Tabula Rasa
Directed by Steve Boyum
Written by Dan Dworkin & Jay Beattie
A suspect in the murder of three women wakes up from a four-year coma and doesn't remember a thing. The BAU learn that he's half Native and was adopted, and that shortly before the killings began he tracked down his birthmother and was rejected by her. After looking at pictures of the victims, the man begins to remember what he has done, and filled with remorse, he escapes and unearths the body of a victim they had not been able to find.Written by Dan Dworkin & Jay Beattie
Hotchner: "All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy. For what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves. We must die to one life before we can enter another." Anatole France.
Tropes:
- Bait-and-Switch: Reid and Garcia seem to be discussing something awful and scandalous. Reid says he can't believe it used to be socially acceptable. Emily asks to see what they're looking at, and Reid reveals a photo of her from The '80s, wearing a goth-style haircut inspired by the lead singer of Siouxsie and the Banshees.
- Bat Deduction: What the Unsub's attorney claims profiling is. He's not wrong, but he has genre unsavvy notions about the accuracy of it.
- Break Them by Talking: What Hotch does to attorneys who question the validity of profiling.
- Deranged Park Ranger: The killer, Brian, was, when free, a park ranger who hunted and killed several people in the woods after being abandoned by his mother.
- Flashback: The opening scene is to a police chase four years ago, where Morgan and Hotch tried to catch a suspect and it ended with the suspect falling off a rooftop. Doubly so as he sees his life flash before his eyes as he falls.
- Freudian Excuse: The UnSub's actions are suggested to have something to do with him being adopted and rejected by his birth mother. His ethical recovery is hinted to have something to do with said birth mother having visited him in the hospital while he was in a coma.
- Rousseau Was Right: Played with. The team discusses whether Brian Matlock is inherently innocent thanks to his retrograde amnesia. Morgan argues that he's still a murderer. Brian himself seems to return to his old ways when he regains his memories, but only in that he assaults a police officer, steals her gun, and escapes custody; he genuinely regrets killing those women, and says it feels like someone else did the things he remembers doing.
- Serial Killer: The UnSub hunted and killed people in a forest.
- Subverted Trope: The profilers relied on the psychological theory that burying people face-down shows remorse, but start doubting it after they find that in Native American mythology, burying someone face-down traps the soul and keeps the victim from haunting their killer.
- Teen Pregnancy: The UnSub is the product of one.
- Mr. Corbett: "What though the radiance that was once so bright, be now forever taken from my sight..."Reid: "Though nothing can bring back the hour of splendor in the grass, of glory in the flower; We will grieve not, rather find strength in what remains behind."note
