Criminal Minds - Uknown Subject

Criminal Minds – Unknown Subject

(Series 7 – episode 12)

I’ve been looking forward to this weeks episode, not only because it is the 150^th episode but because of how great the information on the episode sounded. What would be more terrifying then being re-victimised by someone who has already raped you?

The episodes opens with a woman home alone and pouring herself a glass of wine and lighting a cigarette only to quickly panic and down a glass of water with a load of salt in to make her vomit, this showed that the woman was already prepared for if her drink was drugged again. At that moment the unsub is stood at the glassed back door, his face covered with a mask, which I believe to be scarier then if he was stood there unmasked. As he smashes his way in he calmly walks over to the TV to put some music on whilst the woman cowers behind the breakfast bar, I did wonder why she didn’t grab the knifes on the top or run but then thought maybe she didn’t get all the drug out of her system

We then see Prentiss in session with her counsellor and it seems that she is in profiler mode and saying that everything fine, she feels great and she hasn’t had a nightmare for two weeks. The counsellor then gives her something to think about when she says she hasn’t had time to mourn her own death, her colleagues got to bury her and mourn, and she did not.

The team are then taking the jet to search for ‘The Piano Man’ a rapist that is re-attacking his previous victims. It is only Hotch and Prentiss on the jet to start with as Hotch wants to discuss Prentiss’s counselling progress away from the prying eyes through his office window. He thinks that she has been overcompensating because of her guilt and he knows this because she rushed to get her relationship with Morgan back on track. Even though the counsellor has said she is healthy for the line of duty but he knows that she has lied to her counsellor as the report says that she has reached out to her mother (which she hasn’t) and she has a new man in her life called Sergio (which as we all know is her pet cat.) The only thing Hotch wants Prentiss to do is to tell him when she is having a bad day, be it today, a week or a few months from now.

The team have tried getting in touch with ‘The Piano Man’s’ previous victims but not many turned up until the press released the story and turned out a few had been re-attacked. The lack of women coming forward isn’t a surprise to the team as Reid points out that 83% of rape victims don’t report when they have been raped the first time let alone the second.

Speaking to the victims helped the team work out that he was drugging his victims through cigarettes not through drink, which explains why Vanessa’s stomach content found no traces of the drug. They also found out that he played a different piano themed song for each victim over and over again which after the attack they react to the song oddly without knowing why. One of the victims, Diane seems reluctant to speak to the team which shows that she is hiding something she remembers but says that during the second attack he told her that ‘no one believes a slut who cried wolf twice.’

We then see a waitress which turn out to be another victim when she reacts badly to a man playing ‘Total Eclipse of the Heart’ on the piano, she then gets really drunk and stumbles into the car park with him and seems very flirty but as she searches for a lighter she pulls out a stun gun and attacks the man. Has she got the right man?

We then see the guy that the waitress attacked strung up like a puppet with piano string and sat at a piano. It’s clear that the girl has had an emotional breakdown since her attack five years ago and it obsessed with getting revenge. The guy is trying to convince her that he wasn’t playing ‘Total Eclipse of the Heart’ by playing that song and a different one but she is convinced that he is playing the same song, she is only hearing what she wants to hear. In a desperate attempt to convince her she has got the wrong man he sings the two songs which only adds fuel to the fire and convinces her even more that he is the guy who raped her as he also sung the song during the ordeal. She was his first victim so he didn’t drug her properly and she kept coming too. In an attempt to put him through some of the pain he put her through she shoots his hand.

I loved the banter between Hotch and Garcia when she is searching for the unsub, after she came up with nothing the first time and then she decided to get in to the mind of Hotch, what would Hotch do? A classic Garcia moment that we all love and of course she has something for the team to chase. The possible unsub runs as the FBI barges in and we get to see one of my favourite people Agent Derek Morgan powerfully arm block the guy to the ground. POW!

Vanessa’s body has then been disposed and the unsub hasn’t tried to hide it, there was no signs of any sexual activity, why hasn’t he raped her? Hotch’s theory is that he wanted to stay hidden and she came round so he had to kill her, my idea was that maybe he was suffering from impotence and to get his thrill he had to kill Vanessa instead of raping her.

Diane then comes forward and tells Prentiss that she kept coming round and he kept talking to her, the reason why she wasn’t as drugged up as the other girls is because she has been a life longed smoker and knew it tasted funny so crushed it up. She had inhaled enough to drug her initially just not enough to keep her unconscious.

Afterwards we go back to the house where the waitress is keeping the guy captive at this point confusion creeps in for me as the guy says that he never did anything to her that she didn’t want. Has she captured the ‘Piano Man’ after all? He then changes and says she has gotten him mixed up with someone else just like the way she kept mixing up the songs. He then reveals that they have met before but not the way she thinks. He used to play in a bar where she would be with a different guy each week and she picked him up one night and went back to his place and showed him her scars and never saw him again. He always wondered what she was up to and now he knows since she branded him with the same scars.

During the interrogation with the guy they arrested he says ‘nobody believes a slut who cries wolf twice’ making Diane burst in tears as she it was something she wasn’t sure of.

JJ, Morgan and Reid are going over Scobey’s (arrested guy) apartment and going through his CD’s, come to the conclusion that he is too young to be the original ‘Piano Man’ however he did attack Diane. So he is just a clever copycat that the real Piano Man is trying to frame for all his attacks and the murder of Vanessa all in order to stay hidden.

After speaking to Scobey again he admits that he found the victim through reading their hospital records and he was going to go for Vanessa next but the Piano Man had already beat him to it. The team get an address when he says his victim after that was going to be Regina (the waitress). Is the Piano man the guy that Regina is holding captive or is he watching somewhere near by? We see Regina try to calm herself down in the kitchen as the guy we now know as Hemilton trying to free himself from the piano wires which he successfully does as Regina head back into the room with the gun.

Regina notices the snapped wire but Hemilton struggles with her and runs when he has knocked her into the wall. As she nervously tries to find him he makes a 911 call, would the Piano Man do that but for me as he was making the call he had a sadistic smile on his face.

The team barge in just as Regina is pointing a gun to his head. Prentiss tell her that he is not the guy as the print originally found on her glasses does not match his prints and if she shoots him she will be shooting an innocent man. As she breaks down Hotch goes to Hemilton and asks if he is alright and can walk but as he gets him outside he arrests him for the attacks.

Regina wants to give her statement to Prentiss and demands to know why she didn’t let her shoot him which Prentiss replies that she would then be in jail and what life would that be? It’s then that Regina notice that Prentiss has a monster of her own in which Prentiss reveals that he is dead but she didn’t pull the trigger. Regina’s statement is ‘Your monster is dead, mine isn’t.’ It just shows that the Piano Man being behind bars doesn’t make a difference to her; he will still be a monster for as long as he lives.

This episode ends with another nice moment from Hotch and Prentiss on the jet, she admits that she is having a bad day, keeping her promise to Hotch and in return she receives an encouraging smile.

Overall this has had to be one of my favourite episodes, it kept me guessing right until the very end whether or not Regina had the Piano Man and I loved how you saw two sides of Hemilton, the desperate guy who is innocent and being held captive and then bits of the Piano Man coming out i.e. ‘I never did anything you didn’t want.’ The only thing I had against this episode is that we didn’t get to see a lot of Rossi but then there was that much going off where would they have fitted everything in.

Criminal Minds never seems to disappoint, roll on the 200^th episode.