Criminal Minds: Damaged
By fred | April 3, 2008
(S03E14) It’s been quite a while since we had a new episode of Criminal Minds, but as with more and more series these days now back in production, new episodes are coming in, and that’s a great thing for sure. This season will have been a very weird one for the show, with lots of unexpected things that came in the way and challenge them.
Of course there was the writers’ strike, which affected this show like it did any other show, but let’s not forget either that if Rossi is now part of the team, and the boss we’re used to see around here, it wasn’t always the case, and back when this season premiered Gideon was still around. If hasn’t been easy and took a while, but they eventually managed to get over that loss, and found a new way to work with a new dynamic in place.
Now that the strike is over, it feels like we’ll have to go over the same steps before we get back in the game. Not regarding Rossi taking over Gideon, that’s a done deal and it is behind us now, but regarding not coming back with the A-game right away. Let’s make it clear right now : this episode was bad.
Right from the start I had a pretty bad feeling, because that first scene was one of the worst cliché of all, one of those things I just really don’t like to see, and not just because we went over it millions of times already - even though we have. Rossi being haunted by an old crime and having never gotten over it, waking up in the middle of the night, unable to sleep for as long as that case will remain open, my God what a bore!
And having him to show up at Garcia’s place only to find her in the shower, with her new boyfriend coming out not wearing much, or anything for that matter, well that’s just another stupid cliché on top of it, and it really wasn’t a good start. Before watching anything, I was actually happy to see the show back. But as early as during the opening credits, I was already questioning things…
I remember how things ended, how the last few episodes we got to see were really great, I loved many of them. They were great, inventive, well written and done in pretty much every way possible, it was such a good hour to spend watching the show. Sadly, the same cannot be said about this episode, quite the contrary in fact !
What was the point of that meeting with Hotch and Reid going to some prison to see some serial killer, it went absolutely nowhere. Could this whole mess have been any more of a filler ?? I really don’t think so. And what the fuck was Hotch doing right there ? Okay, he’s pissed that his marriage is over, good, if he really wanted to fight he could have just walked into a bar, drank way too much and fight with the first guy he saw. Let that anger out, go spend a night in jail and move on. Or did he actually wanted to kill somebody ?? Because him getting ready to fight was laughable if you ask me, and he was not behaving in professional manners at any point during this whole filler plot.
And of course today is the day Rossi woke up and decided it was over, so he grab the file of that case dead for 20 years, he went over there, and look what happened : he found the guy, who was just waiting for him all those years, and lock him up. Because no one ever thought of actually investigating that case before it seems, or did they really never figured out that the family went to a carnival the day (before) the murder ? And that thing about the toys, are we really supposed to believe that the kids got their present every year, and that Rossi had been seeing them and talking with them for years and years and never, not once, did those gifts ever came up, ever ? Yeah right…
It’s pretty much a non-sense to me, just like when they’re trying to see why Rossi is so much attached to that case, have Garcia look it up for them, and somehow they completely miss that the guy bought the house in which the crime took place ! Not that it helped understanding why he was obsessed with it, but it sure was a pretty important sign of his obsession !
I’ve really not enjoyed anything during the entire hour, this was a highly disappointing episode, and I now want to forget about it as fast as possible, hoping that next time we’ll get an episode more of the quality of what we used to get before the strike…
Posted in Reviews
Shows: Criminal Minds
