I haven't watched it yet, but man. That's disappointing. Especially as last week, I was really uncomfortable with the way that Rossi and Morgan were using homophobic baiting to try to trip up the baddie (who didn't seem too bothered by their articulating his desire for his partner in crime).
Seriously. I couldn't make up how horrible this was. It was way worse than the "usual" thing where Romani appear as thieves and such on tv. The family of course lived in a trailer, they trained their kid to pickpocket and lived on shoplifting and crime, once the boy turns ten they steal some girl for a forced Stockholm syndrome marriage, and the father who does this got his wife like that too and team discovers that this is a pattern all over the US with dozens and dozens of cases going back to the begin of their records, like 1900 or something, and they just didn't discover it earlier, because the crimes were too far apart. And the family had stranged superstitions too that helped the team to discover them. I was sitting their with my mouth dropped open, and didn't know what to say it was so bad.
tangentially--YES that was the thing that bugged me about the gay-baiting last episode. Not that they did it--in the interrogation room all kinds of nasty shit is fair--but that they kept obsessing over it when it obviously WASN'T working and WASN'T a weak spot. So then it started to feel like it was actually our guys obsessing over it, which I really do not like.
Oh man. Yes. I just watched these two back-to-back and it was totally “Wait… what?” Last week's was fail in a couple of ways, one of which for me was that they never seemed to twig that there was something fundamentally odd about a Black serial killer targeting white girls when they've always previously made a thing about the fact that the most common serial killer is an upper-middle class white guy, and if white girls are being killed, look for a white man, you know? And this time, they apparently picked this guy based on priors, and him being present at the scene of one of the previous crimes. But from a profiling POV, it looks like they were totally doing a REALLY BAD JOB if their profile pointed to him and the team aspect caught them by surprise.
I was just talking to someone about this example of the failboat last night. I think I'm especially disappointed because CM has done so well in so many other subject matters (the institutional prejudices against stalking cases, JJ's pregnancy, geekdom, feminism in general, some forms of mental illness, etc.) that to watch them fuck up something this horribly is sort of a double whammy.
Not that it mitigates at all, but I sort of thought the family at the end was maybe directly related to the unsub family - since there was mention of brothers, it seems that possibly the initial perversion in 1909 branched into a narrow family network...which made me wonder what they did with the girl babies because in 100 years, they had to have had a few. But again, that's a double fail because they've made the corrupted tradition of one (initial) person/family into a subsociety that's indistinguishable from the overarching group.
Yeah, sometimes CM does really well, but this one was just awful. And considering the number of dots on that map they must have had a lot of boy children they forced into marriage. I wondered about the girls too, maybe they used them for blood sacrifices or ate them, both of those explanations would fit with rest of the episode.
It was pretty horrifying. I mean honestly? I think Americans generally don't get that this is IN THE PRESENT. They have a couple romanticized ideas about ~The Romani~ and they've read a little urban fantasy and watched Snatch a couple times, but it's not a present and urgent cultural issue over here so unless people educate themselves they assume it's something that's either over or not a big deal. Which needless to say is not an excuse, just a reason. It was a pretty big shocker to me too when I realized they were playing it straight.
(Especially because if they'd dropped the sensationalist aspect they could have done a really interesting episode involving a "normal" (for them) crime taking place in a Romani group, and there would be cultural issues and difficulties due to transience and distrust, and they could get their "creepy superstitious killer perverting tradition" while actually HAVING OTHER ROMANI CHARACTERS and presenting it in the context of an actual culture. How awesome would that have been? SIGH.)
I guess there aren't many Romani in the US then? I mean, I remember hearing about a law passed in the 19th century that forbade their immigration to the US. They still seem to be regularly suspected of crime in the US just as they are here though: http://www.nabihq.org/en-us/News/la_times_2006-01-30.php?sf_jst=r
well i gather that--in the british isles at least, which is where i have absorbed a little cultural information--the stereotype of 'travelers' and them being thieves and so forth is quite current and more or less common knowledge? whereas again to use Snatch as an example, U.S. audiences (myself mostly included) had no IDEA what the whole 'travelers'/RV/weird dialect thing was about. It's just not something people think about at all. Possibly because the US is so huge geographically that there's much more of a cultural divide between urban/suburban and rural areas? POSSIBLY I AM WRONG. But I definitely had the impression that most americans have no clue that "gypsies" are an actual, currently alive and persecuted culture.
I think the UK travelers are a different people (though probably facing similar problems).
But yeah, I guess it is more visible here, since regularly the problems land in front of the EU human rights commissions and such. And there are Romani activists too. Not that many care, I think the issue doesn't get much public support, whereas the opinion that it was somehow justified to harass and ostracize Romani because they are seen as some sort of "social blight" is still fairly widespread. It's not just individual hate crimes and police brutality, and prejudice (like people don't want Romani as neighbors and even admit to that when asked) but also governments. Like last year in Italy when they wanted to fingerprint all Romani as some kind of anti-crime measure. And I think Slovakia and the Czech Republic were censured by the EU for segregating Romani children into special schools. There even have been a few cases of forced sterilization in some EU countries in the 2000s still. Which is mindboggling.
Thank you for posting this. This bothered me as well, but you enunciated it so much more clearly than I could have. I normally trust Criminal Minds not to mess stuff up on quite this scale. It was sort of a "they did not really -- oh god, they did. D:" moment for me all episode.
Yeah. I sat in speechless horror the whole episode (well actually at first I hoped this would turn around somehow still, but it just got worse and worse), and just couldn't believe it.
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I haven't watched it yet, but man. That's disappointing. Especially as last week, I was really uncomfortable with the way that Rossi and Morgan were using homophobic baiting to try to trip up the baddie (who didn't seem too bothered by their articulating his desire for his partner in crime).
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Not that it mitigates at all, but I sort of thought the family at the end was maybe directly related to the unsub family - since there was mention of brothers, it seems that possibly the initial perversion in 1909 branched into a narrow family network...which made me wonder what they did with the girl babies because in 100 years, they had to have had a few. But again, that's a double fail because they've made the corrupted tradition of one (initial) person/family into a subsociety that's indistinguishable from the overarching group.
SIGH.
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(Especially because if they'd dropped the sensationalist aspect they could have done a really interesting episode involving a "normal" (for them) crime taking place in a Romani group, and there would be cultural issues and difficulties due to transience and distrust, and they could get their "creepy superstitious killer perverting tradition" while actually HAVING OTHER ROMANI CHARACTERS and presenting it in the context of an actual culture. How awesome would that have been? SIGH.)
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http://www.nabihq.org/en-us/News/la_times_2006-01-30.php?sf_jst=r
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But yeah, I guess it is more visible here, since regularly the problems land in front of the EU human rights commissions and such. And there are Romani activists too. Not that many care, I think the issue doesn't get much public support, whereas the opinion that it was somehow justified to harass and ostracize Romani because they are seen as some sort of "social blight" is still fairly widespread. It's not just individual hate crimes and police brutality, and prejudice (like people don't want Romani as neighbors and even admit to that when asked) but also governments. Like last year in Italy when they wanted to fingerprint all Romani as some kind of anti-crime measure. And I think Slovakia and the Czech Republic were censured by the EU for segregating Romani children into special schools. There even have been a few cases of forced sterilization in some EU countries in the 2000s still. Which is mindboggling.
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