A Crime Against Criminal Minds
Criminal Minds happens to be one of my favorite shows on television. Sure, it’s formulaic, and yes, the quotes read as the jet takes off each week can be a little cheesy, but I still love the show. (For those who don’t know, it’s about a special FBI team that profiles particularly hard to catch serial killers known as the BAU, Behavioral Analysis Unit.) Thomas Gibson, Paget Brewster, Shemar Moore and all the rest are welcome at my house any time.
(If you’re wondering how anyone with as much paranoia as I have can watch a show about serial killers every week, I’d like to remind you of two points, 1. I still can (barely) draw the line between reality and fantasy and 2. With Criminal Minds, I’m pretty much guaranteed that the bad guy(s) will get caught.)
The show also lets me indulge the fantasy part that I would be a great criminal profiler. I’ve always thought it would be awesome to be a cop with a desk job. No way, no how do I want to run after bad guys or face armed people, but the idea of solving crimes and putting together clues – awesome. Considering my occasionally obsessive mind, I think I’d be good at it. Criminal Minds has also led me to believe that the FBI employs PR people just to feed the right clues to the media. In my new role as a freelance PR person, I have decided this would also be a cool job although I doubt its existence.
Last year, during what I thought was one of the best seasons of Criminal Minds, I found myself crying and yelling “Aaron” at the TV screen (because obviously after five years together, Thomas Gibson’s character and I are clearly on a first name basis) as Agent Hotchner faced off against the man who had killed his wife. (The SO really thought I’d lost my mind on that one.) I’m also convinced Agent Prentiss and Agent Hotchner are totally in love with one another, but that’s another story for another day.
Spoiler Alert: So, considering my love of Criminal Minds, you can see why I’d be particularly wary whenever they introduce a new character (especially since they already had a great character in JJ before they let her go). Last week, said new character was introduced, and I am not happy.
My issue isn’t necessarily that they introduced a new character; I knew it was inevitable. My issue isn’t even that they introduced a new character who looks just like the old character they’re replacing. My issue is that the new character totally sucks as an FBI agent. Let’s examine:
The new agent was brought in because murders were happening in a gated community, and traits of all the supposed suspects were too homogenous. So, new character being – wait for it – the daughter of a serial killer, was coming in to identify traits in the families that might tip the team off as to who the killer was. She grew up with a serial killer, so she’d know what the daughter of another serial killer would act like. Makes sense, no?
As an aside, the fourth murder happens while the team has called together all of the community residents for a meeting about the murders. The woman who doesn’t go to the meeting gets killed. Note to everyone: if your neighborhood is being taken out one by one, don’t stay home alone while the police and FBI and EVERYONE YOU KNOW head to the local church for a briefing. There’ll be plenty of opportunities for peace, quite and “me” time once the psycho stalking your streets is caught.
Now, let me get back to our new agent. Instead of getting anywhere close to identifying the serial killer, she decides to settle her own demons and apologize to the family of one of the victims because she never got a chance to apologize to her father’s victims. So, without telling anyone or taking a firearm, she marches over to the house of the third victim.
Of course, the husband of the third victim also happens to be the serial killer, which means our supposedly brilliant and very-sensitive-because-of-her-dark-past agent not only can’t help identify the serial killer, she walks straight into his house. He even negotiates with her three times when she says “no,” and any Oprah viewer can tell you there’s trouble when a man turns a single “no” into the beginning of a negotiation.
How is she saved? Hotchner calls her cell phone and she doesn’t really answer his questions, so he, being a good profiler and FBI agent, goes in to save her butt.
Not only is she a terrible profiler, walking into the murderer’s house and all, but she probably got him killed because we all know that a normal Criminal Minds episode ends with a chase scene and Shemar Moore tackling the suspect. This one ended with the suspect being shot. Need I say more?
Then, our new agent spends the whole plane ride home crying about how tough it was and how she’ll never go out into the field alone, and unarmed, again.
Do you know what I’m crying over? The fact that a show built on the premise of incredibly perceptive and intelligent FBI agents solving the most difficult and disturbing crimes there are would allow this dolt as part of their team. For God’s sake, a bloodhound would do more for them than this kid.
It is my hope that we won’t see Miss Great-at-the-obstacle-course-but-really-clueless-about-everything-else again – unless the team decides to use her as bait during a sting. That I could get behind.