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Recap / Criminal Minds S 9 E 18 Rabid

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Rabid

Directed by Doug Aarniokoski
Written by Virgil Williams
Reid: "It is more important to know what sort of person has a disease than to know what sort of disease a person has." Hippocrates.
A man struggles to come to terms with his brother dying of rabies, and infects several people in an attempt to figure out how to cure the disease.

Tropes in this episode:

  • Artistic License – Biology: Rabies doesn't actually turn humans into compulsive biters; the only cases of human-to-human transmission on record occurred through organ transplants, not saliva.
  • Bait-and-Switch: The intro initially focuses on a woman rushing onto a bus with shopping bags. She is being eyed by a nebbish man until they are the only two left on the bus. When she gets off, he follows her. While this would suggest he's intending on abducting her and she's the primary victim of the week, the nebbish man, Russel Holmes, was just trying to return a bag she dropped and is just socially awkward. Russel is the actual victim of the week, being kidnapped on his way home.
  • Blatant Lies: More than one gets directed at Morgan, but Reid claiming that stretching his quads keeps his brain limber is particularly notable.
  • Drill Sergeant Nasty: Morgan has a reputation for this, and does indeed make Garcia and Reid do a lot of fitness before telling them that the fitness test is just a formality that he has already waived for Garcia and that Reid as a field agent with enough case hours doesn't need at all.
  • Fashion Hurts: At least, that's Garcia's excuse to Morgan for why she's limping.
  • Freudian Excuse: When the UnSub was in his early teens (a very impressionable age), his younger brother contracted rabies after being bitten by a bat on a camping trip weeks before, and was admitted to the hospital far too late to be saved. Their parents took the brother out of the hospital to live out his final days at home, so the UnSub watched his brother gradually go more and more insane from the disease (even making a tape recording of it) before their parents finally euthanized him and quietly buried him in the woods at the site of their campsite. This led to him becoming so obsessed with the disease that he first kidnapped and infected a man with it via a rabid squirrel, then periodically kidnaps new victims for the previous one to spread it to, video-records all of them gradually getting more and more sick until they eventually die from it, and buries their corpses in the same place as his brother's body.
  • Freudian Excuse Is No Excuse: Not to say that he's at all sympathetic, since he's a complete sadist who does what he does thanks to that obsession with the disease.
  • Insane Equals Violent: At least when you have rabies, and escape from the UnSub's custody back into society. The woman who does so is literally foaming at the mouth, snaps at and tries to attack numerous bystanders in a cafe and on a playground, and Morgan is finally forced to shoot her in the leg to stop her from hurting anyone, at which point she can only give an insane, animalistic scream.
  • Let Me at Him!: Played for Laughs when Garcia and Reid realise Morgan has been trolling them about the fitness test. Morgan tells them about his joke, but only after they went through rather painful exercises.
  • No Good Deed Goes Unpunished: The primary victim of the week, Russel Holmes, was downtown after getting off at a different bus stop while trying to return a woman's bag. He had to walk the rest of the way home. After finishing a call with his mother, he comes across a seemingly homeless man and his dog. The homeless man asks for food, and Russel tries to help out by offering him a banana. The homeless man is actually the UnSub, who then proceeds to attack and abduct Russel.
  • Super-Speed Reading: The coroner comments on how fast Reid gets through the autopsy report.
  • Troll: Morgan let Garcia and Reid think that they had to take fitness test and waited until after they had already spent time working out to inform them that he already had it waived for them

Morgan: "True friendship multiplies the good in life and divides its evils." Baltasar Gracián.

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