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Criminal Minds
Rite of Passage

Original Air Date: Apr 14, 2010

Angelique – Associate Staff Writer
angelique@thetwocentscorp.com

We start out this weeks episode with a man who is literally running for his life trying to get away from a threathening situation. The area surrounding him is a desert and through the sand he is running for his life while he was being preyed on by a man chasing him on an ATV. He chases the man untill he is too tired to get up and that is when he kills the man.

In a nearby town a couple of kids are racing the streets on their bikes when one of them overlooks a stack of coolers and trips over them. He tries to get up but finds himself staring at three decapitated heads. The case lands on JJ’s desk who calls together the team. The victims are unindentified Mexicans, probably people who crossed the border in the dead of night to find a better life in the United States. It is a crime which could have easily gone undetected for years but something made the killer want to step out into the light and show his crimes to the world.

Upon arrival in the small Texas bordertown JJ and Hotch are met by eight soldiers of a local drug cartell to demonstrate their First Amendment rights. They are standing there waiting because their cartell leader is held inside the Police Station by the Sheriff. Once inside the building they meet with Sheriff Ruiz, a female Sheriff who used to work Homicide in NYC who came to this town to semi-retire. She asked the BAU to help her because she believes that it is bigger then just three death Mexicans.

She has four deputies but they don’t really follow her orders. She told them not to pick up cartell leader Omar, but they did nevertheless. She locked him up but kept her Deputies away from him. Hotch is the first to talk to him and he gets him to tell him what he would ‘hypotetically’ kill a person if he wanted to.

Hotch is quickly convinced that Omar didn’t have anything to do with the murders. The team starts working the case and setting up the profile. In their profile the team tells the Sheriff and Deputies that the unsub is a man who chooses to kill the weakest person. He finds the person who gets behind while following the ‘Coyote’s’ to find a safe way into the United States. That the unsub chooses these particular victims tells them that the person who does this is weak himself, that he probably has a disability and can’t fight a stronger victim. So he wears them out, lets them run through the dessert until they are too tired to fight.

The team is able to find one of the ‘safe houses’ and Emily, Morgan and Deputy Gannon catch a ‘coyote’ and release a couple of his victims. Unfourtunately they also find the family of the latest victim, his wife and son. The son tells Emily that he saw the sun while they where fleeing. His mother tells him that he is wrong because they fled Mexico at night.

Later on Boyd tells Sheriff Ruiz that something about the boys comment is bothering him, he might know what he meant by the ‘Sun’. There is a murial on an old building north of the town. He tells her that it is only fifteen minutes away, she asks him if he wants to go for a ride. The next morning the Sheriff doesn’t show up at the Police Station and her Police Cruizer is missing.

Deputy Boyd is the one who ‘finds’ the Sheriff, her body is mutilated in the exact same manner as Omar told and in detail described to Hotch he would do. When Hotch tells the team that only he and the Sheriff heard Omar say this and JJ comments with a specific detail of the mutilation they find out who they are looking for, Deputy Boyd. JJ tells the team that she was standing behind the window watching Hotch and that Deputy Boyd put on the speaker during the interogation so they heard the specific details as well. Upon asking one of the other Deputies where Boyd is they find out that he is off to find Omar.

Meanwhile Boyd and his partner Gannon arrive at a junk yard where he immediately starts shooting at people with a shotgun, finally he finds Omar who tries to run away and he shoots him in the back then he turns around and shoots his partner. Staging the scene as if Omar shot Gannon while he shot back. He flees away to the barn where he killed the Sheriff and the team follows him.

Hotch and Rossi are the first to arrive because Emily and Morgan are at Boyd’s trailer where they find the graves of his victims and the place where he decapitated the bodies. They quickly follow Hotch and Rossi to the barn. Hotch tells Rossi to be careful with the MP5 and to certainly not fire it inside the car. When Morgan and Emily arrive at the scene Hotch and Rossi are already taking fire from Boyd. Emily’s driving the car while Morgan is sitting next to her, when they take fire from Boyd he starts shooting the MP5 from inside the car. Which results in one death unsub and a pissed off Prentiss.

In my opinion this was a great case based episode, of course this season has been an emotional rollercoaster with heavy storylines like the Foyet arc. And last week we had the episode with the ‘crossover’ team, but in this weeks episode the team seemed to have found their footing and they are on a roll. This episode had a great mixture between team interaction, individual personalities and traits and a good case to work. I liked it a lot and when it comes to Criminal Minds the expectations are high, very high. This episode was the perfect mix.

My personal favorite moments would be the Sheriffs comment about wanting one of her – meaning Garcia – as a present and Rossi’s comment that they where pretty sure they broke the mold.

And of course Emily’s comment about being ready for the smell weakness to kick in. After Reid telling her to breathe through her nose because the smell organ is the weakest of all and if you try to breath through your nose after a little while you won’t even smell the decay anymore. At times like that you really want to have someone like Reid with you to tell you some statistics. And well Morgan shooting that gun through the car window with Emily sitting right there next to him. Yes, Rossi and Morgan got some new toys and they used them too!

And that scene where Hotch tells Rossi not to fire the gun in the car

Let me know what you think, I would like to hear your opinion.

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