A bunch of Criminal Minds episode write-ups
x-posted from dw
These are the eps that were either instrumental to me becoming a fan, or the eps I feel strongly about (not in the squee-y way).
1.14
Synopsis: After interviewing a married couple sitting on death row for serial murder, Gideon suspects the woman is actually innocent. But since she's set to be executed in two days, it's a race against time to prove it.
So, the woman thinks that her life is less important than her son's peace of mind, and insists that she be executed. Now, one might observe that a woman who has been abused since childhood, first by her father, then by her husband, is hardly the most objective judge of her life's worth, right? Not so for Gideon, since motherhood is sacred, and (male) child's peace of mind is more important than his mother's frigging life. Misogynistic much, eh? There's also the question of his attitude to Prentiss in later eps.
Am I the only one to see this?
3.07
IMDB summary: The unit has to deal with the militia when they're called to rural Montana to track a killer who's obsessed with his mentor.
This ep pretty much sums up to reasons I love this show: awesome women & Rossi (in no particular order). Most women on the show, even the most episodic ones, are kick-ass, or smart, or funny, or all of the above. I liked the kick-ass shop owner who, upon having witnessed an abduction, rushes for her shotgun instead of calling 911; and the abducted girl, who, despite being scared & traumatized, did all the right things, like trying to make the abductor see a person in her instead of just an object.
As to Rossi, this episode has pretty much cemented my love for him (and bloated into the unhealthy realm of obsession, yay :) ). Obviously, one cannot help loving a man who keeps Renaissance works of art on his desk & is so confident of his masculinity as to never hesitate twice before pretending to be a submissive troubled gay man (true quote, yay!) for the sake of the investigation.
3.08
IMDB summary: A killer is abducting women and forcing them to eat fingers before killing them, Rossi plays with Morgan's head, and Garcia meets a man at the local coffee shop.
As the show explores the nature of evil, it keeps coming back to the issue of the supernatural & faith & religion. Onscreen, the BAU seems to be the sole proprietor of the (quasi-)preternatural forces in this universe (and that's episodes like this one that almost take that quasi- out of the equation).
There's a perfectly valid psychiatric explanation for the actions of the satanist cannibal who believes himself to be possessed by demons; but then, there are those tiny, easily-overlooked details that do not quite fit within the materialistic worldview. The candles gutter out by themselves as the killer defiles the church by leaving the half-eaten corpse of his victim in the pews. The killer knows that the clock he cannot see has stopped (he says the voices told him that). Also, there's that creepy-awesome parody of the communion rites in which he feeds the whole parish with long pig soup:
"God is inside all of us."
"So is Tracy."
(how can one not love a show with dialogues like that? XD )
The problem is, dialogues that just repeat what could have been deduced from the plot & bring in nothing new are known to have killed many a fine scene in TV shows, and that is definitely the case here. I would have appreciated the under-explained "if there might be the evil forces, than there should be the good ones too- yay, the FBI is sacred the characters are doing angels' work" much better than the overwrought explanation along the same lines. Show, please bring in some subtlety okay thnx.
3.14
IMDB summary: Rossi determines that the case that haunts him has gone unsolved too long on its 20th anniversary, and the team horns in on his investigation despite his displeasure. Elsewhere, Reid and Hotchner interview a manipulative death-row convict.
This might easily be my favourite ep so far. The two main themes were simple, emoporny & broke my heart.
Theme 1. The only difference between the BAU members and the killers they hunt down is that they control themselves better. Otherwise, they are not very well off psychologically themselves. Hotch casting off his usual veneer of studied calm to provoke the killer, give himself an excuse, any excuse to fight; Rossi with his obsession with a crime even the victims forgot about - they are all broken. Rossi's obsession hardly amounted to any real actions: I mean, he left FBI for several years, but still kept calling the kids to tell them he's working on the case, which obviously wasn't true at that point - and only broke after they stopped acknowledging him.
Theme 2. BAU=family. That was pretty heavy-handed, but all the more angst-licious for it. Hotch loses his family; Rossi never had a proper one to begin with (his marriages are treated as a joke), and likely wanted kids badly enough to be moved by crime victims like taht. All they can turn to is their team.
Minor squeeage:
* "I can make anything a BAU case." JJ FTW! She totally owns the FBI! XD
* "Rossi is the reason most of these fraternization rules even exist." XD
* Garcia's boyfriend is awesome XD
* "Rossi is a guy who color codes his handwritten notes in his notebooks. [...]The guy is a fussy, anal-retentive neat freak who never leaves anything out of its place. I would say this is a scream for help." XD
4.06-07
IMDB summary for 4.06: A child abduction case in Las Vegas causes Reid to have strange nightmares which appear to be connected to an event in his past.
IMDB summary for 4.07: Driven by his nightmares, Reid stays behind in Las Vegas to find his father in order to find out the truth about Riley Jenkins' murder.
I don't find Reid interesting as a character. He looks like a canonical Mary Sue to me: lots of unusual skills, no realistic fallacies. Some say he's bad at people, but that's stated rather than shown (hell, I'm worse at people than he is, and I don't even have eidetic memory to show for it :( ). The whole sequence with his childhood trauma & presumed schizophrenia look like plot points straight out of the gothic novel. So, not too fond of this story arc, no.
The details I did like:
* Morgan & Rossi hanging out in Reid's room watching Days of Our Lives :)
* Reid winning at casinos XD
* Rossi being protective of Reid during hypnosis seanse
* Garcia hauling JJ off to the hospital = awesome. JJ keeping working till the very last minute = still more awesome.
* Reid's mother is actually is pretty cool. Going off her meds for her kid must take some balls.
For a change, here we had a positive portrayal of a small town mentality, what with people uniting & taking justice into their own hands. Consistency, show?
4.13
IMDB summary: A family consisting of two parents and their son break into a home, kill the parents and kidnap their daughter. As the investigation proceeds, the BAU team begin to suspect that what they're dealing with is bigger than they thought.
Obviously, I'm no judge of this, for I grew up in a different culture etc., but to me it seems that Criminal Minds do go to great lengths to provide sympathetic portrayals of characters of different ethnicities, so I was pretty surprised with how they portrayed Eastern Europeans.
Eastern Europe is comprised of roughly ten countries, populated by yet more nationalities, most of them with distinctive languages that do not even belong to the same language group. It would be nice if the scriptwriters realized, that, yes:
a) Eastern European nations are neither interchangeable nor homogenous. Romanian =/= Romany. Also, there's no such thing as "Eastern European superstitions" (that I know of).
b) there is no such thing as the "Eastern European accent". Different languages, different accents, and most anglophones without previous exposure to said accents would not recognize them. My strong Ukrainian accent had been pegged as German more than once.
etc.
4.18
IMDB summary: After being inactive for 10 years, Hotch's first BAU case, an elusive serial killer known as the Reaper, starts killing again.
A shipper dream come true, granted that you ship Hotch/Rossi (I do). I mean, they are on a first-name basis! And Rossi taunts emo!Hotch by offering him his gun to put himself out of his misery (he also offers words of wisdom which Hotch later repeats, but I liked the gun better)! It has exchanges like "Dramatic, don't you think?" "My wife said I was dramatic." "Which one?" "All of them."! Fannish squee.
These are the eps that were either instrumental to me becoming a fan, or the eps I feel strongly about (not in the squee-y way).
1.14
Synopsis: After interviewing a married couple sitting on death row for serial murder, Gideon suspects the woman is actually innocent. But since she's set to be executed in two days, it's a race against time to prove it.
So, the woman thinks that her life is less important than her son's peace of mind, and insists that she be executed. Now, one might observe that a woman who has been abused since childhood, first by her father, then by her husband, is hardly the most objective judge of her life's worth, right? Not so for Gideon, since motherhood is sacred, and (male) child's peace of mind is more important than his mother's frigging life. Misogynistic much, eh? There's also the question of his attitude to Prentiss in later eps.
Am I the only one to see this?
3.07
IMDB summary: The unit has to deal with the militia when they're called to rural Montana to track a killer who's obsessed with his mentor.
This ep pretty much sums up to reasons I love this show: awesome women & Rossi (in no particular order). Most women on the show, even the most episodic ones, are kick-ass, or smart, or funny, or all of the above. I liked the kick-ass shop owner who, upon having witnessed an abduction, rushes for her shotgun instead of calling 911; and the abducted girl, who, despite being scared & traumatized, did all the right things, like trying to make the abductor see a person in her instead of just an object.
As to Rossi, this episode has pretty much cemented my love for him (and bloated into the unhealthy realm of obsession, yay :) ). Obviously, one cannot help loving a man who keeps Renaissance works of art on his desk & is so confident of his masculinity as to never hesitate twice before pretending to be a submissive troubled gay man (true quote, yay!) for the sake of the investigation.
3.08
IMDB summary: A killer is abducting women and forcing them to eat fingers before killing them, Rossi plays with Morgan's head, and Garcia meets a man at the local coffee shop.
As the show explores the nature of evil, it keeps coming back to the issue of the supernatural & faith & religion. Onscreen, the BAU seems to be the sole proprietor of the (quasi-)preternatural forces in this universe (and that's episodes like this one that almost take that quasi- out of the equation).
There's a perfectly valid psychiatric explanation for the actions of the satanist cannibal who believes himself to be possessed by demons; but then, there are those tiny, easily-overlooked details that do not quite fit within the materialistic worldview. The candles gutter out by themselves as the killer defiles the church by leaving the half-eaten corpse of his victim in the pews. The killer knows that the clock he cannot see has stopped (he says the voices told him that). Also, there's that creepy-awesome parody of the communion rites in which he feeds the whole parish with long pig soup:
"God is inside all of us."
"So is Tracy."
(how can one not love a show with dialogues like that? XD )
The problem is, dialogues that just repeat what could have been deduced from the plot & bring in nothing new are known to have killed many a fine scene in TV shows, and that is definitely the case here. I would have appreciated the under-explained "if there might be the evil forces, than there should be the good ones too- yay, the FBI is sacred the characters are doing angels' work" much better than the overwrought explanation along the same lines. Show, please bring in some subtlety okay thnx.
3.14
IMDB summary: Rossi determines that the case that haunts him has gone unsolved too long on its 20th anniversary, and the team horns in on his investigation despite his displeasure. Elsewhere, Reid and Hotchner interview a manipulative death-row convict.
This might easily be my favourite ep so far. The two main themes were simple, emoporny & broke my heart.
Theme 1. The only difference between the BAU members and the killers they hunt down is that they control themselves better. Otherwise, they are not very well off psychologically themselves. Hotch casting off his usual veneer of studied calm to provoke the killer, give himself an excuse, any excuse to fight; Rossi with his obsession with a crime even the victims forgot about - they are all broken. Rossi's obsession hardly amounted to any real actions: I mean, he left FBI for several years, but still kept calling the kids to tell them he's working on the case, which obviously wasn't true at that point - and only broke after they stopped acknowledging him.
Theme 2. BAU=family. That was pretty heavy-handed, but all the more angst-licious for it. Hotch loses his family; Rossi never had a proper one to begin with (his marriages are treated as a joke), and likely wanted kids badly enough to be moved by crime victims like taht. All they can turn to is their team.
Minor squeeage:
* "I can make anything a BAU case." JJ FTW! She totally owns the FBI! XD
* "Rossi is the reason most of these fraternization rules even exist." XD
* Garcia's boyfriend is awesome XD
* "Rossi is a guy who color codes his handwritten notes in his notebooks. [...]The guy is a fussy, anal-retentive neat freak who never leaves anything out of its place. I would say this is a scream for help." XD
4.06-07
IMDB summary for 4.06: A child abduction case in Las Vegas causes Reid to have strange nightmares which appear to be connected to an event in his past.
IMDB summary for 4.07: Driven by his nightmares, Reid stays behind in Las Vegas to find his father in order to find out the truth about Riley Jenkins' murder.
I don't find Reid interesting as a character. He looks like a canonical Mary Sue to me: lots of unusual skills, no realistic fallacies. Some say he's bad at people, but that's stated rather than shown (hell, I'm worse at people than he is, and I don't even have eidetic memory to show for it :( ). The whole sequence with his childhood trauma & presumed schizophrenia look like plot points straight out of the gothic novel. So, not too fond of this story arc, no.
The details I did like:
* Morgan & Rossi hanging out in Reid's room watching Days of Our Lives :)
* Reid winning at casinos XD
* Rossi being protective of Reid during hypnosis seanse
* Garcia hauling JJ off to the hospital = awesome. JJ keeping working till the very last minute = still more awesome.
* Reid's mother is actually is pretty cool. Going off her meds for her kid must take some balls.
For a change, here we had a positive portrayal of a small town mentality, what with people uniting & taking justice into their own hands. Consistency, show?
4.13
IMDB summary: A family consisting of two parents and their son break into a home, kill the parents and kidnap their daughter. As the investigation proceeds, the BAU team begin to suspect that what they're dealing with is bigger than they thought.
Obviously, I'm no judge of this, for I grew up in a different culture etc., but to me it seems that Criminal Minds do go to great lengths to provide sympathetic portrayals of characters of different ethnicities, so I was pretty surprised with how they portrayed Eastern Europeans.
Eastern Europe is comprised of roughly ten countries, populated by yet more nationalities, most of them with distinctive languages that do not even belong to the same language group. It would be nice if the scriptwriters realized, that, yes:
a) Eastern European nations are neither interchangeable nor homogenous. Romanian =/= Romany. Also, there's no such thing as "Eastern European superstitions" (that I know of).
b) there is no such thing as the "Eastern European accent". Different languages, different accents, and most anglophones without previous exposure to said accents would not recognize them. My strong Ukrainian accent had been pegged as German more than once.
etc.
4.18
IMDB summary: After being inactive for 10 years, Hotch's first BAU case, an elusive serial killer known as the Reaper, starts killing again.
A shipper dream come true, granted that you ship Hotch/Rossi (I do). I mean, they are on a first-name basis! And Rossi taunts emo!Hotch by offering him his gun to put himself out of his misery (he also offers words of wisdom which Hotch later repeats, but I liked the gun better)! It has exchanges like "Dramatic, don't you think?" "My wife said I was dramatic." "Which one?" "All of them."! Fannish squee.