The episode opens where the last one
left off - JJ meeting with Barnes about replacing Emily! Apparently
the FBI is a little unsettled by the team's treatment of the whole
Scratch/Aubrey situation, so Emily's handling of it is going to be
scrutinized! She also tries to rile JJ up by asking why she thinks
she didn't get the team lead job when Aaron left.
As JJ walks to her car she gets a phone
call from Emily! They've got a case tonight. JJ immediately warns
Emily that people are coming for her - which she was specifically
told not to do. I'm not saying that you shouldn't have told her, JJ,
but at least wait until it's face to face!
There's an emergency case briefing, but
it doesn't seem like anything that couldn't have waited until the
morning. Cops in New Orleans found a crypt with ten bodies stacked
inside and then burned. Is that really a 'overnight flight' type of
situation, though? Even if the victims were drained of blood?
There plenty of voodoo markings around
the crypt in question, but apparently they were preexisting, so the
killer might have liked them for some reason, but they're not an
actual message. Then Emily announces that she's not going to be going
along on the trip because of the performance review! I'd point out
that this means Barnes lied to Emily, since she said she wasn't going
to tell Emily until the morning, but it's more likely that Barnes
found out about the mission, and told Emily early to make sure she
didn't skip town.
Meanwhile, in New Orleans, the killer
is draining a corpse's blood! Also, the killer is wearing a strange,
long-nosed mask.
I often joke about the team rarely
deals with cases important enough to warrant them leaving in the
middle of the night, but there's a reason I mention it. I like to
call focus to the show's weird obsession keeping a straight timeline.
Other than specifically frames flashbacks, the shows are always told
in strict chronological order - and since they always want to end the
episode's cold open with a murder, so they can be at a daytime murder
scene right after they land. If the briefing took place during the
day, then the death is at night, that means that chronologically they
couldn't do the plane conversation scene, which the producers feel
the show couldn't do without.
And that's why they're always getting
called to work in the middle of the night.
On the plane, the team doesn't care at
all about the murders, and spends minutes talking about their work
drama. Matt goes over how Barnes destroyed his unit, and warns
everyone to stick together! They observe that she's good at her job
(that being destroying careers) and Reid says 'We're better'. Which
might be true, but is wholly irrelevant to the situation - your job
is catching serial killers. Hers is destroying careers. Your skills
will not defend you from her.
We move to the police station, where
I'm distracted by this reflection in the briefing room window-
I can't tell exactly what's going on
there, but it sure looks like someone was shopping Amazon for water
bottles on set, and didn't bother closing their laptop when the
filming started.
In the scene, we discover that five of
the bodies have been identified. Three homeless people, two
'citizens'. They talk a little about figuring out where the killer
would have enough space to do some blood draining, and Reid talks
about doing a geographic profile, but warns that he'll need more
information about the victims' final movements. Which should be
pretty hard, given that three were homeless.
Then the chief gets a letter about the
newest victim - he was found right away because he was burned in a
less-secluded place! JJ has to be reminded that she's the one in
charge of assignments, but then she does them just fine!
Barnes brings Emily into the office,
and Emily lies and says JJ didn't tell her about the reason for the
performance review. I agree with Barnes on this - not off to a great
start. She announces that she's looked into the team since Emily took
over, and is disturbed by what she's found! My god, are we going to
be spending the whole episode going over all the team's mistakes?
This should be good!
Or maybe it won't be, since Barnes
starts off by saying she puts team loyalty over FBI policy. I don't
know when she did that, other than I guess pulling strings to
transfer Reid. That's not really against FBI policy, though. They
cover up for the agents all the time. She was acting in the best
traditions of the agency, even if they don't admit it publicly.
JJ, Eric, and Matt head to the newest
tomb, and note that the killer must be pretty bold to be burning
people in public. Isn't there a good chance he'd have been caught?
Actually, why hasn't he been caught? He had to drag a corpse and a
can into a cemetery at night, then light a large fire to torch the
body. How, exactly, did no one notice that?
Eric also observes that the killer must
have used an 'accellerant' during the burning due to the scorch marks
on the inside of the tomb. Here's a better sign that accellerant was
used: The body was burned to charcoal. Do you think that would happen
if a guy just put a lighter to the man's clothes and left?
Apparently the victim left work
complaining of an illness, but then went to a basketball court
instead of home. Did the killer lure him there? Are there security
cameras around that basketball court? Inquiring minds want to know!
JJ notices that there's no voodoo
markings on the tomb, even though there are plenty around, so the
killer wasn't picking dump sites that were voodoo-related. So what is
motivating him, then? Hilariously, the tombs all around the one
they're looking at don't have any voodoo markings on them, so I don't
know what JJ thinks she was talking about there.
Then, on the street, we see the killer
stalking his next victim - a fat guy waiting for a bus! Once he's
alone, the killer parks in front of the bus stop, and waves the
victim over to look inside his van. Which he does, without
hesitation, perhaps because he's excited to die?
Yeah, there's not even a ruse or a gun
or anything. The guy just walks right up to an open door and allows
himself to be dragged inside.
Back to Barnes' office! She thinks the
team has been going rogue too much, and Roswell is a great example of
it! Well, if you mean that having the big meeting at the legion hall
was a mistake that got someone killed, then yes, you're making a good
point.
Emily defends her actions, saying the
the truthers would only have met them in a giant location all
together, and would not have spoken to them at a police station. Of
course, you didn't try to see if they would, you just assumed they
wouldn't, and your sloppiness got a man killed. And the sloppiness of
a police department not bothering to test their metal detectors.
Then Barnes announces that she wants to
talk about Steven dying, since it's the first time the team has ever
lost an agent on duty. Weird that it's taken them five months to want
to have this conversation, but sure. Let's go for it.
At the morgue, Joe gets some bad
information from the ME - he explains that the bodies were set on
fire using rubbing alcohol, which sparks incredibly easily, but burns
out right away, so he must have used a BUNCH of it. Here's the bad
info - the doctor explains that the people were killed with an
overdose of ketamine, a club drug, and then exsanguinated after
death. Except there's no way he could know that. Testing residual
blood and tissue could get the drug results, sure, but how would you
know whether the throats were slashed when they were alive or dead?
The only way to tell would be the behaviour of the tissue around the
wound - but all of the wounds have been burned to charcoal, so that
kind of subtle determination would be completely beyond the ME's
ability to detect.
When the team hears that the murder was
via an overdoes of ketamine, they think that this means the killer
wouldn't even have to have a ruse, he could just walk up and inject
someone. Except that's not how injections work. If you're not going
to hit a vein - which you probably won't, just running up and
grabbing someone, it would take a huge amount of ketamine to give
them an overdose, and one would think the natural reaction to flinch
and pull away from the attack would screw up the plan.
Or is this a fantasy Dexter-style world where it's incredibly easy to grab someone and perfectly inject drugs into their veins?
Emily says that no one could have
foreseen Scratch ambushing them on the road, so it's not her fault
that Steven died! Except it absolutely was. You were specifically
rushing towards what you knew to be a trap. You thought it was just a
trap for Derek, but you should have anticipated it could have been a
trap for all of you as well, the way Scratch's last trap was.
You could have brought along a SWAT
escort. You could have had helicopter support - you could have
followed the basic rules of the road and left a good amount of
following distance between the two SUVs, so that only one of them
would have hit the spikes. You failed to do any of that, and Steven
died as a result. Barnes says she's shocked Steven's wife hasn't
sued, and she's right - they absolutely should have been sued over
their performance.
Then we get the bombshell - the Mexican
cop put it in his file that Emily destroyed the recording of Reid
confessing to murdering the doctor last year. Which Emily actually
did. This performance review is going really, really badly for her,
isn't it?
JJ runs an all-team meeting at the
police station - they've identified two more victims, one a runaway,
one a professional! They still have no idea why he's targeting these
people, so they focus on what they can investigate - try to figure
out where he's getting the huge amounts of drugs he uses, and have
more patrols around the graveyards, hoping that he'll bring the new
victim to one!
I know it's a stretch, but maybe look
into the rubbing alcohol as well? I know you can buy it at any drug
store, but someone buying gallons of the stuff might well have been
noticed.
At the killer's lair, his victim wakes
up, smashes him over the head, grabs his keys, steals his van, and
speeds off into the night! Go, fat guy! I have to assume that because
of his weight the killer completely misjudged the amount of ketamine
he needed. That's why it's just so important to consult with an
anaesthesiologist before starting you killing spree, people. Anyhoo,
one block away from the lair the guy crashes the van, because he's
still under the influence of powerful drugs.
At the hospital, JJ interviews the
victim, who isn't able to identify the victim, and has no good idea
where he was! So they haven't found the lair yet? He drove like a
block and a half, and a bunch of cars saw him weaving out into the
street. At the crash site, we learn that the van in question was
stolen eight years ago, so they may not be able to get any clues from
it!
Finally they get an idea of where the
lair is from Reid's geographic profile. By which I mean they just
follow the trail of destruction backwards, because the victim kept
ramming into things while he was driving. I mean, the show claims
Reid's involved, but we know what actually happened.
In the lair, Reid finds the killer's
mask, which turns out to be a costume version of one of those plague
doctor things. Immediately they decide that the killer targets people
because he sees them acting sick in public, and is trying to purge
the infected from the city!
Joe and Emily chat on the phone, and he
tells her not to worry, because she's earned her job, and all of her
choices have been the right ones! So is he lying, or is this a shared
delusion?
The team gives the profile, and it's
pretty basic - the guy is obsessed with old-timey medicine, and now
that he's lost his van and lair, he'll probably go on some kind of a
spree! No word on his fingerprints yet, which is weird, since they've
got both the guy's home/van and his lair that had all of his tools in
it.
We flash back to the killer's childhood
- his mother got sick after Katrina because of an infection, so now
he thinks the whole city is at risk of falling to a plague! He then
screams that it was the fault of the doctors who didn't help her, so
maybe that's who he's targeting next?
Emily goes to Barnes' office and
threatens her! She says the BSU won't be another one of Barnes'
stepping stones on the way to becoming director, and she plans to use
every favor she's banked to destroy Barnes if she tries anything. I'm
not super-sure why Barnes doesn't fire her on the spot, since that is
gross insubordination that she just witnessed.
At the city garage, they look over the
van. They're upset that the killer scrubbed it clean after each
victim, so they don't have any large amount of DNA. Fingerprints once
again go unmentioned. They find a bag of his mother's medication, and
hope they can use it to track down the killer! I don't know why that
would be particularly difficult, what with a bunch of those drugs
being prescription-only. You'd think Garcia could just run the
numbers and get a name almost immediately.
I know that we're told that there's no
'identifying information' on the drugs, but that's just not
believable - pharmacists slap those labels right onto the bottles and
puffers, so unless the killer was scrubbing them off, and there's no
reason for him to do that, they'd have a name right away. I'm not
sure why the show is making it seem like this guy is so difficult to
identify - even if they have his name and face, he's still a crazy
homeless murderer that's not easy to find, so the rest of the episode
would still happen the same way if this was written believably.
The end result is, since they think the
guy is attacking sick people, they suggest posting guards at
pharmacies and hospitals, since that's where the largest
concentration of sick people are.
But can guards help the woman the
killer sees coughing while pushing her baby around, though? Turns out
they won't have to - instead of focusing his rage on the sick woman,
he heads into the health clinic to attack the doctor, who, for some
reason, is completely alone in the clinic! He immediately murders
her, obvs. Also, the doctot sucks at staying alive - there was a
crazy man in front of her, but instead of barricading herself in an
office and calling the police, she tries to attack him with scissors.
So this one's largely on her.
JJ and Matt talk about ways to possibly
identify who the killer is, but I'm too distracted by their bad empty
coffee cup acting to pay much attention to the scene. They're both
really bad at pretending that empty coffee cups have anything in
them. So terrible at miming that you wonder why the prop people don't
just fill the cups up with water and be done with it.
Anyway, they decide to look into the
guy's first victim, guessing that he may have started with someone he
encountered in his day-to-day life. For some reason they treat this
as if it's a revelation, rather than one of the foundational concepts
of behavioural analysis.
Barnes suggests that Emily find a
scapegoat to take the blame for her team's failings. She suggests
Joe, who's too busy writing books to care about his job, or Reid,
who'd be happier just teaching. Obviously Reid in a classroom is a
terrible idea, but yeah, fire Joe. That's not a bad idea. Emily,
naturally, sees her whole team as being indispensable. Even though,
you know, they all have completely interchangeable opinions, and any
time one of them takes a week off we don't even notice that they've
gone.
At the station, JJ announces that
because they can't find any connection between the first victim and
the killer, maybe the killer had an earlier first victim! That's a
strange bit of circular reasoning, but let's move on to what she
wants to do about it - use Penelope to try and track down who bought
a withered bouquet that was found in the back of the van! I don't
mean to nitpick*, but shouldn't you be trying to track down a
preserved bouquet whether you think it has anything to do with an
earlier victim or not? It's obviously significant, or he wouldn't
have kept it.
(*I do, actually)
Garcia immediately tracks down the
woman who sent the flowers. She tells them that the mother lived in
an apartment, then got sick, came into some money, moved in next
door, and then died. Was the illness a post-Katrina mold situation?
It was! She got black mold from the apartment she lived in, and sued
the owner. Oh, and she died just a couple of weeks ago, which is why
the murders started.
Joe and JJ go over to the landlord's
office in a local bar, but because they didn't bother telling the
cops or bringing backup, they wind up trapped inside when the killer
arrives to douse the place in gasoline. He takes a worker hostage and
demands to see the landlord!
JJ goes downstairs to talk to the
killer while Joe sneaks around the building behind him. The killer
closes his lighter to talk to JJ, but for some reason she doesn't
immediately pull her gun and demand her surrender. Well, I say 'some
reason', it's because Joe thinks that gasoline fumes could ignite if
you shoot!
Not that that's bothered JJ in the
past. Hey, remember when she murdered that guy? Seems like that
should have been part of the team's assessment.
More importantly, though, gunshots
would have a hard time igniting even the most powerful fumes, and
gasoline fumes are barely dangerous at all. Seriously, you can throw
a lit cigarette into a pool of gasoline, and there's a good chance it
will just go out. So the idea that someone standing ten feet away
from the pool of gasoline, firing at gun five feet above the ground,
is in any danger of setting off an explosion is just laughable.
Joe then walks in and announces that
the killer murdered his own mother to save her from her chronic
bronchial infections! This freaks him out so much that they're able
to arrest him without incident!
THE END
On the way back, the team worries about
what's going to happen to Emily! Speaking of, Emily is wary as the
team returns! She's been suspended, and Barnes is going to be
watching over the team to see if they screw up!
So they're just redoing the exact Erin
plot from season 3, where Aaron was suspended for letting the team
run wild, and then a Erin came in to investigate them? I know it's
been a decade, but wow, is this the exact same story and it's weird
to see it being reused.
Though it's certainly warranted -
Aaron's only mistake was not reigning in Mandy better - Emily's
managing an entire team of murderers. Except for Matt, who I'm still
not sure has killed anyone.
1 - Was profiling in any way helpful in
solving the crime?
Nope.
2 - Could the crime have been solved
just as easily using conventional police methods given the known
facts of the case?
They checked who ordered some flowers
they found in the killer's van. The person who sent the flowers told
them who the killer was.
So, on a scale of 1 (Dirty Harry) to 10
(Tony Hill), How Useful Was Profiling in Solving the Crime?
1/10 - I don't get the guy's obsession
with plague medicine. He only killed his mother three weeks ago,
which they indicate is the stressor that led to this rampage. How did
he go from what he thought was a mercy killing that to this elaborate
masked blootletting and corpse burning ritual?
None of what we learn about this killer
matches up with anything about the MO.
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