photo: cbs
Drive
Original Air Date: Jan 20, 2016
Caitlin- Senior Staff Writer
caitlin@thetwocentscorp.com
There’s been a lot of debate around ride share companies recently, highlighted by a few creepy instances. That said, I doubt Uber has ever had an instance of a driver chopping off his passenger’s head. But you know Criminal Minds, always ready to take anything to its worst possible extreme.
A woman thinks her driver is being a gentleman when he walks her to her door. She presumably changes her mind when he attacks her with a taser, and would definitely change her mind (if she were still able to) after he chops off her head in a guillotine after ignoring her please of “I will never do it again”.
By the time the BAU is called in, two bodies have already turned up, and the third shows up in the middle of downtown Boston while they’re on the plane. The team debates exactly why someone would want to steal people’s heads- and their phones, but not any other personal possessions- and leave their bodies for all the world to see. Presumably he’s trying to send some kind of message. And an extreme one, given that he sawed off his first victim’s head. (Ouch.)
Rossi talks to the father of one of the victims, who is devastated but also suggests she may have been having personal problems. Garcia is sent to look into all the wonderful ways someone could part someone else’s head from their body, but Reid suggests the unsub is actually using a guillotine- a method once popular for public executions. A homemade guillotine, even. Well, at least you can’t say our modern-day executioner isn’t skilled.
Garcia works out that all the victims ordered cars from a ride sharing company called Zimmer shortly before their phones all died with their last whereabouts. Meanwhile, a man driving a car with a Zimmer decal grudgingly picks up a passenger who wastes no time calling someone and telling them all about his affair while in the back of the cab. This seems like a very poor idea even when you’re not on a crime drama. Needless to say, the guy winds up tased and unconscious.
The head (lol) of Zimmer rules out the idea that hackers could be tracking down his passengers, and none of the current drivers match the profile, either. This means our unsub is probably posing as being with the company even though he was actually rejected by them. This knowledge doesn’t do much good for Anthony, who is having his knuckles broken and his final fate revealed to him. It’s at this point that I lose all track of whether he was actually cheating or not.
Flashbacks show that the unsub was cruelly disciplined at the hands of a private school principal who kept a “Wall of Shame” for problem students. But it turns out that the lovely hypocrite was also sexually abusing young girls. After he was found out, the man committed suicide, triggering the unsub, who is upset that he’ll never be properly punished. He calls Anthony a liar and is just about to kill him when his supposed mistress calls. Still, the team winds up saving Anthony literally as the blade drops toward him.
Amidst all this bloodshed, there are some sweet moments with Lewis and Rossi bonding over their love of fixing up old cars. And despite of all this bloodshed, not a whole lot went down. It could be just because the writers are giving us a break after the whole “Dirty Dozen” angle, but this feels very “calm before the storm”. If so, could we at least get more happy scenes with the team and fewer focusing on the murderer we’ll only see for one episode anyway?
Next Week: The Bond