Criminal Minds 710: The Bittersweet Science

Uh-oh, looks like we're in for another tragic week! A dumb guy calls his friend (Charles S Dutton, TV's Roc!) to share his worries. It seems the dumb guy took a kid to the hospital - possibly his son - and then stumbled outside, no longer capable of discerning fantasy from reality. The dumb guy's rantings involve him maybe beating someone to death in an alley, but he doesn't express them clearly enough to raise Dutton's concern. So Dutton merely tells the dumb guy to get some sleep since he'd had such a brutal fight earlier in the night. It seems Dutton should have listened, as right after hanging up the phone dumb guy notices that he's covered in blood! Not that he calls the police about it or anything sensible like that.

The next morning Greg is out jogging when a woman decides to hit on him! Greg is a little uncertain about calling her, but later that morning he tells Joe about the situation, so despite his reticence he must subconsciously he must feel he's ready to start dating again. After all, why else would he tell someone who would no doubt push him into calling the woman? You know, for a minute there, I was going to hypothesize what reaction he would have been subconsciously hoping for had he confided in another member of the team, but then I realized that all of them are generically super-supportive of one another, so it really wouldn't have mattered.

On to the briefing, where the team is told that tow men were beaten to death with pipes, then propped up on crates, and had their faces covered with cloths. The circumstances are bizarre enough that even with just a single clustered violent act, the team already thinks they need to be there. Which is more of an explanation than the show generally gives - remember those kidnappings they just leaped at the chance to help out with? We also get our first cheat of the night, as it's explained that the killer will likely escalate because he's clearly had a break from reality.

Based on what? He beat some people to death with pipes, then - presumably wracked with remorse - he cleaned them up and put them in seated positions. How do you get completely psychotic and degrading from that? There are fugue states, he could have done it while high on a drug and then regretted decision - it could even be a gang with a strange initiation rite. At this point there's no way you can authoritatively guess that you're dealing with a killer whose mental state is rapidly failing.

That is what they're dealing with, of course, as we learn in the next scene, where the killer contemplates his disturbing memories, showing in the form of flashbacks to a cap-and-glove wearing man beating someone do death with a pipe. But is he, in fact, the killer? We don't see any faces in the flashback, but he's obviously wearing the same clothes, so it would be a stretch if the show tried to pull a twist on us.

The Hundred-Fifteenth Greatest Panel in the History of Comics

You're right, Uncle Sam - two ape-monsters fighting each other overtop of a corpse they want to eat is just like World War 2. Brilliant observation.

Criminal Minds 709: Self-fulfilling Prophecy

This week's murderfest begins - as so many do - somewhere deep in the mostly-charted wilderness of America. The Commandant of a military school drives his ATG (all-terrain-Golf Cart) out to a camp where some teens were supposed to be roughing it, only to discover this-

No, I was not prepared for it either. I'll give Criminal Minds this - from time to time they can still surprise me with a singularly unpleasant opening kill!

Over at Quantico Greg is called in to talk with his boss Strauss (who's back - no mention of the absence that was supposed to take her off the field and shift Greg into upper management this year) about the deaths. It looks like a mass suicide, but Greg won't sign off on that analysis without actually visiting the campus. This could be tricky, since the school is in the running for a prestigious grant, and the director of the FBI (Richard Schiff! Not that he'll be in the episode or anything.) went there!

It seems one teen had hung himself some weeks prior, and the rest are thought to be part of a suicide pact whose motivation and details are as yet unexplained. They talk about how the kids probably waited until the heat was off from the last death, then killed themselves when they were unsupervised. Although bringing bedsheets on a camping trip to hang yourself with seems like a lot of work to go to - couldn't they have all just synchronized hanging themselves in their rooms? And what does the 'we're sorry' message that they left carved into a piece of wood mean? Mysteries abound this week!

Also, there were six teens out in the woods, but only five were hanged - everyone wonders what happened to the sixth teen, but the audience is let in on the secret: He's taken to the trees like John Rambo, stalking animals with a pointy stick!

The Hundred-Fourteenth Greatest Panel in the History of Comics!

Fascinating how much public perception wavers back and forth, isn't it? In the forties, someone calling the FBI to inform on suspicious people was considered heroic. In the following decades, it would become a symbol of America's transformation into a fascist police state.

These days, I honestly don't know what we're supposed to think about it.

Criminal Minds 708: Hope

Penelope is at a support meeting, offering some backstory! It seems that her parents died in a car accident while they were out looking for her during a curfew-breaking incident. Tragic! You know who might comfort you in re: that? Xander. Where is he, I wonder? Another woman shares her story about how her depression is only getting worse, so Garcia follows her out of the meeting room for a heart-to-heart. It seems this is the anniversary of her foreshadowingly named daughter 'Hope' disappeared, and offering that is explanation enough to get Garcia to leave her alone. Once she goes back to her car she gets a much better reason to be distracted - a letter from her daughter sitting on the front seat of her car!

I'm a little unclear how the letter is supposed to have gotten to the mom if the killer didn't know it existed, but the mother is so full of... hope... that she's willing to set aside that obvious question when a mysterious man shows up, holding a few of her daughter's 'missing persons' flyers. He announces that a 'little girl' was putting them up around the parking lot, which really ought to set the mom's nerves on end. After all, are we really to believe that a child would put a set of her own missing persons fliers outside of the very church that her mother was inside without making some attempt to contact literally anyone?

Still, the mom's critical thinking faculties have atrophied to the point that she immediately agrees to the stranger's suggestion that she get into his car to search for her little girl, even though she has a vehicle of her own. One would think that two cars would be able to search for a little girl far faster than one, but if she'd thought of that, how would the killer have so easily abducted her? Also, how could the killer have known that she wouldn't have immediately called the police - sure, the letter said not to, but then he said the daughter was running around with a man. Wouldn't mom assume that her best chance for the police to rescue her is when they're out in the open?

Anyhoo, with mom now missing, it's up to Garcia to realize the game is afoot, which she does by noticing that mom's car is sitting empty in the parking lot. She does the smart thing and immediately calls for backup. It's no wonder she solves all the cases, is it?

Okay, this is strange - when I first saw the mom read the letter, it looked like she was surprised to find it in her car. Its sudden appearance, along with the flyers, could logically stun her enough that she wouldn't notice how incredibly creepy the kidnapper seemed. When we cut back to them, however, the kidnapper announces himself, and suggests that she's read the letter hundreds of times since receiving it yesterday.

So if she's had the letter for over 24-hours, how could she not know the kidnapper was circling her? And why wouldn't she be incredibly suspicious of the solicitous man who showed up, claiming to have seen her daughter? No wonder the actress played the letter-finding scene so surprised-

She was trying to fill in a plot hole.

The Hundredth-Thirteenth Greatest Panel in the History of Comics!

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Ah, what would a vicious beating be without a racist taunt capping it off?

Really, I suppose we should thank our lucky stars he didn't say 'Excuse Prease'.

Superman: Earth One

Is a bit of an odd graphic novel, largely because it's unclear (at first) what purpose it's intended to serve. Joe Michael Stracynski (JMS from here on out, if I have to use the name again) was writing both Wonder Woman and Superman around the time this was released, but it's not connected to their continuity. It doesn't really function as an 'Elseworlds' title either, since it offers no twist larger than 'what if Superman were 22 in the year 2010, meaning that Krypton exploded roughly around 1987-8, and who could really blame them after all The Quest for Peace did to tarnish the name of their favorite son?' to serve as a basis for the plot.

Finishing the book, I couldn't understand why it had been published - while a fun reboot/reimaginement of the character, it seemed to serve as more of a tease than anything else. The story is built around giving the Superman mythos a race of villains - the denizens of Krypton's neighbouring planet, who are half-angel/half-demon - and establishing a central mystery: who gave those villains the technology to blow up Krypton? More importantly, why was that third party so intent of seeing every Kryptonian destroyed, to the extent that they would send the Demgels on a 20-year quest to track Superman down?

It's a good hook, and leaves the reader wanting more, which is a shame, since there isn't any more to the story. It was only a few days after reading the comic that I realized why the whole experience was so dissatisfying - despite all appearances, I hadn't been reading a comic book at all, but rather the comic book adaptation of JMS' pitch for the new Superman movie. Add a few more scenes of the Daily planet gang, some sequences of Superman stopping general crime (perhaps rescuing a kitten), and a bit more of an epilogue and you've got a perfect jumping-off point for a new movie franchise.

Which is why I'm so disappointed to discover that it's just not going to happen. No, with David Goyer and Christopher Nolan teaming up to deliver a (no-doubt overlong) script for director Zack Snyder to ruin, it looks like the new Superman movie is shaping up to be a stunning disappointment. I like Michael Shannon and all, but who really thinks that making another movie about General Zod is going to be a winner? Is he somehow going to out-Zod Terrence Stamp?

Okay, enough general complaining - it's a tragedy JMS didn't get the Superman movie despite his doing such a great job with Thor, but in the end, I kind of understand it, since the climactic threat - a series of drills positioned over the Earth's surface, might have been a little too close to the ending of the new Star Trek movie for the studio's comfort.

Hey, speaking of those drills, here's the one thing I really had a problem with in the comic!

First off, isn't it convenient that the optimal place for positioning drills to contain/destroy the Earth's core is near incredibly recognizable national landmarks? Secondly, why is there a drill in both Egypt and 'Africa'? Especially when the dunes and camels are offered as stereotypical 'Saharan' imagery, which Egypt is actually inside of? Couldn't they have dropped one on the Sydney Opera house? By that Statue of Jesus in Rio? Near the camp that MacReady wrecked to kill The Thing in Antarctica?

You only have six images to represent the entire world that Superman can apparently sense, and you can't pick a single one from the southern hemisphere? Weak, JMS. It's called Easter Island, and it's every bit as recognizable as the Eiffel tower.

Superman debates The Authority, and it doesn't go well for him.

Superman vs. The Elite begins with writer Joe Kelley asking an interesting question: What if Superman's non-interventive, no-murder morality were held up against that of The Authority, who are happy to use their powers to kill people who they identify as morally corrupt (largely because those villains make ethnic cleansing their trade). Would the world value Superman's endless optimism, even when people have to be sacrificed to it, or would they side with a group who would rather just kill Lex Luthor and call it a day?

It's a debate that could open up all sorts of possibilities for interesting storytelling, if only Joe Kelley had the slightest bit of interest in exploring them. He doesn't, though. Instead of making an impassioned case for Superman's point of view, he simply makes The Authority (pseudonimized as 'The Elite' for purposes of lawsuit-avoidance) simplistic villains so that their way can't be taken seriously as an option.

Am I being too harsh in saying that Joe Kelley uses hack writing to undercut his own characters so that they won't ever be a legitimate threat to Superman's ideals? You tell me. Here is literally the first thing we see them do as a team:

They kill a dog. For barking at them.

Because, you see, only monstrous psychopaths could ever consider killing a supervillain as a solution. Monstrous psychopaths like Barry Allen.

The problem with the movie - and why I'm being so hard on the writer (although who knows how much of this is his fault, I haven't read the comic he adapted this from - although he's the writer of that, too...) - is that the movie completely fails to make Superman look like the good guy. I mentioned earlier that it fails to make an impassioned case for Superman's morality, but that's not entirely accurate - it fails to make any case at all.

This is the Atomic Skull. The film introduces him as he walks through downtown Metropolis, killing anyone who gets within arm's reach. For no reason other than he likes seeing people die. Superman jails him in 'Stryker's Island', but he escapes soon after, killing at least fifty more people. At that point the Elite announce that they've had enough of the supervillain's nonsense, and explode his head, ensuring that he'll never again escape from prison and murder dozens of people.

Criminal Minds 707: There's no place like home

The week opens on a parked mobile home during a thunderstorm - not a happy opening, and things are only going to get worse from here! The driver is in the middle of a nightmare so severe that it's got him sweating profusely. He's woken up by a thunderbolt, which lets him know that it's time to drag his captive out of a storage container for some reason. The killer's explanation? "It's coming!" Also he seems to have two captives-

One in the box he's opened, and the other in the green box he knocked on to announce "its" imminence. The killer drags his victim outside, then stands outside shirtless in the thunderstorm so that he can, I don't know, stay clean while he beats his victim to death with a tire iron?

Back in Quantico there's some stress between Jr. and JJ - he misses the days when she worked at the Pentagon, and therefore had weekends off and kept semi-regular hours. Her counterargument is that the case she's been called in on revolves around missing kids - what if it was their son? Wouldn't Jr. want someone looking for him? It's a nice argument on her part, except for one thing:

The 'kids' (really teens) are already dead. So looking for them isn't going to do much good. Also, why are they just getting the call now? Based on the 911 child abduction episode from a couple of weeks ago, doesn't the team fly across the country every single time anyone younger than 18 goes missing?

At the office Joe comes in to help work the case - he's had a few days off after the whole 'assisted suicide' mishegoss, and he's ready to put his nose back to the grindstone! What's the case this week? The killer murders teenage boys, then leaves their bodies in the path of oncoming tornadoes for some reason! Is it to destroy evidence, make it look like the tornado did it, or because he has a sexual fixation on tornadoes because of a childhood trauma?

Given the nature of this show, probably the third.

Greg also announces that he's especially alarmed by the guy killing one person a week in the past two weeks. What about this alarms you, Greg, the fact that he's killing at a much slower rate than every other killer you chase on the show?

While this seems like a preposterous premise for an episode, it's true that there are enough tornadoes in the US that someone driving around that area might just be able to find one a week. Compared to Tim Curry's ability to psychically predict every blackout in the US over a period of thirty years, that's nothing special.

The Hundred-Twelfth Greatest Panel in the History of Comics

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This is Will Eisner at his most cheekily creative, and I maintain that it counts as a single panel, since Uncle Sam refuses to be bound by the conventions of sequential art.

Criminal Minds 706: Epilogue

Time for more flashback intros - this one to 1996! Two guys are out fishing - a son and his sleazy drunk beardo father! The father starts to beat his son with a belt for talking back - will this drive him to grow up to be a serial killer? Almost certainly, presuming that this creepy guy-

Is the grown up son, watching campers from the woods while the cops pull some bodies from the lake nearby. Then, in a puzzling move, the camper's friend who's currently boating near the cops watches the killer bound out of the woods and club the camper without mentioning it to the police. Or yelling 'look out behind you' over the walkie-talkie that they're communicating with.

Over at the office, people notice that Joe is distracted and withdrawn, so they try to drag his personal information out of him. He's tight-lipped however, and then rescued from the interrogation by Greg, who announces that it's time to start talking the case.

They go over the basic details - three bodies of young men in the water, the latest guy kidnapped, and the forest is so big that people will doubtless have trouble finding him. Nothing to complain about here, except when they say that the victim's friends saw him clubbed and dragged away, but the two were long gone by the time they reached the shore. Here's the thing, though - check out where the friends were-

Now let's see the camp in relation to that-

So, what - two-three hundred meters, tops? Can't be much farther than that, can it? And please note that the cops have an outboard motor on their boat, meaning they could be at the campsite in under two minutes. Given that the killer is trying to drag someone his own approximate height and weight up a hill into the woods, how far could he possibly get before the cops arrived to arrest him?

Not very god-damned far.

Yet the next we the kidnapped victim, he's thrashing about while being held underwater by the killer. Nice work, producers. Couldn't give both characters a set of binoculars and said the action was happening way on the other side of the lake, rather than a nearby outcropping?

The Hundred-Eleventh Greatest Panel in the History of Comics

What, exactly was his plan if that wall hadn't been canvas? Ah, "painful" and "unreliable", the two key elements you don't want to see in a description of your intended method of suicide.

Criminal Minds 705: From Childhood's Hour

A child is locked in a bathroom, and he begs his mother to stop whatever she's doing. It turns out that what she's doing is searching her dresser for a pair of scissors! Uh-oh. Then it turns out that the kid is in a hallway and I'd guessed wrong about the bathroom thing - but who has an interior opaque glass door on anything but a bathroom?

 Profoundly freaking out, the mother dials someone on the phone, then takes her son out in the car and leaves him on some house's lawn. The child doesn't want to do this again, but the mother says he must, then drives off. Moments later a creepy van drives up - the child is shocked that the driver, who he knows, has come to meet him. Man, she'd better not have sold that kid to a child molester.

At roughly the same time Joe is meeting one of his ex-wives for breakfast. It seems she'd like for them to get back together! But will him constantly being called in to battle serial killers interrupt their lives once again? He invites her over for dinner one night to see if they can work.

Okay, the mother claims the situation isn't as sinister as it might seem - she's called the police, claiming that she dropped the kid off at his grandmother's, but didn't know what happened to him since then. This seems like quite a lie, since the drop-off scene was two days earlier. If she was really supposed to have dropped the kid off at his grandmothers, wouldn't said grandmother have called to let her know that the child never arrived?

I'm not entirely clear why the team is working on this case at all. A single child was abducted two days ago. It's not like they're saying that this is part of a series of St. Louis child abductions, and that they have to put a stop to it. This one kid went missing, and the entire FBI profiling all-stars team showed up? That's super-unusual for this show - unless of course the case is within easy driving distance, like the mall. Then again, in the mall show, they actually suspected the abduction was the latest in a series, even though it wasn't. So I really don't know what's going on here...

The kid is still alive, luckily (although little kids never get killed on the show, so I'll understand it if you're not surprised), and being cared for by a young guy who keeps him locked in a bedroom. He also refuses to tell the kid why he's being held, or where the mother is. Mysterious!

The Hundred-Tenth Greatest Panel in the History of Comics

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I feel like if everybody could just see this image they'd understand why America is the greatest country in the world.

Okay, I don't even know if that was sarcastic.

Castle Vardulon presents: The notes I made while watching The Thing (2011)

- Why did they fly to America? Couldn't they have just sent for her?
- Also, since they found a tunnel leading down to a wholly intact alien spaceship, shouldn't their first priority be to secure it and bring down a sufficiently large team of experts to investigate it?
- I've got to say, for a ship that crashed in Antarctica, it's in remarkably good condition.

- Why are you acting like the EBE is the important find that you have to investigate and document immediately? It's a frigging ice cube. For all you know there could be ten dozen living Things in that perfectly preserved spaceship, waiting to be woken up from their sleep pods.
- Wow, did it make far more sense in the story/original when they accidentally destroyed the spaceship while trying to melt their way down to it. With no spaceship to examine, of course the Thing is the most important find in human history. If there's a just-off-the-lot stadium-sized spaceship lying around, however, who cares about a single alien?
- The thing escapes? What? Did they thaw it out?
- So it can instantly generate grappling hook spears? Is this a Mortal Kombat character suddenly?
- I'm confused - between escaping and getting burned, when did the Thing have any time to replicate anyone? This isn't like The Thing where the dog has all day to replicate Norris/Palmer, depending on what your theory is.
- Are you seriously talking like you want to keep this a secret? You should be shouting this from the rooftops: it's an amazing discovery!
- Wait, why did you attack inside the helicopter? How does causing it to crash improve your odds of survival?
- I can't stress enough how the Thing doesn't have enough alone time with people in this movie to replicate them. It's not like Fuchs' theory was right - it can't poison you with a cell and gradually take you over - so when is all this changing happening?
- I'm confused about the Thing's endgame in this scene: does it not realize that people are going to hear when it starts making screeching sounds two rooms away from everyone else? Also, when it's torn its own and Mary's clothes apart in the envelopment, how is it going to find new ones?
- Hey, wait - why didn't she just bust out some of those grappling hooks when everyone was unarmed and unprepared in that group setting, if that's something she can do?
- This is something The Thing understood, that The Thing simply doesn't - by giving The Thing clear limitations on its abilities, and a comprehensible physiology, it was far scarier than just having the Thing be able to do whatever the scene requires.
- Okay, so they survived the crash, but no one's going to talk about what happened with the Thing that was on the chopper? Seems like a loose end.
- Um, Mary - you saw that in order for the Thing to envelop someone, it needs to basically tear everything to shreds and spray blood everywhere. Do you think that they had a spare set of clothes in the helicopter? Half-wit.
- Why are you sitting at a table, 'working out a test'? You just said that you were going to drop people's blood in with uncontaminated blood and look for a reaction. You already figured out what the test was. Shouldn't you all be in a room DOING the test?
- Okay, you've done the ridiculous 'iron fillings' test - why are you now splitting up again: and doing so without restraining the suspected guys in any meaningful way?
- Man, I bet the Thing is really pissed he didn't attack back when everyone was unarmed, huh?
- Yeah, tearing off arm? Nowhere near as impressive as Norris' chest.
- Oh, good, another super-strong grappling hook arm - why does he wait before pulling that thing out?
-  Hey, remember when the Thing had to put in some effort to transform, and wasn't super-competent in its new form instantaneously? That made a lot of sense, didn't it?
- It fully copied the guy in just minutes without damaging his clothes? Seriously?
- Wow, does that not look like split-face guy.
- Wait... the spaceship WORKS? Why didn't any of the things go there at literally any point in the story up until now?
- You're telling me the thing managed to simultaneously copy the American guy and also be a flesh pillar in the control room? Explain, please.
- Hey, um, American guy? Why aren't you killing her? You have a flamethrower, she has nothing, and you've got no reason not to kill her, what with you knowing you're a thing, while she doesn't.
- If the thing knows about the 'fillings' situation, and there's no reason it shouldn't, why didn't it put the earring back in? And don't tell me it doesn't - the thing that took the American guy over knew about it, and this guy clearly knows he's the Thing.
- You let her live so she'd have a chance to gloat about how clever she is for figuring it out? What?!
- So she's fine? That's the ending? She was okay, then drove to a Russian base? Why not drive back to her own base?
- Wow, that was a disappointment.
- Hold on, why did that guy kill himself when the threat was gone? There really wasn't enough character work in this movie.
- Oh, The Thing (2011), you can't offer a single reason that anyone should ever watch you, rather than 'The Thing', can you?