Criminal Minds 215: Revelations

This episode picks up just after the last one ended, with Reid dragged off and JJ having shot a bunch of dogs to death. Oh, and some Rolling Stones are playing. I’m not going to tell you which song. Because if you can’t guess, based on the religious theme of the episode, then you don’t listen to enough music.

The rest of the team arrives, and finds that Reid and James Van Der Beek are both long gone. They’re loaded into a truck, driving for parts unknown!

Well, we know they’re in a hunting lodge somewhere, but we don’t know where it is, so that’s not really useful information. Beek wakes Reid up and wants to engage him in a conversation. After playing some Russian Roulette, of course.

Of course, the scene would be a little more tense if the cut-point before the opening credits came before the gun failed to go off when the trigger was pulled, not after.

The team begins to tear Beek’s house apart, looking for clues about where he might have hidden. Also, I saw Muse Watson’s name in the opening credits, and I’m always happy to see Hookman showing up in something. They don’t find anything useful, so it’s time to check back in with Reid and Beek.

Despite the fact that Beek was earlier able to do Swayze’s voice (when the show wanted us to think he was still alive), but now that we’re seeing his face and talking it’s just in a gravelly voice. He begins to torture Reid, demanding that he confesses to something that’s worth getting killed over. Luckily while it’s a violent kind of torture (beating the soles of the feet with a club), it’s not one that’s likely to cause permanent damage.

Back at the house they find evidence that Beek was in NA, and find his sponsor’s phone number. Meanwhile JJ is cracking up because of the way the dogs almost killed her, and Emily is so suspiciously calm about the whole thing that Greg begins to suspect she’s a robot.

Okay, that last part may not be true.

But Swayze’s preserved body turns up in the basement:

So that’s something, right?

The nice personality shows up at the hunting cabin, and Reid tries to reason with it. But Beek has a better idea – shoot Reid up with heroin!

Heroin that makes him have flashbacks about his childhood! It turns out that Reid’s dad was an unbelievable dick. He was so sick of his wife’s schizophrenia that he elected to leave her. And also abandon his son with a schizophrenic.

No wonder he’s such a mama’s boy.

Think Reid’s dad will show up at some point? I mean, his mom’s turning up in the flashbacks, so I guess there’s a chance.

The team interviews Hookman about Beek, and lets them in on the super-abusive childhood that he suffered. The moment he could run away he turned to drugs, but after his father died he went completely nuts, keeping his father alive by becoming him.

This gives them another person to profile – hopefully leaning more about Swayze will let them know where Reid was taken. Hopefully they’ll do it quickly, because now Beek has a plan for Reid. He’s stolen a computer setup, and put Reid on camera. The game? Reid decides which of four possible victims Beek kills next, and then he’ll get to choose another one for the police to save. Reid goes along with the plan, because, as we learned from the Frank episode, while the FBI may not negotiate with terrorists, they’ve got no problem going along with serial killers.

Unsettlingly Reid didn’t even ask anything about the possible victims – so he saved one person, then caused Beek to kill two people. Basic math should have had him picking the couple to live – that was the game with Frank, wasn’t it?

The victims were killed because they were lawyers who defended criminals – but that’s less important than the fact that Mandy rushes to the camera to talk to Reid, telling him it’s not his fault. Which it isn’t, at all, but I’m sure Reid’s going to have some guilt stuff to deal with starting next week.

Oh, and JJ’s dealing with some guilt stuff too, based on being stupid enough to listen when Reid suggested they split up.

No one has mentioned that they now have a radius in which to search for Beek – they saw when the kill decision was made, and the lawyers died just a little while later – so he has to be within an easy driving distance, doesn’t he?

It’s time for another one of Reid’s flashbacks, this one to his attempts to take care of his crazy mother, who’d force him to lay in bed with her, reading Proust, rather than let him play with other children.

Look at this image and tell me there’s not something creepy going on.

The team tries to keep people from watching Beek’s new video by sending out a message announcing that it’s secretly a virus. This massively pisses Beek off, which you’d think is the last thing they’d want to do, what with Reid being his hostage and all. Mandy says he wants to deny the guy a pulpit, but every time he’s felt like his message wasn’t getting across, it’s made him kill faster, so I’m not sure what their angle is supposed to be.

Predictably angered, Beek goes back to torturing Reid, trying to get him to confess. Reid takes the beating badly and has a seizure, but Beek gives him CPR, which he luckily knows. From his new vantage point on the floor of the cabin, Reid finally gets a clue as to his whereabouts - there are graves lining the walls, and a shovel nearby – he must be in a graveyard! But how to get that information to the team without Beek realizing what’s happened? This is going to require all his genius!

They finally god-damn notice the quick time in which the video was posted, and figure out roughly where the video must be coming from. But it’s still a 15-mile radius, so it’s too big to search in the time they have.

Amazed that Reid has survived, Beek now wants him to decide which member of the FBI time should die next. Rather than going over their faults and talking about it to play for time Reid flat out refuses over and over again, letting Beek get through three trigger pulls of Russian Roulette before cracking. Which seems unbelievably stupid. I mean, really, does Reid think this guy has got the slightest chance of actually killing one of the FBI agents? He’s one crazy guy with a knife and a gun. They’ll see him coming.

But no, Reid’s pathological love of drama leads him to play it out until the last moment. Moron.

He ends up picking Greg – but why? Reid claims it’s because he’s a crazed narcissist. Greg knows that’s not true, so it has to be a clue! It turns out it’s a message to Greg – he even mis-quoted the bible verse to offer a bigger clue! The real verse mentioned a cemetery – they look for one within the possible area, and immediately find it!

Meanwhile Beek thinks it’s time for another flashback, so he shoots up Reid, sending him back to the time he institutionalized his own mother. Man, that’s cold.

This flashback proved to be a key one, since it revealed that, according to Beek’s logic, Reid did not honor his mother. So it’s time to drag him out into the graveyard for a little murdering!

Beek decides on a clever murder instead of just shooting Reid, which kills some more time while he’s digging his own grave. Reid manages to play for just enough time that he sees the team coming, but that doesn’t play into the resolution at all. Reid fails to dig the whole fast enough, and claims that it’s because he’s weak. This makes Beek so angry that he decides he’ll just dig the hole himself, and tosses his gun to the ground so that he can pick up the shovel.

So then Reid grabs the gun and shoots him.

The End.

Except that, before leaving the scene of the death Reid rifles through Beek’s pockets and steals the last of the heroin. So I guess he’s going to get a drug-abuse subplot! Sweet?

1 - Was profiling in any way helpful in solving the crime?

Not in the least. Reid figured out where he was by accident, then used coded messages to tip them off as to his location. Not very profile-y. More importantly, the entire ending with Reid shooting Beek would have played out almost exactly the same whether he’d tipped the team off or not. So even all the clues wound up being a little on the pointless side, didn’t they?

2 - Could the crime have been solved just as easily using conventional police methods given the known facts of the case?

Absolutely, but probably not in time to save Reid. Of course, he totally saved himself, so I guess that’s not much of an issue.

So, on a scale of 1 (Dirty Harry) to 10 (Tony Hill), How Useful Was Profiling in Solving the Crime?

1/10 – After all that buildup what ended up happening? Reid tricked Beek into thinking he was a weakling, then grabbed a gun when he wasn’t looking. Total Callahan. It’s also exactly how he took out Timothy Omundsen back in season 1, come to think of it.

Of course, that time he needed Greg's help to save the day. This time whether he'd gotten in contact with the team or not the situation would have been resolved in exactly the same way.