CRIMINAL MINDS: SUSPECT BEHAVIOR “Strays”, Season 1 Episode 11 – I know that nobody really deserves to be abducted. Nobody really deserves to be harmed in any way when they haven’t really done anything wrong, but if you willingly drive to a dark, abandoned alleyway with plans to meet somebody to buy drugs then my sympathy for you is kind of limited. So already, my interest and empathy in this case is at an all time low, so “Strays” had to really improve from the opening scene for me to care. After last week’s episode, Criminal Minds: Suspect Behavior has to not only prove to me that it can be a consistently entertaining show, but that it should even exist.
So it turns out the victim’s dad was a high powered judge who was a good friend of Fickler, so Jack called in a favor from Sam “Too-tight-of-a-leather-jacket” Cooper to see if he could help. The rest of the team comes in to help as well, even calling in Penelope to help them in person! It was cool to see Penelope in person, although it really only ends up hurting the show since it points out how little personality the rest of the team members have in comparison to her. Even though Penelope comes off as much more subdued and restrained on this show than on the original Criminal Minds, she still has something that the rest of the team just doesn’t.
The only other team member who showed any kind of spark in this episode was Prophet. Trying to intimidate the Unsub by telling him how bad prison is was a really cool scene. Not only was it the best acting we’ve seen from Michael Kelly so far, but it was great that it actually tied into his own personal experience. You could really tell that he was reliving the horrors of prison life as he listed all of the terrible things that the Unsub would have to deal with.
This one cool scene was not enough to offset the strong feeling of…boredom that this show exudes. Although, I think I put my finger on what’s leading to such a strong feeling of staleness for this show. The spotting. This is referring to the placement and the spacing between the actors in a scene. Whether the team is circled around a dead body at a crime scene, or discussing the profile of an Unsub, they seem to just stand still. Sometimes they’ll pace back and forth, like Mick did when he was calling his friend at Interpol, but the scenes are directed so poorly that they all just seem to be standing in the same place and delivering their lines. It’s like they’re just trying to rush through their dialogue without making the scenes visually appealing at all!
After a slow start to this series, I thought they were picking up steam with “See No Evil” and “Here is the Fire”. However, now the episodes seem to just frustrate me more than entertain, so I’m hoping they can pick up the pace with just two more episodes left in this season.
Random Thoughts:
- Apparently one of the advantages to being in the FBI is you can get a Microsoft Surface before anybody else. Unfortunately, they didn’t use it very much in this episode, but if you’re a technology nerd like me than do yourself a favor and go find YouTube videos of the Surface in action. It’s pretty awesome.
- I think some serious profiling could be done about the fact that Janeane Garofalo shot and killed somebody for the first time in her life and was totally cool with it. Didn’t even bat an eye!
- Another person they should add to the watch list for future psychos: Sam Cooper with his goth splatter paintings.
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