Criminal Minds: 3rd Life
By fred | January 10, 2008
(S03E12) Sure, there’s a strike going on and new episodes are becoming rarer and rarer every day. So networks love to play with us, tweaking and re-arranging their schedule again and again once or twice a week, making sure we don’t know for sure what is when. And even if they still have new episodes left in the can, they don’t rush into putting them on the air, because they’re stupid and think as such.
So yes, CBS sure had us waiting for quite some time before they finally granted us a new episode of Criminal Minds, but today here it finally was, and without waiting any further let me tell you this, right now : the wait was all worth it.
I could tell you about the new guy, Rossi, and how he’s not like Gideon and how things are and work differently now with the “new team”. I could, but I won’t because I’d much rather talk about what was, without a doubt, (one of) the best episode of Criminal Minds yet.
Yes, I’ll go that far, and I really don’t question myself whether or not I should go there, as the episode ended I was still all excited about it, really, and I knew it was the best God damned thing I had seen in a while, no less ! It was almost perfect.
I’ll be honest, for a good first part of the episode, as I was watching I had no idea of what I would be saying here, because pretty much the only thing I could think of was that it was good, really good even. It was great, but it’s not the first time Criminal Minds was great, it’s not even the first time this show is great since Rossi took place. But then it kept its high level of quality throughout the entire episode, all the way till then end, and delivered the best you could have expected, or didn’t even dared to dream of.
It a well-known fact that Hollywood loves happy ending, all the time. And if for romantic comedies that’s just fine, I can’t tell you how many potentially great movies have been entirely ruined by a shitty happy ending, and so have TV series or episodes. And in the big lines, the story we had this week on Criminal Minds wasn’t all that new.
A daughter had been kidnapped, the father - who used to be a bad guy - leaves the cops behind and go find her himself, faces the last guy standing, points the gun, and didn’t shoot yet. Then comes the good cop, who’s going to try and talk him out of it. And honestly, Reid did quite a great job at that here. I don’t think he could have said anything any better, he used all the right words in the right way, at the right time. It was all good, so good that I was already the freaking classic “happy ending” where, always, he puts the gun down, the moron on the ground tries to do something that can only get him killed, like reaching to a gun or a knife, and then either :
- the cop shoots him dead,
- or the dad do it himself, but you know, only because he had to. Sometimes, he does so even before the audience and/or the cop can see why, so we think he did it, but not really. (Well, the bad guy still ends up dead his brain all over the walls, but you know what I mean.)
Posted in Reviews
Shows: Criminal Minds
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