Criminal Minds 814: All That Remains

The episode opens with home video footage, as a teen is getting ready to go out in the least flattering dress I've ever seen. It's a formless mess of layers and frills, all in a red that makes her skin look sickly white in comparison. Maybe the character is hiding a pregnancy? I can't imagine any other reason to wear such a terrible outfit.

This has been the fashion criticism portion of the review, which I will retire, right up until Derek shows up in a T-shirt.

It seems the a guy is coming to pick up the elder daughter for homecoming! A tradition I still don't quite understand. Who is coming home? From where? Why?

Okay, yes, I understand the why - to watch the football game. But I don't get the rest of it.

The video ends and it's two years later - suddenly things get stylistically weird, as text of a 911 call shows up on the screen as the characters read lines. It's weird - the lines actually disappear from the screen once the actors finish speaking, for reasons I don't quite understand. Aren't we watching a preservation of a record, or something like it?

Apparently something like it was right, since the action moves into the assignment room, where the full text of the call is up on a monitor. According to the call, the two daughters disappeared, and the father called the police. And the team are just now getting around to working on the case two years later. Or is the disappearance happening now? This opening is confusing me to no end.

Just want to pause and give the show a compliment here for understanding how to structure these things - in previous episodes we've seen titles like 'six months ago' opening an episode. This is, of course, nonsense, since the first scene sets a timeline and the rest of the episode has to relate back to that first scene. This time they got it right, and I'm happy to see that they're learning.

Okay, then things get even weirder, when the show reveals that the 911 call just came in an hour earlier, and the father was confused, not knowing what day of the week it was. Has he had one of those 'Memento' brain injuries, and he keeps reliving the day his daughters went missing over and over again? That would be depressing!

What I want to know right now, though, is why the team is working on the case. All we've heard so far is that two teen girls are missing, and their dad was confused on a 911 call one hour earlier. Why is this FBI business at this stage?

Ah, the big reveal comes moments later - the mother disappeared the year before, and the father also waited two days before calling the police about that one!

Um... why wouldn't you start with that? It's context that helps you understand the significance of the new call, and makes it clear why you're working this bizarre serial abduction case. You know that you're not trying to surprise the people you work with, don't you, Greg?

Also, who called you to let you know about it? It's been a single hour since the 911 call. Assume 10 minutes for a patrol car to get there, and another 15 for a uniformed officer to assess the situation and call in detectives. Charitably let's assume 15 more minutes for the detectives to arrive, and let's assume they already knew about the wife and immediately understood that this was a super-serious situation. That's still 50 minutes after the 911 call for the detectives to be on the scene, realizing that they need help.

When Greg says the 911 call happened an hour earlier, he's already got the whole team assembled in the briefing room, and Garcia has assembled an audio-visual presentation of the case evidence, including a transcript of the 911 call, and photographs of all the relevant parties.

And we're being asked to believe that all of this happened - a detective calls the FBI, the call goes through to Greg, Greg gets all the details and agrees to take the case, Greg tells Garcia to put a presentation together, Greg tells everyone to assemble in the meeting room, and Greg gets clearance from his superiors to travel to "Salisbury" - all within around ten minutes.

That's just ludicrous, even by Criminal Minds standards.

BTW - I put the town name in quotes, because I don't know where this episode is set - there was no location title over that first scene. I'm just going on what Greg said in the briefing. It's either Salisbury Maryland or North Carolina. When it comes time to make this episode's map listing, maybe I'll just flip a coin?

Anyhoo, I'm sure this will all be explained after the credits!

On the plane we get the sordid family history of the victims! There was marital trouble - the wife cheated on the husband right before her disappearance! He might have killed her to inherit her money! It's all dramatic stuff, but I'm more interested in the credits. The dad is being played by Ken Olin, who was briefly famous as the star of 'Thirtysomething'! I've never seen an episode of it, though, so I can't comment on how his appearance here plays into or against his image as a performer. I think he mostly directs now? Maybe he's related to Lena Olin?

More importantly, the episode also stars Keith Szarbajaka, whose name I hope I spelled right, since he's a beloved genre actor and voice performer! His credits range from The Equalizer right up to L.A. Noire! So he's kind of a big deal. Perhaps only to me, but still.

On the drive over to the hose the team continues their guesswork. The wife's lover had an alibi, so he's not a valid suspect. Unless, you know, the wife left to be with him, and then he killed her later on when he no longer required an alibi. They wonder whether the father could have lashed out at the daughter who was leaving for college soon, basically just marking time until they start finding evidence.

Maybe I'm crazy, but isn't the fact that the father claims to have missing time surrounding both disappearances - which happened on the same day a year apart, BTW - the real headline here? Whether he's drugged, lying, or crazy, that seems like the road you want to follow.

Yay! Keith is playing the local cop! Good for him!

Greg and Joe go to talk to Ken, but stupidly bring Keith with them, who's so needlessly confrontational that he keeps them from being able to get a read on Ken's mental state. He does mention that he's made flyers, though, so that's something!

The rest of the team searches the daughters' rooms, and the only big takeaway is that the older daughters' space is unusually tidy. Sign of Ken cleaning up after a crime, or something more sinister?

Then it's back to Ken, who tells the story of how he woke up and discovered that his daughters were missing. The whole sequence of him realizing this plays out in a colour-desaturated 80-second flashback, which is a weird choice. I mean, we already know that - according to him, he blacked out Monday night, and then woke up thinking it was Tuesday and found out the girls were gone. If that's the truth, then the flashback has given us no new information. If it's a lie, then the show just offered a flashback that wasn't true for no real reason.

Either way, it kind of feels like the episode was running short in the edit, and they left in a scene that had no reason to be in the episode. Who directed this episode? Checking... Huh, someone named 'Thomas Gibson'. I'll have to check if he's done many others, because we're 11 minutes in and he's already made two deeply weird choices.

Derek and Jeanne discuss some interesting evidence! Ken owns both a shotgun and a pistol, but doesn't know where either of them are! After the wife went missing, forensic investigators supposedly checked the shotgun to see if it had been used recently, and came away with the determination that it hadn't been fired in years. Is that something they can tell? I'm not being sarcastic, I actually don't know this. Like, if you fired the shogun there's gunpowder particulate all over the barrel and chamber, but if you cleaned it, could investigators tell how long it was since it had been cleaned? And if you didn't clean it, could they tell how long the residue had been in the gun?

They decide to grab Ken's sheets, hoping to see if there's any gunshot residue on them - he washed his clothes before noticing the absence of his daughters, so any evidence clinging to them was destroyed. Check this out, though-

So either Ken went to a lot of trouble posing for mockup photos, or he brought in actual family photos to use as set dressing! That's a step above and beyond in either event, and I may well be willing to overlook this 'Thomas Gibson's' strange choices as a director if the episode keeps getting the little details right.

Although the characters still haven't given the blackouts the attention they so obviously deserve.

Speaking of - Keith has some evidence out in the driveway! There are two hard liquor bottles out in the recycling bin! And since it gets picked up on Monday morning, they think Ken has gone through two entire bottles of booze in just two days - which would go a long way towards explaining that blackout. Although they really are jumping to conclusions. After all, both of those bottles could have had dregs in them, and he'd just finished off both of them over the course of a couple of days, having just two small glasses of liquor. It's not like they found a receipt proving that he bought them recently, after all.

They confront him about the booze, and he claims - as I suggested - that one of the bottles was almost empty, so really, he just drank one entire bottle of bourbon in a single night. Which isn't much of a defense against charges that you're a blackout drunk. At least Keith is taking the blackout seriously!

Derek tells Keith to be less aggro with his interrogation technique, but Keith is having none of it! Then Garcia calls with information - she's looking into the girls' phone records, and will call when she knows who they've been talking to! So... Garcia called to let Derek know that she didn't have any information yet?

Thanks?

JJ and Jeanne check in with the nosy neighbour across the street. Apparently Ken had a fight with at least one of the girls, then drove off somewhere around 10PM on the night of the disappearances, and was back sometime after midnight! Finally, something approaching a concrete clue!

Greg finally tries to ask Ken about his time loss - is it just a result of his drinking, or is something else going on? Ken doesn't have any easy answers though, and Joe interrupts before things can get interesting. It seems they've found the younger daughter's body tossed into a river! Which... ugh. I mean, I know that no one had died in the episode yet, so someone was bound to, but still. Ugh.

Then Greg goes to give Ken the news about his dead daughter, and the show remains at a respectful distance from the human tragedy, even allowing Greg to close the door so we don't see Ken collapsing into despair. Solid choice, director Thomas Gibson.

Scientists have returned with evidence! There was gunpowder residue on Ken's boots and sheets, so they've got to take him downtown for an interrogation! I'd say that this was an unusually quick turnaround for the scientists, but the show is edited in such a way that it's impossible to tell how much time is supposed to be passing between scenes. Have they been in the house an hour? Eight? Who knows?

Then it's time for a trip to the morgue, where we learn that the girl was killed with a blunt force blow to the back of the head! Could she have been clubbed to death with a gun? Maybe. She also could have fallen on something. Also, she was placed in the water after death, presumably as a way of concealing the crime. So despite Derek's suggestion that she was pistol-whipped to death, there's no actual connection between this crime and the gunshot residue yet. There was a new clue, however - skin under her fingernails! Does he father have any wounds?

We find him in an interrogation room, where Greg immediately asks the question, and Ken is happy to roll up his sleeves, revealing that they're covered in scratches. Things look really bad for Ken, everybody. Is this seriously an episode about a guy who keeps getting drunk and murdering his family members?

JJ and Jeanne talk about JJ's own dead sister for a little while, then Garcia finally comes through with evidence! The mother's lover "Godwin" had been texting the older sister, offering support and advice. Suspiciously, he sent her five texts on the night of the disappearance, but Sarah deleted them from her phone! What could the conversation have been about?

Godwin has an innocent explanation - Ken gets scary violent when he drinks, so Sarah was looking for advice and a place to hide out on occasion. Godwin was her soccer coach as well as her mother's lover, so it makes sense (kind of) that she would go to him for help!

Garcia then turns up more evidence - a recorded phone call to a domestic abuse hotline on the night of the disappearances! The recorder captured the sound of the two girls hiding in a room while Ken, in a drunken rage, banged on the door, demanding to be let in! Um... maybe there's some kind of confidentiality thing I'm not sure about, but if you're working an abuse hotline, and you actually hear abuse on the call, do you not involve the police right away? Is that not a responsibility?

Anyway, it's time for another flashback, as Ken remembers some more of his missing time! Again, it's just his POV on the scene we just saw, which feels like a waste of our time. Are Thomas Gibson and Ken Olin friends? Was this whole episode designed to be nothing more than an acting showcase for him? Because it really doesn't have much of a plot, and I'm still not sure why the team was called in. We're more than halfway through the episode, and they've offered zero insight and haven't contributed to the case in any meaningful way.

Except for Garcia, of course, whose penchant for violating privacy laws gets things done.

Ken freaks out, revealing that he has a second personality, one who's happy to murder all of the people that Ken doesn't like, and then dispose of their bodies! So that explains the missing time!

Finally we get to the psychological aspect of the episode - and it's about time - but it really does strain credulity that the team would have been asked to consult on this case at all. It was a crime with one suspect, and a search of the house revealed plenty of evidence against him. You can make the stretch that the FBI would have been called in because of a kidnapping - although that rarely happens - but since there was no reason to suspect that this was a kidnapping, why involve the team?

It's almost as if they needed to be there so that experts were on hand when a psychology-based twist occurred, and the episode's writers didn't care how preposterous the situation that got them out there was!

The team goes back over what they know - there was mud in the car and on his boots, so he drove the girls out to somewhere off the beaten path. Keith wants to arrest Ken and be done with the case, but the team thinks there's a chance Sarah could still be alive, and thinks they can interview the second personality to get the information! Which isn't a terrible plan. After all, there's nothing about the younger daughter's death that screams 'murder', rather than 'terrible accident', since she was killed by a single blow to the back of the head, and she'd scratched up his arm. Heck, he could have just shoved her, and she fell on a rock, immediately dying Ruby-style.

Okay, so the team finally has a psychology-related goal in mind - convince Nek (which is what I'll be calling Ken's evil other personality) to reveal what happened to Sarah. Can they get the job done, whether that job is bargaining with Nek or proving he's not real?

Greg goes to talk to Ken, who reveals that he's been blacking out since grad school, and always blamed it on his drinking. Here's a thought - if this guy has been having chronic blackouts for over 20 years, how does he still have custody of his children? Seriously, his wife is missing and presumed dead, and his defense is 'I was so drunk I don't remember the 36 hours in which she disappeared'. How does that not immediately lead to your kids being taken away from you? Especially when the family court judge is told that he's such a heavy drinker that he's been having periods of lost time for his entire adult life? There's just no way he gets to hold onto those kids after the wife disappears.

Also, where were the kids during that missing day when the wife disappeared? Did they not have some clues to offer?

In the conference room, Reid is leading a discussion of the DID diagnosis, and posits that there's no way Ken's liver would have survived twenty-five years of blackout drinking. Which is just a silly thing to say, since Reid has no idea how healthy his liver is. The guy could be a few drinks away from cirrhosis and you'd have no idea by just looking at him. Jeanne points out that he's been in AA a few times, but Reid thinks that there's no way that could account for his lack of severe physical symptoms of alcoholism.

Just to be clear - all of Reid's suppositions here are based on absolutely nothing, and are a writer's contrivance to get him to ask Penelope if Ken has ever been on medication for alcoholism, which will presumably lead them down a new investigative path. While I appreciate the writers attempting to make it look like the characters are driving the story with their knowledgeable insights, Reid's illogical leaps are too preposterous to seem like anything but contrivance, and the show should have just had Garcia come up with the info on her own, while illegally searching his medical records to check into the blackouts. Which, again, should have been the focus of the investigation right from the start.

A little digging revealed that the wife had a prescription for the drug that makes you feel sick if you drink alcohol. Why didn't Ken just get the prescription himself. Did he want to keep his drinking a secret? It's not like the wife could have secretly drugged him for decades, so he obviously knew about it. I mean, a guy would have to be pretty out of it to take a pill every day without knowing what it was, wouldn't he?

JJ then has a great idea - bring Godwin into the interrogation room and accuse him of molesting Sarah in order to make Ken mad enough to turn into Nek! Actually, I don't know if that's actually a great idea. You're putting Godwin's life in danger for no obvious reason. I mean, yes, you want to talk to Nek, but there's no clear timeline that has t

Obviously I'm aware that Keith gave them an hour to find Sarah before charging Ken with murder, but I'm disregarding that plot point because it's so ridiculous. After all, Ken should already be under arrest. They're clearly holding him in a custodial setting, he's obviously not free to leave, and they haven't read him his rights. If they actually manage to get Ken to confess with these crazy tactics there's a decent chance the confession would be thrown out because they eagerly violated his constitutional rights.

JJ interviews Nek, asking if he dealt with parental stress by shooting at things at night. He admits that yes, that's his normal move. He then explains that he took the girls out into the woods to scare them, specifically by taking them to a creepy cabin in the woods!

When we get a look at the place I'm a little disappointed - Nek was attempting to make it sound super creepy, suggesting it was long-abandoned. But check this out:

Doors and shutters are solid and in perfect repair, the shingled roof is completely even, there's even glass in all of the windows. This isn't the creepy location we were promised. Hell, the windows all have intact curtains on them. What kind of a sleazy den is this?

Also, why are a dozen of them closing in on the place with their guns drawn? You don't think you're hunting down the Manson family. The killer's already in jail. You're trying to rescue his victim. The idea that there are more people involved in this crime has never entered your heads.

They find a shotgun hole in a window, and the younger daughter's phone - this is where the attack happened! Now it's time to drive wildly through the night, hoping they stumble upon Sarah in the scraggly woods!

I wanted to be more sarcastic there, but I don't actually have a better plan.

Although I will point out that this episode is set in the dead of winter, and characters talked about it hitting 20 degrees overnight. That's well below freezing, people who live in sane countries that use Celsius. Despite this warning, it's pouring rain, rather than snowing.

Dear producers - why try and make the temperature sound worse than you're going to be able to depict? Being soaking wet in 5 degree weather is plenty cold enough for someone to die of hypothermia.

Anyhow, the 'just drive aimlessly around the woods' plan works out great when JJ spots Sarah hiding in some trees. She's cowering away from the convoy of vehicles for reasons I hope the show will explain. When she comes out from behind the trees, she's still clutching the shotgun, super freaked-out. I know she's been through some trauma, but why would you hide from a convoy of vehicles, rather than running towards them for help? She can't possibly think it's her evil dopplefather Nek in those three black SUVs, can she?

Unless he also has the ability to make clones of himself!

Probably not, though.

Then it's off to the hospital, where I guess more flashbacks will happen? JJ talks to her about missing her mother, then it's off to visit Ken! Sarah begs him to tell what happened to her mother, which is important, of course, but I feel like could wait a little while. Especially since she's still processing the death of her sister. Like, Mom's been dead for a year, Sarah, there's plenty of time to find her body.

Ken claims to not know, so JJ takes Sarah home, and is disturbed to discover how blase Sarah is. She immediately judges that it's not shock, but rather something more sinister! Did Sarah kill everyone and drug her father to create blackouts? Almost certainly not, because that would be crazy, and why would she have still been in the woods if that was the case?

Oh, in a line of dialogue it's mentioned that there's family driving in from Charleston, so let's figure this is happening in North Carolina.

JJ then talks to the team about Sarah's bizarre behaviour, and they agree - this whole thing was a plan to frame her father for murdering her sister. The bigger twist? The team knew all along! That's right, the second they read her diaries and school articles earlier that day they realized that she was obviously a crazed psychopath. They didn't mention this on camera, of course, and they all acted like they were sure Ken and Nek had done it. To the point where they spent a huge amount of time torturing a guy who they thought was a victim of a frame, just to deceive the audience!

The team rushes over to the house in order to rescue JJ, because they assume Sarah is so crazy that, after thinking that she got away with perfect murders, she'd just kill an FBI agent for no reason?

Reid checks with Garcia about who exactly canceled Ken's prescription to the alco-nauseant, and she finds that it was Sarah! Which is just so confusing. Did Ken not notice when the drugs stopped coming? Was he unconcerned that someone had mysteriously canceled his prescription? Or was he just so psyched to be able to drink again that he gave it no further thought? Also, when they were quizzing him about his alcoholism earlier in the episode, why didn't it come up that he's been clean for more than a decade thanks to drugs, and only really started drinking again recently?

It makes sense for him to choose to stop taking the drugs and start drinking again when his wife started cheating on him. It makes considerably less sense that he stopped the pills and drank around the time of his wife's disappearance, then went back onto the pills for most of the year, only to have Sarah cancel them for him four months ago. So then Ken just took the pills running out as a sign, and went back to drinking? What? This whole subplot about the anti-alcohol pills is just a baffling mess that adds nothing to the story.

While Sarah has the shower running upstairs JJ sneaks down into the basement. Because she can't wait for the rest of the team to get there before searching the house with a warrant? Do these people all hate the laws of evidence?

I guess she's going downstairs to look for the rubbermaid quilting supplies container she saw earlier in the episode. See, Sarah mentioned that her mother used to hold her in a quilt that she made, and then when JJ got to the house just now she discovered a quilt hanging on the wall, so she's jumped to the conclusion that Sarah will have hidden incriminating evidence with the quilting stuff, I guess? Seems like a stretch, and something she can wait on the evidence collection people to deal with, but whatever. Episode's almost over.

Then things get super-dumb, as JJ finds the mother's ledger in with the quilts, and Sarah confronts her with Ken's other gun! Because she's an idiot? JJ explains that because all of the trophies from the mom's murder are in the bin from the year little sister was born, Sarah must have concocted an elaborate, years-spanning plot to kill her mother and sister out of jealousy for her mother loving her sister more.

Wow, this episode went from boring to amazingly stupid in a hurry, didn't it?

The team shows up and arrests Sarah, and with less than one minute left in the episode, I bet we don't get any kind of a resolution!

My prediction proves accurate, as the next two scenes are Greg uncuffing Ken and taking him home. There's no dialogue in the scene, and frankly I'm a little worried that he's going to kill himself. The guy's a blackout drunk with an evil second personality who just found out that his evil daughter murdered the rest of his family and tried to frame him for the crimes. And Greg doesn't even walk him inside to have a brief conversation.

I'd say you suck at your job, Greg, but I guess you're not a grief counselor. I will say that you're a terrible human being for not leaving Ken with any kind of support system, and I think that assessment of your character will be supported by the evidence.

THE END.

Seriously, that's the end of the episode.

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

Um... no? They didn't solve anything this week. They just stumbled into a series of nonsensical situations and got evidence handed to them.

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

I mean, probably not, because this crime is so preposterous that no one could have solved it. It's also so preposterous that it couldn't have happened, but more on that below.

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

0 - This episode was a conceptual train wreck that was executed somehow even more terribly than it was conceived.

Let's take a moment to break down the plot that's revealed in the last five minutes of the episode. Here is Sarah's plan, as I understand it.

- Boil with resentment over lack of parental attention, plan to kill mother and sister.

- Wait until mother starts having affair with soccer coach, and dad starts drinking.

- Notice that dad occasionally turns into a violent second personality when drunk, then forgets what he did for days at a time.

- Wait for dad to get that drunk again.

- Lure mom somewhere isolated and then kill her, hiding the body somewhere it can never be found.

- Plant mother's ring, necklace, and appointment book in a bin in the basement, so that when the police find it, they'll think dad is the killer.

- Hope that the police don't search the house extensively and eventually drop the case against dad.

- Hope that dad doesn't lose custody of his daughters, although he obviously would.

- Wait one year, during which time dad repeatedly gets drunk and threatens his daughters in his Nek persona.

- On the one-year anniversary of murdering mom, wait for dad to get super drunk, then anger him into a Nek transformation, while getting her sister to call an abuse hotline so that they'll overhear him threatening them.

- Know with confidence that the abuse hotline won't call the police, completely ruining the plan.

- Allow Nek to drag them both to a cabin in the woods while wielding a shotgun.

- Taunt Nek into shooting out a window so that he'll get gunshot residue all over himself.

- Somehow overpower Nek, grabbing the shotgun and telling him to drive off.

- Club sister to death with the shotgun.

- Drag the sister's body kilometers away to a river and dump it.

- Hang out in the woods for 48 hours until the police find you.

- Claim that dad did everything.

This plan has six times as many moving parts as it should, and it leans way too heavily on a disturbed, alcohol-conjured multiple personality behaving exactly as expected. Also it requires Sarah to be able to disarm him.

Here's the real problem with the episode - they act like they've known all along that Sarah was the killer, but the more logical explanation is that Nek, when recounting the events of the night, had told them that Sarah got the gun away from him and ran him off, with younger daughter still alive at the time.

Had this happened, they would have disbelieved him at first, then looked for evidence that Sarah was the killer, and found plenty. But the show doesn't play it like that - because if they'd suspected Sarah of being a crazed killer, they wouldn't have sent JJ in alone. They would have just gotten a warrant and searched the house while she was busy at the hospital/police station.

Instead, this episode has the strangest ending - they want to do the Silence of the Lambs thing, with JJ walking into the death house and suddenly realizing that all of the evidence points to Sarah, but they also want to make it look like the team figured it out on their own. They don't seem to understand that you can't have both.

I wonder how much was cut out of this episode. Probably a lot, right? At some point they must have shot a flashback of Nek threatening the girls in the cabin, and then being scared off by Sarah, right? Why do the other flashback if you weren't going to do one when it mattered to the story, and finally gave the audience some new information? I'm guessing it got cut because they wanted the Sarah reveal to come out of nowhere, because they valued surprise over logic and basic coherence.

Looking over the whole episode, the part that bothers me the most is Sarah's decision to spend 2 days hanging out in the woods. It just doesn't make sense. Yeah, every other part of her plan is stupid and requires absurd contrivances, but this is just the dumbest. Look at it from her perspective - she's just grabbed a shotgun, run off her dad with it, and clubbed her sister to death. Why on earth wouldn't she then go to the authorities? What is to be gained by staying out in the woods? If she'd just called for help/gone for help immediately, the police would have arrested her father that very night, found out that he was incredibly delusional, and immediately locked him up forever. The FBI never would have gotten involved, and she would have gotten away with it?

Yet she stayed in the woods at near-freezing temperatures with no shelter or fire. And the only reason she did it was so that the rest of the episode could happen. God, it's like we're back in that awful Strangers On A Train episode, only somehow worse.

Really, this feels like the "High Tension" of Criminal Minds episodes. As if the producers had built a whole episode about alcoholism and family violence, and then when they were in the middle of shooting it, someone said 'wait - this is the most boring episode we've ever done! We need a twist!' So they just announced that the daughter was a crazy murderer and rewrote the ending to accommodate that.

I'm not saying that this is the worst episode of the season, I'm merely stating that this is the worst episode of the season so far. And this season has had some pretty terrible episodes.