Criminal MindsCatching Out
Original Air Date: Oct 29th, 2008
JD - TwoCents Reviewer
JD@thetwocentscorp.com
Five things to take away from Catching Out:
1. Sometimes--just sometimes--Morgan is made of fail in the flirting department.
2. JJ is one of those annoying 'touch my belly even if you don't want to' pregnant women.
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[photo: CBS]
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Criminal Minds
ReplyDeleteCatching Out
Original Air Date: Oct 29th, 2008
JD - TwoCents Reviewer
JD@thetwocentscorp.com
Five things to take away from Catching Out:
1. Sometimes--just sometimes--Morgan is made of fail in the flirting department.
2. JJ is one of those annoying 'touch my belly even if you don't want to' pregnant women.
3. The homeless will tell you anything in exchange for Nutter Butters.
4. Just in case you forgot that Prentiss speaks Spanish: Prentiss speaks Spanish.
5. Oh yeah, and Hotch has got his edge back again!
This episode, we start out in the unsub's head. He jumps off a moving train, and then the unsub's point of view starts. For a moment, you're really not sure what's going on, except for one thing: whatever it is, it's not good. I have to admit, the unsub's point of view drew me in right away, but it felt a little strange after a moment. At first, I liked it--grainy, flashy, distorted snapshots of the crime as it's happening. It was properly freaky, especially when you caught glimpses of bloody hands turning on shower taps. Problem is, I didn't really understand the reason for it. The great folks at Criminal Minds sometimes make stylistic changes when it really fits the story. Take True Night, for example. The Sin City sort of style in the murder sequences reflected the comic book style of the unsub's art. This time, I don't really see what the point was. I was honestly expecting the unsub to be mentally ill, as if that truly was the way he saw things, distorted and unreal (along with the distorted images of the actual crime, for example, we get random shots of clouds and flying over landscapes), but that didn't turn out to be the case... Regardless, as I said, it's all effectively creepy, anyway, if motion-sickness-inducing.
We jump from there to watching Morgan spectatcularly fail in trying to pick up a girl in a coffee shop when she calls him on it. Pay attention to that one; you'll see her again later. And then we're back to the BAU.
As it turns out, our unsub as been busy. JJ tells the team that there have been six burglar homicides spread out over central California. The unsub is delivering a blow to the head to kill his victims, then spending hours in the victim's houses after the murder, eating their food, sleeping in their bed, using their showers, and generally treating the place like it's a castle and he's the king. Once he's done, he ransacks the place and gets out. There's also DNA evidence strewn about the place, so they know it's the same guy in each location, but there are no fingerprints at all. To add to the weirdness, the crime scenes are spread out over four hundred miles apart and they can tell the unsub is changing directions, rather than staying on a given course. The team is off to figure out why.
They head to Sacramento, the site of the last murders, and take over the task force headquarters. The local cops have already proven how immensely uncreative they are; they've named the unsub the 'Highway 99 Killer,' as the murders have all happened along that stretch of interstate. Not only that, the police department is a bustling beehive of activity; there are far too many cooks in the kitchen. JJ and Reid beat a hasty retreat when Hotch pulls the local detective over to talk about these two little 'issues', and here we watch our hero, Hotch, back from the abyss of self-doubt, smack some sense into the investigation. Thank God! Hotch is back; all is right in the world! I would have kissed my TV, if it weren't for not wanting a static shock to the lips.
On the scene, Prentiss, Morgan, and Rossi quickly discover that the house of the last victim was a perfect target for burglars, and that the unsub is a fan of huffing household chemicals. They also find out that after the unsub kills his victims and changes into their clothes, he leaves his own clothes spread out on top of the victims. They pin it down as an expression of transference, and determine that between that, his clothes being dirty, and the cheap drug choice, the unsub must be homeless. And Bingo! Rossi ties the unsub to the train tracks! Not literally, of course; this isn't vaudville.
The rest of the episode is spent chasing the unsub around the state. The evolution of the profile was interesting, as usual. I wasn't expecting it to end up where it did at all. And the climax was just amazingly fun! Morgan and Hotch get to play action heroes! This is the sort of action I prefer in my show, just enough to be exciting, without dominating the show. And do you remember in my Mayhem review when I said almost every episode contains what I like to call 'Derek Morgan's Extremely Stupid but Ultimately Useful Move of the Episode'? It's a good one this week. In the past, he's flying tackled people, jumped into the window of a moving car, drove an ambulance with a massive bomb that was about to go off in it, and now he's flinging himself at trains? This is just a natural progression, I suppose. I'm waiting for him to jump onto the wing of a plane as it takes off next. He's very obviously Superman (case in point: in Tabula Rasa, he leaped a tall building in a single bound!) I'm sure he'd get through clinging to a flying plane just fine!
This was a strong episode, and other than the strange camera work and stylistic weirdness in the unsub's point of view, I don't really have a single thing to complain about. Hotch was finally back on his game again, and I couldn't be happier to watch him go! Last week, when Rossi said 'welcome to the club' as Hotch questioned himself (yet again), it wounded me just a little. But maybe it was exactly the sort of kick in the shins that Hotch needed.
So did you like the tricky camera work? Do you prefer seeing angsty Hotch beat himself up? Were you as creeped out as I was by the unsub's 'loud' silence? Was the climax was a little too Die Hard for you?
...Were you amazed Morgan came out of that climax without so much as a bruise? Because I was.
Give me your two cents!
I absolutely loved the train scene. Partly because, as you say, there was just enough action without being too much. And partly because it felt like a great homage to the old Westerns with the guy riding his horse alongside the train while his partner fought someone on top of the moving train.
ReplyDeleteAbsolutely agree!
ReplyDeleteSo maybe not vaudeville, but Spaghetti Western? ;)
Aha, yes! Mmmm, Aaron Hotchner stars as the Man With No Name.....
ReplyDeleteI thought the stylistic viewpoint of the unsub reflected his substance abuse, how the chemicals affected his brain and thought processes. It might even be how he really saw the world. Either way, you know at once that this guy wasn't your average psycho, that there was something physically as well as mentally wrong. At least, that's how I interpreted it.
ReplyDeleteLoved the coffee shop thing and the payback - it's good for Morgan to be that bemused now and again :)
That's a possibility, yes! I won't pretend to know how that sort of drug use can affect the brain, or how much the effects linger. We see him get high only after he's already in the house, and I hadn't considered he might be high (or have lingering effects from his drug use present) before entering, so I didn't make that connection. Thanks!
ReplyDeleteYes, Morgan's ego does need to be checked once in a while, doesn't it? :)