Frederic Lehne (AKA YED) on Criminal Minds - Review and recap, sort of.
Anyone else watch Criminal Minds with Frederic Lehne (or Lane?), the man formerly known as the Yellow-Eyed Demon guest starring last night?
OMG FREDERIC LEHNE FRIGGING ROCKS!!!
I am so glad I actually taped this episode of Criminal Minds because seriously, Frederic Lehne frigging rocks hardcore! And it's not just a "Hee! It's the YED!" thing. Nooooo. I totally bought him as the character, he was awesome, and in all seriousness I would watch a show about the character he played on Criminal Minds. Plus! PLUS!! He traumatized Reid! YAY!!! Not that I don't like Reid, because I kind of do, but traumatized Reid is a very nice thing once in a while.
Quick recap from memory of one watch through:
Two teenage girls go missing, one turns up dead, beaten, strangled and unidentifiable. Frederic Lehne's character Jack... something... was the father of one of the girls. The other girl's parents are freaking, Jack is very controlled.
There's some waffle about identifying the body, which has no face and no hands, but then a phone message that sounds really, really fake to me on first hearing shows up from one of the girls, and after much reluctance they let the parents listen to it to see if they can ID their child. It's... actually, I'm not sure how it helps figure out which one is the dead one, because it's- *handwave* whatever. To me, it sounds as fake as a 20 bill with a naked man on the front, so I declaim theory #1 to the cat: "The girls are both alive, they picked up some random third girl and killed her to fake out the cops and are off... doing... something." My theories suck.
Anyway, back in the room of IDing the incredibly fake voicemail, it's declared that this somehow means that Jack's (Frederic Lehne) daughter is alive, and the other parents are S.O.L. Other Parents break down weeping and flailing in a realistic manner, Jack is sympathetic, but oddly controlled emotionally. And the cat gets to hear theory #2: "Jack's daughter is leading victims off for Jack to do horrible things to them so he knows his daughter is fine and he's EVIL because he's the YED."
That one holds up through the next commercial break at least. The FBI guys go over the site the girls would have been taken from, decide that they must have known the person they went with because otherwise it would have been noticed. Leading them to go to Jack's place and search.
FBI guys search the place, and do the usual "We know the victim is an atypical teen who is frightened and repressed because her walls are beige and she has no stuffies or posters of Justin Timberlake" thing while Jack and a nameless male friend of some sort lurk defensively.
In the meantime, Reid (in-house) and Garcia (in her sanctum) are trying to figure out what's going on with the family's computer, which has way too much security, automatically cleans its browser cache frequently and has an IP address routed through a gray something which Garcia is impressed by.
Also, she's turned up a video blog by the dead girl that implies something's weird about the Jack-and-daughter family. His wife is dead in a car wreck, something about fishing, and Jack treats his daughter more like a wife. Which of course (after Reid is discovered messing around with the computer and glared out of the room by Jack and nameless friend so Reid can tell the rest of the team about this vague implication) leads to the standard roundabout accusation of repeated sexual abuse, which Jack goes batshit at. Wonderfully. I could spend hours just watching Frederic Lehne seethe. He charges at one of the FBI guys with intent to pound. Yay!
Nameless friend steps in and restrains Jack, in the process revealing a gun jammed down the back of his pants by accident. The revealing of the gun was an accident, not the jamming down his pants, which I'm sure was deliberate. Ill-advised as nestling a loaded weapon in one's butt-cleavage may seem, it's popular on TV. Also, Nameless Friend's pants, not Jack's. Clear as mud? Anyway. FBI guys see the gun, and they all freak and draw weaponry.
Nameless Friend whips out a badge. Hey! He's a Marshal, and Jack and daughter are, yep, in the Federal Witness Protection program. Whee! They're going to give testimony against some mob bunch in two weeks, and the girls' kidnapping/murder most likely has something to do with that. So theory #2 goes out the window and I stop having theories for the rest of the evening because I already owe the cat ten bucks.
FBI guys get huffy about being left in the dark, and they drag Jack off to the local... wherever these guys drag people off to when they're not at home. Other Parents of dead girl see this, flip out that Jack's being arrested and therefore is the one who killed their daughter. Shouting, screaming, death threats, etc. Frederic Lehne is awesome. He's got this regretful/resigned thing going on at this part that's really great, because he didn't do it, can't say why he's being taken away, and isn't terribly bothered by the death threats of a 45 year old lifelong couch jockey.
Off to the office, FBI guys badger backstory and whatever out of the Marshal, Jack is sitting alone in an interrogation room. In a short scene that felt a teeny bit stuffed in at the last minute, jackass-who-replaced-Gideon says some waffle about how he's talked to a lot of murderers and psychos and says: "You can tell by the eyes." And they cut to Frederic Lehne, doing the dead-eyed murderer stare. All that's missing is the yellow contacts and the big toothy grin. I call total shoutout to Supernatural. Hee!
So they go question him and he apparently used to be a hitman or enforcer for the mob before they accidentally killed his wife instead of him and she made him swear to protect their daughter from the life of crime and violence and stuff on her deathbed, etc. Cheesy on paper, Frederic Lehne totally sold it in my opinion.
Then the FBI guys find the murder scene, which is definitely not a professional mob anything, complete with beer bottles, cigarette butts and a blood-trail to a teenager who was killed by his fellow perpetrators, who turn out to be a couple highschool kids and an older guy doing a sort of cult of personality thing.
Somewhere along the line, Other Parents have been brought in and had the whole Witness Protection thing explained to them, including that Jack was an enforcer for the mob, apparently. Which, okay, cover's blown, why not blow it all the way, I guess. I might have missed a transition there, we're having a windstorm and I was distracted by my deck furniture threatening to take flight. Again.
FBI guys post big pictures of the dead kid in the... squad room? Place where everyone's being questioned, and set about trying to find the dead kids buddies. Other Dad sees the picture and recognizes the kid and knows who his friends are. Asks to go talk to Jack, apologizes and slips him the info on the kid's friends with an oh-so-subtle request for Jack to come out of retirement for a bit.
There's some waffle with the FBI bunch, and a few minutes later Other Dad glides out of the interrogation room as subtly as a brick glides through a stained glass window. The FBI guys go charging in to the interrogation room, and of course Jack's gone out for a quick bite of steaming hot vengeance. Bwahah!
The FBI starts scrambling harder to find the kid's murderous cohort before Jack whacks 'em all. (Bunch of missing stuff from before, daughter being held in an institutional looking men's room, head murderer tells freaking out junior murderer to go get a gun, implication that he's going to do everyone in etc. FBI interviews dead boy's dad, turns up a name, leads to blah blah etc.) In the meantime, Jack has found the other younger of the two remaining murderous trio, attempting to pick the lock on his dad's gun cabinet very, very badly.
Kid freaks out that this guy's just walked into his garage. Jack picks up a handy hammer, bashes the lock off the gun cabinet, and with some nifty repartee about daddy storing loaded guns (hee), shoots the kid in the leg. Kid starts screaming, Jack tells him essentially to suck it up, he's got two legs, and asks the whereabouts of his daughter and the other perp. So, so, so very cool scene. Frederic Lehne did a very good workaday kind of enforcer, no sadism, just expedience, and controlled rage. Very awesome.
The FBI have people spread all over hell and gone apparently, because when Reid figures out the daughter is probably being held at a school two blocks away from the wherever he is, he's the one that has to haul ass and go get the bad guy alone, guns a'blazing. Hee. Reid is a tremendous brainiac who's a little socially out-of-step with the world, and built like a preying mantis. Guns-a-blazing is not his forte. From the admittedly not too many episodes of Criminal Minds I've seen, when Reid is flying solo he either gets hurt, or does this weird psychology fast-talk and the person gives up, or sees the light, or goes stark raving bonkers. I like Reid. He's kind of crazy.
Jack shows up at the school before Reid and heads down to the men's john in time to stop the remaining perp from raping his daughter at the last minute and knocks him to the floor. Daughter jumps up and starts shouting at Jack to kill the guy. Jack hesitates. Perp whines.
Reid runs down hallways with a gun, which is always funny. He currently has collar-length flippy hair and when he runs he looks like a nine-year old girl playing hopscotch. With a gun.
Anyway, he hears the daughter shouting "Kill him daddy!" and pops into the bathroom to see Jack pointing the borrowed gun at the murdering would-be rapist's head. Guy on the floor bleats for help and how he's sorry and wishes he could change it or something which given his unapologetic behavior before people started pointing guns at him is a total load of shash.
Reid unloads the usual "Reid-gets-into-the-psycho's-head-and-throws-around-some-pop-psychology" about how Jack's wife wanted him to protect the daughter who is shouting for her dad to shoot the currently defenseless murderous asshole lying on the floor, right in front of her, and how Jack's dead wife wouldn't have wanted her daughter to witness a murder, and that Jack's life's been about violence and if he kills the guy, he'll make his daughter's life be about violence too. Only a lot better and not all in one run-on sentence.
Frederic Lehne is awesome and subtle in this part, with daughter asking for Jack to shoot the guy, and Reid doing his Reid-thing and the guy on the floor whinging. There's this long, continuing hanging moment where I had no idea what the character would end up doing. Frederic Lehne played the suppressed rage and the conflict in the character excellently, with in all honesty a very tense and stony expression and slight eye shifts. I honestly could not have said which way the character would go in the end.
But then Reid says something to the effect of "When does it stop?" meaning life of violence, etc. And Jack says "Tomorrow" and shoots the guy in the head.
I cheered. Out loud. Arms a-waving. Bad. Ass. *koff* Of course in a moral context is was not the lawful legal thing to do but what the hell ever. Fiction! Awesome!
Jack and daughter wander out into the gathering arms of the FBI. Reid is standing in the washroom staring at the corpse, stunned and traumatized that his psychology-fu has failed him and he just watched some guy get shot in the head, while the other FBI guys oddly file into the bathroom, waffle about things, then file out to leave Reid standing there mind-blown. Aw, poor Reid.
The Marshals re-locate Jack and daughter, who takes the name of her dead friend in the next witness relocation thing in Atlanta. Voiceover about parenting or something from one of the FBI guys and credits.
Sketchy recap, but there it is.
Anyway, I reiterate again, some more, Frederic Lehne rocks! Hee. He didn't even nibble on the scenery. Much.
OMG FREDERIC LEHNE FRIGGING ROCKS!!!
I am so glad I actually taped this episode of Criminal Minds because seriously, Frederic Lehne frigging rocks hardcore! And it's not just a "Hee! It's the YED!" thing. Nooooo. I totally bought him as the character, he was awesome, and in all seriousness I would watch a show about the character he played on Criminal Minds. Plus! PLUS!! He traumatized Reid! YAY!!! Not that I don't like Reid, because I kind of do, but traumatized Reid is a very nice thing once in a while.
Quick recap from memory of one watch through:
Two teenage girls go missing, one turns up dead, beaten, strangled and unidentifiable. Frederic Lehne's character Jack... something... was the father of one of the girls. The other girl's parents are freaking, Jack is very controlled.
There's some waffle about identifying the body, which has no face and no hands, but then a phone message that sounds really, really fake to me on first hearing shows up from one of the girls, and after much reluctance they let the parents listen to it to see if they can ID their child. It's... actually, I'm not sure how it helps figure out which one is the dead one, because it's- *handwave* whatever. To me, it sounds as fake as a 20 bill with a naked man on the front, so I declaim theory #1 to the cat: "The girls are both alive, they picked up some random third girl and killed her to fake out the cops and are off... doing... something." My theories suck.
Anyway, back in the room of IDing the incredibly fake voicemail, it's declared that this somehow means that Jack's (Frederic Lehne) daughter is alive, and the other parents are S.O.L. Other Parents break down weeping and flailing in a realistic manner, Jack is sympathetic, but oddly controlled emotionally. And the cat gets to hear theory #2: "Jack's daughter is leading victims off for Jack to do horrible things to them so he knows his daughter is fine and he's EVIL because he's the YED."
That one holds up through the next commercial break at least. The FBI guys go over the site the girls would have been taken from, decide that they must have known the person they went with because otherwise it would have been noticed. Leading them to go to Jack's place and search.
FBI guys search the place, and do the usual "We know the victim is an atypical teen who is frightened and repressed because her walls are beige and she has no stuffies or posters of Justin Timberlake" thing while Jack and a nameless male friend of some sort lurk defensively.
In the meantime, Reid (in-house) and Garcia (in her sanctum) are trying to figure out what's going on with the family's computer, which has way too much security, automatically cleans its browser cache frequently and has an IP address routed through a gray something which Garcia is impressed by.
Also, she's turned up a video blog by the dead girl that implies something's weird about the Jack-and-daughter family. His wife is dead in a car wreck, something about fishing, and Jack treats his daughter more like a wife. Which of course (after Reid is discovered messing around with the computer and glared out of the room by Jack and nameless friend so Reid can tell the rest of the team about this vague implication) leads to the standard roundabout accusation of repeated sexual abuse, which Jack goes batshit at. Wonderfully. I could spend hours just watching Frederic Lehne seethe. He charges at one of the FBI guys with intent to pound. Yay!
Nameless friend steps in and restrains Jack, in the process revealing a gun jammed down the back of his pants by accident. The revealing of the gun was an accident, not the jamming down his pants, which I'm sure was deliberate. Ill-advised as nestling a loaded weapon in one's butt-cleavage may seem, it's popular on TV. Also, Nameless Friend's pants, not Jack's. Clear as mud? Anyway. FBI guys see the gun, and they all freak and draw weaponry.
Nameless Friend whips out a badge. Hey! He's a Marshal, and Jack and daughter are, yep, in the Federal Witness Protection program. Whee! They're going to give testimony against some mob bunch in two weeks, and the girls' kidnapping/murder most likely has something to do with that. So theory #2 goes out the window and I stop having theories for the rest of the evening because I already owe the cat ten bucks.
FBI guys get huffy about being left in the dark, and they drag Jack off to the local... wherever these guys drag people off to when they're not at home. Other Parents of dead girl see this, flip out that Jack's being arrested and therefore is the one who killed their daughter. Shouting, screaming, death threats, etc. Frederic Lehne is awesome. He's got this regretful/resigned thing going on at this part that's really great, because he didn't do it, can't say why he's being taken away, and isn't terribly bothered by the death threats of a 45 year old lifelong couch jockey.
Off to the office, FBI guys badger backstory and whatever out of the Marshal, Jack is sitting alone in an interrogation room. In a short scene that felt a teeny bit stuffed in at the last minute, jackass-who-replaced-Gideon says some waffle about how he's talked to a lot of murderers and psychos and says: "You can tell by the eyes." And they cut to Frederic Lehne, doing the dead-eyed murderer stare. All that's missing is the yellow contacts and the big toothy grin. I call total shoutout to Supernatural. Hee!
So they go question him and he apparently used to be a hitman or enforcer for the mob before they accidentally killed his wife instead of him and she made him swear to protect their daughter from the life of crime and violence and stuff on her deathbed, etc. Cheesy on paper, Frederic Lehne totally sold it in my opinion.
Then the FBI guys find the murder scene, which is definitely not a professional mob anything, complete with beer bottles, cigarette butts and a blood-trail to a teenager who was killed by his fellow perpetrators, who turn out to be a couple highschool kids and an older guy doing a sort of cult of personality thing.
Somewhere along the line, Other Parents have been brought in and had the whole Witness Protection thing explained to them, including that Jack was an enforcer for the mob, apparently. Which, okay, cover's blown, why not blow it all the way, I guess. I might have missed a transition there, we're having a windstorm and I was distracted by my deck furniture threatening to take flight. Again.
FBI guys post big pictures of the dead kid in the... squad room? Place where everyone's being questioned, and set about trying to find the dead kids buddies. Other Dad sees the picture and recognizes the kid and knows who his friends are. Asks to go talk to Jack, apologizes and slips him the info on the kid's friends with an oh-so-subtle request for Jack to come out of retirement for a bit.
There's some waffle with the FBI bunch, and a few minutes later Other Dad glides out of the interrogation room as subtly as a brick glides through a stained glass window. The FBI guys go charging in to the interrogation room, and of course Jack's gone out for a quick bite of steaming hot vengeance. Bwahah!
The FBI starts scrambling harder to find the kid's murderous cohort before Jack whacks 'em all. (Bunch of missing stuff from before, daughter being held in an institutional looking men's room, head murderer tells freaking out junior murderer to go get a gun, implication that he's going to do everyone in etc. FBI interviews dead boy's dad, turns up a name, leads to blah blah etc.) In the meantime, Jack has found the other younger of the two remaining murderous trio, attempting to pick the lock on his dad's gun cabinet very, very badly.
Kid freaks out that this guy's just walked into his garage. Jack picks up a handy hammer, bashes the lock off the gun cabinet, and with some nifty repartee about daddy storing loaded guns (hee), shoots the kid in the leg. Kid starts screaming, Jack tells him essentially to suck it up, he's got two legs, and asks the whereabouts of his daughter and the other perp. So, so, so very cool scene. Frederic Lehne did a very good workaday kind of enforcer, no sadism, just expedience, and controlled rage. Very awesome.
The FBI have people spread all over hell and gone apparently, because when Reid figures out the daughter is probably being held at a school two blocks away from the wherever he is, he's the one that has to haul ass and go get the bad guy alone, guns a'blazing. Hee. Reid is a tremendous brainiac who's a little socially out-of-step with the world, and built like a preying mantis. Guns-a-blazing is not his forte. From the admittedly not too many episodes of Criminal Minds I've seen, when Reid is flying solo he either gets hurt, or does this weird psychology fast-talk and the person gives up, or sees the light, or goes stark raving bonkers. I like Reid. He's kind of crazy.
Jack shows up at the school before Reid and heads down to the men's john in time to stop the remaining perp from raping his daughter at the last minute and knocks him to the floor. Daughter jumps up and starts shouting at Jack to kill the guy. Jack hesitates. Perp whines.
Reid runs down hallways with a gun, which is always funny. He currently has collar-length flippy hair and when he runs he looks like a nine-year old girl playing hopscotch. With a gun.
Anyway, he hears the daughter shouting "Kill him daddy!" and pops into the bathroom to see Jack pointing the borrowed gun at the murdering would-be rapist's head. Guy on the floor bleats for help and how he's sorry and wishes he could change it or something which given his unapologetic behavior before people started pointing guns at him is a total load of shash.
Reid unloads the usual "Reid-gets-into-the-psycho's-head-and-throws-around-some-pop-psychology" about how Jack's wife wanted him to protect the daughter who is shouting for her dad to shoot the currently defenseless murderous asshole lying on the floor, right in front of her, and how Jack's dead wife wouldn't have wanted her daughter to witness a murder, and that Jack's life's been about violence and if he kills the guy, he'll make his daughter's life be about violence too. Only a lot better and not all in one run-on sentence.
Frederic Lehne is awesome and subtle in this part, with daughter asking for Jack to shoot the guy, and Reid doing his Reid-thing and the guy on the floor whinging. There's this long, continuing hanging moment where I had no idea what the character would end up doing. Frederic Lehne played the suppressed rage and the conflict in the character excellently, with in all honesty a very tense and stony expression and slight eye shifts. I honestly could not have said which way the character would go in the end.
But then Reid says something to the effect of "When does it stop?" meaning life of violence, etc. And Jack says "Tomorrow" and shoots the guy in the head.
I cheered. Out loud. Arms a-waving. Bad. Ass. *koff* Of course in a moral context is was not the lawful legal thing to do but what the hell ever. Fiction! Awesome!
Jack and daughter wander out into the gathering arms of the FBI. Reid is standing in the washroom staring at the corpse, stunned and traumatized that his psychology-fu has failed him and he just watched some guy get shot in the head, while the other FBI guys oddly file into the bathroom, waffle about things, then file out to leave Reid standing there mind-blown. Aw, poor Reid.
The Marshals re-locate Jack and daughter, who takes the name of her dead friend in the next witness relocation thing in Atlanta. Voiceover about parenting or something from one of the FBI guys and credits.
Sketchy recap, but there it is.
Anyway, I reiterate again, some more, Frederic Lehne rocks! Hee. He didn't even nibble on the scenery. Much.