Criminal MindsSoul Mates
Original Air Date: Jan 14th, 2009
JD - TwoCents Reviewer
JD@thetwocentscorp.com
Well, it's a brand new year, and that means new Criminal Minds! After one long month without my team, after arms full of gifts and gorging on too many sweets, they are back, and I wish I could say better than ever. What I have to say instead, though, is that after so long without an episode, I wish they would have come back with one a little punchier than this. This is the sort of episode that works well as a breather between bigger, more explosive episodes. Soul Mates was slow, and while slow is not always bad (and I should say, there was nothing bad about this episode necessarily), it's not the sort of thing to get one excited for the rest of the season to come.
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Criminal Minds
ReplyDeleteSoul Mates
Original Air Date: Jan 14th, 2009
JD - TwoCents Reviewer
JD@thetwocentscorp.com
Well, it's a brand new year, and that means new Criminal Minds! After one long month without my team, after arms full of gifts and gorging on too many sweets, they are back, and I wish I could say better than ever. What I have to say instead, though, is that after so long without an episode, I wish they would have come back with one a little punchier than this. This is the sort of episode that works well as a breather between bigger, more explosive episodes. Soul Mates was slow, and while slow is not always bad (and I should say, there was nothing bad about this episode necessarily), it's not the sort of thing to get one excited for the rest of the season to come.
The beginning of the episode actually sort of began to excite me. We start out in Sarasota, Florida, where William Harris (Michael Boatman) is teaching his daughter Andrea how to drive. Or at least, he's going to do that, until he's interrupted by something on his cell phone, and he all but bolts from the car. Andrea is upset, of course, as apparently daddy has been MIA a lot lately... Well, she's upset until daddy says she gets the car when she gets her license, and then all is forgotten! Already, we see what a fantastic father William is, buying his child's love with expensive things, instead of actual parenting--you know, like any self-respecting parent would.
Once William is out of the picture, we see Andrea's friends approach, asking her if she knew another girl is missing. Apparently local college girls have been disappearing, but this last one was in high school, and the girls disappearing are alternating between black and white.
Insert police sirens before the conversation is even over, and the local police are on the spot, surrounding the Harris house. William Harris is promptly arrested for the kidnapping of the last girl and the murder of the others, and suddenly Hotch, Rossi, and Prentiss are on the scene too, chastising the local PD for making the arrest. The latest girl, they say, isn't going to be in the Harris house at all.
And she isn't, of course.
This opening was what excited me, though, people! There was a format shift here, and I always like when the show switches things up. There was no intro at Quantico, no round table briefing. We just jumped right into the action with the arrest and the BAU team showing up like the cavalry. Aside from my pleasure at this format switch meaning less Jordan Todd screen time, I also thought, "Woo, this is going to be a fast one if we're jumping in head first!"
Yeeeaaah... not so much.
It probably would have been better to stick to the format on this one. It would have taken up some of the time that this episode spent simply floundering for clues if we'd had some team time in the beginning, then watched Jordan brief them.
Anyway, back to the action. Or should I say inaction? As it turns out, William Harris had been arrested on offenses of this sort in Atlanta, where he moved from recently, and the local PD have a witness who can place Harris at the abduction site... but that's about all they have. Harris fits the profile of the guy they were looking for, and they had probable cause to arrest him, but they had nothing else to go on, nothing to prosecute with, and no evidence. Good one, guys.
On top of that William Harris is a successful litigator, and not one that's going to break easily, even with Rossi and Morgan interrogating him. This, my friends, will become very apparent in the breathtaking redundancy of this episode later on.
Harris' wife and daughter are, of course, not really willing to listen to Hotch of Prentiss at all. I think this might have been a good avenue for exploration in the story, but it was mostly left untapped. What do you guys think?
As it was, we're left with only the fantabulous Garcia's assistance. She sets off through Harris' personal computer to "find the grime". What she finds is an encrypted link to a webpage, an unsearchable blog, and Reid is able to ascertain that there is not just one author on the blog, but two authors who are communicating with each other through it. Pay attention here, as this scene contains the only truly memorable line in the entire episode, when Rossi answers the local detective's question about where exactly the FBI found Spencer Reid.
Reid's theory of two authors is proven true, shortly afterward, when the the body of the missing girl turns up. There's a second killer, and he's trying to clear Harris' name. And then begins the floundering that makes up the majority of the episode.
Rossi and Morgan struggle through the rest of the episode, trying to make something out of the nothingness that is the case they actually have. Reid keeps filling in bits and pieces of the puzzle, but it's never enough. I, frankly, was getting tired of Boatman's smirk about twenty minutes into the episode, and it never got better--he was smirking right up until about the last ninety seconds or so. Things didn't get interesting in the interrogation room until Harris tried to draw a parallel between himself and Morgan based on the color of their skin, but even that came too late for it to add any real zest to the episode.
Overall, this episode was just okay. If it had been book-ended by two exciting episodes, I might have felt better about it, and while I loved Normal, that aired too long ago for this to feel like a slow episode for the sake of letting us catch our breaths.
What did you guys think? Give me your two cents!