Knittzu

That's a really excellent point, and one I hadn't considered. It also fits in nicely with my "laziest writers ever" theory. Maybe there really is no pro-JJ conspiracy or shady behind-the-scenes dealings or anything dramatic at all. If that's the case, I have to admit I'm a little disappointed; I was enjoying all the hints of real-life high drama on the CM creative/production team. But if I pull out my handy Occam's Razor... yeah, laziness does seem to be the most likely explanation.

JMO, we can always count on you to be very fair. :) And I never find your fairness annoying.

Yeah. The general tone simply feels wrong. Everything was so bright and cheerful and normal. I don't know if it's a budget issue or lack of vision or if maybe I was just hoping for too much.

I know, right? And I've watched a lot of ridiculous nonsense over the years! Vampire shows, time travel, space creatures, you name it. I sat through Sam and Dean outsmarting Lucifer himself and whatever the heck the X-Files was doing in their last few seasons. Absolutely nothing has been as absolutely absurd as the US government deciding the person most qualified to track down Bin Laden ... was the BAU's media liaison.

for me, the problem is more that having the usual male/female partnership with UST makes the show feel so generic. Last night felt exactly like your standard-issue procedural, only with demons instead of serial killers or whatever. Where the pilot felt like something different and interesting, this episode seemed to take pains to show that it's not going to be different at all.

Reposting because this made me spit out my coffee with laughter. So, um, thank you? Hee.

Once MGG leaves, I'm out. I don't really enjoy this show anymore and spent more of seasons 6-9 thinking, "ANY TIME now they will start focusing on Reid, Hotch, and Rossi again... right? Right? Right?" *sigh* The only things I'm enjoying right now are 1) talking to you guys here and 2) the tiny bits we get with Reid. I have no idea what factors into the renewal process or what the numbers would have to be in order for that to happen, but new fans on Tumblr or not, the show's ratings have been in steady decline since S6: 14.11, to 13.20, to 12.15, to 10.88. It seems like a LOT of people bailed on the "season of JJ," so I'm surprised EM has been allowed to keep doing what she's been doing.

Man, I miss them. They were convincing in their toughness -- whereas JJ comes across to me as Tough Girl Barbie, complete with Roundkicking Action Moves. I wonder when they decided to make this pandering "poor JJ has PTSD" episode? It sure doesn't fit with anything they showed last season (drinks with her buddies at the bar! Yup, JJ doesn't even need an overnight stay at the hospital after days of torture!) or that annoying scene where she and Morgan were bragging about their scars. I remember watching her closely during the episode last season where a victim was water-boarded, and there was no reaction from her at all. Not even a flicker in those empty eyes. From what I've read, the network has made it clear that without TG, they don't have a show. So my theory is that EM has managed to backdoor her favorite in as the defacto lead. AJ Cook doesn't have top billing, but she's clearly getting more screen time than Hotch... more than anyone since Gideon, really. You almost have to admire that someone with so little talent for showrunning or writing has achieved so much of her agenda. Re-watching the early episodes makes her achievements even starker -- this show doesn't even resemble what it began as.

So, new JJ topic for discussion.... Is JJ really “better” this season? I keep reading here and other places that JJ has been “toned down” and is “much better” this season, but frankly, I don’t see it. She’s still in nearly every scene, everywhere, doing everything. We continue to have episodes where cast members vanish without explanation — usually just Reid, but most recently half the freaking team — but somehow JJ is NEVER among them. Oh no. She’s present from beginning to end, no exceptions. I agree that so far in S10 she’s no longer doing things that are absolutely laughable — taking down unsubs with roundhouse kicks, killing bad guys single-handedly after enduring days of torture, being personally selected to take out Bin Laden… but in a perverse way, I almost enjoyed that nonsense. It was SO laughable, SO ridiculous that I couldn’t even begin to take it seriously. Now that she’s no longer doing superhero stuff, she’s just… the clear lead of the show. She gets the most lines, the most scenes, and is apparently the only indispensable character on the team. That’s not fun for me — it's just depressing.

I agree with all of this. At this point it feels like Liv was replaced by Zed because the showrunners decided UST is a must and that that wouldn't work with John's dead friend's daughter. It might not have bothered me so much if they had led up to it slowly, or even given in a couple of episodes, but no. It was full-on forced attempts at UST from her first scene to the last. I don't like that she's such a complete blank slate, either. Did she just pop into existence once she started sketching John? Doesn't she have a job, a reason for being in that town, or any sort of a life at all? I also didn't appreciate the line about gypsy magic being the darkest of all magic. That's pretty damn gross, and not even true in the Hellblazer universe.

I didn't realize this was a common procedural troupe rather than something uniquely irritating about CM. (I'm not much into procedurals and the longer I watch this one, the more I realize why.) LOLOLOL. Yeah. I wonder if this is a question that parents of missing children routinely ask in real life? Accusing the people looking for your kid of being incapable of understanding love seems like a very poor place to begin such a critical relationship.

Regardless of what would happen in the real world, in the AU-CM world there is zero chance super-mommy Mary Sue would lose custody of the kid.

I'm sorry, but there's no way Elsa's injuries were survivable. She would have been dead within minutes from blood loss and shock. Also, I really don't understand the point of a snuff film that doesn't end with... well, snuffing. They turned off the camera while she was still alive? Why? I feel like I must have missed something in that scene. I'm with the others who are already sick of Emma Roberts this season. I'm disappointed that they brought her back. She has zero on-screen chemistry with EP and her perpetual sulky teen act annoys me. I feel like this season is missing something. Suspense, maybe? There's so many characters, but Elsa and her horrible accent seems to be front-and-center in every episode. IMO she's just not interesting enough to be the central focus of the season. I often feel like I'm watching a cartoon character, especially when she fell right into the trap of "I'm here from HOLLYWOOD!" Hasn't she developed any street smarts over the years?

But... there's absolutely no guarantee that other parents will understand how they feel, or even care. See: JJ and Hotch, neither of whom had any problem with the fact that no one bothered to look for Joshua. Because he was a "bad kid" -- unlike THEIR perfect angels, presumably. And people who don't have children can absolutely care intensely about finding other people's children. While I agree that law enforcement can sometimes be apathetic, that's really not the case when it comes to missing children. Especially (sadly) WHITE missing children. There's a woman on another board who swears she "timed" each characters scenes and that JJ's scene-time was equal to the rest. What can you do but laugh? Kate, Reid, Morgan and Garcia vanished at the half-way point so there is no way in hell they had anything close to the amount of time Mary Sue did. I swear I'm watching a completely different show than some of these people. Where can I sign up to watch the version of CM where the other characters get equal screen time to Mary Sue? I'm already dreading next week. I am so not ready for more JJ-centric episodes when it already feels like every episode is JJ-centric.

And! As intelligent as Reid is, buying illegal drugs requires a skill-set that he simply does not possess. It would require street smarts, and connections, and not to even mention the ability to pass himself off as something other than a law enforcement agent to a very paranoid set of people. I can’t imagine it, no matter how I turn it over in my mind. I can’t buy that Reid knows people who deal soft drugs, let alone heroin. I can’t visualize Reid interacting with a heroin dealer, or even knowing how to ask for what he wanted in the correct coded speech. Does the show expect me to believe that he went wandering around in the bad part of town randomly asking shady characters if they were selling? Because that’s silly. That’s how you wind up dead, especially if you look and talk like Reid. And then there’s the whole “getting caught would end his career” angle… although I could certainly buy that on some level, he wants out.

Co-signed 100x. It really annoys me when they do the now-standard scene of a missing child's parents demanding, "DO YOU EVEN HAVE CHILDRUUUN?" How many times has CM used that line now? Too many for my liking. If, god forbid, one of my daughters were kidnapped I wouldn't care one iota if the people looking for her were parents or not. I would want the best detectives on the case. Their parental status is completely irrelevant. If anything, this episode displayed just how unempathetic other parents can be. Neither Hotch nor JJ even batted an eye at the news that no one bothered looking for poor Joshua. And I just can't get over JJ declaring the abducted kids "bad all around" because of typical kid mischief like TPing houses on Halloween.

Sorry, that should have said "Jack" instead of Henry. I get their names mixed up. But regardless! I don't want to see any more of either of them.

I was okay with it because 1) Reid is my favorite character so any focus on him was happy-times for me and 2) it at least attempted to answer my most nagging question about his character. Which is, WHY did Reid join the FBI? That's never made much sense IMO, especially considering that you certainly don't need a genius-level IQ to be a profiler. In fact you apparently need very little education or experience to be one. See: whatever two-week correspondence course JJ took while chasing Bin Laden. His entire educational background seemed to be leading up to something else. PhDs Chemistry, engineering and mathematics? He clearly could have done anything. I didn't understand why he settled for this crappy job, where he's constantly in danger, being kidnapped, being drugged, watching his girlfriend being murdered, lied to and mocked by his "family," etc. Actually... strike the first paragraph! I still don't understand why he settled for this crappy job that apparently anyone can do. He should be working to cure schizophrenia, not once again wondering if this week's psycho killer might be impotent.

Agreed. Well, except for the 30 seconds of Henry part -- personally, I think we've had more than enough of the actors' RL children on this show. They are both distracting to me because neither can act and we all know the only reason they're around is their parentage. If this show absolutely MUST have children loitering about every other episode, I'd prefer that they hire trained child actors. But really, I'd prefer the kids just fade into the background. I liked this show much better when they focused almost entirely on the cases and let the family stuff happen off camera.

The only way I can begin to accept the Reid addiction story is that he only used what he took from the unsub and when that was gone, he was finished. Can you see Reid out on the streets, scoring drugs? Or even knowing where to go to buy drugs? To me that is just ludicrous. But then I never accepted that he would have taken the drugs off the unsub and continued using on his own, either, so there's that.

Not ten-year-olds. No way. Maybe if they'e made him a very young teen I could have bought it. Or a minority... sadly, cops in this country just don't care as much about missing minority kids. But no one in their right mind would assume that a ten-year-old just "ran away" for more than a few hours. He's a child! When children that young go missing, it's because something very bad has happened. We actually had this happen in my community a few years ago (he was nine) and just about everyone around here was looking for him, putting up posters, volunteering weekends to search the woods, etc. It was the top story in the news for months. Etc. We're seen the same thing in this universe in other episodes. A young child goes missing, everyone drops everything and springs into action. The first 24 hours are critical, etc etc. I still haven't gotten over her bullshit harassment of the mentally ill woman last week and feel like the character needs to be rehabilitated. Instead she vanishes. It's just so obvious that this show has too many characters! When half of them regularly go missing without a word of explanation, that's a clear sign that your cast is bloated. I have an idea for them -- why not move JJ into her own show? Super JJ, Ninja Crime-Fighting Woman. She can be a one-woman crime elimination force... and reduce the cast by one. If Morgan is really out at the end of the season (please please please please let that be true) then season eleven would have a cast the writers could manage without randomly disappearing characters.

Well, I thought it started out promising. Hotch was actually present in the episode! And Rossi! There was minimal Garcia, for which I am profoundly grateful, and for once her magical computer didn't solve the case. But dear god. It was JJ, JJ, and even more JJ. I was drifting off during the dull second half, but every time I glanced up, there she was again. This time, when Reid vanished at the midway point, they didn't even bother telling us where he went. Checking out drugstores the kids might have wandered through, perhaps? I'm starting to wonder if he has a second job. Really, why not? This one is so easy and boring, he might as well pick up some moonlighting hours as a fill-in chemist or something. Okay, so, Joshua. The ten-year-old box occupant. In THIS world, having "chronic discipline problems" would most certainly not preclude him being classified as an abduction when he went missing. I can't even believe the actors can recite these lines with a straight face. The child was TEN. They expect us to believe that because he has some behavior problems and ran away a few times that the cops would just shrug their shoulders and never look for him? God, this stuff drives me out of my mind. Even though I assume CM is set in an alternative universe, their universe is so much worse than ours that I would expect an all-out search to begin if a child was missing for more than ten minutes. Because of the 100,000 or so serial killers crawling all over the place. Also, no pedophile would be willing to go to prison "just for attention." I can't even begin to get into how stupid that idea is without my head exploding. Loved JJ calling little boys doing things like egging houses "bad boys all around." Not naughty, not mischievous, not just having fun on Halloween.... but bad kids. All around.

Ha! So true! Worse, they make profiling look just super incredibly easy. The team is usually ready to do the awkward presentation about twelve minutes into the episode these days. It never fails to shock me, because it seems like the jet landed 20 minutes ago and suddenly they're all TIME TO GIVE THE PROFILE. Whaaaaat? If it's that easy, every law enforcement agent in the country should be given whatever crash-course JJ took that instantly turned her into a super-profiler.

Don't give them any ideas or we might have to suffer through three JJ-centric episodes this season. If it means a few minutes here and there without JJ being shoved down my throat, I'm perfectly happy to assume that Mary Sue has the bestest and most perfect marriage ever. The only thing I care about less than JJ on this show is the boring JJ/Will union.

Good question. The writers basically refused to commit to anything (canonically; I have no idea what they were saying in interviews) about Reid's drug use. I imagine there was a lot of disagreement behind the scenes between the show creators and as a result, we wound up with a wishy-washy storyline. I'm pretty sure that Reid's statement "I'll never miss another plane" was supposed to neatly end it all, though.