Criminal Minds 318: The Crossing

Keri, a Maryland woman, is running her daily errands – the scenes are filmed to let us know just how much of your personal information gets let out in ordinary day to day interactions. She has to give her phone number at the dry cleaner, a pharmacist asks her to confirm the street she lives on, and so forth. Any one of the men standing nearby could find out all they need to know in order to stalk her!

How do we know this is an episode about stalking? When she gets home, this is sitting on her stoop:

So yeah, stalking episode.

The way Keri freaks out when she sees a photo included in the love note, we know that she’s been stalked for a while. Meanwhile Greg and Joe giving an anti-terrorism speech when a Boston cop approaches them about doing a psychological profile of a woman who claims that she murdered her husband because she’s a battered woman. But there was no on-paper history of abuse in the house… so will they prove her to be a liar, or confirm her story?

Over at the home office, Emily and JJ read the letter Keri sent them – she’s looking for help to stop the stalker who’s been after her for two years! The police say they can’t do anything because no crimes have been committed, and JJ tells her that she’s interested, but can’t guarantee the team will take the case. Keri then decides to make her point by drama-queening it up, writing down a list of who to call after her corpse is discovered.

(the stalker has an evil wall!)

Will her gambit pay off? Find out after the opening credits!

But yes, it will.

Product Reviews? You Heard Me.

Recently I was approached by representatives for csnstores (surely you've heard of them - they're the barstool people), who are apparently interested in some sort of a promotional partnership with 'The Castle', which is a reference to this website, and not anything off-colour, before you ask.

What kind of partnership, you ask? The kind where they send me a thing, and I tell my readers (the 'you' of the post's title) whether those things are worth purchasing. Since that's kind of what I'm doing here anyways (without numerical scores or obvious instructions in re: buying things), it seems like a natural fit.

One hindrance? They don't sell movies or comic books. They do, however, sell knives:

Probably not these knives, though.

It's not something I mention here in posts, but my sixth-favorite hobby (after singing and before hiking) is cooking. Add that to the fact that this is (theoretically, at least) a horror-themed blog, and you've got a perfect match!

So look forward to those product reviews in the near future! A few days after the knives arrive, I suppose.

I Hate 'Outsourced'

Are you familiar with the show ‘Outsourced’? It’s about a bigot, pictured here:

Who travels all the way to India so he’ll have a larger group of people available to insult. I’m not taking this time to talk about how loathsome a human being the main character is, though – I’d like to point out the stupidity of what’s going on over his shoulder.

Criminal Minds 317: In Heat

People are dancing with abandon! This can only be Miami, if my years of watching CSI Miami are any indication. Will the BSU team run into Horatio and the gang? They are on the same network, after all. Somehow I’m guessing no.

A woman in a blue dress propositions a man in a black shirt – seems like sexiness is about to occur – or more likely, murder! Speaking of sexiness, Xander has snuck into Garcia’s apartment to prepare a romantic dinner. How sweet of that guy. He’d better not turn out to be a serial killer.

Now, back to the Miami sexiness, where the man and woman are making out on a boat in the harbour – turns out they’re not the killer or the victim – they just discover a corpse!

The team goes over the case – three victims in two months (bet that’s going to speed up, huh?), all men who’ve been strangled to death, then left in barely-concealed areas. The key element of the crime so far – no crushed necks, no wire marks, which means that a chokehold was used to murder them. So right away, although no one says it, they know the killer must have military or police training.

Yes, he could be a judo guy or an ultimate fighter, but seriously, what are the odds of that?

Hopefully we’ll find out after the opening credits.

The Twenty-Seventh-Greatest Panel in the History of Comics!

And now, allow me to introduce you to El Carim-

Anybody can win a duel with Death for a man's soul. It takes a special kind of fella to be insufferably smug about it. While wearing a monocle and turban.

I get the sense we'll be seeing more of El Carim soon...

Introducing Jason Ritter’s Preposterous Facial Hair

This is Jason Ritter. You may be wondering about his preposterous facial hair.

In this scene we’ve just met the young man for the first time. He’s sneaked onto a plane, and is being pursued by men in suits. Presumably this means he’s been on the run for a while, and hasn’t had time to shave, hence the odd stubble.

Except here, in the very next scene, we learn that 11 days earlier he had the exact same stubble-goatee. That’s right, he didn’t think it was important to shave before asking his girlfriend’s father if it was cool for him to propose. Which means he’s extremely fond of this odd, stubbly look.

How fond? Well, let’s flash back even further than two weeks, to-

Five years earlier, when he first met his girlfriend.

This isn’t the show 24. All of these scenes aren’t happening just minutes apart. The funny thing is, had Jason just been clean-shaven we wouldn’t have ever noticed that he had the same haircut over the past five years. Even if it wasn't matted.

But they selected a preposterous bit of facial hair for him. And the rest is mediocre-TV history.

Criminal Minds 316: Elephant’s Memory

Operating under the belief that there’s nothing that can’t be improved by Johnny Cash (a convincing belief, to be sure), this episode opens with a guy driving home to the strains of ‘When the Man Comes Around’, Johnny’s musical version of the Revelation of John in his letter to the seven churches of Asia. Then his house blows up.

Two cops respond to the crime, only to wind up gunned down by a killer hiding at the treeline. It seems this guy had it all planned out! Also, for no clear reason, the deputy was filming the fire with a cell phone camera when he was shot. Okay, we all no the reason – it’s so that there can be contrived footage of the killer.

Then it’s time for more personal stuff, as we see Reid hanging out with a support group for cops with drug and alcohol problems. He explains that although he’s clean now, he’s been craving drugs lately, mostly since the emotionally wrenching sight of having a rapist/torturer/murderer/corpse mutilator gunned down in front of him. Yup – seeing an evil monster get what was coming to him may drive Reid back to drugs.

I don’t know if I’ve said it before, but man this guy is a wuss. Just two episodes back, Greg was willing to beat a serial killer to death with his bare hands. Mostly for fun. I guess what I’m trying to say is:

Man up, princess. You’re an FBI agent. Start acting like it.

His introspection is interrupted by a phone call – the team is being asked to help out with the murders, so he has to flee the session. He’s interrupted by Michael Ironside!

Who is apparently a high-ranking member of the FBI, although they don’t specify which one. He gives Reid some helpful advice, and makes me hope we’ll see more of him.

The team hassles Reid about being late – which is a little odd, since he delayed taking their call for maybe sixty seconds, and then talked to Michael for just ninety. Can’t imagine that he took that much more time getting there than the rest of the team, seeing as the call came in… actually, it’s not clear what time the call came in, but half the team looks sleepy.

We get another detail about the crime, though – apparently the first victim’s daughter was in the house when it blew up! Yikes, this killer isn’t messing around!

Criminal Minds 315: A Higher Power

A woman arrives home, talking on her cell phone with a friend. We can glean from the conversation that she and her husband are having a hard time because their daughter died recently, but apparently the husband was reacting well.

His suicided corpse would beg to differ. Or is it murder!? Probably the second, since this isn’t a show about investigating suicides.

How does the team even get onto this one? It seems that the a cop feels there’s been too many suspicious suicides recently, and wants their help. That cop? 24’s Ryan Chappelle!

The team looks over the details of the case – 14 children died in a fire, and a suspicious number of the parents have killed themselves in the aftermath. Five, in fact, each two weeks apart – the last was Ryan’s brother!

Meanwhile Greg heads off alone to spend some time with his son. How will that go? Find out after the credits!

The Twenty-Sixth-Greatest Panel in the History of Comics!

Every now and then a character, through seemingly incidental dialogue, reveals more about themselves than they'd intended.

There are two other members of the Purple Trio there presently foiling her scheme. Why focus on the short one?

Criminal Minds 314: Damaged

Okay, I got pretty pissed-off at last week’s Criminal Minds, and went off on a pretty long tangent. Gonna try to dial that back this time around. I’ll try not to get overly upset, but I really hope that the episode doesn’t do anything to set me off. Meet me halfway, Criminal Minds!

The episode opens with a nightmare – Joe is still haunted by that murder he was never able to solve, and those three orphaned children. Will this be the episode he finally solves the case? I hope so. Also, the dream lead to a weird continuity error-

That’s a bloody axe lying on the floor. A few episodes back he said that the mother an father were ‘bludgeoned’ to death. Unless he was working with the back end of the axe, I’m pretty sure that doesn’t count as bludgeoning.

Then it’s over to Garcia’s apartment, where Joe wants to berate Penelope for failing to put together a decent file on the twenty-year-old murder. She pleads both inability to find information, and that she was on a date with Xander when Joe knocked on the door. Both are compelling arguments, so Joe leaves in a huff.

Meanwhile a young woman is leaving a strip club – is this the little girl who saw her parents’ get killed? Of course it is! She’s menaced by a loser outside, but pulls a knife to protect herself. It’ll be harder to protect herself from the truck that’s following her, though – whose occupant left an adorable stuffed animal on the dash of her locked car-

Whatever you were trying to get across with that doll, you failed. Unless you were trying to get across ‘I want you to be creeped out before I kill you’, in which case, bravo on that one. Stripper drives home, with the truck keeping a good distance behind. Will it manage to catch her? Let’s find out together – after the opening credits!