I may be completely wrong, but I found something unique about the Unsub on last night’s episode of Criminal Minds. He was crazy, for sure, but it was a craziness bred by desperation more than anything else. Have we ever seen an Unsub driven by something as specific as the desire to get his daughter back from foster care?
Imagine being where he was mentally. His wife died, and the courts deemed him unfit to care for his own daughter (did we hear how they got involved in the first place?). For whatever reason, the deficiency he connected with was his not having a wife to care for his little girl. So that’s exactly what he set out to find. All he wanted was his kid back. I’m not defending his actions, but I think any parent can at least in theory understand what he thought he was doing.
And the compartmentalization he was utilizing in his life? Wow. He’d hit the road, study and snatch a new mark, and then “test” them for a day. Meanwhile, his daughter was always on his mind, and he’d return to her often to almost give her a report on how things were going. And from the little we saw he seemed to be a loving and caring father. Again, I’m not here to defend his actions, but I think the character was a really interesting construct. There’s something they could study back at the BAU.
Of course the most important thing I got out of this episode was to never hitchhike. Not that I’ve ever considered it, or been in the position to do so, but how many people, particularly teenagers and young adults, are out there hitching their way across the country? It’s unbelievably unsafe, even if it is cheap and somewhat dependable. I know we shouldn’t go around painting everyone with the same brush, and my hope is that most people are good, but why run the risk of getting the bad apple? Prentiss is probably low-balling it by guessing that there are a half-dozen serial killers driving across the highway system in this country. Now that’s an idea for a series….
What was with that weird vibe I was getting between Rossi and Reid? I’m sure it’s an exaggeration, but it felt like Reid was only as useful to Rossi as the offhand data he could rattle off. I’m sure I’m over-analyzing, and I think the scene was supposed to fall into the infrequent cutesy side of the show, but Rossi misses in his delivery a lot for me. And I think it’s only when he’s paired with certain people, like Reid. Reid’s “little buddy” relationship with Morgan, and brains-to-the-brawn of Hotch work really well with how awkward he is socially, but I just always find him clashing with Rossi. And I put that on Rossi. It’s a shame that I’ve been waiting so long for Reid to get more screen time, only to have him finally get it with Rossi. How could Rossi leave Reid in that ditch?
Oh! And Morgan seemed to be back in a position of leadership. At least in dealing with the local cops. How many heads can the beast have at once?
Clacked by Aryeh S.
on Mar 11, 2010 @ 15:39 EST5EDT
This episode bugged me. The daughter was supposedly up for adoption even though her father clearly still wanted custody and was not giving up parental rights. Okay, the girl may have been in foster care due to, I think they said, neglect. Fine. So the father temporarily lost custody. That’s a far cry from the girl being up for adoption. Losing custody is a completely different thing than losing parental rights. The circumstances of the father (homicide aside) were such that the courts would have kept the girl in foster care UNTIL the father’s circumstances changed (different job, remarried, something). The father’s circumstances would have likely been considered a temporary thing, even if it ended up being permanent. It was certainly not the sort of thing where he would have lost parental rights.
Anyway, that was so off that it made the entire episode annoying. It seems like the writers could have skipped the adoption part and just made him desperate to get his daughter out of foster care and back in his custody.
*POST AUTHOR*
Interesting. That didn’t even occur to me. Did we know, though, that the father still had parental rights? There wasn’t really clarity there, so I’m not sure. But I wonder how the courts got involved in the first place. Who would have known their living situation after the mother died unless something had happened?
I have followed Criminal Minds from the onset. Something just seems out of place. Am beginning to enjoy other shows like NCIS, The Mentalist and and several other shows similar to it, because there is more interaction with the characters. Humor and more personal intervention is needed. I understand them dealing more into the mind set of these people, but good grief give them and us a break!