Criminal Minds Minicaps: Season 1

[ Onward: Season 2 ]

Criminal Minds is a procedural about the FBI's Behavioral Analysis Unit--serial killer profilers. It's very formulaic, with every episode containing at least one sequence where the main team lectures local law enforcement about what kind of criminal they are looking for (a white male age 20-30, fyi) and two voiceovers of famous quotations ("Nietzsche once said..."). Most episodes end with the team coming back from the place of the crime on their special profiler jet, with four of the six sleeping peacefully, one too harrowed by what they have seen to sleep, and one offering wise counsel. This portion of the episode, approximately one minute in length, contains 80% of the character development. Most episodes go by and I don't realize what the character arc was until what I have dubbed the "Mile High Minute."

This is one of those shows where, despite (and, to certain extent, because of) the lack of deep characterization, it's fun to think about everyone's personality. It doesn't hurt that the climax of a surprising number of episodes is one of the team giving the killer a big speech about how he or she is like them in some way. Here's the team:

Gideon, the calm-radiating, intuitive, unreasonably wise Captain Picard of the group. Brilliant, but occasionally afflicted with PTSD and/or emotions. Notable for being played by Mandy Patinkin.
Hotch, a cool and businesslike ex-lawyer. Only member of the team with a satisfying personal life outside of work (he is married and during the season has a baby. I mean his wife does. This isn't sci-fi.) Equivalent to Riker.
Morgan, who I think is ex-military. A ladies' man and one-liner-deliverer, he seems to be the most fun-loving of the bunch. Also equivalent to Riker.
Reid, a Doogie Howser-esque omnitalented prodigy. He's the team's Data, constantly providing tidbits of relevant or irrelevant information. At a scant 23 years of age, he is also the team's much-protected, much-mocked Wesley Crusher. Notable for being very beautiful and carrying a unisex purse.
Elle, a tough agent who is a woman. Hard-headed, ambitious, and defensive; may have anger issues. Mostly I suppose this makes her Worf, though her obsession with rape makes her more closely resemble Tasha Yar.
JJ, the perky blonde "department liaison" who handles the press and so forth. Seems to have a bit of a death wish, though I may be making too much of the extremely limited information we're given. I would say she is Troi.
Garcia, the quirky bespectacled hacker type back at the base whom they're always calling to find out addresses or trace phone calls. She is LaForge in her omnipotence, but O'Brien in her slightly-less-than-A-list-cast-iness. A self-described wizard, Garcia calls all the boys pet names but somehow never gets fired for sexual harassment.

1x1 Extreme Aggressor

The team tracks down the first of many serial killers with impotence.
Character Development (Such As It Is): More than usual, although it's fractured, because we're getting introduced to everyone. Primarily, Gideon is called back into service after six months' medical leave due to PTSD, and everyone is kind of nervous that he's not fit for duty. Meanwhile, Elle, a SWAT agent, is trying to prove herself and work her way onto the BAU team. We also learn that Hotch and his wife are picking out baby names; Morgan is good with the ladies and has a mutual, Moneypenny, work-flirty thing going with Garcia; and Reid has a 187 IQ, an eidetic memory, and blinks a lot.
Highlights: A questionee's dog barks at Reid, who flinches, and Hotch affectionately explains, "We call that the Reid Effect. Also happens to small children."

1x2 Compulsion

The team searches for a serial arsonist on a college campus.
Character Arc (Such As There Is One): It's Wisdom Week for Gideon. After telling a serial killer "I know why you stutter," Gideon challenges Elle to figure it out for herself. Meanwhile, he counsels Reid to "think outside the box." In the Mile-High Minute, he and Reid play chess. "Check in three," says Reid. Gideon nods and moves a piece. "Checkmate." Reid: (hangs head). Gideon: "Don't worry. You're getting there."
Highlights: Diversity Watch: The culprit is a girl!

1x3 Won't Get Fooled Again

To find a bomber, Gideon has to negotiate with the killer whose original arrest gave him PTSD.
Character Arc (Such As There Is One): Surprisingly absent, given the premise.
Highlights: Morgan teaches Garcia about bomber profiling.
Impotence Watch: Reid and Garcia decide to plant a keystroke-recording virus on the suspect's computer by disguising it as a porno message, because he's impotent (...?). It's pretty amateurish and I have no idea why it didn't get caught by his spam filter. Dude, you guys are FBI profilers sending a single message to one man; surely you can come up with something more personalized than "wet teens xxx".

1x4 Plain Sight

The team looks for a rapist who glues his victims' eyes open and leaves portions of a 16th century ballad at his crime scenes and probably some other assorted quirks.
Character Arc (Such As There Is One): Reid's sweet 24 and never been on a date. (He doesn't seem to be concerned about it until Morgan starts making jokes.) Elle points out it's because he's never asked anyone. In the Mile High Minute, Gideon gives him football tickets which Reid assumes are for the two of them, but Gideon convinces him to ask JJ: "There's someone else on this plan who's a huge 'Skins fan. The only person in the world who calls you 'Spence.'"
Highlights: Impotence Watch: Now, I could be getting it wrong because granted I don't follow the plot twists and turns as vigilantly as I should, but I am pretty sure it turns out that the rapist and the killer turn out to be two different men, and the killer is impotent.
Quote of Episode: "We're looking for a particular needle in a pile of needles." --Reid

1x5 Broken Mirror

A kidnapper holds a girl ransom, but he's not so much interested in the money as in completing his set by acquiring her twin sister.
Character Arc (Such As There Is One): I think this one is mostly about Elle? She ends up being the hero of the hour as she busts in and knocks down the kidnapper and hovers her foot over his balls. Later, Morgan tells her the killer underestimated her. Also, there's a telling moment early on where Elle tells the non-kidnapped twin that she's in this business to put some bastards behind bars.
Highlights:

1x6 L.D.S.K.

The team hunts down a long-distance serial killer (sniper).
Character Arc (Surprisingly Competent): Reid fails his gun qualification, prompting mockery from Morgan, who gives him a rape whistle; and tough love from Gideon ("I don't care if you carry a gun or not. Most important weapon we have is a thorough and accurate profile." "Of course you believe that." "The Footpath Killer had a shotgun to the back of my neck. I'm here, he's not.") Even the main, crime-oriented part of the plot seems unusually related to the character arc this episode, with every new piece of information about the killer seeming to match Reid: he's possibly a bad shot; he feels underappreciated; he's recently had a blow to his ego. In the end, Reid learns from watching an disarmed but fast-talking Hotch that the most important weapon we have is a thorough and accurate profile. Also, a gun.
Highlights:
Guest Stars I've Seen Before: The killer is Lassiter from Psych.

1x7 The Fox

The team looks for a killer who targets vacationing families--and keeps them alive long enough to play house.
Character Arc (Such As There Is One): I watched this episode before I started minicapping and, without watching it again, which is obviously out of the question, I can't be sure. Possibly this is the one where Hotch has now got a baby. That would make sense.
Highlights: Out of necessity (he is there and Morgan is not), Garcia innuendoes with Reid, who finds it extremely disconcerting.

1x8 Natural Born Killer

The team realizes the mafia-connected suspect they've been trailing is actually an FBI plant in deep cover. After they inadvertently screw up his assignment, it's up to them to rescue him from dental torture (ewwww).
Character Arc (Such As There Is One): The actual killer turns out to be a man who was violently abused in childhood, and in the course of his interrogation, Hotch implies that he was too ("Some people who were abused grow up to become killers." "Some people?" "Some grow up to catch them.") Let the emotionally!tortured!Hotch! fic commence!

1x9 Derailed

Killer on a train.
Character Arc (Such As There Is One): It looks like this episode will be about Elle as she's originally the one trapped on the train with the killer, but in an eleventh-hour heist, Reid takes over, and ends up talking the paranoid schizophrenic killer down with a big speech about how he understands what it is like to have voices in your head compelling you to do and learn and know things. Later Elle compliments his acting, and he's like, ha ha, yes, acting. Okay, but... really? Reid's schizophrenic? You want to open that can of worms?
Highlights: When the team is unable to convince the killer that he hasn't got a government microchip embedded in his arm, Reid hatches a scheme to board the train in the guise of a technician, make an incision, and produce a bloody microchip out of thin air using his magic skills. Because he has those. Like Doogie Howser!

1x10 The Popular Kids

The team investigates what appears to be a Satanic ritual murder in a small town.
Character Arc (Such As There Is One): CM seems to have an obsession with Reid not unlike TNG's obsession with Data. Every episode is about him. I, for one, am in favor. In this episode, Reid confides to Morgan that he has been having job-related nightmares. Morgan tells him to talk to Gideon. He doesn't, but in the Mile High Minute, Gideon gives him a little speech about focusing on the ones you save instead of the ones you can't, and Reid lies back and closes his eyes.
Highlights: The killer holds Reid at knifepoint, and Morgan lunges, tackling them both to the ground. This results in the killer's capture and in Reid complaining.

1x11 Blood Hungry

A delusional killer with a compulsion to drink the blood and eat the flesh of his victims (ewwww) is protected by his snotty old-money mother.
Character Arc (Such As There Is One): Gideon has a list of 25 things to do before he dies. At the end, Hotch convinces him to make steps toward one of the more difficult item on the list: patching things up with his Estranged Son (TM). I guess that ties in, sort of.
Highlights: Gideon's on crutches through the episode from performing another list item--skydiving--which leads to some hijinks when he invades Garcia's first-floor office. Garcia, who's usually all "hiya sweetcheeks" with the guys, is strangely deferential to Gideon, which makes her dismay and alarm at his abuse of her space all the more adorable.

1x12 What Fresh Hell?

Kidnapped girl. I guess we're supposed to think maybe her father did it (her parents are divorced, and her father is secretive), but we saw her be abducted and we know it wasn't her father. This is why they shouldn't put the crime in the pre-credit sequence. I don't like knowing more than the detectives.
Character Arc (Such As There Is One): It's sort of all over the place. There's some stuff about Garcia thinking Gideon sent her flowers (to make up for last week, I guess), but Gideon didn't. In the Mile High Minute Gideon asks Hotch if he sent Garcia flowers in his name, and Hotch just says "Yeah!" as if, of COURSE, and no big deal. Oh, and there's a little bit of hinting around that Gideon misses his family. I think we are still not supposed to know what happened to them. When Elle tells him that the girl's parents are getting back together, but perhaps it would be better if they didn't since the husband has cancer, Gideon firmly disagrees. At the end, we see that his collection of family photos appears to be a collection of pictures of people he's saved.
Statistics Watch: The team isn't called in until the girl has been missing for 20 hours. Reid says that in child abduction cases like this, 44% of abductees are dead within an hour; 75% within 3 hours; and virtually all within 24 hours. Like a big idiot, Hotch concludes, "So we have less than four hours to find her." For the rest of the episode, everyone--including Reid--decides to buy into the mass delusion that some magical killem timer goes off in the heads of abducters at the 24 hour mark.

1x13 Poison

The team tracks a mass poisoner who turns out to be putting poison on envelope stickum!
Character Arc (Such As There Is One): Possibly this episode is about JJ? I discovered this during the Mile High Minute, which was JJ feeling like perhaps the job is not worth the aggro (this happens for somebody every episode) and asking Hotch why he became a profiler. Hotch says he used to be a lawyer, but he wanted to work on the cases earlier in the process, when there was still some chance of saving people.

1x14 Riding the Lightning

The team questions a husband and wife serial killer team who are about to get the chair, trying to find out about the final victims. Over the course of their interrogations, Gideon realizes that the wife is innocent.
Character Arc (Such As There Is One): Gideon comes to like and respect killer wife Sarah Jean, with her quiet dignity, and he gets all fired up to clear her name when he realizes her son is still alive (she just Mosesed him away). She weakly protests that she's totally a killer, so he should cut it out, but he single-mindedly and intensely tracks down the boy. Sarah Jean begs him to let her die and let her son live his life without knowing who his parents were. At the last moment, Gideon acquiesces. So I guess he learned something about being merciful instead of just? Or is this about his own Estranged Son (TM)?
Highlights: Hotch agrees, after some cajoling, to play poker with the killer. When he wants his prize to be a whiff of JJ's hair, Hotch chivalrously vetoes, but JJ hastily agrees.

1x15 Unfinished Business

Former BAU agent Max Ryan publishes a book on an uncaught serial killer, prompting the killer to come out of retirement, prompting Ryan to come out of retirement.
Character Arc (Such As There Is One): Mostly the episode is about Ryan, the typical no-life-post-retirement, back-in-my-day-we-worked-solo, once-I-said-not-to-get-emotionally-involved-but-that-totally-doesn't-apply-to-me-now ex-agent. There are a few character moments for Elle, who snaps at an alleged killer for no discernable reason. In the final Mile High Minute, she asks Hotch for advice on having a life outside of work.

1x16 The Tribe

The gang checks out murders which appear to use Native American war rituals, but turn out to be a cultish group of college students co-opting the culture.
Character Arc (Such As There Is One): This is another episode that's largely centered on a guest character, the Native American cop John Blackwolf. He tries to teach Hotch to use a knife instead of a gun, but Hotch doesn't buy it. There is also a minor D-plot about Hotch's younger, hotter brother, who wants to be a chef, but Hotch wants him to go to law school. (Apparently their father, also a lawyer, is dead.) At the end, Hotch comes into the brother's restaurant and makes up with him, presumably because he saw some kids who had really gone astray, or something.
IQ Outliers Watch: The cult leader supposedly has an IQ of 189--two more than Reid!
Quote of the Episode: "Just so you know? You sound like a fortune cookie." --Hotch

1x17 A Real Pain

The team chases a New York City serial killer who's targetting people who were (he believes) wrongly acquitted of various crimes.
Character Arc (For Real This Time): It starts when Gideon mentions "boys in Iowa" to Hotch. Reid eventually asks what it means, and Gideon explains that back when Hotch was relatively new, they caught a killer of boys in Iowa, and Hotch talked the gun out of his hand and arrested him without firing a shot: a textbook win. He walked, though, on a technicality, and went on to kill another boy. At the end of the episode, Gideon is trying to talk down this week's killer, and he's convinced him to hand over the gun--but there's a moment where it looks like the killer might be either handing over the gun or pointing it at Gideon, and Hotch neatly shoots him dead, showing he has learned exactly the wrong lesson from Boys In Iowa.
Milestone: For once in ever, the ending quote actually adds to the episode for me. It's Hotch reading a Gandhi quote about how the good caused by violence is temporary and the evil is permanent. It neatly and complexly suggests the reason Hotch disapproves of the killer as well as doubt about (or resignation to the evil of) his own actions.
Highlights: Reid has never been to New York City (Morgan can't believe it: "It's a one-hour flight! It's a three-hour train ride!") This of course means that he has never used chopsticks. There is an adorable scene where the team is gathered around a table in a Chinese restaurant, mostly discussing serial killers, but also smiling fondly at Reid's spastic, over-the-top inability to get food anywhere near his mouth.

1x18 Somebody's Watching

Young L.A. actress Lila Archer is the target of a stalker who's targetting Lila's professional rivals; and rivals for her affection, including Reid.
Character Arc (Sure, I'll Give Them This One): Reid tries to keep Lila safe and maintain professionalism while bodyguarding her in her house, but she is just too spirited, and insists on going for a swim in her pool, pulling him in, and making out with him. (Arguably Reid's first kiss.) During the final showdown, Reid tries to get the stalker to target him instead of Lila by insisting that Lila loves him (tactic or wishful thinking?) They bid each other an awkward but fond farewell when their professional duties pull them apart. As Reid later tells Morgan, he knows that Lila was probably experiencing a normal psychological reaction to having a bodyguard, but that doesn't diminish his feelings.
Highlights:
Guest Stars I've Seen Before: One of the victims is Taub from House.
Diversity Watch: The culprit is a girl!

1x19 Machismo

Mexican government officials request the BAU's help investigating a murder, certain they will declare it not a serial killing and thereby uphold the perception that serial murder is a distinctly U.S. phenomenon. The BAU, however, think it is a serial killing (of course; they're American).
Character Arc (Such As There Is One): The episode opens with Hotch spending some rare time with his family before he is called in on his day off. Although he promises his wife he's just going in for the briefing and he'll totally be back, he makes no effort to get out of going to Mexico. He just goes and is vaguely sullen while he's there. The case itself has a lot of family-related themes, as the team unfolds the family drama between the victim and her children, but it doesn't so much seem to comment on Hotch's situation in any meaningful way as it just makes him vaguely uncomfortable to think about.
Character Facts: Elle speaks Spanish. She makes sure to broadcast this as much as possible, by correcting Reid's pronunciation, speaking Spanish to Mexican law enforcement and witnesses even when the rest of the team is around and the Mexicans are all speaking English, and by unnecessarily dropping "I speak Spanish" into conversation with people who have all heard her speak Spanish.
Impotence Watch: The profilers deduce once again that the killer escalated from sex crimes, probably after he became impotent.
Highlights: The episode seems to go out of its way to show how cool everyone on the team is with homosexuality, especially Morgan, for whom the obvious (to him) love of the victim's son's boyfriend is sufficient evidence to remove him from suspicion.

1x20 Charm and Harm

The team looks into the past to catch a serial killer with a fixation on drowning and the chameleonic ability to blend in anywhere.
Character Arc (Such As There Is One): Not too much. Morgan makes fun of Elle, whom he believes has a boyfriend. Gideon freaks the fuck out on the killer's father, claiming (when Reid asks him about it later) that it's because the father helped the killer by protecting him, although Gideon's exact words at the height of the yelling are "You weren't there!", which is not actually true of the father (but is true of Gideon).
Impotence Watch: The killer is obsessed with unfaithful women, leading the team to surmise he was protecting his "impotent father."
Guest Stars I've Seen Before: The serial killer is another of the potential doctors from House season 4.
Highlights: Hotch calmly interrupts Garcia's flirting by saying "I'm putting you on speakerphone," to which Garcia cries, "You completely suck!"

1x21 Secrets and Lies

Gideon's old CIA friend (from the army?) calls in the team to uncover a mole.
Character Arc (There Is Not One): It looks for awhile like there will be four parallel character/plot arcs as each team member is assigned to profile a suspect who is like them in some way (Reid, the genius hacker; Elle, a woman; Morgan, a woman who kicks ass; Hotch and/or Gideon, the leader), but the system breaks down almost as soon as it's set up. The most we end up with is some slight Estranged-Dadding from Gideon ("Our kids don't have to know everything about us," he tells the CIA guy who is complaining that his kids don't know what he does for living), and some vague flirting between Morgan and Kickass Agent, but nothing new or substantial.
IQ Outliers Watch: The hacker Reid is supposed to profile has a 197 IQ. That is one more absurd than Janine from The Baby-Sitters Club, and ten more absurd even than Reid! He sort of seems like a dunce in this episode though. I guess he's probably really good at computers.
Highlights: Mostly Garcia hijinks, as she is told she cannot come to Langley because her name is on "a list," but she is given limited access to CIA networks. "Now we can find out if Princess Di's death was really an accident!" she gushes. "This is why you're on the list," says JJ.

1x22 The Fisher King, Part 1

The team's downtime is cut short when an unsub sends them all targeted hints and clues at their vacation spots, each with the message to "save her." The episode ends with a cliffhanger as Elle is maybe shot.
Character Arc: Too soon to tell if there's a cohesive one without seeing part 2, but there is at least stuff for every member of the team (see highlights).
Highlights: