Okay, that unsub was more than I can take. Surely there are more ways to continue to have drama than ever more horrifying crimes.

Also, Prentiss saying she lost six friends compared with Reid losing one is bogus. She knew they were alive and that she could see them again.

I agree with Vortex and Ginger, but let me get this out of my system.

WTF was up with tonight's unsub. None of it made any fucking sense. I guess we are to assume that he had developmental delays due to his lacking oxygen at birth. Are you going to tell me that living in the same family as him all these years you wouldn't have noticed his sociopathy. Really?

And would he really have gone after his niece like that? I mean, WTF? The whole thing was unnecessarily convoluted, creepy, over the top. I really HATED it.

I did like some of the interactions among the team for drama's sake, but I agree that Reid's reactions were discounted. And isn't it Prentiss who he told that he was worried about schizophrenia? You'd think they would have shown some sensitivity and Hotch for SURE needed to bring in psych again. One spaghetti dinner ain't gonna get it.

Frontal lobe damage can theoretically affect judgment, impulse control and ability to respond appropriately to social cues. While this may a factor in sociopathy, it doesn't seem likely to be behind a killer whose crimes are pretty well planned. He apparently enjoyed hurting things from an early age, which you'd think someone would have noticed by now.

I'm with le nubian. I hated it.

Also, Prentiss saying she lost six friends compared with Reid losing one is bogus. She knew they were alive and that she could see them again.

I thought the same thing, and was surprised that Reid didn't call her on it.

I'm actually not feeling Reid spraying blame around like that. Trying to blame, even vaguely implying JJ would be responsible for lapsing back into his addiction? No. That's all on him.

If you live and work in a world with security clearances, sometimes you're just not that special. It also bugs me when relatives of agents complain that they should have been told anyway. It's the job.

Be mad, be upset, but actually laying blame with other people like that isn't cool in my book.

I am only just watching now but I'm not loving it.

Okay, I agree with ita that Reid really isn't so superspecial that he should have been told. And frankly dealing with his addiction is either something he can do or he really is in the wrong line of work.

But, damn, I do not like this ep.

Frankly you shouldn't be expected to just get over having your dead friend return. Some people may but I'm pretty sure it is not obligatory.

Also I am not sure I like the wine glasses at the Cooking Lesson Makes Everything Okay scene. I mean I liked them better than the scene and the ep certainly.

Surely there are more ways to continue to have drama than ever more horrifying crimes.

This to me is one problem with a LOT Of television drama. Continuing fiction does not have to have ever escalating stakes, any more than real life has to. The hero takes on an unsub who has killed eleven people, and catches him before he kills twelve more all at much. That does not mean the next unsub has to have 20 right hands in his suitcase and be threatening a school bus full of kids. If after catching a serial killer the next guy killed his wife and the mistress is in danger of being the next victim, that can be a perfectly good basis for suspense.

It annoyed me that Buffy had to make each season's big bad a worse threat than he last. And it annoys me that a certain contemporary horror show thinks it has to raise the threat level season after season. I wish writers would understand they can get just as much suspense out of a threat to one life, or one family or one neighborhoods as from a threat to the universe. There is an old Jewish saying that to take a life is to destroy the world, and I think that works in fiction as well. Heck, the best apocalyptic fiction often tells the story of the end of the world or threat thereof through the eyes of a small band of survivors - reducing it back to human scale.

To go back to a classic mystery writer I was fond of, Rex Stout's Nero Wolf went right back to solving ordinary mysteries after he defeated Zeck. Stout did not feel compelled to give Wolf new supervillain opponents once Zeck was gone.

So, I'm watching the new drama Unforgettable. I like it, but if they keep harping on the whole dead sister thing, I'm going to get annoyed.

Things I liked about this week's CM:

Bitchy-Reid is always fun to watch, at least for me. Not that I agree with all of the reason of his being bitchy, but his striking out with little snarky asides is so consistent with his character (see "Elephant's Memory"--"Still haven't found the Father-of-the-Year award...", and "Memoriam"--"They say people look like their dogs, too") that I was okay with it. However, him calling JJ Jennifer was strange; I don't think anyone has ever done that.

Hotch actually smiled, and more than once!!! I think that's something we haven't seen since Season 3. And I liked the way he made his "strongly tempered suggestion" to Rossi.

Speaking of Hotch, he was looking very hatchet-faced in some of those interrogation scenes. He's going to age into an interesting-looking character actor.

Things I didn't like:

All the really explicit horrific scenes. I averted my eyes (and ugh, seeing those two bodies in the morgue with their acid-etched eyes really tripped my eye-damage squick bigtime, almost as much as the S5 ep about annucleation) for all of it. Shudder.

I was another one wondering how the hell the family didn't realize how off the brother was.

Prentiss's talk with Reid on the plane wrapped things up too quickly. I was really hoping that they'd have him repress things until mid-season, at least, and then have it blow up in their faces. Maybe it'll make a reappearance around ep 15?

And yes, that finale was overly cheesy for this show. Very un-CM. But, I guess it was more meta than anything else.

ETA: A neat, if long, podcast with MGG. The interviewer played the socialite who was killed in "52 Pickup" in S4, btw.