At the mail sorting facility in a
Virgina prison, two guards find a bloody garment inside of a package!
But why, and for what reason? It turns out the clothes belonged to
two boys who disappeared two years ago! Everyone thought it was a
runaway and a parental abduction, until the bloody clothes turned up
last night! They were being mailed to a lady serial killer who was a
social worker that used her position to lure and murder teenagers!
She'd been killing along with her live-in lover, who shot himself in
the head when the cops turned up!
There were nine bodies in the basement,
so that was an understandable choice. This was fifteen years ago, so
maybe one of their victims is old enough to have turned to killing as
well? The team decides to operate under the theory that the victims
are still alive, because there's no good reason not to. Could the
serial killer be arranging this crime from behind bars?
Then we cut over to the cell where the
killer is waiting! She talks to the warden, and reveals that she
knows about the package of clothes, and wants to make a deal for
information!
Greg and JJ arrive at the prison, ready
to chat about the package - but the killer will only see one of them
at a time! Naturally, Greg goes. She won't talk to him, though, and
just throws a balled-up piece of paper to him with the 'all work and
no play' jive on it. Luckily, she was writing something on the
previous page when he walked into the room, so they decide to
Manhunter the impression on the page to see what that was!
Or, you know, you could have just had
the guards go in and take her notepad. She's a prison. She has no
privacy rights.
Joe has a scene with one of the
victim's mothers, and it's a rough look at what grief does to people!
She still wants to hope, but she doesn't know exactly what for! Damn.
JJ goes back to talk to the killer, and
I'm left wondering why she didn't do that already. Instead, she and
Greg drove all the way back to Quantico, talked about how maybe she
would rather talk to a woman, and then had JJ drive all the way to
the prison again. Doesn't that seem like a huge waste of time?
The killer tries to do a Hannibal
Lektor thing with JJ, and it's kind of silly to watch. Especially
since she suggests that JJ isn't taken seriously because of her
looks, and she's obviously smart enough to be in charge of the team
rather than Greg. Which, you know, is one hell of a reach. Greg's not
into murder and suffering from terrible PTSD the way JJ is. Then
again, no one ever accused this serial killer of being a good judge
of character.
In exchange for a information about the
person who sent the clothes - who might be a woman, given the way she
scoffs when JJ suggests that a man sent them - the killer wants a
transfer back to her home state of Kentucky! JJ says that it's
impossible, but I assume that's just a bargaining position. I mean,
they have Federal Penitentiaries in Kentucky, don't they? Where did
everyone on Justified keep getting sent?
Back at base, the team immediately
assumes that the transfer is an escape attempt - she's tried before,
and someone recently sent her a road map! Garcia announces that the
killer gets plenty of mail, but hasn't ever sent anything back to one
of her fans! Joe points out that prison guards tend to be pretty
corrupt, so maybe she was smuggling letters out? Then they get word
that the letter impression is ready to go!
The letter is obviously a code, because
they're obviously doing Manhunter again, but Reid can't break it
without talking to her first! So he goes to see her, and she does
more Manhunter stuff, and gives Reid the initials of who he's looking
for. She also says that the boys are still alive. But for how long!
We check in on them in small kennel
somewhere. One is ill, and the other is taking care of him! There's a
large man with big dogs outside, so that scoff was a misdirect, I
suppose. The guy brings them some dog food, and then leaves! Ick!
Reid tries to puzzle out what CH - the
initials - could have meant, when there's no one in the list of
visitors or correspondents with those initials! Could it be the
cipher key for the letter? If so, how?
They get some background on the
killer's last victim - he and another boy were held by her together!
He escaped, and she killed the other boy before the cops could arrive
based on the escapee's call! Could he have grown into the killer,
warped by his experiences at her hands?
Garcia gets the team the name of the
guard who spends the most time with the serial killer, and Reid goes
to talk to him. He admits that he's been sending the mail for the
serial killer. Reid assumes that it's because he wants to protect
another inmate in the prison, who the serial killer's goons would
attack if she asked them to! The guard admits all of that, but
doesn't have the real name of the recipient of the last letter she
sent, just 'John Smith'. I'm sure he has an address, though.
Joe and Aisha go to visit the serial
killer. They taunt her by saying that her lover was the one
responsible for all the killings, and she was just a patsy! This
makes her immediately prideful, and wants to prove them wrong! She
always needs to be the dominant one in every situation, you see!
Back at base, they go over the serial
killer's past crimes, and note that he accomplice was completely
subservient to her, so she'd need a partner who was every bit as
passive now. Like a former victim, for example? Garcia says 'John
Smith' is a dead end, but Joe suggests that she look for loners who
work in detail-oriented fields named John Smith. Maybe they'll get a
hit!
More Manhunter stuff with Aisha! For
some reason, Aisha lies to her about a story from her childhood.
Maybe it's just so she can make the killer feel smart by spotting the
lie and demanding the truth? It was a story about her being bullied,
but that seems false - she seems way more like a bully than a victim.
At the office, they get the clothes
back from the lab! It was dog blood on them, and relatively fresh -
what is the killer trying to accomplish by setting off this furor
now? Also, Reid has broken the code - the message the killer wrote
wasn't CH, but C++, the programming language. When you run the
sentence that she specified by underlining the date through that, you
get a message about atoning on the full moon!
Atone for turning her in all those
years ago?
Seriously, when am I going to give this
up?
They do yet another Lektor scene,
putting the killer on a plane to Kentucky! Joe and Reid discuss the
oddness of this creepy weirdo wanting to go home to Kentucky. Could
it be that she wants to witness the murders in person, and all of
this has been her plan to get just a little bit more blood on her
hands? Or is this just a an excuse to turn this from a Manhunter
rip-off to a Silence of the Lambs rip-off?
This causes the team to suspect that
the killer has some connection to Kentucky. They're puzzled for a
moment, as if it's impossible to understand how someone could have
mailed something from Roanoke if they lived in Kentucky. The
conclusion they come to is that he moved there to be close to her.
Here's an alternate theory - he drove there as a forensic
countermeasure? It's a five-hour drive. Not really such an ordeal. I
mean, I'm sure they're right, but it's an assumption they shouldn't
be making.
Oh, and on the plane, the serial killer
has noticed that Aisha is a psychopath, which honestly makes the team
look kind of bad for not picking up on ot.
Thankfully, the killer isn't the
escapee after all! No, he's just one of her patients, who moved from
Kentucky to Virginia to be close to her, and tried repeatedly to
visit her under assumed names! Wow, how did you not find this
obsessive a fan way sooner? JJ goes to his Roanoke house to look for
clues!
Meanwhile, on the plane, the killer
wants her handcuffs taken off, or she won't offer any further info!
So they take them off. Ugh, these people.
We see the fan take the kids out of the
van - but where are they? The killer says they're out in the woods,
but Greg says they're at the clinic where the killer first treated
the fan - which has been abandoned for years! Who should they
believe, a mass-murderer or Greg?
The continue into the woods and find
the van, along with one kid, who's locked in a shed! They demand the
killer lead them to where she would take the fan on walks, and she
says she will! They find the fan by a lake that I feel like we've
seen on the show before, and he demands to see the serial killer!
Does she want to cause his death? Is that what all this was about?
Yup. She tells him to kill himself, and he does it! We don't hear what she said, though.
THE END
Then they don't transfer the killer,
and Aisha says she won't tell her the truth the way she promised to!
Greg goes to visit the killer, and says he wants to know why she
triggered the whole mishegoss with the killer.
Greg has figured it all out - when she
was 14 she missed school for a year, and a 15-year-old neighbour was
killed in a hunting accident! So I guess she was impregnated, and her
father the minister killed the neighbour and forced her to have the
baby in secret? Was the fan her son?
No! The child is her final disciple,
and she says that they're going to be coming soon in order to wreck
everything! No gender of the child is given, so we're left wondering
who's going to be cast in the part!
1 - Was profiling in any way helpful in
solving the crime?
Nope. They just did what the killer
wanted at every point, and they got the kids back. Everything
happened exactly the way she wanted it to.
2 - Could the crime have been solved
just as easily using conventional police methods given the known
facts of the case?
As long as they followed her rules as
well, sure!
So, on a scale of 1 (Dirty Harry) to 10
(Tony Hill), How Useful Was Profiling in Solving the Crime?
1/10 - So I guess this is setting up
the cliffhanger next week? They can't resolve a setup like this in a
single week, can they?
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