The episode opens on a plane, which is
weirdly full of actors with speaking parts! Seriously, like six
different people get lines! It's amazing! Anyhow, the plane's wifi
goes out and it starts shaking like a leaf - will a killer cause a
plane crash this week, immediately jumping to the second-highest body
count of all of their quarries other than Frank?
The answer is yes! There's a plane
crash out in a field in Colorado! It's such an important case that
when JJ and Jennifer get a call from Penelope, they're told to head
straight to the plane, rather than into the office! Which is
something you'd think they would do more often, considering how
frequently they call people at 2AM with a case. It's nice to see them
belatedly smartening up, though.
So, why on earth would the team need to
work on this case? Aren't crashes the NTSB's bailiwick? Well, it
seems that someone on the ground thought they saw a streak of light
going towards the plane, which might have been a surface-to-air
missile, and the team is supposed to profile the mass-murderer!
Yeah, that's pretty tenuous. If someone
had immediately claimed credit for the attack, I'd see getting the
FBI and BSU involved immediately, but a witness seeing light? Such a
stretch. What are they going to do, stand in a field and check to see
if the light is still there?
Miraculously, one of the pilots has
survived the crash! So that gives the team someone to interview after
the credits! Again, that's the kind of thing that might have been of
interest to them, but they shouldn't have been called in until he
showed up.
Over at the crash site, Jennifer and
Reid discover that the plane wreck is scattered over a mile, meaning
that it broke up in mid-air, so a missile is back in the running! Oh,
and Jennifer's sister and brother-in-law were killed on 9/11, so that
girl in her house is her niece, who she's raised since she was a
baby.
Also, and I'm not sure why this is
relevant, but there's vomit around, suggesting that passengers were
sick before the crash... but why?
The local crazy who saw the light
describes a green trail and a blinding flash of light. Is that what
SAMs look like? Like a small burner to get the missile airborne, and
then a flash as the afterburners kick in to chase down the plane? Is
that a thing? He also claims that he knows who was responsible for
the attack, but before we can hear his thoughts, we cut over to some
militia guys out in the woods, stashing their rocket launchers,
grabbing some rifles, and asking where 'Cole', one of their missing
guys is!
Could these guys be the domestic
terrorists responsible for the crash, or are they just paranoid that
after the crash the government is coming for them? We notably don't
see a missile launcher in their stash, just a bunch of smaller rocket
launchers. Is that significant, or just bad propsmanship?
At the hospital, the co-pilot is too
freaked out to offer much information - he does mention severe
turbulence before the crash. Could it have been the missile hitting
the wing? You'd think an explosion from a missile would be more
impressive than a thump followed by severe turbulence - wouldn't you
have heard/felt the explosion as the wing was torn apart?
Greg goes to talk to the witness
without the military officer in tow - the guy claims that the
military was behind the attack, just like TWA 800 and Flight 93! Greg
assumes he's just a crank, but then the guy volunteers that he's seen
militia guys creeping around his property, which he thinks is proof
of a Black-Ops situation!
Joe and Reid look over the map of where
the plane went down, and try to calculate where a missile launcher
might have been. Oddly, they don't use the location of the old
crank's house when putting together their calculations. The big
problem? Shoulder-mounted missile launchers can't hit targets that
high in the air! Could someone on the plane have caused it to dive so
that the missile could reach it? Unlikely, since if you could cause
the plane to dive precipitously, why bother with a missile? Why not
just crash the plane?
The vomit turns out to be a useful
clue! It seems that the thing most likely to cause that is rapid up
and down movement, which could only be caused by opening the climb
slats in mid-flight, which isn't supposed to be possible if you're
not in take-off!
Oh, and the co-pilot's wife has made it
to the control center! Which seems incredibly suspicious - it was a
flight going from Philadelphia, PA to Phoenix, AZ. Even if she lives
in Phoenix, isn't that something like a six-hour drive? There's no
way six hours is meant to have passed at this point in the story. Or
maybe it has? This show is so garbage at timelines.
Garcia checks into everyone who lives
in the area, trying to figure out who could be involved in a
terrorist cell - the two options: 1: A guy who donated money to a
mosque. 2: An army missile operator that was dishonourably discharged
for being grossly insubordinate.
It's crazy that in America, being a
Muslim makes you seem exactly as threatening as being a disgruntled
ex-soldier.
Although, it seems that being
dishonourably discharged is enough of a reason for a Judge to sign a
search warrant, because in the very next scene the team is arresting
all of the militia guys at their base! Oh, and 'Cole' is still AWOL,
BTW.
The militia guys won't talk, and they
didn't have any SAMs on their property, just plenty of illegal guns
they'll be charged over. Everyone's concerned about the missing Cole,
though - could he have done this on his own? Oh, and the Muslim guy
was cleared off-camera.
Reid has a report on how the plane
broke up! It happened along all of the weld lines, meaning that it
was likely broken apart by the severe up and down motion mentioned
earlier! It's kind of weird that Reid is explaining this, since the
NTSB guys are the ones trained to know about that sort of thing. But
they want the team to seem useful, I suppose.
The point is, the flaps were messed
with - probably by hackers - until the plane cracked up and crashed!
They don't know about the wifi issues,
of course, so the team discusses the possibility that either the
pilot or co-pilot crashed the plane manually in order to commit
suicide in the most awful way possible! Which has happened, so I can
see why they'd think that.
In the hospital, the wife confirms that
the co-pilot was grounded because of severe depression years ago -
which is a little weird, since we were told just a few minutes ago
that both pilots 'passed their background checks', and depression
severe enough to take a guy's wings would be one hell of a red flag
on any check Garcia was doing. Oh, and the guy went off of his mood
stabilizers a few months ago, so there's that.
He's pretty sure he didn't crash the
plane, though. He remembers arguing with the pilot about something,
and turning off the communication system, but he doesn't know why!
His wife thinks that the pilot was the problem - the guy rented a
room to a foreign student who was supposedly very strange and
obsessed with planes!
Oh, and Cole turns up at the base. He
was hunting squirrels. Disappointed.
They finally turn up the black box,
which has the cockpit recorder! As we assumed, the controls started
going nuts without the pilots doing anything, and that's what they
were arguing about! The communications system was shut down because
they attempted a full system reboot!
The team gathers around to talk about
plane hacking! This leads to Reid getting the Prentiss Award-winning
line of the night:
How can you possibly know that, Reid?
Wouldn't terrorists love to be able to crash planes remotely? Nothing
about the fact that it was a hacker rather than a bomber suggests the
type of person you're looking for, other than a different set of
technical skills.
That being said, if you sketched out
the general traits of serial killers and terrorists - religious
mania, sociopathy, hatred of women - there would be a lot of overlap.
Let's be honest here, any distinction you want to make between
terrorist and serial killer is cosmetic at best.
Then we cut over to the killer's
Unabomber shack, where he's got a bunch of wooden furniture and a
huge computer setup for crashing planes!
Back at base, we learn that the
co-pilot's wife has been getting death threats, since people aren't
psyched about him surviving. Because people suck, I guess. Also the
team is sure that the killer didn't pick this flight randomly, and
that he'll have a connection to someone on board that he was trying
to kill. Which is, you know, nonsense - that's like saying an
arsonist would only burn down buildings if he wanted to kill a
specific person living inside of them, which is just not how that
kind of compulsion works. Since they probably won't be able to find
him if this wasn't the case, though, I guess we'll just let them have
it for now.
The killer hears the news that the
co-pilot survived, and it prompts him to decide on his next target!
Which, how does he have one of those?
Even if the president doesn't ground all flights the way they want
him to, they're operating under the theory that he's using some kind
of a transmitter to directly target the plane's systems - so wouldn't
airlines at least give this part of Colorado a couple-hundred-mile
berth?
This is a perfect example of the way
the show always requires a 'ticking clock', even when it makes no
sense in the narrative. Any normal person would see a story about a
serial killer on the loose, and they'd agree that he needed to be
caught and punished for his crimes, which would have the knock-on
effect of also saving potential future victims. That's not good
enough for the producers of Criminal Minds, though - for them, the
team must always be - in addition to catching and punishing criminals
- preventing an imminent death/rescuing a specific person. They truly
feel that the audience won't care about the stakes unless someone is
about to die when the team catches the killer.
They're so unwilling to deviate from
this formula that you end up with an episode like this, where there's
no way the killer could threaten another plane, but since the plot
requires that he does, reality is bent in his favour.
Oh, and Garcia has spotted a person on
the plane who was sent a death threat - it's the Oppenheimer 'I am
become death' line from Hindu scripture.
It turns out that flights have been
grounded, but too late to stop a plane from flying over the threat
zone - it's out of contact... but why? Seriously, though - even
before the grounding order, there shouldn't have been a plane with a
flight path going over Colorado - while they didn't know about the
hacking until just recently, 12 hours ago they thought people in
Colorado were shooting down planes with missiles. That's more than
enough reason to give the state a wide berth.
Yeah, it's not hard to catch the killer
at all! As usual, Garcia does all of the hard work. The lady from the
plane went on a terrible blind date with the killer eight years ago,
and then he withdrew completely from society, popping his head up
only to talk about how awesome Robert Oppenheimer was. They assume
he's going to keep killing people, since Oppenheimer had a bunch of
bombs go off, but we're left with a puzzling question: a woman he
disliked just happened to get on a plane to go to a sorority reunion
that had a flight path that just happened to cross over the
relatively small radius within which he can crash planes? That's a
coincidence too far, show.
We get a scene inside the new plane -
it's being piloted by Lyta Alexander, of all people! They have
trouble with their controls, because that's the whole premise of the
episode.
The team discusses how hard it's going
to be to track the killer down - since the predicted radius of his
control setup is 28 square miles! Also, NORAD is planning to shoot
down the latest plane if the team can't find the killer and shut down
his control, because they're afraid that the killer will crash it
into a populated area!
Which is just so dumb - first off, as
far as we can tell, he can't control the plane outside of his radius,
and there isn't a city within it - but more importantly, even if he
could keep flying the plane outside of his transmitter ranger,
there's no way he could aim it accurately at anything, even a city.
He's making it crash by wobbling it in the air, and he doesn't have
access to real-time data about exactly where the plane is, so how
could he possibly bring it down at just the right moment?
At the control center, they realize
that there's a big football game happening at that very moment!
Which, again, there's no way he could accurately aim the plane into.
Hell, he just destabilized the whole thing by putting down its
landing gear at cruising altitude - this is not exactly a guided
missile.
Luckily the killer was one of the
people who called to threaten the co-pilot, and despite the fact that
he's some kind of super-genius, he left the GPS active in the phone
he called from, so Garcia is able to immediately send the team his
location! Convenient!
Okay, things just got even crazier -
the show is now saying that yes, once he's taken control of a plane
via his transmitter, he can fly it indefinitely - and he's just
turned it towards Washington D.C.! Which gives them like 2 hours to
kill before they have to shoot it down. Thanks, killer!
More importantly, the people in the
plane are just kind of hanging out, and things seem to be going
smoothly even though a couple of scenes ago the landing gear were
lowered, which should completely screw with its aerodynamics.
There's also a guy on the plane who is
shocked to discover a news story on his laptop about planes being
grounded after the crash in Colorado! Which is kind of silly, since
the plane crash was like 30 hours ago and would have been
international news all day yesterday - and it's actually a little
strange that there's anyone on this flight at all. I'm no
psychologist, but when you hear about a plane mysteriously going down
over Colorado, and they have no idea what caused it, would you be
psyched to fly over that same stretch of land?
Next up, the team attacks the Unabomber
cabin where the guy is controlling the plane with a standard RC rig
with some extra circuit boards attached, and they try to negotiate
with him - but have no luck! He tries to crash the plane, so they
shoot him, which destroys the controller as he falls! They've brought
no electronic or flight specialists with them, so they just have to
hope that breaking the controller was all they needed to do!
And it was!
THE END
It's that abrupt, by the way. The plane
makes an emergency landing literally twenty seconds after the killer
was shot. The only way that could have happened is if the killer's
random turns and dips had - in another amazing coincidence - aligned
the plane perfectly with a miraculously clear runway long enough to
service a giant passenger jet!
Come on, Criminal Minds. Is there
anything you can't ruin with your compressed timelines? Why not just
have Lyta come on the radio and say 'we've regained control of the
airplane and we're heading for airport X, eta 17 minutes'? Would that
somehow be less of a satisfying climax?
Then they drop by the crash site, where
everyone is sad about the dead people, and Jennifer is especially so,
due to the 9/11 connection.
1 - Was profiling in any way helpful in
solving the crime?
God no. One of the people on the plane
had a direct connection to someone who A: had an obsession with the
death-cult aspects of Robert Oppenheimer, and B: the skills necessary
to pull off this mass murder. Their efforts were largely irrelevant.
2 - Could the crime have been solved
just as easily using conventional police methods given the known
facts of the case?
They just checked into the backgrounds
of the people on the plane. Standard operating procedure. Also the
killer phoned one of his victims. So there's that.
So, on a scale of 1 (Dirty Harry) to 10
(Tony Hill), How Useful Was Profiling in Solving the Crime?
1/10 - Gosh, very little of this made
sense!
1 comment:
Very thooughtful blog
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