Criminal Minds - Hell’s Kitchen - Review: “Dark Side”

So I really hope you all enjoyed last week’s episode, with its return to a more typical case setup and a decent balance between the case of the week and the continuing storyline with Reid.

Because seriously, this week’s episode? I just have one big question about it.

What. The hell. Was that?

I don’t even mean that as a slam. Oh, there were issues with the episode, sure, it was far from perfect, but there was still enough interesting stuff happening in it, most notably the unexpected movement in the prison storyline.

But if I could describe this episode in one word, it would be “weird”. Just plain flat out weird. It left me with a whooooole lotta questions, very few, if any, concrete answers, the case was utterly bizarre in so many ways (which is saying something in a season that featured a Satan-worshipping unsub killing people with sinkholes), the Reid storyline took a turn that, while shocking, left a lot of people utterly confused as hell… Honestly, this may well be the strangest episode of the season yet, as well as perhaps the most terrifying where Reid’s concerned, depending on the outcome of certain events.

But part of the fun of writing these reviews is that it allows me to try and make sense of whatever craziness the show throws at us. So let’s see if we can’t do that here.

The Case:

Somebody walks through an unknown place that’s shrouded in virtual darkness. The only light they have to guide their way is a match, and it’s through the flame of that match that we can just make out their face. The person holding the match is revealed to be a man, and it doesn’t take very long for us to find out that he’s not all together upstairs, if you get my drift. He’s got this creepy childlike tone to his voice, and his eyes look a little wild and manic.

Oh, yeah, and he’s also got a young woman held captive wherever he’s lurking. Once he reaches her, he begins asking strange questions about her parents. How she felt when they got divorced, why they got divorced (“they just stopped loving each other”, the girl explains, and there’s something very heartbreaking about the way she says that), whether or not her sister Addie was named after the character in To Kill a Mockingbird (she confirms she was, and this seems to delight this strange man, as he’s a fan of Harper Lee). He also makes note of the fact that it’s her sixteenth birthday, and he asks her how she’d originally planned to celebrate the big day. She’d hoped to go out for a Thai dinner with her family (an awkward evening, the unsub notes, given her parents are newly divorced and all). Turns out the unsub loves Thai food, too! What a coincidence! This conversation isn’t getting creepier and creepier at all!

Basically, he seems to know an awful lot about her personal life, implying she lied to her parents by not showing up to see them. How? We don’t know. But he’s not going to let this young lady’s birthday pass without a celebration, so he lights a candle and asks her to blow it out, and brings some food for her to enjoy as well. Aw. How nice. Still a creepy as hell dude.

So who is this woman, and what on earth is going on here? Cue the BAU case briefing. The young woman’s name is Katie Hammond, and she went missing five days prior. There’s an image of her on the streets of New York City, looking rather lost and frustrated. Apparently she’d accidentally left her phone in the cab she’d taken to that area of town, in order to meet some friends (and not her family, as she’d planned – there’s the lie), and wandered off, most likely to try and call somebody, only to vanish shortly thereafter.

She’s not the first woman to have disappeared in that area, either. Emily explains that her disappearance is similar to two cold cases involving two other young women who went missing from that area. They look a lot like Katie, and the unsub held them for a full week before killing them. Both women were hit on the head, and prior to their deaths, the unsub drained three liters of their blood. Oh, joy. It’s one of those unsubs. Since Katie’s only been held five days thus far, Emily has reason to believe she’s still alive...but of course, that also means that her time is running very short. If the unsub keeps to his pattern, in two more days she’ll be his next murder victim.

When the team arrives in New York City, one of the local officers informs them Katie’s parents are coming to be interviewed. While the team waits, they delve further into the available information about the cold case victims. Those women were drug addicts and runaways, and the reason their cases went cold is because they didn’t have any family or friends to look for them (or who cared to look for them). Such a tragic thought, that. I can’t imagine what it’s like to be that alone that you could disappear and nobody would come to find you.

Judging from the lack of blood in the women’s bodies, and marks indicating a spot on the body where the unsub might’ve drained their blood, the team also thinks their unsub is a blood drinker, or otherwise uses the blood for some kind of sick fetish. If there’s one saving grace in all of this disturbing information, there’s no signs of assault on the women. Course, that means the blood would be a substitute for the lack of sexual assault, which is a stomach-churning thought. Their ribs were also broken, so he still abused their bodies to some degree.

The women were also found at sunrise, and their bodies were posed, with their arms crossed over their chests in an almost angelic state. This would seem to indicate some level of remorse on the unsub’s part, which would be odd, considering he seems to love messing with their blood, but… Go figure unsubs. They’re also certain these killings aren’t the unsub’s first by any stretch, given his experience, and that the addicts’ blood was tainted, and he rejected it after draining and testing it.

Moving back to creepy unsub guy, we see him sitting in a van, muttering to himself and counting what look to be some spots on his hand. He says something about the number seven being good in relation to Katie, and then starts in on how fourteen is the next number he should get up to, likely trying to figure out how many liters of blood to try draining out of Katie. After jotting this stuff down, he opens up a hatch in the floor of his van, takes a stick, and manages to pry open the lid covering the sewer hole below. Once he does that, he slips from his van down into the sewer, bringing a bag with him, and goes to find Katie. Apparently, he lives in the sewers. Alright, show, sure, we’ll go with that.

Once down there, he brings some orange juice to Katie, and the area where she’s staying is now bathed in this really odd red light. The unsub reminds her that she “hasn’t asked today’s question” yet, and points out that it must allow for only “yes” or “no” answers. Katie asks him if the reason he leaves the sewer is because he has a job. He says yes, explaining it’s a job he’s held since he was eighteen years old.

He doesn’t really explain what his specific job is, though. Instead, he starts going off into this random tangent about a notable memory from years before. Late one night, he saw a coroner’s van outside an apartment building across the street from his workplace. They were loading a body inside. Curious, he went over to ask the coroner what had happened, and it seems the body was that of an elderly woman who’d lived in the apartment building. She’d been dead for two weeks, her body just lying there in her apartment, and nobody came to check on her or look for her, or even noticed she was missing. The only reason she was finally discovered was because of the pungent smell that comes with a decomposing body.

When the coroner went to open a window to get some air into the apartment, he noticed the window had been completely blacked out. But upon closer inspection he noticed the black thing covering the window appeared to be moving...and realized the window was covered in flies. I happened to be eating dinner at this point in the story. Trust me, I immediately regretted it. Then the unsub starts talking about how the woman’s body had maggots everywhere and EW EW EW CAN WE STOP WITH THE ICKINESS NOW THANKS? He also remarks on how strange it is that one woman produced one-hundred thousand flies and what even is with this episode seriously?

Katie’s “WTF?” reaction to this story no doubt mirrors that of every viewer watching, and when she gets another minute alone, she finally decides, “Screw this, I am out of here” and tries to make a break for it. Unfortunately, with the sewers being as dimly lit as they are, this slows her down some as she struggles to navigate her way around. But she does eventually manage to find an opening. Problem is, it’s covered, and all she can do is try to scream for help. New York City being the noisy place it is, however, her pleas go unheard, and she falls back into the sewer..

Moving back to the less freaky side of things, Katie’s parents have arrived at the station, but given the tense relationship between them, the officers recommend that two team members go to talk to them, and preferably separate them as well. JJ talks to Katie’s mom, while Stephen meets with her dad. Mrs. Hammond comments on the fact that JJ hasn’t asked her how she’s doing the way others have, as well as the fact that there’s no word to describe a parent losing a child, the way “widow” or “widower” is used to describe the loss of a spouse, and that’s enough to make her break down in tears. JJ does her best to try and comfort and reassure Mrs. Hammond that they’ll find Katie, but her words seem to do little to help this poor woman.

Katie’s dad isn’t faring much better emotionally. The fact that it’s their daughter’s birthday just adds to his anguish over her disappearance, and he blames himself for not doing more to protect her. Stephen is sympathetic to the struggles of fatherhood because, in a surprising revelation, he’s a father himself! He has a sixteen year old daughter as well. And he knows how tough it is to try and shield them from the outside world, and stresses the importance of trusting them and teaching them how to take care of themselves. My heart’s going out to these poor parents. I can’t even imagine.

Later, when the parents are together, Stephen informs them about the other victims. Turns out all the disappearances thus far have happened in the Hell’s Kitchen area of New York. Katie’s dad resides in Hell’s Kitchen, and it’s revealed that Katie’s been to that area a lot to visit her dad...and that her mom didn’t know about these trips, as they’re not following the “every other weekend” custody arrangement Katie and her dad have. Katie didn’t tell her mom about these visits because she was tired of being grilled about her dad, and the friction that caused between them.

Needless to say, Katie’s mom is VERY unhappy about this news, and she proceeds to chew her ex-husband out for keeping this from her. She essentially proceeds to blame him, and he doesn’t really try and fight her critique, as he’s blaming himself just as much. While I understand and sympathize with Katie’s mom’s anger, and know some of the tension between them is because they’re both stressed about Katie, this is still a very uncomfortable moment all around, and it makes me feel for Katie all the more.

The team then discovers their assumption that this unsub’s killed before is quite spot on – turns out there’s been two dozen other murders similar to the cold case ones in that area over the past ten years. Trying to move past the horrifying implications of that news, they turn their focus to the possible reasons for the unsub posing his victims as he does. Is it a religious statement? Is he trying to make some sort of sacrifice? Both options would certainly fit with the fascination with blood, after all.

They also figure their unsub must use some sort of a van for his victims, and as luck would have it, a camera does manage to capture an image of a van lurking in the Hell’s Kitchen area, with its windows tinted quite dark.Between the tinted windows, the fact that the unsub seems to work at night, disposing of his victims at sunrise, and the use of blood, the team concludes the unsub must be using the blood not for fetish purposes, but rather, to help himself with some kind of blood disease that causes him to eschew light sources of any sort and need transfusions. Garcia’s research does seem to bring up a possible disease that fits, one whose technical term can be shortened to XP, where people burn when exposed to light. Now they just need to figure out who the van belongs to now, and on they’ll go from there.

Back in the sewers, the unsub is chastising Katie for her attempted escape earlier. She begs him to let her go, but he doesn’t want to because “the world is too dangerous”. At one point, Katie tries to ask the unsub why he’s like this, and this is where he finally starts to let his guard down. He claims he’s got a condition so rare that it makes him a “genetic mistake”. As a result, he claims, his parents wanted nothing to do with him and left him in the care of his uncle. The fact the unsub speaks highly of his uncle indicates he didn’t mind that, though, and had a good relationship with him despite the fact that his uncle came home from Vietnam all “troubled”.

This leads to a debate between the unsub and Katie as to whether or not life can be boiled down to fate. The unsub thinks it was fate that he wound up with his uncle, and fate that he met Katie. Katie doesn’t buy it. She does come up with a bold and novel suggestion, however. She asks the unsub to let her try and find a way out of this place. If her attempt fails, she’ll accept his belief in fate. Clever trick, but will it work?

Evidently, yes, as the unsub gives her only one command in response: “Run.” And she does.

Meanwhile, the team’s managed to finally narrow down a building the unsub’s uncle once owned, where the unsub’s van currently resides. Emily, Rossi, and Luke examine both the building and the grounds, while JJ and Stephen, after investigating the van, find the hatch and use that to make their way into the sewers. Stephen suggests he and JJ split up, because that always works out well for this team when they do that. JJ does manage to get lucky on her end of the search fairly quickly, though, as she literally runs right into Katie during her scan of the tunnels, and gets her to safety. Hooray!

Stephen’s part of the search doesn’t go quite as smoothly, however, as he winds up getting knocked out by the unsub! Knew they shouldn’t have split up. Fortunately, he comes to not long after, and while he’s got a head wound, it’s not so serious that he can’t continue looking for the unsub. As he makes his way through the corridors, the unsub actually calls out to him, and he responds back. This continues for a short time until Stephen spins around and fires his gun, getting the unsub good. Stephen tries to calm the guy’s ragged breathing by teaching him a special stress relief technique with his hands (more on the story behind that later), and it helps a bit, but it doesn’t save his life. He is grateful, however, that he won’t produce “a hundred-thousand flies”. Really? We’re back to that gross image again?

Back above ground, there’s ambulances everywhere, Stephen’s getting his head wound treated, the unsub’s being wheeled away on a stretcher, and Katie’s getting tended to, and her traumatized reaction says it all. And so ends yet another case on the most incomplete, abrupt note imaginable. There’s no mention of the unsub’s name, no expansion on the tidbits about his life that the unsub gave Kate (he may have loved his uncle, but did the guy’s struggle to deal with the events of Vietnam affect the unsub himself on any level?).

There’s also no explanation for why, if he was looking for healthy blood, he took so many addicts for so long, and we don’t know if he stalked his other victims and asked them about their lives the way he did Katie. We don’t even know what job he had, or why he needed to tell that story about the coroner. Maybe the fetish theory would’ve worked better – the “genetic mistake” idea sounded interesting, but it wasn’t really explored much.

There wasn’t a profile briefing, either, which is an exceedingly uncommon thing for this show. The whole case was just very odd and surreal and I’m just sitting here scratching my head and going, ‘Bwuh?” at it all. Even the unsub’s takedown seemed kinda rushed – I can get where Stephen would shoot him, since he did attack him, but why not just shoot to injure instead of shoot to kill? That’s how the team normally tries to do things when taking down unsubs, after all. And why split up with JJ?!

On the plus side, I did like Katie herself – she was a much needed source of calm through all this weirdness, and I loved her trick to escape. I also liked the scenes with her parents – the tension between them was interesting, and yet it was hard not to feel for them with their guilt and fear. The end of the case showed both of them embracing Katie at the ambulance – I’d like to think that means her parents will start setting aside their issues from here on out, and things can get better for all of them.

But yeah. That’s all the more I can say. Just...go figure all of it. And because things weren’t nearly complicated enough, the storyline with Reid just further added to the “head-scratchiness” of it all.

Desperate Measures:

Reid.

Reid. The hell, man? The hell?

We begin with a replay of the end scene from last week’s episode, in which Reid was forced to watch as one of the gang members slashed Luis’ throat and left him for dead. It’s not part of a “previously on” recap, though. Instead, it’s a nightmare that jolts Reid awake in the middle of the night. In short, Luis is dead (and the attack on him happened two weeks prior, so we’ve skipped over a whole bunch of days in this timeline), and Reid is not handling his death well. At all.

Reid immediately grabs a journal lying next to his bed and begins to write out his thoughts about Luis and the dream. A voiceover lets us into these thoughts, and honestly, I’m legit scared for Reid’s mental well-being. As is he. Reid writes about the toll his time in prison is taking on him, his fear that he’s starting to think and act like the other prisoners, and that the loss of Luis is affecting him in ways other losses haven’t. Even when he tries to get back to sleep afterward, it’s clear he’ll be awake for a good long while.

“Not a single person can admit that they’re terrified.”

The next morning, Reid, clearly exhausted, scratches out another day in prison on the wall. For those keeping count, he’s been in jail thirty-six days. Fortunately, his day gets off to a good start in the form of a visit from Rossi. Up to now, he’s been the only team member who had yet to come out to see Reid. When Emily learns of this and asks him why, Rossi explains it’s because of the guilt and frustration he feels over his inability to do more to help Reid. He drove out to the prison a couple times, but he just couldn’t bring himself to go inside. Aw. Emily then tells Rossi that Reid asked for him during a recent visit with Stephen. Double awwwww.

That bit of news is enough to give Rossi the confidence to go see Reid, and the two settle in for a long overdue chat. Rossi starts off by stating the obvious – Reid hasn’t slept in a while, a fact that Reid doesn’t even try to deny – and extends his condolences in regards to Luis. When he asks Reid if he has anyone he can talk to about all of this, Reid tells him that he’s going to group therapy every week, and that the journal he’s writing in was a recommendation from his therapist.

Problem is, though, Reid’s not sure he even sees the point in going. He opens up to Rossi about the fears and frustrations he described in his journal, noting the overall feeling of helplessness that pervades this prison. “Maybe they’re numb to it all,” Rossi suggests, and Reid’s not because he’s a good person. Reid then starts to mention to Rossi another observation: how helplessness winds up making people do things they never thought they were capable of doing. Hold on to that statement. It will matter later.

Unfortunately, Reid’s interrupted mid-sentence by a sudden buzzing sound indicating the prison has gone on lockdown. This puts an end to Rossi and Reid’s chat, and they’re forced to go their separate ways. Once Reid gets back to his cell, he overhears Shaw and a guard discussing the reason for the lockdown, and it turns out one of the cell blocks got tipped about some drugs coming in, and the guards are going through and investigating and nabbing what’s in there.

This leads Reid and Shaw to have their own conversation regarding the demands the prison gang had put on Reid at the end of the last episode. To recap: he’s supposed to help see to it that the gang’s stash of drugs gets into the prison without any fuss. Thing is, though, Reid makes it clear to Shaw that he’s not going to participate. As per usual, Shaw seems flabbergasted by Reid’s refusal to play the game, and tries to suggest he look at this whole thing as a chess game, indicating that this business with the cell block being investigated is a distraction of some sort and that he can’t guarantee Reid’s safety forever. “There’s only so far I can go,” he insists.

“So can I,” Reid replies, his voice brusque, and with that, he’s made his stance clear. Looks like there’s cracks forming in this little friendship between these two men.

Despite that argument, however, things seem to be back to normal later in the day, when both men are in their cells. Shaw comments on Rossi’s visit to see Reid, and mentions having known him during his days in the FBI. He asks if Rossi’s the one who taught Reid how to play chess, and Reid tells him he learned from Gideon, and mentions his murder a couple years back as well. Yeah, let’s just dig that particular knife in a little deeper, show, shall we? “Hope that’s not an omen for me,” Shaw jokes. Hm.

Reid then changes the subject, asking Shaw if he knew that that gang would kill Luis. Shaw tells Reid that he knew that gang would try and send a message. He just didn’t think that’s the message they would send. He’s pretty blasé about Luis’ death in general. Could be the result of being a murderer himself, or being hardened by prison, but judging from Reiid’s expression, it seems he thinks there’s more to Shaw’s reaction than that.

When Reid reports for laundry duty, he meets the new guy coming in to replace Luis. The guy’s name is Malcolm, and he seems pretty congenial and chatty. When a basket is brought in with drugs mixed in with some laundry, Malcolm explains that he’s trusted with the drugs because he doesn’t touch the stuff, and tells Reid that because the guards have tightened up security since the lockdown, they’ll try smuggling the drugs out after the late shift ends. Reid doesn’t say anything in response.

“I’m looking at a fisherman who cannot swim.”

The next time Reid meets up with Shaw, it’s for a game of chess. But that’s just a pretense, because he’s actually there to have a much-needed “no BS” chat with him. He asks Shaw about Malcolm, and Shaw further raises Reid’s suspicions when he insists he’s never even met Malcolm, let alone knew him or worked with him. Hmmmm. Reid reiterates his stance on the drug smuggling plan from earlier, and Shaw reminds him that he could be beat up again, possibly even killed, if he doesn’t cooperate with this gang.

Reid responds with an incredibly nonchalant “I’ll survive”, and points out that they don’t need him now Shaw’s got Malcolm helping out. He then proceeds to call Shaw out, claiming that he overseas all the shady stuff that goes down here. He decides when people get involved and when they don’t, who’s protected and who isn’t, and knows how to intimidate people into playing his little games. Watching Reid profile Shaw, and using that dangerously quiet voice to try and intimidate him, was truly a welcome sight. I missed this side of Reid.

If Shaw’s shaken by Reid’s analysis of him, though, he doesn’t show it. Instead, he tries to brush it all off, insisting Reid’s “losing it”. A cruel blow, to be sure, but considering some of Reid’s earlier behavior, Shaw’s not entirely wrong with that statement. Reid then says the above quoted fisherman line to him, a callback to their initial meeting and Shaw telling him the story of the fishermen lost at sea, and it’s a perfect little, “Ooh, snap!” moment. Shaw simply responds by making a move on the chessboard and saying, “Check”, and that’s the end of that conversation. Given what happens later, I suppose we should all be grateful he didn’t use the word “zugzwang” at some point.

Seems like a pretty simple chain of events thus far, doesn’t it? Reid’s trying to hang on to his sense of justice and his innocence, Shaw’s continuing to be all shady and weird, and the power play between them continues to develop and deepen. The tension is just kinda simmering as it waits for the right moment when it can finally implode.

Well, hang on to your chairs, folks, and get ready for an epic implosion.

Reid’s back in the laundry room once again, and there’s another voiceover similar to the one at the start of the episode. His conversation with Rossi comes back to him, too, particularly the part about him being a good person. While he’s thinking to himself, he’s just kinda standing there at the table with this really strange look on his face that’s made all the more unsettling by his overall scruffy, disheveled, rundown appearance.

He then secretly pulls out the drugs from earlier and spreads them out on the table, It looks to be cocaine, and I won’t lie to you, guys, for the briefest of moments I was legit scared that this storyline was going to veer into a very scary place. Much to my immense relief, my worst fears are unfounded. Instead, he grabs a cup of what appears to be some sort of liquid – laundry detergent of some sort, and adds it to the cocaine mixture on the table. He continues to examine this combination a little further, the wheels in his head are clearly spinning, and I’m side-eying him and wondering just what in the world he’s up to.

We get our answer at the end of the episode. At least, I think we do. When Reid next enters the laundry room, he sees Malcolm sprawled out on the floor coughing up blood, and he immediately rushes to try and help him. Could this be Luis all over again?

Nope. Turns out Malcolm was apparently poisoned, claiming that “they made him try” the drugs. And he’s not the only one. Next thing you know, Shaw’s coughing up blood and collapsing in his cell, too, and all of a sudden, there’s a whole bunch of guards calling for gurneys as more and more prisoners fall violently ill from a bad batch of drugs.

The only prisoner not being affected by this sudden string of poisonings? Reid. And as he hears about what’s happening to the prisoners, he paces back and forth in his cell, running his hands through his hair and looking visibly agitated. And Officer Wilkins is now suspicious of him because of this.

Soooooo, yeah. Color me (and if online reaction is any indication, practically every other viewer as well) officially very, very confused. Just...what? Did Reid seriously just poison a whole cell block full of prisoners? And if so, was his attempt to do so intentional or accidental? His reaction at the end of the episode seems to indicate this was NOT the outcome he’d intended, implying an accident – but maybe there’s more to his reaction that implies this was intentional on some level, too. There’s been a WHOLE mess of theories shared online the last few days, so let’s try and examine some of the most popular and likely ones, and see what each would mean for Reid going forward.

The most obvious and logical theory, of course, is that Reid intended to taint the drug supply solely so that that gang wouldn’t trust or rely on him for this drug smuggling endeavor, or any other that they plan down the line. And unfortunately, in the process, he unintentionally caused a lot of people to get sick, thus perhaps putting his own life at further risk from fellow prisoners, as well as negatively affecting his chances of getting out of prison. I like this theory the best, because that would mean he’s trying very hard to hold on to his true self in prison despite the circumstances, and simply wanted to stop an illegal activity from happening.

The next big theory floating around is that Reid messed with those drugs in the hopes of hurting or killing the men who’d beaten him up and murdered Luis, but unfortunately, other people got hurt in the process. This theory gives me some mixed feelings. On the one hand, Reid wanting revenge on these guys does make sense to some degree, especially if he’s trying to avenge Luis’ death.

The problem is, Reid generally isn’t one to seek retaliation. He’s known for being remarkably forgiving and sympathetic to unsubs, regardless of what they’ve done to him. He does tend to let his anger out more when somebody hurts a person he cares about, yes, but even then, he’s normally not this calculated in seeking revenge. If prison is starting to change him the way he fears it is, though, then maybe he is starting to give into that, “It’s me or them, and it ain’t gonna be me.” mentality more and more.

Of course, the big problem with this theory is that Reid’s already in jail for murder and drug charges. Would he really want to risk adding to that by endangering prisoners’ lives? And if his attempts to mess with the drugs get traced back to him, it may not matter at that point what his intentions were. He could still be culpable. And despite his show of bravado to Shaw, he’d HAVE to know that messing with somebody’s drug supply will put him at even bigger risk of being attacked by the other prisoners. So while I can sympathize with the reasoning, ultimately, I would prefer this theory to be untrue.

The third option is that this was Reid’s way of covertly checking to see just who all was in on this smuggling business, and who’s connected and knows whom around here. This theory has some merit considering Reid’s belief that Shaw knows way more about what goes down in this jail than he lets on. And when writing in his journal, Reid mentioned feeling like he had to think like these prisoners to survive. This could be an example of him trying to do just that, and strike back at them in the process.

After all, Shaw getting sick certainly shows he was taking some of these drugs. And if Reid’s right that Shaw is in cahoots with this gang, then that explains Luis’ death, the fact Shaw wasn’t there to save Reid when he got violently attacked in his own cell, and why that gang kept harassing him even after Shaw supposedly told them to “stay away”. If that’s the case, then perhaps Reid’s horrified reaction at the end of the episode was less, “Oh, my god, what have I done?” and more, “Oh, my god, I can’t trust anyone!”.

Like with the second theory, if this is true, I can very much sympathize with Reid’s motives here. He needed proof and he got it. And it’d be a bold move on his part, too, because if all the prisoners are involved in sketchy activities, they’re not going to risk snitching on each other, since they’d be implicating themselves as well. As a result, that means they might actually be less likely to call Reid out for his actions, too, and that, ironically, could be his saving grace going forward.

And if he now has proof he’s not safe there, will this be enough to get him moved somewhere? And what does this mean for Shaw, Malcolm, and the gang members who murdered Luis? Will they back off for good, having gotten the message? Will they amp up their efforts against Reid? Heck, will this poison incapacitate some of them, or kill them? So many questions to consider here, so many ways in which Reid’s moves could pay off or hurt him even more.

There is one other big possibility to consider, though: that between the time Reid did his little experiment with the drugs and the time the other prisoners got them, somebody else might’ve screwed with the batch somehow, either in an attempt to frame Reid (and Reid realizes that, thus explaining his panicked reaction at the end) or to make their own muscle move in prison independent of Reid. Malcolm did say “they” made him try the drugs, after all, so if that's the case, who’s “they”? Maybe there’s cracks forming in that gang? Maybe a guard contaminated the batch once they caught on to the attempts to smuggle it, as a means of punishing the people involved? Heck, maybe somebody who’s involved in this overall Mr. Scratch/framing Reid setup has connections to the prison and did something to help further add to the attempts to make Reid look bad. Who knows?

Much as I would love this option to be the right one, however, I’m pretty sure that’s not going to be the case. For one thing, the synopsis for this episode specifically stated that Reid would “make an impossible decision” that would affect everyone. That pretty much indicates he’s responsible. For another, he wouldn’t freak out like he did if he wasn’t involved. And all the talk about Reid being a “good person” and his fears about becoming like the prisoners read like heavy duty foreshadowing. So basically, at this point, we have to hope that, at best, poisoning the prisoners was was an accident, and nobody’s the wiser. Because otherwise, I shudder to think of what this means for his safety and his freedom going forward.

On an entirely different note, Reid’s journal comments about his reaction to Luis’ death intrigue me. Notably the part where he says he’s “lost people before, but not like this”, which, to me, seems like comparison to when he lost Maeve and Gideon. This lends credence to my theory that Luis reminds him of somebody he forged a close bond with, perhaps in Mexico. Maybe Nadie? Another member of her family? Somebody else she knew? It just seems like a hint at something or someone important.

So that concludes discussion of all the heavy duty stuff that happened this episode. Did anything that was actually pleasant occur?

Meanwhile, back at Quantico:

Um, well, Stephen and Garcia bond over their interest in yoga, and we learn that the whole hand bit Stephen did with the unsub on the case was a technique called Sa Ta Na Ma. He’d learned said technique while spending nine months in Sri Lanka. Unfortunately, he wasn’t there for vacation purposes; rather, it was a wartime situation. And it’s clearly not something he likes to talk about much. Considering Luke spent time in Afghanistan, though, I’m thinking that would make for an interesting bonding opportunity for the two of them at some point.

As for the daughter Stephen mentioned on the case? She isn’t his only child. Stephen specifically notes that she’s his oldest daughter. How many other daughters or children in general he has, we don’t know, but I’m hoping we’ll get to find out at some point. I liked getting these little tidbits of Stephen’s personal life, and I liked how they quietly worked them into the overall plot (though I did think the whole hand thing between him and the unsub was a bit of a stretch and kind of an odd way to bring an interest of his into a case. But hey, it calmed the unsub down, so…). But yeah. There’s that side of things. Woo.

Okay! So. As strange as this episode was, it also looks to have clearly been some kind of game changer for Reid, and perhaps the team at large. Unfortunately, the promo and synopsis for the next episode tell us absolutely nothing in regards to what happens to Reid from here on out, so feel free to share your speculations and theories, no matter how out there they may be! At this point, it seems like virtually anything is possible with this storyline and show in general. Might as well go hog wild, right?

What did you think of the episode? Were you confused (and grossed out) by the case? Do Reid’s worries about his mental well-being have you concerned, too? Or do you think it’s just part of the natural adjustment to prison life? What do you think Reid’s intentions were by messing with the drugs? And what do you think that means for him in terms of his chances of getting out of prison? Share your thoughts in the comments!

""