photo: cbs
Hostage
Original Air Date: Feb 10, 2016
Caitlin- Senior Staff Writer
caitlin@thetwocentscorp.com
Fair warning: many episodes of Criminal Minds explore the psychology of the perpetrators, exploring the reasons, however unjustified, for why they do what they do. And this week’s unsub does have reasons, but in the end, he’s just plain sick, and this whole episode is just horribly sad.
Three girls are held in a basement with the window locked shut. One is trying to saw through the lock while another frantically tries to dissuade her. The third lies unresponsive on the floor. Just before their captor arrives, the first girl is able to escape, promising the others she’ll get help.
This girl’s name is Gina. The girl who is sick is named Shelia, and was found in the basement by herself when Gina went for help. All three girls have been held for over a decade. The third, Violet, is nowhere to be found. Presumably, she’s off with our unsub, a man Gina calls “Tom”. Indeed, when we see her next, she’s in the back of a van with a man she calls “daddy” even though he has a cycle of treating her terribly and then apologizing for his actions. Hello, circle of abuse.
Gina has no such affection for Tom, and with good reason. He kidnapped both her and Shelia when they were 8 by tricking them with a puppy. Because she resisted his attempts to make her accept her new name and role as his daughter, he treated her more poorly than he did her “sisters”- though part of their special treatment involved being taken away with him alone, where we can presume nothing good happed. Poor Gina fled a terrible foster family and doesn’t even have anyone looking for her.
Tom was able to hide his hostages for so long by taking advantage of an old woman named Clara. She likely never had any idea they were there. When Gina mentions one of the rare occasions she and Tom would plant flowers together, the team looks in the flower bed outside the home. Sure enough, Clara is buried there. Tom swears she died of natural causes, and this is the truth. He also swears she’d want to be buried where she was. That’s probably not the truth.
Then things turn terrible. Shelia dies of her illness without ever being able to wake up and meet the mother who waited so long to see her again. The team is able to track down Tom and Violet, taking him into custody and learning the full extent of her Stockholm Syndrome. She continues to call Tom “daddy”, and doesn’t recognize her own real parents when they come to see her. Though we can see her memories starting to return, she screams at them to go away.
For his part, Tom is every bit as disgusting as you would imagine, and then some. When Violet reveals that she gave birth to two “sisters” after being impregnated by Tom, he refuses to give up the location of these two others girls, who may be sick or dying, unless he gets a cushy deal, making him somehow both a cold monster AND a class-A scumbag. He also insists on seeing Violet one more time- to say an emotional goodbye to her, of course. Ugh.
Thankfully, it backfires spectacularly for him. Though Violet is at first affectionate, the contact finally pushes her to remember the truth- her real name is Amelia (both Gina and Shelia were given flower names as well, but rejected them), and Tom is not her “daddy” at all. Outraged, he takes his own deal off the table, but the team finds Violet’s daughters anyway. One of the young girls is sick, but both are alive, and he just threw away his own last chances.
As he’s being hauled off- hopefully to a hole in the ground for the rest of his life- Tom is shot dead by Shelia’s mother. I don’t think there’s ever been a more understandable motive for murder. As I said, this is a sad episode. The one silver lining is that Gina, Violet, and Violet’s parents and daughters, all seem like they might be able to form some kind of family together. The fact this whole episode was based off a real-life event makes it just that much more awful.