A couple is moving into the new house
they just bought, and discover that it's an absolute wreck! A sink
fully of dirty dishes, dilapidated furniture everywhere. But will
there be a corpse buried in the basement, triggering an
investigation?
Nope. The corpse is in the wall!
mummified and covered in salt to keep it from smelling!
I'm not saying this show goes back to
the well too much, but isn't it strange that within four episodes
we've had two scenes where a young, pregnant couple is moving into a
new house and then drama ensues from tearing open walls? I know it's
on the other side of a season break, so it feels far away, but the
hum was only three episodes ago.
At the office, Emily complains about
her commute, announcing that one should never live anywhere that
you'll have to cross a bridge in order to get to work. I can't
imagine what she's talking about, though - the marine corps base she
works on has its own exit from the I-95, and while and since she
definitely lives in a DC suburb, she should be driving against
traffic every day. The only way she could have any traffic issues is
if she actually lives in downtown Washington DC, which would be a
crazy thing for her to do, based on where she works.
This might be my strangest nitpick
ever.
Emily finds out about the mummy, but
doesn't see how it's relevant to their work. But since Joe is in
Georgia visiting Crystal anyway, she asks him to drop by the crime
scene on his way home! That's right, they've continued dating, and
are both hiding it from their loved ones. This is the third time
they've done a story about Joe hiding a relationship, BTW. Just in
case you were wondering if the show cared about going back to the
well. Oh, and Portia has met a new man - will he also be a
psychopath?
Joe arrives at the crime scene and gets
some details. One of the previous owners is dead, and the other is in
a nursing home. Could they be responsible for the body in the wall?
Scratch that - bodies. They bring out a corpse dog, and it barks at
literally everything. They pull the walls down, pull up the
floorboards, and discover nothing but corpses! Also, some lumber
that the props department forgot to age:
You know what? I'll change my guess -
that was probably my strangest nitpick.
On the plane, the team gets some info
about the previous owners of the house. Apparently they were shut-ins
who had no family or friends. There are five corpses in the house so
far - all young women. Could they have been killing together?
Probably, since it's not like you could hide tearing up floorboards
and squirreling corpses away. They also dismiss the idea that
wrapping the corpses and covering them in salt could have been a
forensic countermeasure, since just throwing them in a swamp would
have been a better way to do that.
Except, you know, people find corpses in swamps all the time. It's happened on this show more than once. By comparison, if you bury a victim in your own house, you remove all chance of someone just stumbling across it so long as you liver there. How is that not a better forensic countermeasure? Still, they go ahead an assume that there was some psychological need being met by keeping the corpses around.
Reid and Aisha go to visit the old lady
in her mental hospital. Apparently she was found wandering the
streets in a daze three months ago, and hasn't been good at
communicating since then! She doesn't react to their arrival, but
she's startled enough by them talking to her that she stabs herself
with the needle from the needlepoint she's doing! Hey, I've never
worked in a facility for people with dementia, but do they really let
them have super-sharp objects for crafts? Seems like a recipe for
disaster!
At the murder house, they've found some
watches and keys along with the bodies - maybe that will help them
track down the women's families? Weird that we didn't already check
in on Garcia and her search for every missing person in the area over
the entire length of the time the couple owned that house. The ME
gives them a way to narrow down that estimation - she thinks the
corpses are all roughly the same vintage, and have been around for
twenty years or so.
The corpses mostly have bad teeth,
suggesting that they could have been drug addicts - but their clothes
had all been carefully mended before they were buried in them. Wait,
didn't we just see the old lady doing needlepoint? Coincidence? I
think not!
Oh, and there's some way more recent
corpses in a root cellar outside. They've been dead less than a year,
and presumably no one was feeling up to tearing down walls all over
again. Also, this happened after the old man died, so there's a a
killer on the loose! Did the couple have a secret, gorked-out son?
Wow, does this scene invalidate that
opening sequence. There's no way someone sells a house to people
without even bothering to look in the basement. It says something
that the show is so desperate to shock and disturb the audience that
they have a young family find the corpses completely unrealistically,
when it should have been the city authorities who were taking
possession of it because the old lady had been put in a home.
Aisha and Reid try to ask the old lady
about the new bodies, but her only response is to yell that it won't
work, and it's 'not the same'! I guess is a reference to the new way
of disposing of bodies? Although we have no confirmation of that,
obvs.
Meanwhile, the killer clubs a woman
who's putting something in the trunk of her car, then shoves her into
the trunk and drives off in the car! So... people finding the corpses
has reactivated his love of murder?
At the police station, JJ talks to a
woman who thinks her sister is one of the older victims. Dental
records should be able to help figure that out! Then Matt arrives and
says they have to drive down to Charleston to get more information
from the Medical Examiner about the corpses. That's a 90 minute
drive. Is there going to be anything that the ME couldn't have just
called about? Is this really worth three hours of your investigation?
Oh, and the new victims are women in
their 40s who were abducted while running errands. So the killer has
an incredibly specific MO. Hey, if two super low-risk women in a town
of just 2K mysteriously disappeared, why wouldn't this have been a
much bigger deal? That's the kind of case that the team should have
already been called in on, since it's a good sign that there's a
serial killer just outside their back yard?
Then we cut over to the latest victim,
who's tied to a chair in a murder shack! Notably, the killer has torn
up the floorboards in the murder shack, presumably looking to keep up
the body disposal tradition, but this house doesn't have huge voids
in the wooden foundation, which must have been a disappointment to
the killer. The killer then enters, and we can't make out any details
other than that it's a large man carrying a teddy bear. So probably a
weird, gorked-out son, then.
At the medical examiner's office we
learn that the original victims were killed between '98 and '08, and
all of them were poisoned - although I don't know how she's been able
to perform poison tests on mummies within like an hour of them
getting back to her office. Then she says something so stupid that I
wish I could give her an award for it, but she's not a Federal agent,
so I'll just have to put the video here-
'Ranged in age'? What are you talking
about? There's only two victims. There's no 'age range'. There's just
two ages. God, how are you so bad at this? The latest victims were
clubbed viciously about the head, and then entombed while still
alive, judging by the insulation in their lungs! What insulation?
They were dumped in a root cellar that had a door. This feels like a
situation where they changed the production details of the episode,
then didn't bother going back and editing the script. Which is a
little weird, considering that this is the first episode of the
season - that kind of sloppiness normally comes with a time crunch at
the end of a year.
Then again, it's possible that everyone working on the show was dispirited that their episode order was cut back to 15 from 22, and they've lost their motivation to put in even a baseline amount of effort.
At the base, the team wonders how two
different killers could be using the same MO and dump site. How long
will it take them to get to the possibility of a 'secret son', I
wonder? More importantly, though, they're operating under the
assumption that the old man was the instigator behind the killings,
even though the victims were all poisoned, which is traditionally how
women serial killers operate, according to the previous scene at the
ME's office.
Garcia has found nothing significant
about the recent victims that could have led to them being targeted
by a killer. Joe wonders aloud why no one noticed two different women
mysteriously disappearing from such a small town. I'm wondering that
myself, but I'm also suspecting that the show won't have an answer
for the question.
Aisha and Reid try to get information
about the old lady, but she's not forthcoming. The attendant comes to
take her to her medication, and on the way out of the room, she stabs
herself in the neck with a fork that someone has left lying around!
This is why you don't leave sharp objects in dementia wards, people.
This should be Day 1 type stuff.
The old lady dies on the way to the
hospital, so the team decides to search her room, hoping that she'd
kept a souvenir of the murders tucked away all this time! Inside a
vent Aisha locates a bundle of letters! Then we cut to the murder
shack, where the killer is writing one of those letters while the
victim tries to talk to him! This freaks the killer out, and the
victim refocuses on trying to escape. The door isn't locked at the
moment, so maybe she can just stand up while still in the chair and
run out! Tragically, though, her legs are tied. Maybe hopping?
It turns out that the letters were
written by the victims - even addressed to their families! Just never
mailed. We don't find out about the contents of them, though. Reid
and Emily wonder if the fact that the couple understood the value of
family means they had a family of their own! This is a ridiculous
leap - of course they understood the value of family. They both came
from families. The only reason you should think that they have a
secret son is that someone is killing people and disposing of them in
the way that the original killers did.
Of course, they didn't need to bother
with theories - the autopsy on the old lady showed that she had a
kid. So she killed herself to keep from being tricked into testifying
against him! JJ then enters with news about another victim in her 40s
being abducted while running errands. The team takes a moment to
wonder why the victimology is so different between the two different
killers. I don't know, perhaps because they're two different people?
Speaking of the killer, he unties the
lady and asks her to sing him a song because he's sad. So, does he
have a mind of a child, and he's looking for a mother figure, and
kills women when they fail to fill that role?
The team finally gets around to reading
the letters - all of the dead women talked about spending time with a
friendly couple who were helping them put their lives together! Will
this be a good clue to help them track down the killer? They go to
the press, and ask for anyone who knew the old couple to reach out to
them, hoping that someone has a line on the gorked-out son!
Back to the murder shack, where the
killer is cooking food while the victim is untying her feet! She's
surprised by the killer, who asks her to feed him! So yeah, arrested
development is the real villain, here. She wait until his eyes are
closed and smashes him over the head with the frying pan, which only
stuns him for a moment, ruining her escape. He demands to know why
she doesn't love him! It's weird, given the fact that the new victims
look like older version of the original victims, I'd think that this
guy was actually the son of one of the victims that the killers
raised, and he's searching for a replacement real mother - but we've
been told that the old lady had a kid, so I guess that's not it.
In the next scene we discover that my
guess was right - the old couple's daughter turns up at the police
station to talk about her parents, and let the cops know that they
didn't have a secret son, but rather a secret daughter! She ran away
at 16 and they kept kidnapping girls to replace her! She, for her
part, thinks that her parents couldn't have been murderers, because
they were too sweet for that!
At the office, Joe thinks that a
cloistered woman wouldn't have just run away from home at age 16 for
no reason, and there must have been a trigger for it! It turns out
that right around the same time, a neighbour of theirs murdered his
whole family - including a teenaged son - and then killed himself!
Wait, is the gorked-out guy the old couple's grandson? And that's why
they were looking for a replacement mother for him?
The team takes one look at the pictures
of the dead neighbours, and discovers they were all shot in the back.
Um... how could anyone have thought this was a murder-suicide? Just
because you leave a gun next to the dad's body that doesn't mean he
killed anyone. At least when Hannibelle's teenaged lover was murdered
her dad had the sense to make it look like a hunting accident. Also,
among the evidence found at the crime scene was a baby bottle, and no
one found that suspicious!
So... I guess the local cops were all idiots back then?
They confront the daughter about her
secret son, and she confesses immediately! She left her son with the
boyfriend's family and fled to get away from her crazy family. Then
she never checked up on him at all, which seems kind of cold, really.
She's not psyched to hear that her son was raised by crazy murderers,
and asks where he's gotten to! Um... have you not already figured
that out?
At the murder shack, the victim stabs
the killer with a piece of broken plate and then hides in a closet
because he can't undo the front door chains in time! Just jump
through a window, people. It's dangerous, but in situations like this
it's also your best option. Also, in the closet, the victim is
surprised by another victim that we didn't know about. Did Garcia not
check for other missing people in the area? Weird.
Since all of the letters talked about
fishing in a pond, but there's no pond on the family property, Emily
asks the daughter where the fishing hole was. She tells them about a
shack about fifteen minutes away from their property, and the team
rushes over there to find the killer!
Joe and Matt break into the shack and
arrest the killer without incident. But the don't see the victim!
Luckily they remember that this guy likes to entomb people alive, so
they check under the floorboards and find her! I'm kidding, of
course, they don't remember anything - they just yell for her and
hear her yelling back from under the floorboards. That's right - if
she hadn't been awake, they might not have found her before she
suffocated! You're terrible at this, team.
THE END
Back at the police station, JJ gives
the letter to the sister of the dead girl from earlier.
Then, in New York, we see Joe visiting
with Crystal and the family! Joe approves of the new boyfriend, which
is important to everyone, since the last guy was an obvious psycho.
Hopefully Garcia's background check clears this guy!
Oh, and I looked it up - they're doing
this whole 'Crystal' storyline likely because the actress who plays
Joe's daughter got a steady job on a TV show and was no longer
available for guest appearances.
1 - Was profiling in any way helpful in
solving the crime?
Oh, dear lord, no. They knew who the
original killer was immediately, and the new killer could have only
been a family member, so they asked for help finding that family
member and got it immediately.
2 - Could the crime have been solved
just as easily using conventional police methods given the known
facts of the case?
Considering that no one would have seen
three people shot in the back and said 'this is a murder/suicide' the
first crime realistically would have solved 30 years ago, and none of
the other women would have been killed.
So, on a scale of 1 (Dirty Harry) to 10
(Tony Hill), How Useful Was Profiling in Solving the Crime?
1/10 - Hey, isn't it weird that we
never find out who that last body in the closet was? It's almost like
this show doesn't care at all about the victims of these crimes, and
just drops more and more corpses onto the pile whenever they need a
gruesome shock!
You know, between this and last week,
where they killed off Theo and didn't let us know what happened to
April or Owen, this show has developed a real sociopathic streak. Or
maybe it's always been there and Season 14 is just decompensation!
Thank you for this summary. I keep missing the end! BTW the other victim in the closet that she found, they were dead? This show is all over the place. Why would there be a victim in the closet? Goofy episode, but tragically addicting to me 😂
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