photo: cbs
Inner Beauty
Original Air Date: Apr 13, 2016
Caitlin- Senior Staff Writer
caitlin@thetwocentscorp.com
The beginning and end of this episode focus on Rossi playing with his adorable grandson and having awkward run-ins with his ex-wife, Hayden. I suggest you focus on those parts as much as possible, because everything else related to this case is going to make your skin crawl.
Rossi is playing baseball with Kai and Kai’s father/Joy’s husband when Hayden shows up. They get to that whole “not telling him he had a daughter” thing pretty quickly, with Hayden saying Rossi of the past was always obsessed with work. And guess who calls him on his cell phone at that very moment?
At least Hotch has good reason. Two dead women turned up in a water tank, their faces slashed up and then sown awkwardly back together. Meanwhile, a girl named Danielle is avoiding some creeps on the street when a stranger seemingly steps up to save the day. Too bad that, when she takes him up on his offer of a ride home (in the back of his van, of course), she sees a dead body on the floor of the vehicle before she is drugged and kidnapped herself.
Given that all the victims thus far have been “low-risk” (read: drug addicts), the team considers that he could be a vigilante. One of the victims was also a hooker- a hooker whose pimp is surprisingly passionate about the chances she would have had in life. Both victims turned up wearing the same dress, which Garcia looks into while Rossi and JJ check out the extremely skeevy…hotel? Watering hole? Abandoned basement? …place the victims were found.
Lindsay wakes up on a bed in a sort of jail cell as another girl, presumably the one she saw in the van, turns up in a jaccuzi. She was mutilated and put in the dress as well, but her hair was left its natural blonde. An earlier victim, a brunette, was given a sloppy dye job. Needless to say, this is yet another case of a man projecting his feelings toward onto various surrogates. It seems natural to believe those feeling include a lot of rage. This is BAU bread and butter.
We go through the usual moves. Our guy wants to cause his victims pain, we need to find “victim zero”, AKA the original woman. But during all of it, Rossi is distracted. He’s feeling bitter towards Hayden. And JJ understands, but also manages to reason with him. He really used to only care about his job. So he may come around, but first we have a twist. Some of the drugs the unsub uses are for pain management- meaning he may actually be trying to help his victims, not hurt them.
I think we can all agree that this is a very strange way to help anyone. Danielle would definitely agree when she wakes up with her face cut to pieces. In looking for the unsub’s reasoning, we must find the mystery woman. They reason that she was disfigured herself and Reid narrows that down to a condition that caused tumors to grow on her face. Just a few weeks ago, that woman, Sarah, drowned herself. Her boyfriend, Joseph, found her. Thanks for finding our man, Garcia.
While the team is putting facts together, we spend a little more time with poor Danielle. Joseph will only refer to her as “Sarah”. He believes she is more beautiful in her current state, not less. And he wants her to live the role of the woman he lost. She eventually plays along, then tries to make a break for it. She almost gets to a neighbor, but Joseph catches her and convinces the man his wife just got back from that hospital. Clearly Mr. Neighbor does not watch enough crime dramas.
As we prepare to go rescue Danielle, we learn some more of the facts that turned Joseph into the man he is now. His mother was in a car accident that mutilated and eventually killed her. He had recently taken Sarah, who was nervous about her appearance, to the park. Sarah had an anxiety attack when he briefly left her alone, and killed herself a few days later. And so Joseph wants to recreate their relationship as though that had never happened.
By the time the team arrives, Joseph has Danielle in bed and she is clearly ill as a result of her rudimentary “cosmetic surgery”. They are able to break him free of his delusions and take him in, but she is going to have a long road to physical and emotional recovery. Perhaps reflecting on her family’s continued support, though, Rossi decides to give Hayden another call. And maybe they’ll make it work as well as they can. They are both grandparents, after all.
Next Week: Devil’s Backbone