It's late at night and an old-timey car rolls slowly down a dirt road. Is this a flashback? More Killbillies? A wealthy car collector about to get murdered by a serial killer who also collects antique cars? I can't wait to find out!
It's Reid, who apparently bought an old car because he doesn't have anything else in his life to spend money on! He's looking rough! But why?
We get a brief cut over to the team standing around a body of a black-haired man as a sheet is pulled over it. Did Mandy kill himself? That would be terrible. Would it be better if he'd been murdered, and they have to catch the guy?
Well, since Reid walks into the room and starts crying immediately, yeah, I guess that's exactly what happened. Ugh. Rough.
Garcia and Derek arrive, and Greg confirms what we'd all figured out. Mandy is dead! But was it suicide, as suggested by the gun next to the body, or murder? Let's find out together, after the credits!
The episode opens with a flashback to Joe's homeless army buddy, Meshach Taylor. Remember, Joe got him off the street, then was worried he was going to kill himself, so he reconnected the guy with his kid? That character! I guess we'll be seeing him a third time - unless this episode was shot after the actor died, in which case it's more of a tribute.
Then it's time to get into the episode proper - but before we do that, let's just all take a moment to remind ourselves that last week JJ was PTSDing so hard that she couldn't be trusted to drive a car, let alone carry a gun, and then she murdered a suspect. This didn't make her feel any better, in fact, at the end of the episode she had a psychotic break and was talking to a manifestation of her PTSD!
Will she be off in therapy for the next few episodes, the way she should be? Or, you know, on desk duty to make sure she doesn't murder any more suspects? Probably not!
Anyhoo, the episode: a guy is driving a lady to the hospital, telling her not to die on him! Then, instead of pulling up to the emergency room, he stops a hundred meters away, props her up against a tree, and claims that he's going for help. Instead, he shoots her with a pistol. Does this guy want to get caught? Because you could have done that anywhere. Any time of day or night, there's a good chance of a cop being close enough to a hospital to respond to a gunshot in a couple of minutes - less than a minute if they're inside, which they often are.
I can't wait for an explanation for this madness.
Over at the office, Joe and Derek are chatting about a trip Joe's headed out on that day! This leads to a bizarre moment, where Derek mentions that it's surprising that Joe is 'stopping to smell the roses' - has finding out about his daughter softened him? This is kind of crazy, since Joe is - by far - the least obsessive member of the team. He takes plenty of time to himself to write books, he relaxes in his mansion with fine scotch. This isn't a man who seems like he takes his work home with him - other than to the extent he has to in order to write the books that allow him to mine extreme extra profit off of his day job.
Garcia rushes in to give David the bad news - there will be no vacation... Meshach has died! This means Joe is headed out to LA before visiting the fam up in San Francisco. Will he find out about a serial killer in LA and drag the team along with him, or will this be a split focus episode?
Time for the case - which is in Tallahassee! Split focus, people! The killer caused an accident to get an excuse to bring a woman to the hospital - again, that's the kind of thing that draws a ton of public attention, and makes him hugely likely to get noticed. Oh, and the previous night, he'd killed a guy by beating him up, then shooting him on the steps of a church.
Information that might be relevant - the two victims are black, and the killer is Italian - the actor who played the dumb Miami capo on The Sopranos.
Speaking of that actor, he calls 911 on himself, then walks up to a guy in the middle of the street in broad daylight and shoots him! This guy is white, so there might not be a racial component to the crime.
On the plane, they find out about the white guy - and hear that he was just leaving a counseling session, allowing the doctor to witness the crime! Gosh, this guy shouldn't be hard to catch at all, should he? It's almost like they didn't even need to bother coming?
Also, why are they going to visit the medical examiner? All three victims were shot. The first two were bludgeoned and crashed into first, but I'm not sure how talking to a doctor about their injuries could possibly provide a lead.
Greg goes to talk to the counselor, who explains that the guy had problems, but nothing that would suggest he was being targeted by a murderer. He notes two odd things, though - first, that the killer clubbed his victim first, then carefully pressed the gun against a specific part of his head before shooting, and second, that he heard sirens before the shooting, which made him turn around.
This is ludicrous, of course - the guy made the phone call announcing the location of the shooting less than thirty seconds before shooting the guy. That would mean the dispatcher would have had to put out a call for responses in that area in less than twenty seconds after the killer hung up the phone. Response times can be great, don't get me wrong - but 20 seconds is pushing it.
In LA, Joe calls his daughter to announce that he's going to be delayed because of the funeral prep in LA. She's obviously disappointed to hear that. Joe heads in to the halfway house where Meshach was living to start packing up his belongings - the son is on the way.
Okay, my bad, the medical examiner did have something interesting to say - the bullet didn't kill the first victim, it just grazed the side of his skull - it was the vicious beating that killed him! I feel like that should have already been in the autopsy report they were sent. Actually, that makes me wonder how they matched the bullet. If it didn't penetrate the skull at all, that means it slammed into the concrete wall behind the guy, and would likely be so damaged that it couldn't be matched to anything.
It seems like it was just a fluke that the guy died - according to the ME, he was hit surprisingly lightly with a tire iron, and the bullet did no damage. This is also true of the second victim, who was put into brain death by the bullet without being fully killed - Derek and JJ go to talk to her husband in the hospital room where she lies!
Derek offers the working theory that the killer was attempting to bring the woman in for treatment, then changed his mind for some reason and shot her instead. I have no idea why he thinks that, since there's no evidence to support that theory. Then the husband leaves the room to sign the paperwork to cut off his wife's life support. Ugh. Rough. Is that the killer's theme? He's trying to damage their brains just enough that they'll be put on respirators and their families will have to make the tough choice? That could be why he called the police before the shooting - to ensure that the ambulance arrived in time to stabilize his victim!
There's some more of Joe going through Meshach's stuff and having flashbacks - if you're wondering why they're spending so much time on this, it's because Joe directed in the episode. The flashback is nice, though, with the young Meshach reminding Joe that people aren't necessarily defined by the worst thing that ever happened to them.
Then the son shows up and they chat about their friend and father. They retcon some stuff - announce that Meshach knew that he was dying a year ago, and that's why he was trying to reconnect. No, we all saw that episode, he was hopeless and suicidal because of the mess he'd made of his life, not because of a terminal diagnosis. Don't rewrite this just because the actor died, people.
Joe offers to organize the funeral, and the son explains that it would be nice if the rest of his platoon was there - he'd been trying to reconnect with them since he got his diagnosis, but hadn't had much luck. Weird that he didn't just call up his buddy who's an active federal agent with access to military pension databases.
Then it's over to the killer, who's watching news of his murder. He's disappointed that the cops didn't manage to save the guy's life, even after he went to all the trouble of calling them in advance! His daughter hears him yelling at the television and comes to check on him. They mention that the daughter is on medication, and she used to have a drug habit! Also, her mother died, and she's brought her or the ashes??????? with her to move back home. So much exposition in like 20 seconds! She then says everything is going to work out!
New theory: The daughter's liver has gone kerplunk, and in an attempt to save her life, he's trying to cause brain deaths in people who could conceivably be organ donors for her! Of course, that's a bit of a stretch, because he'd have to know about specific people who were tissue matches.
Although maybe he does have that information, since we know absolutely zero things about him!
JJ, Love, and Reid get together to discuss the details of the case, but other than noticing that the three sites of the murders correspond to mind (therapy office), body (hospital), and soul (church), zero new information is offered or theories put forth!
The killer heads to another house to kill a guy, whom he finds sleeping on the couch. He makes the 911 call about a burglary with attempted murder, then shoots the guy in the head! Maybe the organ thief theory is bunk, because the guy's house is full of booze and prescription pill bottles.
Greg and Love get to the crime scene, and we learn that the killer shot this guy a bunch of times! Then Garcia phones up and we learn that the church where the first victim was found should have had a service starting just half an hour after the assault, but it was canceled because of an emergency - so even the first crime was supposed to be discovered immediately! I'm torn - he just shot this latest guy to death, so the organ thing seems like a stretch, but maybe all the drugs and booze made him realize the liver was no good, so he just executed him?
Yeah, the daughter is definitely terminally ill - she brings a guy home from her 'group' and he's wearing a pump that shoots air right up his nose constantly. This is a support group for people with serious medical stuff, and the dad's trying to save her.
Gosh, I'm going to look silly if I'm wrong about this.
I turns out I'm not! Yay?! Watching the tape of the lady being dropped off at the hospital, Greg tries to profile his body language - he looks like he's just a good Samaritan until he notices that she has a medic alert bracelet revealing that she's an organ donor - then he kills her!
Wow, this is so, so, so very stupid. He didn't have a change in body language, idiots, and he wasn't trying to save her. He caused an accident. Then, instead of driving her to a hospital, he drove her to 100 meters away from a hospital, so that people would rush out when they heard the gunshot and make sure her organs were saved.
This was not a spur-of-the-moment decision, and the show acting like it was, and that Greg was able to discern that from the killer's body language, is absolutely insane.
In the 'giving the profile' scene, they once again present the obvious lie that the guy only killed the second victim because he noticed her organ donor bracelet at the last possible moment. Except that's absolutely not what happened, and I don't know why they're pretending that it is.
They state that they have no idea how the killer figured out the other three victims were organ donors, but they're working on it. Maybe start by looking for 50-something white guys who work in medical administration roles in the Tallahassee area, drive gold sedans and probably have a gun license?
Meanwhile, the daughter gets a call saying that the lady's liver went to someone else - the daughter is philosophical, since plenty of people are sicker than her, such as her friend Keith! Is the killer going to murder Keith to bump her up the list?
Also, organ transplants are only useful if the dead person is the same tissue type as well as blood type - shouldn't the team have noticed that all of the victims have the same subtypes, and narrow their target list down to people and relatives of people with failing organs and similar subtypes? Unless the father doesn't know those things, and he's just randomly killing people in the hopes that they get lucky.
Yeah, in the very next scene, the dad murders Keith to move his daughter up the list. How he found out where Keith was going to be is a mystery to me, since he catches him walking across a completely empty park in broad daylight.
For those keeping track, this is the third person he's gunned down in broad daylight today. How is this happening?
Quick cut-in as Joe calls Penelope to ask her to track down the platoon for the funeral. Although they cut off the scene before he actually asks her, as if it's supposed to be a surprise that that's what he's doing? Weird.
The show tries to pretend that it would be super-easy to find targets who are organ donors, since any cashier could see a mark on a driver's license. Except that almost zero businesses require you to show ID. Then Reid says that anyone with even 'basic computer skills' could get into the organ donor database, which is just an obvious lie. The organ donor list is covered under medical privacy laws, and has to be just as secure as any other record.
Love then says something super-confusing-
What is that even supposed to mean? "They would know friends, family" - of whom? For what reason? Are you suggesting that the friends and family of people who work at the organ center have access to donor lists?
This is madness. I really hope that the show isn't trying to get away with this, and is actually going to give us a reason that the guy was able to target donors.
Then Love and Reid get called out to the latest crime scene! Which they somehow know is involved, despite the fact that there wasn't a 911 call, no one saw the shooting, and there hasn't been time to match the bullets to the previous victims.
Hey, remember when that guy who was killing people and leaving them on the beach killed a woman with a completely different MO, but the team still showed up at the crime scene, even though there was no way to know that the crimes were connected? And how the producers noticed the problem, felt shame, and then looped in some nonsense about 'matching the knife blade' to justify them showing up?
Yeah, the producers don't feel shame any more. Or perhaps they didn't even notice their mistake. Sloth or incompetence, take your pick, in either case, there's no reason the team should be at this crime scene!
The shocking thing is that this is such an easy fix. All you have to do is loop in a line of dialogue about someone hearing the gunshots, seeing a guy who matches the description of the killer run away from the crime scene, get into a gold sedan, and speed away. There - 1-2 lines of looped dialogue and this scene isn't complete gibberish.
Finding out that the victim was high on the list of people desperate for organs lets the team figure out that the killer is trying to get an organ for someone! Which is the theory they should have been operating on already, since it's crazy to imagine that a guy would be going around committing super-high-risk murders in rapid succession just to get more organs out there generally.
The killer gets home and finds his daughter on the floor of the house! She's suffering liver failure! Hey, what do you want to bet the episode ends with the guy killing himself so that his daughter can get his liver?
No, that's too perfect. Especially since if they were a match, he could have already donated half of his liver to his daughter, and it would have grown back into a full liver for each of them.
The team notices that the blood types of all of the victims were varied, meaning that the person they're looking for must have AB+ blood, which is true, but doesn't take into account tissue matching, the far more relevant issue. Okay, at least they mentioned the living donor thing, which allows them to narrow down the list of suspects who tried and failed to donate half a liver.
They then point out that the recipient list is even more highly-guarded than the donor list, so the killer must have known Keith personally to be able to murder him. I still maintain that there's no way he could have gotten ahold of the donor list, but whatever.
Oh, and at the hospital the killer is told that his daughter has - at most - weeks left to live.
In LA, Joe's daughter comes to visit him and help with the funeral stuff! There's some nice chatting about his life, and it's all touching, but it's not like that's what we're here for. The scene ends weirdly, proving that there are no good writers on Criminal Minds. Joe offers to take his daughter to an eatery where they only play Tony Bennett. She claims not to know anything about him. Somehow, Joe's next line isn't "You live in San Francisco".
Every part of this show is inept.
In the police station, Greg suggests they refocus on how the guy found his victims. Derek makes an exclamation that earns him tonight's Prentiss Award!
What do these writers think shopping is like? When Donald Trump said that you have to show ID to buy cereal, was he basing it on dim memories of this episode of television? Here's the number of times I've had to show my driver's license to buy something in the past year: 0. Zero times. As long as you look old enough to buy booze and cigarettes, you will never have to show someone your driver's license in a store.
Renting a van? Sure. Buying bullets? Probably, but maybe not in Florida. But every store? Good god no.
Greg notices something useful - one victim just recently got a temp license, and another just moved in from out-of-state. Could the killer work at the DMV?
I mean, this is something Garcia could have been checking twelve hours ago - it was only your stubborn insistence that 'basically anyone could have this info' - when that's obviously idiotic - that kept you from finding this guy right away.
They immediately find the killer, just as he's finding his next potential victim - will she be saved in time? Of course, there's just eight minutes left in the episode.
Oh, and he might get to give the liver to his daughter after all, since he was rejected for living donation because of high blood pressure. Which doesn't matter if you kill yourself.
The team drives up and asks him not to kill the lady, since she's also a mother. Which the team definitely doesn't know! They're probably just lying to get him to surrender, which is a nice choice. Anyhoo, as predicted, he shoots himself so that his daughter will get the liver! Although the show tries to pretend he shot the lady for a second, because they think we're idiots!
I feel like changing diet, getting exercise, and taking steps to lower your blood pressure would be a better move than serial killing, but what do I know?
THE END
Except for the funeral, which Joe set up. There's an honor guard and the old platoon, so it's sweet!
1 - Was profiling in any way helpful in solving the crime?
Kind of! I mean, guessing that it was about organ donation helped them figure it out, but then again, their weird assumption that it would be hard to track down the killer by access to info actually made it take longer to catch him!
2 - Could the crime have been solved just as easily using conventional police methods given the known facts of the case?
The guy kept committing crimes in broad daylight, in no way disguised, driving his own personal vehicle. There's no way on earth that he shouldn't have been caught right away.
So, on a scale of 1 (Dirty Harry) to 10 (Tony Hill), How Useful Was Profiling in Solving the Crime?
2/10 - How brutal would it have been if the dad's liver had gone to someone else? I'm sure he had a living will saying that his daughter gets his liver in case of an accident, but it would have been at least a little darkly humorous.
Actually, they missed a great opportunity for a truly heart-wrenching moment, with the killer asking the team if they're the FBI, then making a verbal living will/dying request that his liver go to his daughter. It would have been wrenching and beautiful, but the show didn't do it so that they could have a stupid fake-out about the woman he grabbed.
You're terrible, Criminal Minds.
One last time - it's ridiculous that the killer wouldn't have been caught so quickly. Once they figure out it's about organ donation, all they have to do is get a list of everyone who works at the organ centers, DMV, and hospitals, and check the list against 50-something white guy with dark skin and black hair, who drives a gold sedan and either needs an organ or knows someone who does.
Also, they know how tall he is, because they have video footage of him.
Hey, I wonder if the killer was another actor Joe Mantegna knew? I mean, they're the same age and both Italian guys who've been in Hollywood forever... let me check... Well, there's nothing easily googleable that connects them, so who knows?
The episode opens with a man and a woman sparring in a gym! Could this be a return to Forrest Whitaker's hideout from Suspect Behaviour? And we'll finally discover what happened after the end of the cliffhanger? Of course not! That would require anyone who worked on the show to care about anything that happened when Bernero was running the place.
During the sparring, the woman has some flashbacks to being tortured, and it's only at this moment that I realize that it's JJ, who's PTSDing about the events of 200!
The team assembles to get the case and worry about JJ's wrapped-up knuckles! There's a dead body they pulled out of the water next to Hoover Dam - is that Lake Mead? I feel like that might be Lake Mead.
Derek wins an early Prentiss Award when he asks this question about the frozen-solid corpse-
Okay, so, first off, you heard that the corpse was frozen solid, right? And since the water it was in wasn't frozen, then by definition, it can't have been the water that froze her. More importantly, though - this person was killed, wrapped in plastic, weighed down, and dropped in a lake. It makes little to no sense to even be open to the possibility that the freezing was unrelated to the rest of the crime.
Love almost wins another, when she announces that 'hitmen usually leave evidence of an efficient kill'. What on earth is that even supposed to mean? Most hitmen just shoot people. That's by far the most popular way for hitmen to commit murder. What is she even talking about?
JJ then notices that the dead woman has an electrical burn on her chest - which somehow everyone else missed, despite the fact that it's a prominent red mark where the rest of her is white. They immediately jump to the conclusion that the victim was killed by freezing them to death, and then the killer tried to prolong the torture by shocking them back awake over and over again.
There hasn't even been an autopsy yet. These are strange conclusions to be jumping to. The killer could have poisoned or electrocuted the woman and then frozen the body later. This theoretical MO is based on little to no evidence, and just reinforces how sloppy these people are at their jobs.
Over in what we have to assume is the killer's town, a man waits at a bus stop - but when the bus arrives, he doesn't get on. Is he waiting until a person gets off alone in the middle of the night in the hopes of targeting them for murder? Or is something less sinister going on here?
Why am I even asking that? This is Criminal Minds!
Wow, it's something far stranger! A guy in a van drives up, puts a bag over the guy's head, zipties his wrists together, and then throws him in the back of the van! The strange part? It's all consensual! It's part of some kind of initiation, where the man has signed away his freedom, and he has to go through the freezing torture to advance to 'level 2'! We watch him being moved into a walk-in freezer, then get a reverse angle which suggests the freezer is in some kind of private residence, then the door shuts and we're off to the credits!
We open with a car driving on a dark road as gospel music plays! The guy driving the car has a rosary hanging from the rear-view mirror, so it looks like we're in for some religious mania! Or maybe demons are back? We haven't heard from demons in a good long while. I guess that Halloween episode that Gubler directed? You know, with Beaver?
The guy pulls the car into an empty field, then wakes a confused woman in the back seat. She's not sure what's going on, so the guy explains that she was in an accident. She asks about 'Andy', and is told that he didn't make it. He then gets some road flares and gasoline from the trunk and douses the car with it. The woman is not inside for this, which is kind of a departure for the show!
In the nitpickiest thing I've pointed out in a while, they light the guy with red from the tail-lights when he opens up the trunk-
But we saw him turn off the car, so there shouldn't be any light. Seriously, editor - just cut out the shot of the car being turned off, and you don't have this problem.
Anyhoo, the car burns, the guy drags the woman away, and we cut to 12 Hours Earlier, where Greg and Joe are talking about the fact that Greg's girlfriend moved to Hong Kong for a job, and they broke up months ago. Weird to do the '12 Hours Earlier' and cut to something completely unrelated, but I'm guessing that they're just seconds away from being told about the events that will lead inexorably to the car fire.
Garcia presents the case - a security guard was stabbed to death, and the guard's gun was used to shoot a couple a few hours later! They describe the crime scenes as 'chaotic', and use the meaningless term 'disorganized' to describe the killer, despite the 'organized/disorganized' framework having been discredited and abandoned like 20 years ago.
Then we get some weird nonsense from the characters - could the fact that the crime scenes were chaotic mean that the killer is under time pressure? Um... no? Do you think that killers frequently trash houses while killing people, and then carefully clean them up, but this guy just didn't have time to do that? I know that happened last week, but you pointed out how strange it was in that case.
They also suggest that the 'lack of forced entry' suggests that the killer might have known his victims. Which always seems like such a stretch to me. It's like the characters have no idea how easy it is to get someone to open a door just by knocking on it - then you point a gun at someone, and step inside. Look - you just got into the house with no forced entry! You'd think they would have clued into this by now, seeing as things like that happen literally all the time on the show.
Oh, and here's a fun note - these murders happened just four hours ago, and the team is already on the case! Why would the local cops throw in the towel so quickly? There's no serial element to this crime yet, the victims weren't prominent, and state lines haven't been crossed. Why has Garcia even heard about this crime yet, when four hours in, the local cops should still be doing preliminary interviews?
Now it's time to check on the killer, who's washing blood off of his hands in the desert. Huh - how'd he manage to get blood all over his hands when shooting people? Or was it still there from the stabbing eight hours earlier? If so, this is one messy dude.
The killer motions for another guy - presumably Andy - to come out of the bushes. Andy expresses a desire to help the killer, and reminds him that he didn't have to kill the guard or the couple. He even suggests that they get food and water for Rebecca, the girl in the trunk. Andy is super-helpful! Is he this guy's other personality, and it's a twist that the other personality is a helpful dude trying to stop murders, rather than the normal version, where the hallucination is trying to get people to kill?
I'm probably reading too much into how calm and helpful the guy is when dealing with a blood-soaked maniac.
We open with a woman closing up a shop while complaining about a cheapskate! Tipping just 5 dollars on a hundred? Who does that? I don't know exactly how much they should have tipped, though, since I have no idea what kind of business the woman is running. It's not a restaurant, because she said the line 'a hundred dollar service', and there's nothing in the location to suggest any particular service industry. No foot baths, massage tables, hairdresser's chairs and mirrors. No help at all, show.
It was probably a restaurant in the script, but the location fell through at the last minute, and they were like "it's fine, we'll change the word 'meal' to 'service', no one will notice".
The lady hears something at the front of the shop, and goes to investigate - but hangs up on her friend first! Because that's the natural inclination of everyone: the moment you hear something scary in the dark building you're locked inside, hang up the phone so you can investigate it completely alone.
Okay, update, there's a hair dryer in the back so it's a salon! Also, the woman gets stabbed by someone in black, gloves and all. Giallo adventure, here we come!
The next day (I'm guessing), David is driving to work, while a woman in the car behind him stares intently at the back of his head. But why, and for what reason?
Ooh, she's got a file with his name on it on her passenger seat - she's trying to psyche herself up to talk to him about something. The file number on it has 11 digits, with both letters and numbers! I have no idea if that's somehow significant. David stops at a coffee shop, where the clock lets us know that it's 7:53 - a fact belied by how bright everything is outside the window. This episode is set in December after all, which means that sunrise was only half an hour ago.
David picks up two coffees, one for him, and one for his tail! That's right, he was on to her the whole time! Oh David, you scamp. It seems this is the second day he's been followed by her, so he assumes that she's a private detective. Which makes him a terrible profiler, because she's super-flustered. Then he claims that 'most people' would ask for the coffee back at the end of the interaction, but since he's a gentleman, she can keep it.
Um, David, 'most people' wouldn't spend five dollars on a bit of prop comedy, but of the small subset of people who would, I sincerely doubt any but the tiniest fraction of them would ask for the coffee back once the bit is over. What were you going to do, bring two cups of coffee back to your car, and then carry them both up to the office? Weak, David.
Time for the briefing - three victims, and the lady was, in fact, killed last night, and she's the third in a series. Interestingly, the first two were men, killed in their homes, so this is such a huge departure that I'm guessing only weapon similarities tied them together. Or there's an obvious signature we haven't heard about yet.
The first victim worked in a hardware store, the second in a garage - Reid's first thought is to check 'appointment logs', which suggests that he's never been inside a hardware store. You want to check the credit cards of everyone who spent money at those places, and check for security footage.
There's a little more chatting about the M.O. - the killer strangely stabs the victims, takes off their clothes, and then puts them in fresh ones and poses them in a chair. It's pretty strange, actually. Then they give the standard 'the timeline is accelerating' speech, which has to be crazy for the actors to try to say every week as if it's meaningful. This is literally every single person you chase, team. They're all spree killers.
Time for a check in with a random suburban family! They're eating breakfast, and the kids are concerned about a personality shift in their mother - the dad tries to say she's working through some stuff, but going jogging twice a day is pretty odd. They mention that she's been through a lot - is it PTSD? A brain injury that's turned her into a killer? The mom returns and runs straight to a bathroom with her bag - which is kind of an odd thing to bring jogging. Are her weapons and extra clothes inside? Is she the killer?!?
Yes, she is! At least that's what the show is communicating by having her wearing blood-soaked clothes under her running togs, and pulling a bloody kitchen knife out from her bag. Did she not come home last night, and the father didn't notice/is covering for her, or did she just head out and stab someone else?
We open on a trial, which might be a first for the show! Wait, did the Eric Roberts episode of Suspect Behaviour start with a trial? Hmm... something to check. A DA is giving his closing summation in the trial of a young gang member - you can tell he's scum because he has a barbed wire tattoo on his neck.
The defense attorney then pops up to give the most bizarre closing argument I've maybe ever seen. He admits that his client his guilty, then tells a story about his sad, abusive childhood, and implies that the gang was the only place he could find any kind of acceptance. He begs them to only give the kid community service and probation.
It's a nice idea, but why is he arguing this to the jury? They're not in charge of sentencing in any way, shape, or form. If he wasn't going to put on a defense, why have a trial at all? DAs are famously willing to deal with you so long as you plead guilty - that's why 95% of everyone does. And if you force them to go to trial, they'll recommend a harsher sentence due to being pissed about you wasting their time.
Shouldn't this scene be the guy arguing to the judge or DA for leniency in sentencing? The only possible reason to say this stuff to a jury is to attempt to make them feel so bad for your client that they'll find him not guilty. It's called jury nullification, and defense attorneys are specifically not supposed to argue it.
So, let's see how this goes - does the defense attorney get him off, leading to a series of murders? That seems like a weirdly reactionary turn for even this show to take, so probably not.
Oh, and because the show is getting everything about trials wrong, the judge then sends the jury away without giving them instructions of any kind.
Nope, there's something very different going on! That night, the defense attorney is buying some flowers at a store, and he comes out to see his car being smashed up by a goon with a bat. He does the smart thing, calling the cops, then immediately does the dumb thing, and chases the goon into an alley when he runs away. Seriously, why would you do that? What's the plan, exactly? Chase a guy through shadowy streets, updating the cops as you go, but making it far more likely that the guy with the bat will beat you to death? Is this guy an idiot?
He doesn't get immediately beaten to death, though - a second goon puts a bag over his head and clubs him into submission.
Then it's over to the team, where we get some much-needed exposition! The victim was currently a defense attorney, but had previously been a DA, and he'd put a huge number of high-profile mobsters and other criminals in jail! Wait, if he knew that he's the kind of person who might be the target of a violent mobster at any given moment, that makes it even less likely that he'd chase a guy into an alley. Come on, show.
Also, when Love enters the office, she's late because she had stuff to do - one part I understand, her adopted daughter Maggie needed to be dropped at a friend's, but she also says that 'Chris' had a double shift, and I have no idea who that is. I really should have paid more attention in the first episode when they were introducing her character, but my only takeaway was 'gosh, I hope her teenaged daughter isn't the target of that snuff ring'.
Anyhoo, the lawyer wakes in a garbage pit. The two young goons who abducted him announce that he can't leave (or possibly be killed) until he's confessed to his crimes. He claims to not know what they're talking about, but I guess we'll see!
*NOTE* It was pointed out to me that the first J in the name JJ stands for Jennifer, so my habit of referring to the actress Jennifer Love Hewitt by her first time is creating some confusion. I apologize, and from here on out will refer to that character as Love. Hopefully that will clear things up.
It's Christmastime in a Bethesda mall! A couple of zany modern teens are shopping for a ski trip during the holidays! The teen girl takes salacious photos of herself because of her obsession with being instafamous, and meanwhile they're being watched by a creepy shop worker who's placed a camera in the dressing room!
The shop worker approaches them outside the store, claiming to be a fan of hers from online! He tells her that she retweeted something of his, and it was the high point of his year! They take a photo together, and it's just so sad! Then the teens walk off to continue being low-grade terrible.
Over at a local hospital, Derek goes to visit his girlfriend, the doctor! It seems that they have a planned vacation the next day, and she doesn't believe they're actually leaving, because he cancels things literally all the time. Will he cancel this trip as well, because of a new murder?
Probably, because we then cut to the amateur model in her nice house, complaining about her terrible parents! The killer smashes her against a mirror, then slashes her throat with a shard of the glass! Get it, because she was self-obsessed! Then he forces her to take a death-selfie! Dealfie? Which he uploads to social media!
The next morning, they do a breakdown of the case - which includes the claim that the killer stabbed her before slitting her throat, which we absolutely didn't see happen, and there's no sign of it on her dead body.
The team wonders why they're being called in, since there's no reason to believe that this is a serial crime! The twist: When he posted the snuff pic, he tagged it-
#Selfie? That's the best you can do? If you want people to fear you, where's the unique branding? If you tag it #selfie you've just ensured that no one will ever see it, since it'll be immediately lost in a sea of posts with that tag. How about #SelfieKilla, #Deathfie, #Slashfie, #Killfie - why do I need to do this work for you, killer? And by extension, writers of Criminal Minds? This is stuff you should be figuring out on your own!
Hell, if you can't come up with anything, just tag it #fearme - it was right there in front of you!
The show then offers a quick montage of businessmen and women, school classes, even grandparents with grandkids all taking selfies - any one of them could be the next victim! But it'll probably be a pretty white girl, just saying.
CR
The team goes over some of the details of the victim's life - she had hundreds of thousands of followers, the photo of her murder has be seen by millions of people, you know, the usual moral panic stuff. For some reason, Derek is absent from the round table, even though he was there before the opening credits. Did he just up and walk off somewhere in the middle of the briefing? Weird.
Just as they're wrapping up, Garcia hilariously announces that 'the media has gotten ahold of the case'. Greg is worried, because attention is what the killer craves, and the press covering it is only going to egg him on.
Um... the media already had ahold of the case. A million people have seen his post in the last twelve hours. That's why he uploaded it to social MEDIA. Do you think the killer cares if the local DC news does a story about his murder? He wants online fame and he already has it.
Confusing matters even further, the show zooms in on the reporter covering the story, and then the team drives into frame, interrupting her shot. If just Derek got out of the car, this would have been a great transition, and it would have explained where he was in the previous scene - Greg had sent him out to interface with the local PD. But when the SUV doors open Reid gets out - and he was in the previous scene where the report started!
So unless Reid got from the fourth floor of an office building in Quantico to the Bethesda residential suburbs in 30 seconds, this is a giant continuity error, caused by the show's awful attempts to be clever.
It turns out that the victim did a great job of setting herself up to be murdered - she posted her home location online all the time, and talked in her posts that night about her parents being out. Sometimes we bring heartache on ourselves.
This isn't relevant to the show, just a technical question - do mirrors still shatter, letting pieces of glass fall everywhere when they break, like a window? I've seen two mirrors break in the last few years, and both times they just cracked and webbed - in both cases the glass was securely glued to the backing. It left me with the impression that this was how most mirrors are made nowadays - but is that true, or did I just see two unusually well-made mirrors break?
Over at the autopsy, Love and Joe get into some nonsense about what the weapon means for the killer. If he had an elaborate plan to kill his victim, why the use of an on-site weapon? Could he have planned to use something else, and then when she stood in front of a mirror as he walked into the room, the dramatic opportunities just proved irresistible?
Love wins the night's Prentiss Award during the scene-
First off, the whole 'organized/disorganized' concept has largely been discarded as functionally useless when talking about serial killers. Secondly, I don't know that this really reads as 'impulsive' or 'immature'. Think about it - let's say you were planning to kill someone because you hated their cooking, and so you sneaked into their house with a carving knife, ready to do the deed. But then you found them in the kitchen, busy cleaning their oven, with no idea you were there.
Wouldn't you clonk them over the head, stuff them into the oven, and turn it on, since that so perfectly fits your motive? Whatever the guy had planned when he walked into the house, once he saw the opportunity for narcissism-themed murder, how could he not take it, if only for poetic irony's sake? I feel like they think they're getting way too much information out of the writer's contrivance. They're like three observations away from realizing that they're fictional characters.
"That's when they usually make mistakes." He left no evidence at the crime scene, Joe. Shut up, Joe.
They go to talk to the store employee from the day before, who was somehow stupid enough to post the photo that he illegally took in the dressing room. The guy is so terminally stupid that he can't possibly be the killer - although, both he and the killer bragged about crimes they committed online, so who knows?
Wouldn't her friend telling the team about the creepy guy at the mall be a way more logical route to this interview than the guy publicly committing a crime for all the world to see under his own name?
They quickly arrest the guy, and Greg threatens him with being charged if he doesn't give them a lead. Charge him anyway, he's taking nudie photos of women in changing rooms. He lets them know that the victim was with a 'weirdo', which I guess is code for 'stereotypically gay', which is how the actor is playing it?
Then it's over to JJ's interview with the weirdo, and it's not clear whether he contacted the police because his friend got murdered right after he hung up the phone! If this were a Scream movie, then he would be the killer, and he would have been in the house with her while they were on the phone, which is how he'd know the perfect moment to attack. This isn't a Scream movie, though, so he's probably in the clear.
The friend is confronted with the fact that he took down all of his selfies right after hearing about the murder, but before he can explain why he did that, we see the reason in action! A group of three teens is leaving a mall, and one of them is nervous, because he thinks the killer is after him. Apparently a story has started that if you take a selfie in front of a mirror and it looks like there's a reflection of a face in the mirror, then you'll be the next to die. Here's the face in question-
I feel like that's kind of a stretch but I'm not one to police urban legends, so let's move on to a possible suspect! They see a grown-ass man across the street who they recognize as another instagram celebrity, and note that he and the last victim had collaborated on a video of some kind! What if he's the killer? Or possibly the next victim!
Then another teen says not to worry about the reflection, because he has one too-
Is this a thing I'm not familiar about with cell phones? That they're forever making it look like faces appear in reflections? Or is the killer making the photo-edits to taunt his victims? Is it notable that the third friend doesn't have one? Could he be the killer?
Okay, the next scene reveals that yes, it's the killer, putting images of Mark Twain into photos. Which is weird. I know quite a bit about Twain, but I can't think of a quote, story, or aphorism of his that would fit this situation. I'm sure I'm forgetting something obvious, though, and will kick myself later.
The team has dinner at work, chatting about the case and the killer's possible motivations. Did he know the first victim? Who among the people with the doctored photos are connected to her? I mean, there's that guy we met in the last scene who collaborated with her on something, that could be a lead. Although I'm sure she was busy enough that the team won't get to it right away.
Also, Garcia proves quite inept this week, as she's unable to track down who's been hacking into people's insta accounts and posting the Twain photos. She says it's super-easy to get around a password, but I don't know that that's true - like, if the killer worked for instagram, sure, but this guy is getting into dozens of random people's accounts - can they all really have weak passwords, or be that vulnerable to phishing attacks? I feel like the show wants to get away with saying 'he just is' getting into people's accounts, but that's not how the internet works. Unless there's a data breach, you have to screw up your own security to let people get your password, and whatever method he's using, Garcia should have a line on it. Or at least an idea.
Oh, and Derek is at the dinner meeting, which means he's missed his vacation with his girlfriend. The show does not mention this or acknowledge that it's happening. No Derek making a text, getting on a phone call, or really doing anything but hanging out with the team, chatting about murder. He really is a bad boyfriend, isn't he?
Then, the instafamous guy from the afternoon drives up to the mall and gets murdered in an absolutely preposterous way. Let's watch it together!
VID2 (18:40)
So, what happened there was that the killer walked up behind the guy and shot a single nail from a nailgun through the back of his neck, killing him instantly. Then, the editor and the sound editor went nuts and tried to make it seem like he was shot 120 times with the nail gun. This attempt was undercut by the closeup we get of the single red mark on the back of the guy's neck, and the single, completely bloodless nail that winds up protruding from his throat.
So, I guess one of the three teens from the earlier scene is the killer? Like, the murderer was waiting for this guy to arrive, and unless he was constantly posting about all of his movement plans, they're the only three people in a position to have heard him tell his girlfriend that he would be waiting to pick her up at 10PM. I don't know which of the three it is - although the guy who didn't get a Twain photo would be the most obvious choice - but it seems like it has to be one of them, right?
Love and Derek arrive at the new crime scene, and discover that the local cops have no leads! They do point out that plenty of people knew the guy dropped off and picked up his girlfriend at the mall, so there's a slight possibility I went off the rails there in the last paragraph. Also, it's the same mall where the first victim was shopping the day she was murdered! So the killer is maybe there a lot, and focused on the two of them because they frequented the mall as well?
Oh, and the killer has finally branded himself as #mirrorman, which is kind of weak, since only one of his two crimes has notably involved a mirror. I mean, yes, the newest victim was looking at himself in a rear-view mirror when he was killed, but nobody knows that, and the killer made no effort to involve the mirror in any way in the murder or body positioning, either before or after the killing. Garcia is surprised by the news and the new name, which is a little strange, since literally two scenes ago she was talking about how hard it was to track down the guy originating the Twain mirror meme - how could she have done all that work without realizing that the kids were all calling the creepypasta 'mirrorman'?
Then they talk about how strange it is that the killer switched weapons. The detective is actually thick enough to ask why he would do such a thing. Um... because there wasn't a full-length mirror around to slam the guy's face into? Moron.
On the upside, right after I typed that line in and restarted the video, Love pointed out exactly what I'd said! Thanks, Love!
Although she still manages to botch the interpretation, making it seem like he just couldn't pass up the ironic twist of using the mirror as a weapon. Um... we know that, Love, that's what you and Joe were talking about in the morgue scene, remember?
Okay, my bad - apparently the thousand extra nail shots were the killer making a # logo on the back of the seat, and the guy was moving around because the nails were shaking the chair. Hilariously, the show acts like Derek is 'discovering' the nail hashtag logo on the chair, as if that wouldn't be the second thing the first responder noticed, right after the corpse. It's a giant hashtag on the back of the car seat. It's unmissable.
Then they're like 'we're ready to give the profile', as if the nail hashtag logo gave them a piece of information they didn't already have based on literally every other thing the killer has done.
Hey, if he brought the nailgun with him the night before, why didn't he put a hashtag logo on the wall? Did he just now think of this? That seems weird, since nailguns are super-awkward murder weapons, and must be pretty easy to trace, since this kind of powder-loaded nail gun is essentially a .22 caliber pistol that fires nails instead of lead bullets. It seems like the only reason to bring the nail gun would be for this kind of artistic statement.
Before we move on to the profile, let's take a moment to point out how ridiculous it is to try to kill someone at 10PM in a mall parking lot with a super-loud nail gun. There's no sound cover, there's definitely lots of people around since the mall is just closing, I can't imagine you not getting caught for this. Also, you know, malls have security cameras EVERYWHERE.
They profile the killer as a 'narcissitic sadist' who is 'blitzing' with 'weapons of opportunity'. Most of that is fine, but how is the nail gun a weapon of opportunity? Was a fully-loaded nail gun just lying the in the back seat of the car? Because if he brought it with him to the crime scene then it's the literal opposite of a weapon of opportunity. He was looking for an opportunity to use the weapon.
They talk a little about Slenderman and poisoned Halloween candy, cases of people being taken in by urban legends and trying to make them real. Except they're operating under the theory that the guy doing the killing is the one creating the legend, so it's more about self-mythologizing than it is legend-tripping.
While the team is busy theorizing about the killer's motives, the killer is watching people taunt him online, daring him to try and kill them. Naturally the video he fixates on is the lead guy from the trio of teens in the earlier scene, and this so angers the killer that he smashes his monitor. So maybe it is one of his two friends? Either that, or the mirror man killer has really, really, really thin skin.
For some reason, Garcia is working out of Derek's office, trying to use the mirror man stories online to find a clue about who the killer is. I say 'for some reason', it's so Garcia can overhear his awkward conversation with the doctor, who he's finally talking to a full 24 hours after they were supposed to go on vacation. She says he needs to 'make time', but I say 'just go'. I mean, you're a team of five people with interchangeable opinions and skillsets, and one man who sometimes draws circles on maps. If Derek didn't show up for work for two weeks, would anyone even notice?
I mean, other than the amount of inappropriately sexual workplace banter in the FBI going down like 20%.
Penelope is frustrated because she can't figure out which #mirrorman story is the 'right' one. I don't know, Penelope, maybe check into which one was posted first? Even if the guy didn't actually write the absolute first one, he probably became quickly obsessed with it, and would likely have written about it online. Also, not for nothing, maybe check into who received the earliest mirrorman photos? Since these people frequently first target people in their lives?
Derek has another idea - just use demographics, like they always do. Get a list of every man who works in the mall, cut out all the people who were working that night, cut out all the people outside of their generous age range, then focus on anyone who displayed unusual online interest in the murders. Penelope acts like he's unusually good at his job for thinking of this, but this kind of demographic narrowing is literally all that profling is for, so it's kind of crazy that they didn't start on it right away.
Then it's over to the jerk teen's house, who learns to regret mocking mirror man, because he's assaulted as he comes home, and quickly nailed to death! There's a weird moment in the scene when he rushes for the home alarm system to push the panic button, but is knocked to the ground before he can reach it! Should that matter, though? Won't the cops be alerted in a few seconds anyway, since he didn't disarm the system after entering the house?
Things get a little dumb again as Reid announces that the unsub 'has found his weapon of choice' because he used the nail gun. Um... no, Reid, this confirms the theory that the nail gun was ALWAYS the weapon of choice, and he probably brought it to the first crime scene, but found a preferable weapon of opportunity while he was there. How do they manage to always get the small details so completely wrong?
The body is an absolute mess - a severe amount of overkill totally different from the previous victims. Why would the killer be so mad at him? Garcia immediately finds the video where the dead guy taunted mirrorman, which is an especially stupid thing to have done when you live in the same neighbourhood where a serial killer is murdering young hot instacelebs.
Sometimes we bring hardships on ourselves.
The team decides to lower their age estimate because the killer has thrown a defensive tantrum. Here's a more important question - why did you ever have a 30s-40s age estimate? This is a killer obsessed with instagram, which tends to skew considerably younger than that. The entire basis of their age guess was 'the killer has extensively planned his crimes', which doesn't seem like enough to make that kind of a restriction.
Garcia lowers the age guess based on the team's new insight - although she really shouldn't have used the 30s-40s guess in the first place - and it turns out there's just one guy who works in the mall and is talking about the killings online but doesn't have an alibi for either crime! And it's this guy!
Is that one of the three friends from earlier? I have such a bad time remembering faces that I have no idea, and won't go back to check! In a cute nod to a former guest star on the show, he goes to 'Sunnydale High', has a juvenile record, and works in a hardware store, from which he could have stolen the nail gun! The team decides to go looking for him - in real life, they'd just be looking for an interview (with his parents in the room, if he's under 18), so let's see if they do that, or go kicking down his door while wearing body armour.
Obviously it's the second, because they're hugely unprofessional. They find the guy in his bedroom, rather than the crime dungeon that the killer is using, so I guess this isn't their guy. JJ does spend a while looking at the guy's various fanart of mirrorman, really playing up the Slenderman connection.
In the interview with Derek, he reveals that he was the creator of mirrorman, who was supposed to be a boogeyman for the instageneration - but he claims not to have been involved in sending the doctored photos! So who put them together?
JJ and Love find the poem from earlier in the episode, the one with a note written in different handwriting on the margins! Could the person offering the notes on the early mirrorman legend material be the killer they're looking for? More importantly, did they need evidence to inspire this line of questioning? Couldn't they have just asked the author to name all of the people he personally knows to be super-obsessed with mirrorman?
They ask the guy who's the craziest person to know about mirrorman, and he responds that there's a 15-year-old whose parents were killed in a car crash the previous year who is absolutely bonkers for the thing. The team rushes out to find the guy, and it turns out not to have been one of the people from the earlier scene! Which on one level, yay for surprising me, but on another level, it really does stretch believability that some random kid would be able to lie in wait for that second victim. If it was one of the people overhearing it, fine, but this guy's whereabouts being so common that you could lie in wait for him in a parking garage is just preposterous.
They roll up to the mall just as the kid is arriving, and blare their sirens, alerting him to their presence and giving him time to grab a hostage and put a nail gun to her throat! Then, somehow, a news van shows up and starts filming the standoff, giving him the chance to die in a dramatic fashion! So he shoots the woman in the neck and gets shot by the team!
How did the news know to be there? It's not like they knew where the kid was, they just sent cars to his house, school, and the mall, and happened to find him there. Even if someone told the newscasters the kid's identity and likely location, it's hard to believe that they'd be able to scramble vans in the time it took the team to get to the mall.
In the next scene they're in an ambulance with the killer and his victim, both of whom were shot in the neck. Derek phones up his girlfriend and asks her for a favor. Presumably because she's the best trauma surgeon in the ER, he wants to make sure she gets assigned to the victim rather than the killer, since it's important that the woman lives, but who really cares about the kid one way or the other.
Eventually Derek's girlfriend shows up, and it turns out both of them are going to be fine! So... yay?
The creator of mirrorman goes in to check on the killer, who is quite insane. He's not concerned about prison, he's just psyched to be famous! So he takes a photo of himself and uploads it to instagram, and that's that!
Wouldn't it have been nice if Derek had killed that kid?
THE END
Derek then picks up his girlfriend and brings her to the house that he's restored for them to live together in! Which is a sweet way of proposing.
Wait, no, he's not proposing, he literally just wants them to move in together. You're both professionals in your late 30s. Just get married, people.
1 - Was profiling in any way helpful in solving the crime?
Barely at all. Their lame attempts at profiling delayed what should have been the real focus of their investigation - who the creator of mirrorman was.
2 - Could the crime have been solved just as easily using conventional police methods given the known facts of the case?
The crimes are themed around an urban legend that was created the previous year in Bethesda. Obviously you'd investigate who created it, and he'd just tell you who did it.
So, on a scale of 1 (Dirty Harry) to 10 (Tony Hill), How Useful Was Profiling in Solving the Crime?
1/10
Can we talk about how contrived the attempts to link this to profiling was this week? They proudly get into how good they are at narrowing down the suspect pool, but then they expect us not to notice that said narrowing found them a witness by pure luck? They needed to find a guy who worked at the mall, was teen-aged, had access to a nail gun, and didn't have an alibi for the time of the murders. But when they found one, he wasn't the killer, but knew who the killer was. What are the odds of that? What if the creator of mirrorman hadn't worked in a hardware store? Or hadn't been off on the nights of the murders? Would they just have never found the killer?
Again, wouldn't just tracking down the creator of mirrorman be easier to do? Also, why on earth did no one get into what was going on with the Mark Twain pics? Why did the killer pick that image?
I know that I previously chided them for going so old with their profile, but the 15-year-old killer seems a little preposterous. I mean, the killer had to be able to break into houses, have access to a nail gun, be a master at hacking into instagram accounts, have masterful stalking skills to figure out where people live, and be able to kill people without hesitation.
The episode opens - unexpectedly - with an adorable dog! A couple is taking a golden retriever out for a stroll in the woods, when things take a dark turn - the woman announces that she's going to tell the man's wife about their affair, perhaps to ensure that he leaves her? The man is not psyched about this - will he kill her, then make it look like a serial killing, giving the team an ABC Murders-style case to investigate?
That would be incredibly off-brand but also super-intriguing!
The answer, of course, is no - these characters are only important insofar as their dog discovers a dead guy next to a car with a cell phone stuck into his mouth. There 's blood on his shoulder, but other than that no obvious sign of what might have caused his death! Also, and this is in no way relevant, but man, does this guy have some well-shaped eyebrows.
Over at casa de JJ, there's some innocuous conversation between her and her mother about what exactly 'the cloud' is. Somehow, despite being a professional who works with computers every day, JJ says that data is transmitted 'wirelessly' to a server, which is just plain wrong. I mean, obviously her laptop is wirelessly transmitting to her home router, but after that the process is entirely wire-based. I think she's trying to describe the fact that files aren't stored locally, but on a remote hard drive, but she does a terrible job of explaining it.
That's not the point of the scene, though - what's going on here is that Henry - who's also there, FYI - sees a picture of JJ with her sister (the one who killed herself) and things get awkward quickly. Grandma wants to know why he's never heard of his long-dead aunt, and JJ responds that she and Jr. wanted to wait until Henry was old enough to grasp the concepts of life and death before talking about the suicide of a woman he'd never met. Which is actually a pretty solid position to take - great job, JJ!
Her mother goes a different way, however - equating JJ not telling a 5-year-old about suicide with the way she and her husband ignored their daughter's depression until she killed herself. This is a crazy comparison to make, of course, but before JJ can tell her mother to get stuffed, she gets a call to head into work in the middle of the night!
I'm so excited to find out what it is about this murder that necessitates bringing people in on their off hours - is the dead guy rich, famous, or do the writers just not care, and enjoy writing scenes where family drama is interrupted by pagers?
At Quantico, Penelope gives them a run-down of the case - the dead guy is a student at the local college, and the local cops are worried that this is part of an escalating war between students and townies! A month earlier a rich kid ran down a shopkeeper, then got away with it because of his connections. Soon after, a frat was firebombed! Is this new stabbing the next instance of the conflict?
Joe thinks there's something significant about the fact that the dead guy's car had its window smashed - why bother doing that if you've already stabbed a guy to death? Of course that assumes that the window was smashed after the guy was dead - isn't it equally as likely that the window was smashed to frighten the guy out of the car, after which the stabbing occurred?
No one seems focused on the cell phone stuffed in the mouth, which seems like a far more relevant piece of the signature than the smashed car.
And yeah, I was right - there's nothing time-sensitive about this case that would keep them from waiting until the morning to fly out.
Then, because every serial killer is a spree killer, we cut to another guy, drugged in the passenger seat of a car, as he's pulled out to the ground and has a cell phone stuffed into his mouth.
We can't guess much about the killer based on arms alone, other than the fact that they're white. I would suggest that it's probably a woman, however, a guess that revolves entirely around how loosely those work gloves are hanging off the killer's hands. Could easily be a small-boned man, though.
The killer stabs him a bunch with a set of pruning shears, then it's off to the credits!
The episode opens in a pumpkin patch where a Halloween-season carnival is being held! Which makes this the Halloween episode, which I'm guessing is - tragically - not being directed by Matt Gubler, because it's daytime and everything looks flat.
Point is, it's Halloween, so maybe the team finally battles a werewolf?
Suddenly a mother notices that her son is missing, but then finds him almost immediately! That's right, it was a reversal - the kid wasn't missing, he just found a corpse! Then, another twist! It's just a child in a skeleton costume, who starts screaming about being let out as he awakens! Halloween kidnapping, I guess?
Then it's over to Quantico, which is introduced with an establishing shot of the actual marine base, showing that hey, every now and then they're willing to put in the effort! Greg is rushing out of work on Halloween night - which, if this is the same day, it means that lady and her son waited way, way, way too long to buy a pumpkin - but where's he going in such a hurry? To a psychic shop run by a friend of Penelope's - this episode is getting stranger all the time!
Actually, it's just sweet - he's picking up his son's Halloween getup, which Penelope's friend got from a relative out in Hollywood! Man, this had better not be Halloween, because the sun obviously set a while before Greg left work, and since the sun sets around 6PM at that time of year, he would be egregiously late with the outfit.
Greg rushes home to show off the costume to his son and his dead wife's sister, who I guess is like a full-time nanny at this point? He's never home, is what I'm saying. What's the costume that was so hard to get? A kid-sized Darth Vader outfit, with light-up buttons and a voice changer and everything! Now that's what an incredible cultural force Star Wars is - Criminal Minds is on a rival network, and they're still plugging Disney!
Jack goes off to try the costume out, but Greg gets a call from Garcia, which means the kid is in for yet another disappointment. Seriously, it's not enough that his mother gets murdered, Greg's going to miss every single one of his milestones too, isn't he?
I'm hoping that the team can wrap this up in time for Greg to take the kid trick or treating, but given that it's the day before Halloween, and they haven't even traveled to the crime scene yet, that would require them wrapping the case up in like six hours, which would be quick, even for them.
Here's the case: the boy was abducted on Halloween the previous year - one day after another boy re-appeared after a year-long post-Halloween captivity! Wow, that was a convoluted sentence to write. That boy died, BTW, and the supposed killer - a notorious paedophile, is already in the slammer for the crime. So what's the connection to this new villain? Did they get the wrong guy? Was it a partner? An evil spirit who jumps bodies after being caught by the police?
Also, will San Diego cancel Halloween? When one kid was abducted on Halloween and dropped off a year later in terrible shape, you might not think there was necessarily anything to worry about, but when another kid was Halloween-nabbed the next day, and dropped off on Devil's Night a year later, it's impossible to avoid the connection. Seems like the safest thing to do would be to just postpone Halloween until they catch the guy, right?
Oh, in Criminal Minds stupidity news, Reid is surprised that the kid who turned up wasn't on the list of missing children in all of America that he has perfect recall of (sigh). Greg explains that the kid was a 'chronic runaway' who wasn't thought to be abducted. Except it's not a list of 'abducted' children, it's a list of missing children. So why wouldn't he be on it? Also, when he disappeared on Halloween night, wouldn't the cops have assumed it was the same guy from the previous case? I mean, they would have dismissed the idea a little while later when they caught the supposed kidnapper and found no evidence of the second boy, but I feel like there's no way that the second kid's name didn't come up in that investigation.
Over at the killer's hideout, a young man jumps into a hole, scrubs the place out with cleaners, leaves a water bottle and makeshift chamber pot, and locks the hole up! He's getting ready for the next victim!
But is this young man the real killer, or another one of his victims? Or both, in that he's carrying on the work of whoever grabbed him years ago? Only time will tell! After the credits, obviously.
On a highway in Atlanta, a guy does some comedy texting-and-driving, then gets just distracted enough to almost hit a guy wandering out in the middle of the road, grabbing at his head! The almost-manslaughterer stops his car and - rather than immediately call 911, runs across a busy highway to try and get the guy out of danger! Because they're called Good Samaritans, not Smart Samaritans.
So the guy, who's scratching at his skin, demanding that something get off him, wanders into traffic again and gets hit! Presumably fatally, but who knows?
Then it's over to Quantico, which is again introduced using a shot of Washington D.C., because it's as if the showrunners are teasing me with how little they care at this point.
You can't even say that Quantico is supposed to be off in the distance of the shot, because it's due south of Washington, and the view from the Capitol to the Washington Monument is facing due west.
Garcia introduces the case - the man was a reporter who disappeared a couple of days ago, and the local cops want FBI help determining why a person with no history of mental problems would suddenly go insane and throw himself into traffic! I don't know if that's a problem big enough to scramble the whole team, but maybe it's a slow week in serial killering?
My question is how did he get out into the highway? Did someone drop him off? Did he wander away from where he was being held? Inquiring minds want to know!
Then it's time for a super-disgusting interlude, as we see the presumptive killer watching a video of him interrogating the reporter, while at the same time he has a bizarre fantasy about catching a bug moving under his skin and sucking fluids out of it!
Ick! I guess that's what the reporter was talking about before his suicide!
The episode opens on a plane, which is
weirdly full of actors with speaking parts! Seriously, like six
different people get lines! It's amazing! Anyhow, the plane's wifi
goes out and it starts shaking like a leaf - will a killer cause a
plane crash this week, immediately jumping to the second-highest body
count of all of their quarries other than Frank?
The answer is yes! There's a plane
crash out in a field in Colorado! It's such an important case that
when JJ and Jennifer get a call from Penelope, they're told to head
straight to the plane, rather than into the office! Which is
something you'd think they would do more often, considering how
frequently they call people at 2AM with a case. It's nice to see them
belatedly smartening up, though.
So, why on earth would the team need to
work on this case? Aren't crashes the NTSB's bailiwick? Well, it
seems that someone on the ground thought they saw a streak of light
going towards the plane, which might have been a surface-to-air
missile, and the team is supposed to profile the mass-murderer!
Yeah, that's pretty tenuous. If someone
had immediately claimed credit for the attack, I'd see getting the
FBI and BSU involved immediately, but a witness seeing light? Such a
stretch. What are they going to do, stand in a field and check to see
if the light is still there?
Miraculously, one of the pilots has
survived the crash! So that gives the team someone to interview after
the credits! Again, that's the kind of thing that might have been of
interest to them, but they shouldn't have been called in until he
showed up.
The episode opens with a 'previously on' about the time Reid almost got killed in a hospital room and Garcia shot the guy who was going to kill him! Is it time for her to start PTSDing? Probably. I'm more interested in whether we're going to be checking in on the Matchmaker this week, or if they'll make us wait a few episodes.
The episode opens with a Green Mile situation, as a killer is being brought to the death chamber while a priest gives her the last rites! I say her, because of the way she's walking. It turns out Derek is there in the audience to watch the execution - but who is being strapped into the electric chair? Her head is hooded, so we have no idea! Then the audience starts chanting that they should just kill the guy already rather than, you know, strapping him into the chair so that his body doesn't flop around, and I realize that this must be a dream sequence, which is proven when the hood comes off and it's Penelope!
Yeah, PTSDing pretty hard. So Greg tells her to go take some vacation while Xander covers for her, but doesn't mention the pretty vital suggestion that she get some therapy. Although maybe she's already in mandatory therapy, so it's not worth mentioning. I mean, she killed a guy while getting a government paycheck, I don't know how you'd avoid therapy after that.
Okay, it turns out that she didn't kill the guy, just injured him. She's obsessed with Death Row because that's what the guy got sentenced to! It seems that after being arrested for attempted murder, he confessed to all the other murders he committed for the cop conspiracy, and now he's going to be executed!
It seems Penelope blames herself, and is super-guilty about being responsible for a man's death! A man she shot to save her friend's life, remember. Yup, she's been trying to get him off death row, and now she's going to go to Texas to apologize to the guy in person for getting him killed.
Yes, this is a storyline about Garcia feeling guilty about a paid assassin being sentenced to death because of the murders he committed. Oy.
Xander shows up to present the case! Two guys were killed in Seattle! One strangled, the other run over by a car - but the same killer may be involved, since they had mouth injuries unrelated to their deaths! The team wonders if it could be multiple killers, since the guys were different races, or if it's a case of a guy just figuring out the best method for murder! Greg assumes that if the guy is finding himself, that could mean another murder is imminent - because the concept of a cooling-off period doesn't exist in this world, and all killers are spree killers.
Then it's over to Seattle, where the killer - an Asian man wearing crazy goggles, drowns a black guy in a tub, to reinforce the 'crosses racial lines' thing! Also, the killer is hearing voices, but I can't make out what they're saying.
Maybe it's in a foreign language? In any event, I'm sure we'll find out what's going on after the credits!
We open in Bakersfield, California, the site of a famous food riot massacre! Also one of my favorite TV shows. But neither of those facts are relevant to the kid we see running down a hillside towards an abandoned shack!
I've got to assume that this is a location that somebody found, but if it was built by the production crew they did an incredible job for something that's just going to be in a few seconds of the episode! The kid continues wandering around the collapsing buildings, tossing rocks out of boredom - isn't this the kind of 'kids getting into trouble' that video game consoles were designed to solve?
Luckily the kid isn't killed - but his curiosity is rewarded by a lifetime of nightmares, as he stumbles across a human torso! Which, you know, ick.
Then we immediately cut to the killer's hideout, where he's cleaning a knife. The legs are lying nearby. We don't get any info about the arms or head. I'm going to guess what I always do in situations like this: Cannabilly?
We're then introduced to our newest cast member, Jennifer Love Hewitt, playing what I assume is an FBI Agent working undercover, trying to win the trust of a sleazy creep in a bar! She succeeds, and he leads her to his office, where he keeps all of his child pornography! She calls in backup, and he's arrested without incident! Which burns her identity in that circle of child-pornographers, I guess? They make it clear that she's been hanging out with the guy online, and only just now met him in person, so I suppose it's a persona she used just for him? Perhaps I've been watching too much Wiseguy, but now I find it odd when cops on television are all like 'Boom! I was a cop all along!' when they could probably get more done by building up a criminal persona that they use over and over again.
Over at Quantico, the rest of the team wonders exactly who Jennifer is as she heads into Greg's office. For his part, Greg immediately offers her a job - it seems that her undercover work is extremely well thought-of, and he's sure that will make her a great addition to the team! Not sure why, but their last team member was a linguist, so it's not like she could do much worse!
The show then hangs a lantern on its own preposterous timelines, having Jennifer comment that, while she takes months to bring a crook down, Greg and Co. catch a serial killer every week - how do they do it?
That seems like a weird timeline for her, though - is she just working on one case at a time? This latest guy was arrested after months of online correspondence and one meeting. Wouldn't she be juggling a few guys like that? Or was she just working for fifteen minutes a day the past three months?
They have a quick conversation about why the killer might be removing limbs and heads, but it's just theories, so it doesn't come to much. The one useful idea - it's possible he's keeping the limbs, so they should check into sales of chemicals used to preserve human bodies! That's a really good idea, team! Sad that it feels like such a rare accomplishment.
Joe also humiliates himself a little, suggesting that the guy is 'going for a record' by killing three people in the last month. Joe, unless the record you're talking about is 'lowest kill frequency killer in the history of the show' please shut your mouth.
Then we head over to Bakersfield, where a guy we have to assume is the killer, because why else cut to him right now, is seeing his son off for the morning trip to school! The son gets into a minivan, which is either a carpool, or the ex-wife/mother, but we're given no indication of which.
That's not the headline, however, no, the headline is that the killer is Gay Jack from Dawson's Creek!
Yup, it's Greg's one-show-removed brother-in-law!
Anyhow, Jack heads out to the tool shed and pulls out a mysterious footlocker. Oh, and a freeze-frame reveals that he's wearing his wedding ring, so I guess he's a widower and that was just a car pool? Inside the foot locker is a whole leg, which suggests that he's not using it correctly. Although that's really the least of his crimes.
He puts the leg in his lap and strokes it, really getting into his fetish. What could have caused such a bizarre mental break?
Another story cover, this one picking up the whole ‘clone impersonates Dan’ storyline. Personally, I’m still hoping that it’s going to take a Phillip K. Dick kinda twist and it’ll turn out that we’ve been watching the clone, who genuinely thinks he’s Dan. Will this prove to be the case? Find out as the review continues! Although, based on the plot as we see it on this page, with Dan making a sudden course change, there’s no way that’s the real guy.
(also, is that closeup based on a real-life model? It seems weirdly detailed and unlike Dave Gibbons’ normal style.)
So the cliffhanger was resolved on the cover on the next issue. Daring stratagem, Dan Dare. What is this ‘Space Cruiser’ of which they speak? I’ve never heard of such a film!
