At a suburban house a woman is enjoying
her first day back out of drug rehab! Her friends are worried about
her and offer to stay over to help ensure she doesn't relapse, but
she says she'll be fine! We'll see about that...
Then we cut to Aisha giving a lecture
to students, accompanied by a kooky image. You need to see this,
because I have no idea what it means:
Okay, so... doesn't recidivism rate
measure the number of people who reoffend? How can those two
interchangeable terms be the different colours on a pie chart? Let's
see what Alisha has to say! She says that recidivism rates capture
only a small percentage of the crimes repeat sex offenders commit. So
I guess the chart means that 100% of sex offenders reoffend, but only
7% are caught so only that is registered in the recidivism rate? Or
maybe she means they only get charged for a small number of the
crimes they actually commit? In any event, this is flat-out bizarre.
At the end of the speech a guy comes up
to harass her, and based on her reaction, I'm guessing this is the
ex-husband/drug addict she talked about a little while ago? He
demands her attention, because he's been working on counseling
addicts, and he thinks someone is murdering his clients via overdose
to make it look accidental!
While Aisha' ex is showing her some
documents about spikes in overdose rares, we check back in on the
addict! She's preparing a picnic lunch for her kids, but pauses when
she notices that she's sweating way too much. It's withdrawl! She
tries to call someone for help and asks them to come over. Is it her
sponsor, or her old drug dealer? Whoever it is is probably going to
kill her, either way.
Aisha calls the team with the details!
Seven people have overdosed on heroin the day they got out of rehab.
The weird part? None of them were in rehab for heroin addiction!
That's good enough for Emily, who wants to fly the team out
immediately!
Oh, and that lady gets murdered by a
white guy. We see him open the front door with his bare hands, but
that probably won't come up later.
On the plane, the team gets some info
from Garcia - all of the victim went to different rehabs, so there's
no obvious link between them that could explain how the killer was
meeting them! I remember a John Oliver episode about an addiction
phone that recommended rehabs that the phone line owner ran. Could
that be the situation here, they all called the same number? Or were
seen by the same paramedics or medical professionals? I'm getting way
ahead of myself here. Let's wait for some clues!
Hey, Scott Winters is in this episode!
That's Dean Winters' brother from OZ!
Aisha and Daryl talk about some of the
victims, and also how long he's been clean. Five years, BTW. Aisha's
super awkward around him, in a way that is weird to see from a
psychopath. What does she need from this guy? Oh, and he mentioned
that he sponsored one of the people through a 12-step program, so
it's unlikely that the killer is the sponsor of all of the victims.
At the morgue, JJ and Joe hear
something weird about the dead lady - they found no heroin of any
kind in her system! So what was she drugged with? They'll have to
keep testing to find out! Wait, was there no heroin in any of the
other people either? Or is this a big change in MO? Also, she had a
black light tattoo on her arm, but no other ink. Strange - was it
part of rehab?
At the dead lady's house, Eric and Matt
find no signs that she was suicidal - and they're left with no leads
but the number she called at midnight before being murdered! Also all
of the fingerprints from all of the place the guy touched. At the
police station, Emily talks to the friends of the dead woman, who
point her towards the ex-boyfriend who got her hooked on meth in the
first place. Oh, and she apparently hated needles, which is enough
information for Emily to start calling this a homicide!
Then the show cuts to a counseling
session, where a guy is thrown out of rehab because he's not
committed enough for their tastes. Will he be killed, or will the
woman who sticks up for him be the victim?
Aisha and Daryl talk about how strange
it is that the victims weren't killed with heroin, but instead a
mystery drug. He confesses to cheating on a urine test one time, by
buying Chinese versions of drugs that don't show up on the tests!
This makes the team think that the killer is using synthetic Chinese
heroin that doesn't respond to the tests they perform!
JJ then wins yet another Prentiss
Award, for this line about why the killer would be using strange fake
heroin:
No. A thousand times no. The opposite
of that is true. The killer has been going to pains to make all of
these look like unconnected overdoses. If he's used easily-available
opiates there'd be no reason to connect any of the crimes to one
another. By choosing to use strange untraceable drugs that the ME
finds mysterious, he's guaranteeing that the crimes will be
connected. This is the opposite of a forensic countermeasure.
Also, how bad must the LA ME be if he
didn't notice that seven different apparent opioid overdose victims
had zero opioids in their system? We've come a long way since the
days of Quincy, folks.
The team talks motive for a moment.
Does the killer hat addicts, or is he an addict himself who, while
going through rehab found out he'd rather be addicted to murder! All
serial killers are murder addicts, Emily. This isn't worth
mentioning.
At the house of guy who was thrown out
of rehab, guy talks to the killer - who remains off camera - about
how no one believes that he'll be able to get off drugs! So he thinks
of the killer as a counselor or friend. Interesting! Then he's
knocked out by some drugs in his coffee and the killer murders him.
The guy is too resilient to be injected, though, so the killer has to
suffocate him instead!
JJ and Eric question the group leader
about why the new victim was let out of rehab. Before he can answer,
his boss, Scott Winters, shows up, and gives a speech about how much
contempt he has for junkies, and how some of them are so selfish and
awful that they're obviously going to wind up killing themselves.
Also, the guy owns 12 rehab clinics around the city, so he absolutely
could be the connection between all of the victims!
Of course, if he was, Garcia should have found it, since she already knows which rehab facilities each person went to, and checking into those facilities would be the next thing she would do.
Anyhoo, Scott is incredibly suspicious,
and demands that they come back with a warrant if they want to see
any of the business' files! Could he be the killer? If he's this
suspicious, probably not. Maybe the counselor did it? He's more
sympathetic, and the kind of person you'd call if you were in danger
of relapsing. And since he works for Scott, maybe he's spent time at
multiple clinics!
JJ talks to the sympathetic woman, who
turns over the dead guy's journal, which she had for some reason! JJ
stuffs the journal under her shirt so that none of the clinic
employees will see it. I'm not sure why she does this - she is an FBI
agent and has nothing to hide. It's not like the woman asks her to
hide it because she'll get beaten up by the guards if they see her
snitching. She isn't a prisoner - this is a private treatment
facility.
While working on the case Aisha has a
flashback to how happy her life was before Daryl was destroyed by
drug use! That poor lady. The reminisce about going to clubs with UV
stamps, and things get dark, because apparently Daryl beat her up one
time, and didn't remember it because of the drug use! No wonder she
left him! She talks about how hurt she was by his betrayal, and tells
him to shut up when he tries to apologize! Great way to treat an
addict, Aisha.
Then again, he should have apologized for all of that stuff years ago - supposedly this man went all the way through recovery, and never made an effort to make amends to the ex-wife who he treated horribly? He's not good at recovery! Daryl then leaves to call his sponsor, who's hopefully not the killer.
Okay, it turns out that Garcia is,
actually, terrible at her job. When looking into Scott, she finds
that he's a sleazebag ex-con who's rebranded himself as an addiction
support guru! Why is she bad at her job? Seven of the nine victims
were at one of his clinics. Damn it, Garcia, you were supposed to
check what the victims had in common yesterday! What have you been
doing all day?
At rehab, Scott is angry that he can't
find the dead guy's journal, so he interrogates the sympathetic lady.
Before he can get too violent, the team shows up to bring him in for
questioning! Naturally, he tries to run for it, because he's been
committing crimes unrelated to the murders! They catch him with no
trouble.
In jail, Scott explains that he has no
motive to kill. His entire business model is being so bad at rehab
that people have to keep coming back so that he can keep charging
them money! So yes, he's a terrible person. Everything he does is
legal, though, so... yay? They say that he ran away because he was
afraid of the team finding out how bad he is at running rehabs. Of
course, that's not a crime, so I'm not sure why he was running.
Aisha is busy reading through the dead
guy's journal, and thinks that she's discovered a clue to the
killer's identity! Then Daryl's wife turns up, so she doesn't bother
passing along that information to the team, even though time is of
the essence, and she can talk to this lady whenever!
The wife explains that Daryl never did
the apologies part to Aisha because his sponsor told him not to
bother. His sponsor is garbage. Apparently Daryl thought that by
helping her solve this case he could start making it up to Aisha!
Which is a nice thought, but apologize first, dude.
Going through all of the journals of
the dead people, the team finds recurrent language across all of them
that they believe references the killer! None of the people mention
the person who used that language with them by name, or even job
description, though, so it's just going to be a question of finding
an employee of the clinics who had contact with all of the clients!
Or perhaps an outside contractor, since apparently none of the staff
members worked at all of the clinics.
Scott refuses to help the, because he's
a terrible person! It's weird that Garcia can't track down everyone
he's paying. Are there cash-only people he contracts out to?
Luckily Aisha has a guess - if the
killer is giving his victims tattoos, it probably stands to reason
that he has tattoos of his own! And he does! He's got a tattoo for
each victim! We see that it's the nurse who escorted the latest
victim out of the room when he was being kicked out of rehab!
We then cut to the killer escorting the
sympathetic lady out of rehab. Which means she's next on the chopping
block!
The team quickly identifies a nurse who
was working at all of the clinics where people died, and who also
loves tattoos! Will they be able to find him in time? At the clinic,
the counselor tells them that the killer drove the sympathetic woman
home, so the team rushes over there and arrests him without incident!
Well, I say 'without incident', he
holds a syringe to his victim's throat and they have to talk him
down, but they didn't really have to - it takes a while to inject
someone with a syringe, so she's in almost no danger. They could
definitely shoot him with no risk to her, and they could probably
just kick him into submission without her having any trouble at all.
THE END
In jail, we get a look at the killer's
back, and it turns out that he's killed like 20 people!
Then there's one more scene with Aisha
and Daryl, because closure is important!
1 - Was profiling in any way helpful in
solving the crime?
Not really! They found tattoos on the
victims, and they used that as an extrapolation to guess that the
killer had tattoos, but he also had a concrete connection to most of
the victims that was far more important in catching him.
2 - Could the crime have been solved
just as easily using conventional police methods given the known
facts of the case?
I don't know why they didn't focus more
on the tattoos as a lead. Shouldn't they have been going around to
tattoo parlours, asking if people recognized the design, and seeing
who was super-into wing tattoos? Considering the fact that he went to
the same tattooist for all of them, he absolutely would have been
remembered right away.
So, on a scale of 1 (Dirty Harry) to 10
(Tony Hill), How Useful Was Profiling in Solving the Crime?
1/10 - I'd love to give them credit for
their insight about addiction, but the guy was just so ridiculously
easy to find. Also, it's super-weird that the team somehow didn't
notice that the victims all called the exact same number right before
they were murdered. That seems like too juicy a clue to have missed.
FACT CHECK: This episode was based on a
segment from HBO's Last Week Tonight with John Oliver! Between the
scumbag Scott Winters played being a direct reference to the callous
owner of a bunch of rehab clinics, and a reference to 'equine
therapy', the inspiration was quite obvious! You can watch that
segment on YouTube by following this link -
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWQiXv0sn9Y
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