Criminal Minds 223: No Way Out Part 2: The Evilution of Frank

Well it’s about damn time we got back to this. Even if I have to put up with a terrible pun title, I just want this story to be resolved. Please just let it wrap up here and not present us with another cliffhanger, because I don’t know if I can deal with writing ‘Part 3’.

After a quick recap detailing the previous Frank episode we cut to Mandy on his night off, planning to buy flowers for a date that night with an ‘old college friend’ – he’s so nervous about it that I’m guessing he can’t be going to see his sometime girlfriend from the last season ender, who was presumably scared off by the whole ‘severed head in a box’ thing. And really, who could blame her?

The prospective date is interrupted when he gets a call from Greg, who lets Mandy know that the FBI is internally investigating the team, possibly because they want to disassemble it! Now there’s a cliffhanger. The date is even more interrupted when Mandy thinks he sees Crazy Lady across the street, but he assumes it’s just someone who looks like her. The date is then fully ruined by Frank who dials Mandy from his date’s phone – he’s looking for Crazy Lady, who he believes has come to Washington looking for Mandy. Man, this is going to be troublesome. After the credits.

Criminal Minds 222: Legacy

It’s back into torture porn territory, as we open with a beaten, elderly man being wheeled down a hallway while his captor, who wears a contamination-protection suit, whistles a jaunty tune.

Where’s the old man headed? To be tortured, of course! And then thrown into a furnace! Yuck.

Things are a little happier over at HQ, where Mandy is watching a Charlie Chaplin movie because it’s public domain. Derek swings by the office to make a stereotypical quote about Chaplin being the ‘original player’, which is technically true, although kind of creepy to bring up. I mean, seriously, when a guy’s sexual depravities became the basis for the novel ‘Lolita’, maybe you should stop joking about it. In eighy years will there be hilarious gags about Michael Jackson’s bedroom escapades?

Meanwhile JJ gets a visitor in her office – a Kansas City detective whose beat involves him watching the homeless, prostitutes and drug users who hang out on skid row. Recently crime has dropped precipitously, and the city has awarded him for it, but the detective thinks something sinister is going on – crime has only dropped because over sixty petty criminals have mysteriously disappeared over the past few months! And now the killer has sent the detective a letter, annoyed that the detective is getting credit for his work!

Back at the creepy torture-house the old man’s corpse is being cleaned up after:

Yeah, I know that’s icky, but just be happy I didn’t use the image from a few seconds earlier featuring viscera lying everywhere. Then we’re on to the credits!

Criminal Minds 221: Open Season

Is there anything worse than getting chased though the woods by hillbillies with compound bows? Doubtful. Unless it’s getting chased through the woods by hillbillies with compound bows while an editor tries to convince the audience that the killbillies are possibly hunting deer. I know the second would be worse for me.

Anyhoo, the killbillies deal with their prey, and then we cut to a bar where the ladies of Criminal Minds are gathered – see, it’s clever because we’ve gone from a literal hunting ground to a metaphorical one! And things are even cleverer than they first appear, because the scene plays out with a guy thinking he’s impressing the ladies by claiming to be from the FBI, and then being humiliated when it turns out that he’s talking to three real agents! Or at least two, I’m not sure if Garcia’s allowed to carry a gun or anything.

You see? The hunter had the tables turned on him! Much like I assume the killbillies will later in the episode! Yeah, I’m officially being too hard on the show right now. I’m probably still a little bitter over that whole ‘Jill the Ripper’ episode. Honestly, it’s a good scene, and the closest thing I’ve ever seen to well-handled ‘matching scene themes’ in an episode, so bravo, the CM writing team.

Hey, do you think that, while they were making the terrible Jill the Ripper episode AJ Cook told everyone that she played an identical Jill the Ripper character in terrible movie ‘Ripper: Letter From Hell”? I mean, that must have been mentioned at some point, right?

The team gets called into HQ to learn about the killbillies’ murder spree. Because they didn’t leave arrows in the bodies the team is stumped by what kind of weapon might have been used. Which seems like a bit of a stretch to me. Take a look at the arrows poking out of their latest victim:

While it’s true that the lack of an arrowhead would be a hindrance in immediately identifying them as arrow wounds, the fact that the projectiles invariably when clean through their targets in completely straight lines (despite their small ‘calibres’), leaving perfectly round entrance and exit wounds would certainly point away from bullets being involved almost immediately.

Not to mention the fact that each victim was left where they were killed, and the cops didn’t find any bullets embedded in the trees or dirt.

So what’s gained by being mysterious about the murder weapon in this scene? It’s not a twist for the audience, since we’ve just seen the killbillies in action, and it kind of makes the team look a little slow.

That’s not the worst of it, though – when someone points out that the victims (who were abducted in Washington state, but killed in Idaho) are both male and female, Reid mentions that a serial killer without a sexual preference would be ‘a first’.

Um… The beltway snipers? Henry Lee Lucas? Any given ‘angel of mercy’ killer? Your own fictional serial killer ‘Frank’, the ‘Rib-bone killer’?

Despite these weird missteps the team at least manages to put together that the victims were being hunted.

Thank heavens for small favours, right?

Criminal Minds 219: Ashes and Dust

It’s time for some more serial killing this time set in colourful San Francisco, as the Chyron conveniently explains:

Inside the house everything isn’t so calm, as a crazed arsonist sets the entire place on fire while thoughtful music plays on the soundtrack!

The teenage son runs into his parent’s bedroom and wakes them up, telling them about the fire – they try to call 911, but the phone is dead! So Dad leads the kids through the house, crawling below the smoke line through the inferno and…

Wait, hold on. Let’s get another look at the house.

Yeah. It’s only one story. Why did you go crawling through the entire house when you could have just opened a window?

Half-wits. They kind of deserved to die when it turns out that the arsonist (who, ironically, dresses like a fireman-)

Sealed the doors. He watches the family suffer and fall unconscious, then takes the wedges out of the door and leaves the house.

Yes, for the record, the whole family died because they were too stupid to open a window when they saw that the hallway was on fire. Oh, and the guy is able to walk out the front door, take off his costume, and drive away in the car that was parked outside without any of the neighbours noticing.

Ah, luck, you’re the best friend of the killer, aren’t you?

Criminal Minds 218: Jones

Yikes. This episode is even opening with a ‘previously-on-Criminal-Minds’ package about Reid’s drug abuse. Is this going to be the end of the storyline, or is it going to start getting really bad?

The former, please.

We also open with a flashback to Hurricane Katrina, as a cop, desperate to catch a serial killer, refuses to leave his home as the levee’s break, he’s that sure he’s close to a solution. How determined is he? When knocked over by a collapsing tree, and with just moments of life left in him, he manages to grab a piece of broken glass and scrawl the word JONES on the wall of his living room.

Now that’s dedication to your line of work right there. But what does ‘Jones’ mean? Only time will tell!

Oh, and the detective died, all the evidence was lost in the flood, the killer stopped for a year and a half after Katrina, but is now back, and now the detective’s son (detective jr!) is in charge of the case.

Criminal Minds 216: Fear and Loathing

It’s a dark night in suburbia as a female teen sneaks out of her house, dressed to meet someone special. But before she can reach the appointed meeting place of her mystery man a stalker-y ex-boyfriend drives up, demanding to know who she’s sneaking out to be with. The question is answered immediately when another car pulls up at the curb. Stalker goes to question his ex’s new beau, and winds up getting shot for his troubles. The killer then tries to force the teen into his car, then winds up having to chase her into some nearby woods.

What have we learned about the killer from this encounter? A: He’s black – the intended victim (teen girl) was black, and serial killers tend to kill within their own ethnicity, and B: He’s a moron – seriously, who, when having his plan to escort a victim to a secondary location interrupted before anything suspicious has happened elects to kill the interruptor, rather than just driving away? He had no way of knowing he wasn’t being watched from across the street, or that a cop car wouldn’t drive up in that moment. When you’ve gone to the trouble of getting a victim to voluntarily come to meet you in the middle of the night, why suddenly expose yourself?

The team identifies the teen as members of a pattern – three dead black teens, each of whom had a swastika painted on their face after their brutal murders. The assumption? That it’s a killer racist out to make a point about black people moving into suburban Connecticut! Also, and I hope this will become important later, Reid is having flashbacks to his time being tortured by Van Der Beek.

Will his newfound addiction to heroin ruin the case? Find out after the opening credits!

Criminal Minds 215: Revelations

This episode picks up just after the last one ended, with Reid dragged off and JJ having shot a bunch of dogs to death. Oh, and some Rolling Stones are playing. I’m not going to tell you which song. Because if you can’t guess, based on the religious theme of the episode, then you don’t listen to enough music.

The rest of the team arrives, and finds that Reid and James Van Der Beek are both long gone. They’re loaded into a truck, driving for parts unknown!

Well, we know they’re in a hunting lodge somewhere, but we don’t know where it is, so that’s not really useful information. Beek wakes Reid up and wants to engage him in a conversation. After playing some Russian Roulette, of course.

Of course, the scene would be a little more tense if the cut-point before the opening credits came before the gun failed to go off when the trigger was pulled, not after.

Criminal Minds 214: The Big Game

Um… okay, it turns out they’re not chasing down Frank this week. This episode opens with people watching the Superbowl while a mysterious figure waits outside to kill them.

One couple leaves, and the other starts to clean up. Meanwhile the killer enters through the completely unlocked back door and talks to himself about not wanting to ‘do this’. I’m actually not clear on whether I’m supposed to think it’s one guy or two. The voice is clearly one guy speaking, and then the same guy speaking in a scary voice, and we only see one set of boots walking into the bedroom to murder the people.

In an interesting note, the killer phones 911 to tell them why he’s going to kill those people. Also interesting? Now that I heard the two voices clearly, I recognize that the killer this week is totally played by James Van Der Beek, of TV’s Dawson’s Creek! So that’s what happened to him!

Back in Virginia the team is also out at a Superbowl party – this is all character stuff, so largely unimportant, except for the fact that Derek’s in the background, dancing with three women. You know, after episode 12 revealed more about his backstory, I guess I kind of figured that they’d look a little more into the character. Him being molested fits perfectly with what we already knew about Derek – his inability to maintain a relationship, the fact that he’ll chase after anything in a skirt: these are fairly common symptoms of the molested child.

But no, he’s just back to being a dawg two weeks later, and his womanizing is once again nothing more than an opportunity for comic relief. Classy.

Anyhow, the night of partying is interrupted by a call to help out on the whole Van Der Beek affair. Which is my favorite Ludlum novel, by the way.

The only person not at the party was Mandy, who, rather than spending all his time tracking down Frank, as he suggested he’d do last time, has instead swung by the Smithsonian to check out pictures of birds.

This, for example, is a Mockingbird, a bird that can reproduce the calls of other birds. Gee, I wonder if that’s going to come up in an episode where Van Der Beek is doing hilarious voices?

I’m guessing we’ll find out after the opening credits.

Criminal Minds 213: No Way Out Part 1

Here’s the problem with watching these episodes on DVD. I don’t look at what’s coming next, but I can always see the title when I’m starting the episode. So I know that there’s going to be no resolution this time around. Which makes it kind of hard to get into the episode’s mystery, because he structure ensures that I the know exactly how things are going to end.

How can I be so sure? Because it’s one of those ‘starts at the end’ deals.

After a gratuitous gore shot:

Mandy and Derek walk into and sit down at Keith Carradine’s table. They have a genial conversation about milkshakes and people’s names. Keith’s name is ‘Frank’, and he’s kidnapped someone. Mandy and Derek want to know where the woman is – she’s in trouble, because Frank’s a twisted serial killer!

But he’s a twisted serial killer with a plan – despite the fact that there are twenty cops outside, itching for a chance to blow him away, Frank assures Mandy that they’re going to let him go once he finishes his milkshake.

And he’ll succeed – how do we know this? For two reasons: A – this is the end of the story, and the rest is told in flashbacks, and B – the ‘part 1’ in the title. If Frank doesn’t get away, how could there be a part 2?

But let’s take a ride anyway, huh?

Criminal Minds 212: Profiler, Profiled

Like the unabomber episode before it, this one opens with a bang! Although it’s much less impressive. It’s just Reid impressing the girls in the office by making a simple rocket. How simple? It involves putting baking soda and vinegar in a plastic film case, then snapping it shut and turning it upside down.

You may remember this ‘experiment’ from the first grade. Or episodes of Mr. Wizard aimed at the under-5 set. Yet it’s portrayed as something neat or weird that Reid is able to do.

I mean, jeez, it’s not like this is even a weird fun trick, like the match in the upturned glass creating a vacuum. It’s just baking soda and vinegar, like everyone’s paper mache volcanoes.

Is there anything more ridiculous than the way ‘smart’ people are depicted by television?

Anyhoo, let’s get to the actual story. Derek’s in Chicago for his mother’s birthday, and he’s both being followed by someone with a camera and menaced by gangsters.

It’s also mysterious because he’s standing over someone’s grave in that shot. But whose grave, and why? And who does he have to see at the local youth center? One of the kids, or the hardbitten coach? Derek breaks up a fight in the street between a couple of kids, who’ve heard of him because of his time playing football at that selfsame youth centre. Yup, he’s a local hero, right up until the cops show up to arrest him for the murder of one of the fighting kids?

Is Derek a murderer? Does his love of murder come from the fact that he and his sisters were adopted by white people? I guess we’ll find out after the opening credits!

Criminal Minds 211: Sex, Birth, Death

Time for Fincher-Vision here at Criminal Minds. What do I mean by that? Well, take a look at this quick vid-



Yup. It’s the song from the end of Fight Club, playing over random scenes of sin and a guy typing in a diary that cribs from John Doe’s journals in Seven.

Well, it’s the sincerest form of flattery, right?

Anyhoo, right as the montage ends there’s an actual attack on a prostitute, who’s stabbed to death, then has some hair harvested by a black-clad madman.

Perhaps coincidentally a high school student stops Reid on the way to work and asks him about his work as a profiler, while being excessively creepy. He crosses the creepiness threshold when asking about the way serial killers constantly target prostitutes, then mentions the specifics of the murder that just happened.

This is actually a common myth that I think it’s important to address here – the line that the teen asks about whores: “Is it for sex, or is it because they think they’re dirty and they need to be punished?”

These are popular beliefs about the whole serial killers targeting whores thing – and they’re completely wrong. Not to say that there aren’t a few serial killers out there who have those kinds of religio-sexual hangups, but they’re not the majority, and they’re not why prostitutes are the number 1 target of serial killers. You know the real reason?

Because a prostitute is a person who will go with you to a secondary location. That’s it.

Serial killers want to kill people. And they don’t want to go to jail for doing it. That means they have to kill in private. A person you know will go somewhere private with you, but when they turn up dead, you might be a suspect. A person you don’t know can’t be connected to you, but will likely not go somewhere private with you, so it’s hard to kill them.

A prostitute is a person who you don’t know who will go somewhere private with you. They fulfill both criteria on the serial killer’s checklist, and they’re the only large group of people to do so.

Anyhoo, back to the show. Reid goes into the office and tells people about the creepy kid, calling the police to confirm the victim MO, and handing out a sketch.

Well, at least there’s something Reid’s not good at…

Verisimilitude

The word means, quite simply, the quality of appearing real – which is why it sppears so often in reviews of films, especially those based on true events.

Take, for example, ‘To Catch A Killer’, the 1992 television miniseries about the arrest of John Wayne Gacy, as played by Brian Dennehy in a virtuoso performance. A title card at the film’s outset establishes the rules-

And the film does a pretty accurate job of covering the last two weeks of Gacy’s freedom, from the killing a drug store stock boy to his arrest for the murders of 33 young men.

The producers even do their best to make it period-appropriate, since the film is set in the year 1978. The cars are all the correct vintage, as are the clothes, hell, someone even makes a comment about the minimum wage being 2.50 an hour. So it’s obvious that the production cared about verisimilitude.

And then this happens –

Gacy is hanging out with a potential victim in his rec room. Nothing weird about that, right?

Um… yeah. In 1978, Michael Jordan was 15 years old. I mean, I’m sure he was already a great basketball player, but he wasn’t actually being merchandised yet.

This is such a weird mistake, too – it’s not like an extra who forgot to take his digital watch off while putting on a tunic – this is a cast member with actual dialogue, who was being paid real money to be there, wearing clothes picked out by a wardrobe supervisor and then approved by someone who makes more money than she does.

Not to mention every single person on the set that day – every single one of them looked at that shirt, saw the Michael Jordan logo, and didn’t do or say anything about it.

Ah, moviemaking.

Criminal Minds 209: The Last Word

If the beginning of this episode of Criminal Minds is to be believed, some people are just too stupid to live. A family is out picnicking in the park, and while the wife is alone at the table for a moment a mysterious man runs out of the words and announces that his daughter has disappeared. So what does the woman do? Does she yell and run to the crowd of people fifty feet away, hoping to gather a large group of people that can quickly locate this missing child?

Nope, she follows a stranger into the woods.

I’m not saying she deserved to get murdered and then have her corpse raped by the fake Green River Killer, but come on. There’s a bare minimum of personal safety that you have to maintain to deserve being taken seriously as a sentient human being, and she just performed the serial killer equivalent of walking blindfolded out into traffic.

Later that night a prostitute is woken up by her son – once she realizes what time it is she races out the door to get to work. Only to wind up gunned down my a mysterious toque-wearing figure!

Are the two killers the same man? Probably not, but I guess we’ll find out after the opening credits!

Criminal Minds 208: Empty Planet

This episode opens with a ‘bang’… by which I mean a montage of a dude making some pipe bombs, calling in a warning to the news, and then doing this with them-

So who is this crazed bomber, and what is he trying to stop with his explosions?

Let’s find out after the credits!

Criminal Minds 207: North Mammon

I suppose it was only a matter of time before Criminal minds tried to get in on the whole torture porn thing. I mean, they’re kind of a horror-themed show, right?

In this case, it’s a situation where three girls are kidnapped on the night of a sleepover, which happens to be on the exact same night as a pep rally! But who’s done it? And why did they live in a town with the preposterous name of North Mammon? Why not just move down the road to Greed City, TN?

Okay, girls grabbed from a sleepover – not exactly Saw territory, I know, but believe me, it’s going somewhere. And that somewhere is in a small underground concrete chamber with adequate ventilation. The killer opens a vent to talk to them – and he wants to play a game! The rules are simple: If they do nothing, then they’ll all die of dehydration. But if one of them is murdered by the other two, those two get to leave!

Yeah, it’s one of those moral quandry deals. And one of them has a bad cold that’s going to turn into pneumonia what with her being buried alive and all, so it’s just a question of who’s got the guts to kill who?

Criminal Minds 206: The Boogeyman

As of the beginning of this episode Elle is still, technically, a member of the FBI. But given that everyone knows she’s a nutjob, that’s not going to last. Of course, the FBI cleared her of any culpability in the shooting, despite the fact that she was acting against orders in going to the rapist’s apartment, and no one has any idea where his gun came from.

More importantly, when Greg is ordering her into therapy and she tries to say she doesn’t need it, he doesn’t pull out the big gun – that she, whether the shooting was justified or not, created a situation where a shooting was likely to occur, and she did it for no defensible reason at all.

Elle’s headed for therapy, and off the show by the end of the hour, I’m guessing.

So, on to the plot of the episode. A bunch of kids are hanging out, listening to an older child tell a scary story about how an old man who lives in the woods killed a little boy recently. They believe the old man watches them from a haunted house atop a hill. There seems to be some truth to the story though, because while it’s being told another child is beaten to death in the woods!

Criminal Minds 204: Psychodrama

And you thought regular bank robbers were bad? This one likes to strip people down and then force certain selected pairs to simulate sex with one another! The team is on to him, though – they know he’s a serial killer just waiting to happen!

Before they can fly out to California to help catch the guy it’s time for some interpersonal drama, as Greg’s wife drops by to remind him that their child has medical problems. What’s that? A child with a mysterious, unnamed ‘condition’? It seems to me that this will be a well that they’ll be able to mine for years of angst for their main character! Score!

But on to the actual plot of the episode. One the way to LA the team tries to figure out the killer’s specific motivation is, so as to better predict what he’ll do next. He escapes on a bike, which makes him difficult to catch, and wears a mask, so no one can recognize him! They use a little ‘geographic profiling’ to figure out where the robber likely lives, then head down to the crime scene to suss it out. From this they glean an important piece of information – he only attacked a guard at one bank robbery… but why?

Criminal Minds 203: The Perfect Storm

Cruelty’s afoot in Jacksonville, Fla, as a husband and wife receive a mysterious DVD in the mail – one depicting their college-age daughter being tortured to death, all to the tune of ‘Only the Good Die Young’! There’s not just one murder, though, as the father has a heart attack while watching the video and dies!

Who could possibly be so vile as to taunt the parents of the victim? I’m guessing we’ll find out soon, since, with the exception of a two-parter, none of the episodes have ended without someone being caught for the crimes.

Mandy immediately makes the leap that there must be two killers because one of the killers seems to be performing for someone, and not just the family watching it. This would be a useful insight, if the camera, which should be on a tripod, hadn’t moved while the killer is torturing his victim, proving the existence of a cameraman.

Is Harper's Island an Act of Plagiarism?

Anyone who happened by the Castle last summer surely knows that I had a complicated relationship with the show ‘Harper’s Island’. I loved the amazing premise and hated the terrible, terrible execution.

There’s something I neglected to mention during the extensive, some might say comically exhaustive, review of the series, and that’s just which film the series elected to rip off when it was developing the plot.

That film? I Still Know What You Did That Summer.

Don’t believe me? Let’s take a walk through the series…

Criminal Minds Season 1 Recap!

First, a brief message from our sponsors - interested in the real science and areas of academic study underlying the show Criminal Minds? Perhaps you should consider looking into Criminology Education, perhaps even a BS in Criminology! - And now, on to the subject at hand:

As much as I’ve enjoyed watching and reviewing these episodes, the entire purpose of this exercise has been to see just how frequently and effectively psychology is used to solve crimes in the show that purports to be about crime-solvin’ psychologists. So let’s look at the scores from season 1!

Let's start with a mathematical breakdown:

There were a total of 22 episodes, but one of them didn't feature a serial killer, one didn't involve an investigation, and the last episode was a cliffhanger. This means that the season's score can expressed as a number out of 200.

That number? 48. Yup, 48/200, or exactly 24%. It was only an average of one quarter of the time that the criminal minds team actually used psychology to solve crimes.