Criminal Minds 801: The Silencer

Okay, I've been out of the game for a little while, so I'm not entirely sure what it means when the season of Criminal Minds opens at a Texas prison in the middle of the night. Are we starting with an execution? A prison break? An execution turning into a prison break? Maybe someone's last words before being executed creates a new case? In any event, people aren't here for my guessing, so let's get on with the story!

In the prison infirmary a shaking man is strapped to a gurney so that he can be brought out to an ambulance for transfer. During this sequence somebody attached a GoPro to the leg of the gurney, solely because they wanted to play with one, and had to justify buying it using the show's money. Seriously, look at this shot, and tell me what it's doing there-



The shaking man is loaded into an ambulance, where it's established that he has no history of epilepsy. The guard seems weirdly bored by the whole process. Either the guy's got a serious medical condition to be suddenly be having seizures with no history of epilepsy, or he's faking to try and screw with you/escape. In either event, boredom should not be your response.

Out on the road, the paramedic diagnoses the villain's problem as a severe allergic reaction, which the guard thinks was self-induced. They have a debate over whether they should bother saving a mass-murderer's life, but before they can come to a conclusion a deer steps into the road-

 And the ambulance driver decides to risk all of their lives in the hopes of saving it. Is this his fist time driving a car? I know it's sad, but the first rule of animals in the road is that their lives are worth less than yours. He drives professionally along rural highways and somehow does not know this.

So off the road the ambulance goes, freeing the killer like Michael Myers in Halloween 4. I'm going to assume that the gurney was damaged in the crash, since the killer is able to just wrestle the bars that he's handcuffed to loose without much effort. Everyone but the guard is dead from the crash, and when he sees that the killer has gotten loose and grabbed his gun, he tries to talk the guy out of doing anything crazy. Amazingly, it looks like this is going to work for a second when the killer puts the gun down, but then it just turns out that he wanted to kill the guard with his bare hands. Hilarious.

Over at Quantico, Garcia and Derek are returning from a trip to England to consult on cases/visit with Emily. And they brought presents for everyone! As she and Derek debate who gets what, we learn that she's not talking to Xander right now, which is crazy! Didn't they get along really well when they were stopping that mad bomber together? Why can't those two crazy kids make things work?

Everyone talks about the new woman on the team (Jeanne Tripplehorn!), including Garcia dumping a huge amount of exposition about the character's backstory. None of it is important, but I'll point out two hilarious bits anyhow. 1 - She wonders if because the new agent is a Linguistics Professor she'll have to call her 'doctor'. Which is hilarious because Reid already does that, and it would be great if there were two low-self-esteem headcases on the team. 2 - She refers to the new agent as the star of the Unabomber case, which I suppose means that she was the one who was working the phone bank when the Unabomber's brother phoned to tell them who the killer was?

Then something amazing happens while the show is doing the whole 'person they're talking about is behind them' bit. It's so great that I'm just going to put it here - a second video before the credits!



That's right, she's a linguistics prof who can spout the etymology of 'nice', but has no idea how to say the word 'adjective'. Priceless.

Also, the character's name is 'Alex Blake', which I'm going to be using from now on, because it's a shorter word to write than 'Jeanne'.

Is every line of dialogue going to be this bad? Derek asks Alex about the Seattle case they're returning from, and she responds that he made 'Ridgeway look like a saint'. I know she's trying to be colourful, but we're really supposed to believe that the killer was on the scale of someone with 50 bodies to his name?

Time for the new case! Greg breaks it down for them - the killer is on the run with an EMT uniform and a guard's gun! So why is this a case for the BSU rather than Federal Marshals? This photo-

It seems that sewing a guy's mouth shut is the 'signature' of the 'Silencer', a serial killer who went dormant back in 2004 - he was caught by police on an unrelated charge, and has been in jail, refusing to talk ever since! So all through police processing, killing people in jail, he never said a word. Strange. Reid suggests it could be something he was trained to do, which is a decent theory. Perhaps they could look into child abuse cases with eerily silent children from 30-40 years earlier?

As everyone else leaves the room Strauss, whose presence in the scene puzzled me until just now, sidelines Alex to talk about her joining the team. Apparently they have some history, although the nature of it is going to be nebulous for now.

And then it's time for the opening credits? That's really the note you're ending the act on? Weird.

Criminal Minds - Season 7 Recap!

So that was Season 7 of Criminal Minds. Lots of nonsense, plenty of terrible policing, and a few genuinely offensive episodes! Also, let's not forget that the actual Devil made an appearance, marking the second time he's dropped by the show!

I'm not here to talk about super-awkward appearances by malicious spirits, though - I'm here to judge the profiling content of a show purportedly about that!

This season Criminal Minds has 24 episodes. There was one two-parter, giving us a total of 23 gradable criminal investigations.

The total profiling score for the year was 43/230, or 18%. For those keeping track - yes, that's the lowest score a season of the show has ever received, which just goes to show how little effort the producers are putting in. I'm not saying the show is on auto-pilot, but there were two separate episodes (which aired back-to-back!) in which the team had no involvement in resolving the storyline. Whether we're talking about a boxer killing random people and then getting hospitalized, or a murderous dad falling into a punji trap, two times this year the score hovered around zero.

I was actually challenged in trying to come up with a 'best' episode this year, from a psychological standpoint, not because there wasn't an episode that dealt extensively with the use of psychology in criminal investigations, but because that episode, 'Foundation', didn't actually require that the team 'solve' anything. They had an escaped victim who knew everything, and a woman ready to accuse her father of mass murder, all that was required of them was some impromptu counseling to make the two characters comfortable enough to give them solid evidence. So I'll admit that having psychologists hanging around can absolutely be useful, so long as you already know who did it.

Next up is season 8! Who will replace Emily? Will Gubler direct another episode? We're surrounded by mysteries I can't wait to get to the bottom of! Which will require actually watching episodes! So I guess I'll go and do that!

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

(click to bigify)

The Spirit may not always have the best plans, but they're always innovatively-rendered.

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

Not exactly a true mindbender, but for a non-spirit comic in 1943, this is pretty great.

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

(click to bigify!)

I'm a little confused here - was 'gremlin' not a well-known turn in 1943? Isn't this basically the perfect depiction of what a gremlin is/does?

Or did they throw 'saboteur' in there for the war connection?

Adventures in Fake Journalism: Seven Psychopaths

Late in wonderful film Seven Psychopaths, there's a fake newspaper - so let's take a look at it!

Actor Sought in Fifth 'Jack of Diamonds' Slaying
By James Ulberg
Staff Writer

HOLLYWOOD HILLS, CA - Authorities are searching for Billy Bickle, 39, as the primary suspect in the "Jack of Diamonds" killings that have plagued the Los Angeles Area in the past ten days.

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

He was wearing a rubber mask on top of his glasses.

That's incredible.

Also, the JSA!

Remember when I was going on and on about what a Hypocrite Batman was for killing all those Man-Bats? Well it turns out that the Justice League wanted to get in on that action, massacring all of the bio-borgs they could in the movie JLA: War!

In order, that's Superman slicing people to death with eyebeams, Green Lantern shooting them with imaginary bullets, and, of course, Batman about to detonate the skull of a bio-borg.

And before you jump in and say 'but bio-borgs aren't human, it doesn't matter if someone kills them', remember that the JLA is made up of an alien, a god, a magic man, two powered humans, one rich human, and a human working for an intergalactic police organization. Are they really only about preserving Earthbound human life?

Let's not forget that one of the JLA members is a cyborg, his body used as raw building material to create a super-soldier of unimaginable power - which (spoiler alert) is the same origin as Darkseid's bio-borgs.

Does this mean it's peachy-keen to kill Cyborg, and no one should feel bad about doing so?

What is your morality, JLA, and why didn't helping out the Bio-Borgs even occur to you for one second? Do you think they like working for Darkseid? No one does. He's a terrible boss.

None of this would bother me in the least if five seconds later all of you didn't get so wishy-washy about killing Doctors Light and Psycho.

Animated Batman... Hypocrite?

While watching Son of Batman, I noted something strange. While the story followed the only broadest outline of Grant Morrison's intro to Damien (Batman Jr.) Wayne, the storytellers were careful to include Bruce's famous harping about how it's important not to kill anyone, ever. This would be less significant if Batman and his friends didn't kill a whole lot of people over the course of the story.

Let's take a look at Batman's reaction to being cornered by a group of Man-Bats who - and this is important to note - are just regular people (in this case assassins from the League of Shadows) given an entirely reversible serum that has temporarily transformed them into monsters. Here's Batman's play-



That's right - he blew them up with a terrifying powerful explosive, then crushed them under tons of steel and other debris.

I'm going to spoil the ending of Wolf Creek 2

I don't know if I can be blamed for that though, given that Greg McLean already sort of pre-spoiled the ending. How? Simple - Wolf Creek 2 has the exact same ending as Wolf Creek. Not in the broader 'one survivor, Rapist Crocodile Dundee is still out there' sense, but in the specific details of what happens.

A horribly brutalized guy is found at the side of the road.

Explanatory text lays out that at first the guy was suspected of being involved in the crimes, but then the cops let him go, baffled as to who might be committing all of these outback murders near Wolf Creek.

Shot of Mick walking away from the camera.

But I'm not here to just talk about shameless self-plagiarism. There's some plot nonsense to address as well. The violent acts that Mick commits in Wolf Creek 2 could not go largely unnoticed the way they did in Wolf Creek, and it would be nearly impossible for the police to fail to catch him.

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

Every zookeeper's worst nightmare, captured in a single image. So insightful, the 1940s.

And then, The Simpsons Gave Up

Remember cross-section jokes on The Simpsons? Fun little bonus gags whenever the show wanted to do an interesting camera move? Whether it was Shiva running the core of the planet-

Aliens buried next to a wishing well-

Or between the floors of the house-

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

This is one of the reasons I love presenting panels without context. Attached to the preceding panels, this is just an ordinary punchline to a fairly lame gag strip. On it own, however, it's a perfectly preserved exhibition of madness.

Bravo, creator of Lala Palooza!

A character who, as usual, doesn't not appear at any point in this strip.

The Simpsons - Next-Level Nitpickery

Please try to enjoy this frame from a recent episode of the Simpsons:

That's right - it's a blue moon on the 17th of a month. Which is, of course, impossible, since a Blue Moon is the second full moon in a single calendar month.

Why am I so annoyed by this error? Because it's so obvious a mistake and so easy a fix. There's no reason for the wrong number to be there beyond a complete lack of attention and interest in doing a good job.

The worst part? This isn't even an attempt at a joke, like a 'Smarch' calendar, or having the observance for a weird fictional event show up on the calendar. It's just yet another example of the main characteristic of late-model Simpsons: the habit of everyone working there to simply say 'you know what? Good enough, I'm going home.'

The Turing Test Made Me Sad This Week

So this past week there was a bunch of news about a liar claiming that his program was the first to ever beat the 'Turing Test'. Of course, anyone with access to Google knows that this is nonsense - chat programs have been as or more successful than this particular contender for years, and none of them can reliably convince people that they're talking to an actual person.

Still, all this talk about AI conversations got me nostalgic for Watson, the computer that cheats at Jeopardy, and while reading about him/her/it I was referred to a page about Cleverbot, one of those chat programs that people discuss fondly when talking about attempts to beat the Turing Test. So I decided to boot it up and see what happened. This was the result.

Two questions. The thing lasted two questions before breaking. I know there's no reason to expect that cutting-edge AI would be found for free on the web, but wow, that's just sad.