to do better than this at writing it.
Reid mentions that the town they kids
are from was famous with ghost hunters and the like because an asylum
burned down decades ago, and there are rumors of escaped lunatics in
the area! So maybe there's a place that the kids normally like to go
to shoot their short films?
Emily then closes out the scene with a
Prentiss-Award winning line-
It's 12 hours, Emily. 12. The adage is
that if you don't find a kid in the first 24 hours, the odds of
finding them alive drops to near-zero. They disappeared 12 hours ago,
so you have 12 left.
Hey, why is the team even on this case?
It's not an abduction. It's kids that didn't come home last night or
this morning. Why has the FBI been scrambled? Nothing criminal is
suggested by the situation.
Does the FBI get called out whenever a
kid misses curfew now?
The team goes to interview the sheriff,
who says nothing like this has ever happened before, other than those
two kids from 33-years ago. Could the albino basement monster be one
of the kids, raised Caspar Hauser-style?
The team immediately concludes that
there's a connection between the crimes, because they're too similar!
Except you have no reason to believe that these three kids have been
abducted, so... how is it too close to dismiss?
The thing is, if they'd let the kids
keep their phones in the story, and all of them turned off when they
arrived at the same farm where the kids disappeared three decades
ago, I could see the connection being inarguable. But in this
situation? Not so much.
While the rest of the team heads out to
the old farm where the twins were kidnapped from (the original kids
were twins, BTW), Joe and Aisha remain to talk to the victims'
parents! They have some video footage that the kids recently shot,
which Joe and Aisha want to see, for some reason. On it, the video
abruptly stops because an older man in a pickup sees them filming
him. They seem afraid of him, for some reason, perhaps because they
were being dicks and filming people without their knowledge, and
didn't want to get yelled at.
Still, that's enough of a lead for
Aisha and Joe's standards, so off they go! Garcia runs the old man's
name, and it turns out he works on a local farm, and was 15 years old
at the time of the abductions. Then we get a scene of Garcia being
sad about Aaron leaving, but it's obviously intentionally
tear-jerking in a way that previous character departures weren't, and
that's kind of disappointing.
Also, everyone's acting like Aaron is
dead, but you can all talk to him again if you just catch Scratch, so
why not get on top of that?
The conversation ends with a message to
the audience that they shouldn't worry, and they'll adjust to the
show without Aaron.
They should.
They won't.
Out at the cornfield the sheriff
explains that people looked for the missing twins for months back in
the day, and the that town had a devil of a time getting over it!
Speaking of, a balding guy rides up on the bike from the opening
flashback, so I guess this is the brother, still obsessing over his
lost siblings? And who could blame him? He blames the sheriff for not
looking harder back in the day, and tells Reid that he's too
traumatized to talk about the case even now.
According to the sheriff, everyone in
town blamed the older brother for the disappearance of his siblings,
and he took to drinking to deal with the stress. Yikes. Hopefully he
gets some closure!
Amazingly there was a security camera
across the street from the corn field, and it caught the three kids
running into it. Then, just two minutes later, the pickup truck of
the weird guy from their video drove by! Of course, two minutes isn't
enough time to catch all three kids, subdue them, and put them in a
truck, but I'm sure the guy will have some kind of clue to offer!
The teens wake up in the crawlspace,
all unharmed. Was the monster a dream, or is he just weirdly polite?
They hear someone stomping around upstairs - is it the FBI agents
who've come to talk to the old man, or is the show just doing some
'silence of the lambs' nonsense?
The team searches the house and finds a
shrine to the missing twins, built around a polaroid photo of them!
Has he been obsessed with them since he was a teen himself? There's
also a polaroid of the three teens attached to the shrine, but he
could have taken that innocently and then left. After all, by taking
it he loses the element of surprise, which blows an even bigger hole
the the timeline of the kidnapping if he were involved.
The team finds the old man, who now
that I get a look at him, is obviously under 50, so I'll just start
calling him Weirdo.
The team searches the house, but since
they're not hearing a bunch of banging on the floorboards, I'm
guessing the kids aren't in the crawlspace, after all. There's
evidence connecting weirdo to the crime, tough - he's got one of the
kid's helmets from the night of the abduction on his shrine!
Eric goes to question the weirdo, and
he explains that he's always taken pictures of people who tresspass
on his property, going back to when he was a kid - explaining the
twins' photo. He also says that he was fed up with the teens
videotaping him, so he played a prank on them the night before,
flashing a light and taking their picutre. Supposedly they just ran
off into the night, and he as no idea where to!
Fun fact - the team had no legal right
to enter the guy's house, even though the door wasn't locked, so all
of the stuff they found inside would be inadmissable as evidence!
Down in the dungeon, the kids try to
plot their escape - and suggest that there's just a single person
upstairs, who's always talking to themselves. I guess that proves the
whole cross cut scene was, in fact, some Silence of the Lambs
nonsense.
The team splits up to check out some
leads, and then Aisha, who didn't get a task, tells Emily, who didn't
give out the tasks, to call her boyfriend and tell him that she's
moving back to America for the FBI job! Good advice, but then again,
psychopaths can be excellent at reading the emotional states of
normal people, so of course she'd be a good therapist.
Reid and Eric go to talk to the
brother, who's a huge mess! He's got an alibi for the night before,
though. He has basically zero useful knowledge to offer - but he
mentions that in addition to disappearing into the cornfield, he also
saw them at the pond! Although that pond was dragged, so that might
not be an important connection.
They head out to the pond that's right
by the cornfield, and question why it hasn't been searched yet!
That's a really good question, actually. Especially since there's an
orange backpack laying out in plain view! Could it belong to one of
the kids?
The kids pull down some pieces of tar
paper in the hopes of finding a way out of the basement, but end up
finding a window into the main house! They see the creepy albino
monster there, and are subsequently frightened when a lady thrusts
her arm through the hole at them! So I guess both twins got Kaspar
Hausered?
We then check in on the search at the
lake - it was one of the boys' backpacks after all! They mention
finding it in a 'hunting trap', which probably means that the writers
didn't know the term 'hunting blind', which is what it was. The
brother tells Reid and Eric that it probably belong to a creepy old
off-the-grid guy who lived in the area! You know, the kind of person
you'd suspect in child abudctions?
Speaking of traps, one of the searchers
gets his leg caught in one! The trap is lain below some hanging bait,
and a bunch of tranquilizer darts that apparently missed their
target. Was someone trying to catch a wolf or something? I'm kidding,
of course - Eric just says that they missed their target. Obviously
if they'd hit their target and been pulled out of the unconscious
body they'd look exactly the same, so this could easily be where the
teens were abducted from.
In the monster house, the teens have
been brought upstairs for dinner. No, not to become dinner. To be
served dinner. They notice a heavy padlock on the one door out of the
room! How will they escape?
Garcia offers some background on the
survivalist that the brother mentioned, and at this point, I'm going
to have to nope out of the plot of the whole episode. The guy was
institutionalized for assault and self harm and abducting kids, and
then he got let out the winter before the abductions. How was he not
the first and only suspect in these crimes? Anyhoo, the team assumes
that he's kept the twins this whole time, and that the twins are now
his fully-brainwashed caretakers, since he's in his 80s!
The twins prove to be startlingly good
hosts, offering food to the kids, and explaining that they're all
safe from aliens in the house! What nice freaks!
The team debates the best way to
communicate with the missing twins without freaking them out. Given
how alien conspiracy people feel about the FBI, this is no small
task. Meanwhile, the kids want to do the plan where one of them
pretends to be sick, and the other two escape while he distracts the
freaks! Will it work? Not really - the kid goes to the locked door,
which he assumes is the exit, but it turns out it was just the lumber
closet! The escape door was the other, completely unlocked one! Bad
luck, kid!
The lady twin points a gun at the teen,
assuming he's part of a conspiracy somehow, but then the authorities
arrive! Turns out the FBI didn't need to worry about how to talk to
the brainwashed kids at all! The moment the woman sees the sheriff
she recognizes him, and surrenders immediately!
THE END
They go downstairs to get the three
teens, but the man freak is nowhere to be found! What, they didn't
have his sister call for him once she knew it was safe? That's a
little weird.
Okay, it's not that weird, he was just
hiding under the stairs, and they let the brother and sister go back
for him! Yay! How do you think they're going to react when they find
out that there have been five more Star Wars movies since they were
captured? Hopefully they won't be too disappointed.
On the plane back, Emily decides to
take the FBI job! Only because the team emotionally blackmails her
because they don't want a stranger taking over the team - they want
someone who'll cover up for them when they murder people, and a
better leader might not do that!
Then Garcia champagne to surprise
Emily! They try to do another 'it doesn't matter if Aaron is gone,
because we're still a family', but it does matter, so screw you,
Criminal Minds.
1 - Was profiling in any way helpful in
solving the crime?
No. Of course not. They found a
backpack, and then checked on the house of the creepy weirdo who
lived in the area.
2 - Could the crime have been solved
just as easily using conventional police methods given the known
facts of the case?
There was a literal mental patient with
a history of abducting children living a couple of miles from the
site of where the twins were taken. This would have been solved 33
years ago.
So, on a scale of 1 (Dirty Harry) to 10
(Tony Hill), How Useful Was Profiling in Solving the Crime?
1/10 - I'd almost like to give them a
0/10, because this case was so ludicrously easy to solve, but they
did, in fact, solve it, so I'll have to give them the point.
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