We pick up soon after the end of the
last episode! So no, I wasn't forced to watch Beyond Borders, thank
heavens! Reid's in jail, and they're hoping a fresh drug test will
prove that Mr. Scratch drugged him with his custom brainwashing
cocktail in Mexico!
While Emily is looking after Reid, the
rest of the team has a new case to work! So I guess this 'Reid in
jail' thing is going to last a little while? Off-brand for them, but
I'm interested to see where it goes! The new case? Someone is making
self-driving cars run over pedestrians in Florida! Both of them at
the exact same stretch of road!
We see footage of people getting hit,
and it's kind of weird, because neither of them checked for oncoming
traffic before stepping off the sidewalk. Really, I'm saying this is
kind of on them. Joe announces that Garcia is coming along with them
to run the tech angle locally, and then once more butchers the
catchphrase, announcing that they'll have 'wheels up in 20'. Which,
again, is not possible, you stupid, stupid people.
Like, maybe they changed it to keep
from disrespecting the memory of Aaron? If so, just make it a bigger
number, and stop making fools of yourselves. Even Forrest Whitaker
said 'Wheels up in 40', which was a delusional statement, given that
he was in central DC when he said it.
In Jail, Reid gets a visit from Emily!
They're letting him wear a cardigan instead of prison clothes! That's
nice of them. Reid's mad at himself for 'falling into Scratch's
trap', which he should be, what with him only falling into it because
he did zero due diligence on the drugs he was giving to his mother.
Was he hoping that she'd be poisoned with arsenic or something?
Emily then asks if she can send a
lawyer friend of hers to defend Reid, and Reid is worried that
helping him will damage her reputation in the FBI. Here's the thing,
though - the FBI is in the business of avoiding embarrassment
whenever possible. If a lawyer can prove that Reid is innocent,
that's a huge win for them - and if they don't have to stick their
neck out to get that result, that's even better from their POV!
On the plane, the team goes over the
casefile. In a silly moment, they wonder if the pedestrians could
have been the killer's targets. That's the two people who it couldn't
have been. The killer is murdering people by running them over with a
remote-controlled car. That means their ability to kill is based
entirely on who happens to be walking across the street when one of
the hackable cars is driving up to the intersection. It would be
impossible to target a specific person that way.
So the target is either the drivers, or
the concept of auto-pilot enabled cars.
In DC, Emily meets with her lawyer
friend, who worries that the prosecution has a fairly decent case! Of
course, what goes unmentioned is that the team has like a year to
come up with evidence of who the real killer is, since there's no way
a case this weird is getting into court any time soon.
At the crime scene, they look around to
attempt to figure out how the killer was watching the crosswalk -
after all, he must have been, how else could he have timed the
attacks! Garcia points out that there's a traffic camera on the
corner, which the killer probably hacked into. The local investigator
explains that the city has traffic cameras like that anywhere, which
for some reason doesn't raise a vital question in the team's mind -
why this intersection? After all, if the whole city is on camera, and
the killer can hack cars from wherever, it must be vitally important
that the kills take place at the intersection. Hopefully it won't
take them long to get there...
Aisha interviews one of the drivers to
see if she has any strange memories about the day that stick out! She
remembers driving home from work, but the radio mysteriously shifted
to 98.2, and then all of the other electricals freaked out as well!
Then the car full-on started driving itself towards the murder site!
She remembers trying to scream to get the guy to notice her coming,
but she doesn't remember honking the horn, which is like, the first
thing you would do.
Unless the hacker turned off the horn,
somehow.
Aisha reassures the woman that she did
nothing wrong. I feel like not honking and forgetting the emergency
brake exists are both wrong things. Still, it's a nice sentiment.
In jail, Reid meets his new lawyer! He
professes ignorance of what happened in Mexico, and basically the
whole scene is just rehashing last week's plot, so let's move on.
In Florida, the hacker takes over
another car, and once again the guy doesn't try to turn it off or hit
the emergency brake! We get one new piece of information, though -
the killer is specifically changing the radio station to 98.2 - it's
not just a byproduct of the hack!
We also have it reinforced that people in this city are TERRIBLE at looking both ways before crossing the street. By which I mean he hits another lady. The driver manages to hit the horn as he's doing it, though - just think, if you'd been hitting the horn the whole time, she wouldn't have walked out into the road!
True story - I was once driving in ice
rain, going just 20KPH - a hundred meters ahead, I saw a couple press
a crosswalk button and start across the street. I hit the brake and
the car didn't slow down at all - it just kept sliding at exactly the
same speed (the road has a slight downward grade). The moment I
noticed I wasn't stopping, I jammed my hand on the horn and kept it
there until they'd moved back. Then, as I slid past the crosswalk, I
yelled apologies out the window I'd immediately opened.
What I'm saying is, this guy doesn't
have much of an excuse for sloppy emergency driving.
JJ and Joe go to the new crime scene,
and notice that a new car was involved! Also, there are no cameras
around, so the driver must be watching through the car's dashboard
camera! The NTSB cop walks over with news - the car swerved around
one possible victim before hitting the next! JJ thinks this means
he's narrowing his targets - there must be a reason he wanted to hit
an 'attractive, dark-haired woman'. Weird that you'd use that first
descriptor - he was driving at night, using a dashboard camera.
There's no way he would have been able to identify the woman as
'attractive'.
JJ has Garcia check on the victim's
background to see if she was the target. Again, she couldn't be,
because it would be impossible to time that. Garcia says there isn't
anything special about her that might attract the attention of a
killer. Also she had no connection to the latest driver. Hearing this
inspires JJ to win yet another Prentiss Award with this line:
No, JJ, he's also been consistent about
running people down at crosswalks. Just think - he's got complete
control of a car. He could run it into a tree. He could run it into
an oncoming car. He could drive it through a restaurant's patio and
in through the front window. But he doesn't - each time he kills
someone at a crosswalk. That's not just consistent, it's so
consistent that it must be critical! Why is no one focusing on this?!
In DC, Reid is offered a deal: go to
jail for 2-5 years by pleading to involuntary manslaughter and he'll
get to avoid a trial! Of course, that would mean confessing to a
crime he doesn't remember committing! Obviously he doesn't plead
guilty.
Time for the profile, which is just
packed full of nonsense. I'll focus on the biggest one - they think
he's selecting drivers based on them having dash cams and smartphones
mounted on the dashboard. People will be safe if they just remove
those from their cars! Except the first two cars weren't attacked
that way. So, couldn't he just go back to his first method of control
and murder?
Also, they still haven't noticed the
radio station's importance, and they announce that the killer's next
victim will be a dark-haired woman he has a connection to! That seems
like a stretch, considering that he has to operate the cars from his
computer setup, and it would be impossible to time killing a specific
person. Maybe the dark-haired lady will be the next driver, though.
Joe ends the profile with a dickish
'okay, that's it', as if they've given the cops actionable
information. No, the only involvement they want from the local police
is to have them tell the whole city to take down their dash cams!
Bad news from Jack (remember? From last
episode? That guy?) - they've found the murder weapon in Reid's case
with his blood and fingerprints all over it. Yikes!
Oh, and then another car is hijacked to
hit a woman unloading groceries from her minivan! Again, the guy
starts honking his horn way too late!
Emily and the lawyer go to talk to Reid
about the bloody knife! They warn him again that he could go to jail
for life if he loses at trial! They don't mention that the year he'll
have to wait for the trial is plenty of time to find Scratch, though,
which seems like it should be factored into their decision-making.
At the newest crime scene, we discover
that both parties have been killed! But did the killer really take
over this car? I mean, it's so old that it has a tape deck in it
instead of a CD player! There's nothing within that car that could be
hijacked remotely - so has the killer attached a camera and elaborate
set of remote control devices into the transmission and steering
column? Finally they talk about the radio station, but still don't
address its possible significance. Or, again, the significance of the
school crosswalk from the first two murders.
Emily tries to talk Reid into taking
the plea, because it's not worth risking life in prison! Reid is such
a shattered, broken person that he full-on says that if he can't be
in the FBI - which he couldn't, with a felony plea - then he might as
well be in jail. Yikes. Totally believable, but wow, this guy is
troubled.
Eric and Garcia check out the latest
victim's bio - assuming that because she was targeted at her home,
she might have been the real target all along! Although, and I can't
stress this enough, it would be impossible to time a car arriving to
be hijacked when she was getting groceries out of the trunk. I mean,
maybe it's possible that the killer hired the dead guy to follow her
home from the grocery store, and then lucked out on the moment? Of
course, he'd have to luck out even more with the driver being killed,
since there's no way to predict that would happen.
So yeah, the latest victim proves to be
key - she was being cyber-stalked by a weirdo who used to work at the
radio station that's been showing up on all of the car radios! Hey,
wouldn't have been interesting if they'd gone to the radio station
two murders ago and said 'did you recently let any creepy people go?'
It might not have gone anywhere, but it's the kind of basic
investigation techniques you'd think someone would be involved in.
Garcia finds the other woman that the
assumed killer has been stalking, and Eric tells her to come along on
the raid! Which... why would you do that? It's not like there's going
to be a scene where she tries to interfere with the hack, is there?
I guess not, because the killer has
given up on the car nonsense, and just showed up to grab her in
person. Just abandoning the theme there, huh? Eric and Garcia arrive
at the scene, and then she has to hop on her computer and use a
portable router to connect with cellular internet so that she can
look up the killer's car! You know, she'd be much more efficient
doing this if Eric hadn't dragged her out of the office. Just saying.
Actually, there's literally nothing
about this case so far that she couldn't have handled from DC.
Apparently the killer has 'hacked the DMV' and gotten rid of his car
registration? And the show acts like it was incredibly easy? Wow,
this show vastly overestimates what hackers can accomplish. Like...
all the time.
The team assumes that he'd be driving
the same car that he first learned how to hack, because it was the
vehicle he would have been able to practice on! They then say that it
will be the only one without a listed owner! Because I guess he's
enough of an idiot that when he was erasing his name he didn't put in
a fake one? Also, the custom license plate is the call letters for
the radio station he worked at. Yeah, they definitely would have
remembered this guy over there.
Garcia tries to hack into the car to
take it over and save the day! Except... does she know how to do
that? Is that something she's able to do just off the top of her
head? Everyone was scratching their heads at the start of the
episode, and they're not even clear on how it was done, but now
Garcia's just immediately clicking through to the car? She's doesn't
succeed, but it's weird that she was even able to try.
She does locate the woman's phone,
however - and finds that the car is on a road in the middle of the
city headed north way too fast! Of course, when we see footage of it
it's on a highway in rural California, but that's not worth
complaining about.
Anyhoo, Garcia stops the car and the
killer is arrested without incident.
THE END
Reid gets Jane on the phone to
apologize for not being home! Also, JJ's going to visit her for a
while! Also, maybe get her into that care facility now? The rest of
the team shows up at the courthouse to provide moral support, but
Eric does so in a plaid shirt with the top two buttons undone, which
is a really bad look for court, dude.
The judge decides to deny bail because
Reid ran away from the crime scene in Mexico while high on drugs!
Also, the fact that he tried to hide the fact that he was going to
Mexico once a month from the FBI, which he really shouldn't have
done. I understand why he wouldn't get bail.
Maybe Steven should up his game a
little on the subject of Scratch. Seriously, how long have you been
working on this with no leads, dude?
1 - Was profiling in any way helpful in
solving the crime?
Nope. They had not idea what to do
until the killer murdered a woman he had been stalking. Then they
knew who it was immediately.
2 - Could the crime have been solved
just as easily using conventional police methods given the known
facts of the case?
The killer was obsessed with a radio
station. They're always talking about how losing a job can be a
stressor that leads to murder. Yet no one went to the radio station
to say 'hey - did you guys recently fire the creepiest guy in the
world?' Real cops would have solved this thing two murders earlier.
So, on a scale of 1 (Dirty Harry) to 10
(Tony Hill), How Useful Was Profiling in Solving the Crime?
1/10 - They never explained the
hijacking, why the killer was targeting that school, how he hijacked
a non-computerized car from 1994, or why no one in Bradenton looks
both ways before crossing the street. Seriously, this episode made
almost no sense.
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