The Hundred-and-Sixth Greatest Panel in the History of Comics

Wow. That audience really must have hated Tommy, huh?

The Hundred-and-Fifth Greatest Panel in the History of Comics

Ah, those simpler days before hate crimes legislation. And when people didn't care enough about copyrights to sue over people stealing from Our Gang.

Criminal Minds Season 6 Recap

Another year, another twenty-some episodes of Criminal Minds! So, how did they mangle their investigations this year? Let's check out the numbers!

In the 23 gradable episodes, Criminal Minds a total of 52 points out of a possible 230, for a psychology percentage of 22!

A rough year for Criminal Minds, season six featured the departure of two main cast members, as well as the addition of one who managed to make no impression of any kind. They didn't even cast a familiar face to play her serial killing father, that's how little work was put into Rachel Nichols' storyline. Reid got his first post-addiction plot, but it only featured in a couple of episodes, and then totally misrepresented either how schizophrenia works or how old Reid is supposed to be - leave it to Criminal Minds to botch even the most basic plot points. Emily received her first feature storyline this year, and it was among the most nonsensical thing the show's ever done - then it ended with her departure. I assume there are some fascinating behind-the-scenes stories surrounding that mess, but that's not what this site is about, so I'm just going to remain baffled.

The episode with the most psychological relevance was episode 23: Big Sea, where profiling the victim, as opposed to the killer, gave them a decent lead. The absolute low point was the very next (and final) episode 24: Supply and Demand, whose plot revolved around the FBI's complete inability to know how to solve crimes.

At least there were no zeroes this year!

The Hundred-and-Fourth Greatest Panel in the History of Comics

Try to make a list of things better than a plant 'sitting' in a chair. You won't be able to.

Criminal Minds 624: Supply and Demand

It's night, and a guy is driving along a mountain highway. Well, not actually night. Blue-tinted day-for-night shooting. But still. The driver gets frustrated being stuck behind a dump truck on a winding section of road, then tries to dangerously pass it. He picks the exact wrong moment, and has to hit the brakes and then weave out of the way of an oncoming car - that goes well, but then when he tries to pass again he almost hits a minivan, and this swerve takes him right off the road!

Wow. Lot of people out driving at 4AM, huh?

I know that's roughly the time because when Garcia and Xander (yay! It's been like a season, right?) are on their way into the office she complains that she was called in before sunrise. This has to be super bad news. Xander tries to comfort her by reminding her that there are good things about the job. Okay, one good thing - it's where they met. Sweeter than the show normally does!

So, what's the case that's brought everyone in pre-break of dawn? Reid observes that the last time Greg called a meeting this early was because Gideon left - which seems like splitting hairs. I mean, I know for a fact that he's called people in in the middle of the night in a few episodes. Doesn't that count as 'earlier' than 5AM? Or is there some line at which it becomes the next day, and letting people go home at six then calling them back at one doesn't cross it?

Weirdly, it can't be because of the case, because we cut away to paramedics and firemen trying to safely pull the still-living driver from the car. So unless he's a known serial killer, nothing dangerous enough has happened to require the team's presence.

Greg shows up, and announces that he's just arrived from a budget meeting, and they're considering cutting down the unit. He got the news because Strauss roped him into filling in a couple of episodes back. Greg tells the team that each one of them will be given the opportunity to leave the BAU and pursue other opportunities. Greg says Derek will be offered the New York post from season 3 again, and everyone else can expect similar calls. He wants them all to stick around - but it's up to them. Wow, are we about to have another super-meta episode about network interference, like when JJ left?

Also, this doesn't seem like information that couldn't have waited until 9AM. It's not like a meteor made of serial killers is hurtling towards Manhattan. What's gained by not letting them have a good night's sleep?

Greg finally gets a call about this week's case - they popped the trunk of the car, and found two corpses inside. Sadly the driver died before he could offer any information. The dead people are a young man and women, both wearing a uniform of tank top and shorts, and both were tortured before being killed. Their fingerprints are on file, and both are revealed to have been missing since the past winter, from Ohio and Arizona. So they travellled a long way before dying in Virginia, just a quick drive from the FBI's headquarters.

In a weird coincidence, it turns out they were asked to check in on the guy's disappearance back in December. He was a poor student, and it was thought that he'd committed suicide. They ask an odd question: 'why kill them now'? It's strange because they don't have enough information about the killer to find any of his decisions odd yet. At this moment, they have every reason to believe that this is just what he does.

We know better, of course, when it's revealed in the next shot that a whole passel of young people are being held in cages and forced to wear uniforms. Yup, they're clearly being held by the villains from Hostel! This should be a fun week!

The Hundred-and-Third Greatest Panel in the History of Comics

Yeah, you're losing everyone with that explanation. And they're the people who did the murdering, so it shouldn't be this hard to follow.

Criminal Minds 623: Big Sea

Down in Florida some barge-workers come across nine corpses on the ocean floor - the team is immediately called in, without a briefing sequence of any kind! Expedient! Garcia can turn up only six outstanding missing people in all of Jacksonville, and three of them are children - so the killer has to be finding his prey elsewhere!

Wait, they don't know how to restrict the timeline - are they seriously telling us that in the history of Jacksonville, Florida - a city of something like a million people - there have been only six disappearances that weren't resolved? Even if you restrict it to just ten years (as the next scene suggests that we do), that doesn't make the least bit of sense. Still, they're going to spread their search out to surrounding states, hoping to get lucky.

Then three more bodies turn up, and they're faced with an unfortunate reality - now that this dumpsite is public, the killer can go literally anywhere else to dump his victims.

Speaking of victims, we see the killer on his boat, gutting some fish, while the latest victim screams from below decks. Fun!

The Hundred-and-Second Greatest Panel in the History of Comics

That's true. The fury of a woman when she's bored can't possibly compare!

Criminal Minds 622: Out of the Light

Well, thanks for ruining the episode, opening. The first shot we see is Derek performing CPR on someone, demanding they not die, while Greg warns that there's no pulse. Then the show wants us to cut to 'three days earlier'. Except there's basically no point in doing that, since we already know that the team is going to find the woman (because it's always a woman) they're looking for, and that she'll almost die while it's raining in the woods, and that the narrative arc of the show demands that Derek will save her, redeeming himself for failure in not saving Emily. Even though she's not actually dead.

Those three days earlier, a blonde woman is running through the woods, trying to escape her captor. Because this is the teaser, it doesn't go well, and she plummets off a cliff during the attempted escape, landing dead on a highway some fifteen feet below.

This brings the team into the case - although there's a little bit of Greg's real-life stuff, with him being asked to coach his son's soccer team. Joe points out the obvious - that he's never home. For gosh's sake, the guy's sister-in-law had to move to Quantico so that there would be someone to raise the child. Not that the show seems to remember that.

The good news? The woman, despite being raped, tortured, and plummeting from a cliff, managed to survive! The bad news? The local cops had found similarly a brutalized corpse in the woods some time earlier, suggesting that there's a serial killer living in their small resort town who abducts women for extended periods of time!

Attempting to put a ticking clock on the show, the team announces that if the killer has a torture room, he won't leave it empty for long. Which they have no way of knowing. It's not like torture rooms stop working if they're left unattended for a few months. More importantly, the only information they have is that he definitely killed a woman three years ago, and now another woman has escaped from him soon after being abducted. Maybe he works on 3-year cycles?

More importantly, now that the killer knows that one of his victims has escaped, wouldn't he be less likely to kidnap someone when police interest in him is at its highest? This is the exact time a killer would elect to keep his head down. So what's the rush?

Oh, and meanwhile the killer is off in the woods, spraying something from a backpack while collecting decomposed corpses. Then something weird happens - the killer gets a text message from 'Mom':

He types back 'Oh My God. So much fun!'. I'm not sure why, though. Unless this is actually the killer interacting with his mother (seriously unlikely), we're dealing with a guy trying to make it look like his victim isn't missing yet by answering her E-mail. Which is just a terrible idea. People know their friends and relatives extremely well. Writing something even slightly out of character would alert them that something more suspicious than 'my daughter is away from her phone' is going on. Once, when a friend was out of the room, I answered an instant message for them - writing exactly what I was told to say. The person on the other end of the conversation knew it wasn't their friend actually typing based solely on the fact that I capitalized words and used punctuation. Yet this killer thinks he can get away with pretending to be a coed?

At this point he probably doesn't know whether his latest victim is alive or dead - just that she's out of his sphere of influence. So wouldn't getting rid of the phone be priority 1? After all, given that it's got five bars, he's got to be near a cell tower, meaning that the phone's GPS could be easily used to locate him. Why couldn't this message from the mother be a trap?

This actually happened last week, although I didn't comment on it - with the killer suddenly tweeting for the victim, suddenly going from bubbly nonsense about cookies to goth-y claptrap about being in a dark place. Obviously everyone knew something was wrong in that case, but this wouldn't be any less strange.

Also, can you actually text easily while wearing thick work gloves?

You know what? I'm thinking about this too much. Let's pick it up after the credits.

The LetdownVod

After last week's amazing Cabin in the Woods episode, anything that came next was going to be a disappointment, but wow, were DM and I not expecting the movies we picked to be this bad... Still, a fun time was had by all in discussing them, so there's that, right?

By all means, check out this week's episode by means of right-clicking here to download it, and find out for yourself!

The Hundred-and-First Greatest Panel in the History of Comics

Bet you never thought you'd see that literally depicted, did you?

Criminal Minds 621: The Stranger

Another Emily clip package this week. Still not sure why. Did they think we'd forget that Emily was 'dead'? At least this time they don't bother reminding us that she's still alive. Thank you for trusting the audience, Criminal Minds.

Okay, onto the episode - Derek, Garcia, Rachel and Reid are all leaving a movie theatre, talking about slasher films. There's an attempt at humour with Derek calling the killer in the movie an 'unsub' before Reid corrects him by saying that in movies, they're called 'villains'. I've watched a few hundred episodes of this show now, and I'm fairly sure Derek would never make that 'mistake'. He wasn't hatched from a pod. He's seen movies. And read books. And knows not to use their stupid exclusionist academic jargon when dealing with everyday life.

Then Reid says something so stupid as to be nearly unbelievable-



Yeah, the only people who think that women are the only victims in horror movies (or even that they generally get the worst of it) are people who haven't seen any.

The characters keep talking about slasher films, their dialogue narrating the travails of a coed who walks home to her apartment, and is then stabbed to death by a madman. Who manages to open a locked window, then climb across the desk in front of it without disturbing anything. Magical!

The next day when the team arrives at the office they discover Greg talking to Strauss, his boss. She wants to go into the field along with the team to make sure they're holding up, but Greg says that the grief assessments show definitively that they'll be fine. Of course, since he's not really impartial at all, I can understand her lacking confidence in them. Also, it's kind of a nice callback to when she did the ridealong after Mandy's departure.

Time of the briefing! There have been three victims in the past FIVE DAYS. What? Oh, and all of them were brunettes majoring in child development/education, and two even went to the same school. Which means that we're expected to believe that after two women demographically identical to the latest victim were killed in the past four days, that woman was totally comfortable staying in her apartment alone, and not being careful to lock doors and windows? Does the show not know how crazy this sounds?

There are some shots intercut of the killer deciding on his next victim, while Greg mentions that San Diego PD wants them there ASAP. Well, if that's the case, why didn't you present the facts on the plane? Morons.

The Hundredth Greatest Panel in the History of Comics!

I wanted to find something really special for this, the hundredth installment of the Great Panel series (despite the fact that, given the way I've formatted it, the hundredth should be slightly worse than the ninety-ninth, and so forth...), and I don't think it will disappoint. Now, allow me to present to you a double feature. The tale of a bloodthirsty Nazi-

And the magically animated cannon who wanted him dead!

God bless you, Golden Age wizards. Your cruelty was matched only by your creativity!

Criminal Minds 620: Hanley Waters

The episode opens with a clip package letting us know that despite the fact everyone thinks Emily is dead, she's perfectly fine and living in Paris. Which happened just a couple of episodes ago, and it doesn't seem odd enough to necessitate reminding us – unless, of course she's already back? I guess we'll find out in the episode proper.

Seems that in the aftermath of Emily's death Greg has been asked to provide a grief assessment on his team, and he's starting with Derek. They have that clichéd conversation about the five stages of grief, and during the anger part Derek admits that what he'd much rather do than his real job is to spend all of his time hunting down Doyle who – and I can't stress this enough – escaped from the FBI using what I can only imagine was leprechaun magic.

We then cut over to the subject of the episode, a woman who wakes from nightmares about surviving what I can only assume is a car accident based on her neck brace and the fact that she's being wheeled into a hospital. After breaking a mirror (the universal visual shortcut that a character hates herself) she heads to her closet and finds some bullets. Looks like she's going to be taking that self-hatred out on somebody else, since women generally don't shoot themselves. Also, that would be a very short episode.

The woman then heads to a gun shop and asks to see a revolver. When she discovers that she'll have to get a license and wait for a permit, she decides to instead simply steal the gun, which for some reason the store owner left lying on the counter unattended when he went to talk to another customer. Even stranger, the woman elects to load the gun rather than simply running out of the store with it. Since she can't have been intending to commit suicide right then and there, I have no idea why she does this, instead of simply walking off. I know why she does it from a plot standpoint – so that she can gun everyone in the store down after being confronted about her theft – but I've no idea why the character did it. Unless she'd been planning a massacre all along. Which she obviously wasn't.

Over  at Quantico the team is already on top of the case, dropping facts about mass shootings and name checking Columbine. Strangely, we're expected to believe that all four people that she shot - once each with conventional bullets - died, and were therefore unable to give descriptions of her. This, despite the fact that according to the case synopsis witnesses heard the gunshots and called the authorities immediately. You'd think one of the people – none of whom were shot in the head – would've hung on long enough for an ambulance to get there.

Before the opening credits we get a shot of the woman driving away from the scene of the crime, seeing upbeat song to herself. Given the flashbacks to a car accident in the upbeat song, I'll go on a limb and say… Distraught over the death of a child? I guess we'll find out after the opening credits!

Bones, you're terrible!

I don't ordinarily watch the show Bones, largely because it's terrible. Every time I randomly catch an episode it manages to shock me by being excessively awful in some way - suggesting that the team has a database of every tool in the world that could conceivably cause an injury, not bothering to explain why the FBI is called in on any of these random murder cases, doing an episode about whatever was in the public eye a few months ago (Jersey Shore, Teen Pregnancy Pacts, Polygamy). All good reasons to never watch the show again - but the most egregious sin the show commits by far is the incredibly sloppy mystery-solving the show engages in.

Take, for example, this past week's episode, which concerned some body parts that appeared in people's toilets due to a backed-up sewer system. The team quickly figures out that the pieces must have originated in a penitentiary further up the pipeline, and decide to look for the culprit there. They quickly encounter Pruitt Taylor Vince, who must be the killer based on his relative fame compared to the rest of the guest cast.

Now let's take a look at the preposterousness that the show has to offer. First we're asked to believe that, based on examining a skeleton that had been dissolved, crushed, and then sent through a sewer system, they could determine someone was stabbed with a conical shiv. A completely unique weapon, made not from a sharpened toothbrush or piece of scrap metal, but rather a few rolled-up pieces of paper, which they find in a box of weapons discovered in the previous week's search for contraband.

So, point number 1 - why would the killer have kept the shiv? After using it to murder someone your first logical step would be to get rid of the weapon, and this is a ridiculously simple weapon to get rid of. Literally dunking it in a glass of water would do the trick. The killer went to the trouble of dissolving a body, but couldn't be bothered to drop the paper knife into the acid as well?

Hey, speaking of, where did the acid come from? Isn't this a prison? Well, it turns out that this prison's industry is largely concerned with producing mailboxes, and part of making them involves dunking the mailboxes in a giant vat of hydrochloric acid.

This turns out to be a red herring, however, with the stains on the bones being inconsistent with hydrochloric acid. But what other acid could there possibly be in a prison? They get their answer by unfolding the paper knife, which winds up being from a cookbook, letting them know that the killer worked in the kitchen! But how did Pruitt dissolve the body and put it down the floor drain?

The answer? Vinegar! Yes, according to the team it's simple enough to boil vinegar down, reducing it to acetic acid, which could have been used to break down the body. That's all the explanation we get.

Does that make the least bit of sense, though? Consider this - in order to effectively and quickly dissolve a body with acid, you'd need enough to nearly submerge it, say about 200 litres. Which is a lot of acid - but far more vinegar. Since vinegar is maybe five percent acetic acid, you'd need twenty times as much, or 4 kiloliters of vinegar, to execute the plan. For Pruitt's plan to work he would need 4 tons of vinegar, enough alone time in the kitchen to reduce it to acid, a giant tub to store the acid in, and then the hours of unsupervised time it would take to kill a man, melt his body, and shove the remaining pieces down a kitchen drain, then finally clean up the ungodly mess all of that murdering and dissolving would have created.

Is it possible that a killer could do all of this? Sure. Is it possible that he could do all of it in a prison? Dear lord, of course not. Where did you go to school?

What's wrong with you that you would even think that?