Criminal Minds 704: Painless

This week's adventure into questionable crime-solving techniques opens in the aftermath of a school massacre, in which a deranged student shot a bunch of people and then detonated a bomb contained in his backpack. There's some artistic shots of the dead students' faces and the empty school, all apparently from the POV of one middle-aged man, who walks out of the building one night, ten years after the incident.

The man returns home and finds a bomb waiting for him in his bedroom! If that weren't bad enough, the killer also shoots him in the leg before he can escape the poorly-timed explosive!  The gunman demands to be looked in the eye before walking way, leaving the principal to be blown up on the floor of his bedroom! Although, who knows? He may have survived - the bomb was small enough that it could be stuffed into a clock-radio, so it was tiny by bomb standards. Let's keep out fingers crossed, huh?

Then next day Greg is at an elementary school having a parent/teacher conference, where he discovers that his son is being bullied by an a-hole. Will this tie in with the new spate of school shootings? One can only hope!

The team gets started working on the principal's death by offering a little backstory: Joe claims that he and Greg were at the school shooting, and had to drag the principal to safety - that's how dedicated the victim was! Which is some nice colour, but it raises an important question: how were you two at the school shooting? The guy shot up his school at lunchtime and then blew himself up - that can't have taken long enough for you to get on a plane, can it? Did you just happen to be in Boise? I mean, the whole Columbine thing was over in less than two hours.

Then something weird happens - this isn't Prentiss award territory, but rather an entirely new category. I wish I had an award to give for 'most inappropriate line reading'. Behold:



Seriously, JJ, why are you so happy about this?

Since the principal was killed by a bomb which supposedly matched the design of the original, the team fairly assumes that the killer is looking to relive the tragedy on its ten-year anniversary! And this is the perfect time to do it, since the school is about to have a four-day remembrance ceremony, which will be a perfect time for this killer to strike!

Except that there's no way that the ceremony is going forwards. The principal of a school blown up to commemorate the anniversary of a mass murder? Yeah, that school's doors are going to be chain-locked until the killer is rotting away in a maximum-security prison.

Although maybe the cops won't have to bother, since this killer doesn't seem to be particularly careful when it comes to bomb-assembly.

In case the picture isn't clear enough, that's the killer using a block of high-explosives as a steady surface for him to do some soldering on top of. I hope this kid enjoyed having all of his cells touching one another, since apparently that's not going to be happening for much longer.

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

Okay, quiz time: Is the ten-year-old boy gleefully consigning those men to one of the cruelest deaths imaginable the hero of the story, or the villain?

The answer may surprise you!

Criminal Minds 703: Dorado Falls

The show begins with a messy house, full of fast-food wrappers and never-opened newspapers. A mildly injured man wakes in a bad state and looks at the sprinklers splashing against the window. He goes out to shut them off, and the camerawork goes wobbly, letting us know that, even as his neighbours greet him, he's deeply psychologically off-balance. When he gets inside he phones someone on his cell, announcing his suspicion that he's being watched by someone. But who, and why? Or is he just paranoid?

The injured man heads into an office and shoots the boss a bunch of times!  Which would be bad enough, but then he somehow manages to kill everyone else in the office without anyone escaping or people in nearby floors hearing the gunshots. How do we know this? Because minutes later a guy drives into work late and gets brutally murdered, somehow not noticing the flood of people who should logically have been fleeing into the parking lot.

At Quantico the team hears about the mass shooting/stabbing, and JJ asks the obvious question - how could no one have heard anything? The response? That the attack was well-planned! Because if one's thing true, it's that planning makes bullets quieter. Moron.

Garcia is able to pull up pictures of all eight victims-

But doesn't have a picture of the one employee who is 'MIA'. This is a ridiculous way to tease the audience. The final employee either is or isn't the killer:

And we'll know soon enough - there's no reason to hide the information from us, since it's something that Garcia would logically have. Hell, that picture should be the focus of their little presentation, since the first conclusion anyone would jump to when hearing that everyone in a workplace is dead except for one guy who's missing is that the missing guy is most likely the killer.

Speaking of the killer, he grabs some SMGs out of storage, clearly hoping to do a lot more damage before getting taken down. Will he succeed? Of course he will! While eight victims is certainly a high enough body count to justify a whole episode's plot, killers on Criminal Minds always commit at least three distinct 'acts', even if those acts are mass shootings. So look forwards to plenty more violence from this guy, who's most famous for being a government murderer on David Mamet's "The Unit", but with blonde hair kind of looks like the poor man's Neal McDonough!

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

You know, when this comic was written Jesse James had already been dead for sixty years. Had there been no famous thieves in the interim, or was he just that central to America's national story?

Perhaps, once again, it's alliteration that wins the day!

Criminal Minds 702: Proof

The time: 1986. The Place: Durant, Oklahoma (better known as 'the sticks'). Two teen boys are discussing girls, and how you have to be able to prove that you made out with one, you can't just say it and expect the claim to be taken at face value. This is the kind of 'dare' that almost always leads to rape/murder in these kinds of stories. One is retarded, the other not. I don't know if that fact is going to be important, but there you have it. The retarded one (now an adult) begins narrating about his childhood, lying about how happy and important it all was while home movie flashbacks tell a different story. The narration turns out to be the retarded man filming himself with a camera, essentially making a documentary about his life. Does this mean that Criminal Minds is finally taking on the popular 'fake documentary about a serial killer' genre? Almost certainly not!

The retarded man enters his childhood hovel, revealing that inside he's got a-

Crying woman tied to a chair! Wow, just 85 seconds into the episode. That's got to be close to a record, doesn't it? She begs for her life, but the retarded documentarian is unimpressed, announcing that he has no plans to hurt her even as he grabs a dropper of clear liquid (acid?) and applies it to her taped-open eyes.

Meanwhile at Quantico we learn that JJ has completed her training to be a real profiler, rather than just the team's secretary and PR person! So are they still not going to have one of those? This is a puzzling choice - after all, it's not like the team needed a sixth profiler. As I mentioned about the inclusion of Rachel last year - does having six interchangeable viewpoints somehow seem more convincing than five?

There are only two distinctive roles on the team - Reid presents geographic profiles (although really anyone could use a compass on a map...) and Garcia reads a computer screen out loud over the phone after it's decided who the killer is. There used to be a third distinctive member of the team, and it was JJ, who presented the cases and sometimes talked with grieving family members. But now that she's back, she's just going to be another generic profiler? Weak, Criminal Minds.

Or, and Reid ducked out on brunch with JJ over the weekend because of some tsuris involving his mother. Will we be seeing more Jane Lynch? Have they killed her off? I can't wait to find out!

Garcia and Joe are chatting about Italian food on the way into the conference room, where everyone's appetite is quickly spoiled by the details of the case - women are being brutally tortured, blinded with acid, then murdered! The team blathers on about the possible meanings of eye gouging, wasting a little time before Greg has a good idea: have Garcia check into who has access to Sulphuric Acid. Oh, and the two victims died within three days. So it's another spree killer - also, after one blond coed in a town of 16 thousand people was raped and tortured to death, her battered body dumped in an alley like garbage, other women who look exactly like her weren't chilled to the bone, nor did they start taking greater precautions.

Seriously, the women were abducted like five blocks apart:

Although this is a case of the show being a little inconsistent - Garcia says the abduction sites were 'five miles' apart, but the map makes a profoundly different argument.

Then it's back to the retarded documentarian, who's brought his camera to film his brother, who's presumably the 'alpha' in this serial-killing team. The show hasn't really pointed in that direction yet, but it would make dramatic sense for the retarded brother to be kidnapping these women, confining and blinding them so that the older brother can torture them at his leisure. It wouldn't make logical sense, though, since we'd be expected to believe that a retarded guy is capable of kidnapping young women off the street in broad daylight without anyone noticing.

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

Yeah. That happened.

Criminal Minds 701: It Takes a Village

 We're back for season 7! And man oh man, am I ready for the big changes! I assume there will be some, based on the fact that the whole 'last season' clip package revolved around Emily's departure, suggesting that she'll return, and then they played the scene of Greg telling everybody that they were free to take other job offers in the FBI, since their department might be cut back. Oh, and then JJ returned in the last scene. So I'm also supposed to be looking forward to more of her?

Just kidding, JJ - I've seen Ripper: Letter from Hell like a hundred times.

Alright, onto the show! Which opens in a hearing room (I'm not sure if it's senate or house), where JJ is being interviewed about the summer's cases. Yes, while we weren't watching apparently the team was down to just Joe, Derek, JJ and Garcia, and they managed to work 17 cases in 14 weeks!

So is Greg gone? And Reid? I'm really excited for the opening credits montage/group shot. Wow, I forgot about Rachel.

The guy leading the investigation mentions that a case involved JJ being suspended, then we cut out into the hallway, where the aforementioned three cast members plus Strauss (Greg's suddenly-not-evil boss) and Reid are waiting for news and worrying about having to testify.

It seems that the (congressman? Yeah, I'm going with that until I know more) is investigating all of the man-hours they secretly spent on a case while pretending that it was closed. Then they ran with the case over the course of two days after the subject was identified. That subject? The nefarious Doyle!

JJ and Derek apprehend him without incident - the congressman is pissed about this. Why? Because they chased Doyle down without consulting 'Homeland Security' and now six people (including two of her agents!) are dead!

Homeland Security? Don't you mean her superiors at the FBI? I'm fairly sure terrorism is their jurisdiction. More importantly, why was JJ running a secret 'find Doyle' operation? What I mean to say is, how was there not a non-secret everyone's-working-on-this 'find Doyle' operation? Just to recap, a known terrorist snuck into America, killed two entire families and a few government agents, then ran away into the Boston night. Why was anyone NOT looking for him?

Oh, and who got killed?

According to the opening credits, it's none of the main cast! Hell, one of them came back from the dead! Seriously, though, it's nice to have Emily back - who else would I use as a baseline for FBI idiocy?

Other than literally any other member of the cast.

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!