Erin Strauss: Stealth Good Guy or Pain In The Ass?

[Wilowy]

Whether you're happy she's gone, or mourned her passing, Strauss engendered strong opinions. Here's a place to air what you feel about our dearly (or not so) departed Section Chief.

[FormerMod-a1]

I liked her more in the beginning.  She was an antagonist, but not a villain.  She would annoy me at times, like any real person would.  I don't like what she became and I was sorry they killed her off. 

[Wilowy]

I did like seeing her soften towards Hotch after Haley was killed. That whole scene where she's questioning him, you can tell she's deeply affected by seeing him so completely devastated. Thomas was flawless in that scene. 

 

Glad to see Jayne working steadily on House of Cards, and doing theater projects as well. :)

[normasm]

I loved her character originally. There was so much mystery: why did she so live to take Aaron down? It gave a good balance to the core canon portrayal of the team as unmitigated heroes, the fact that someone thought they were a force to be battled and kept reined in. 

 

Originally, she comes across as jealous, threatened, dare I say it, determined to show she, as a woman, would be above the "best." Her machinations with Prentiss were very cleverly not spelled out. The mystery held up. By the time of In Name and Blood, when she found a smattering of respect for "the job," I clapped my hands with glee that Hotch didn't take advantage of her slipping down the hill to collide with the vic ("I stepped on  her haiiiiiiiirrrrrrrr...."). Great character development.

 

Right through to the inquisition in "100" – where she bullies everyone but Garcia – where she asks that one question: what would the Reaper have done if he had gotten up from that floor? When she says, "That's good enough for me," she became a full human being, not an angel, but someone with kids who recognized a father who would kill to protect his son. I thought it was totally in character that she came back next day, offering Hotch full retirement. She would still rather he go away. So whatever mysterious reason she had for wanting him out didn't disappear just because she sympathized with him. 

 

Later, when the second generation of writers came in, they gave her alcoholism to deal with, which, in my opinion, did not need to be done and, in fact, has been done to death. They should have kept her strong and bitchy. It would have made her affair with Rossi even funnier and smarter. And.... they shouldn't have killed her off!!!!!!!!!

Edited July 17, 2014 by normasm

[Wilowy]

I actually think that having her be an alcoholic was a good turn simply because there is such a high level of drug addiction/alcoholism in law enforcement jobs that it seemed almost unrealistic that nobody (except our darling man, briefly) was afflicted by one or the other. 

[SSAHotchner]

I didn't mind her being an alcoholic and I didn't mind them killing her off. What I minded was the complete character change and that they tried to make it seem like everyone really liked her. They all had conflicts with her and she wasn't a nice person.

[zannej]

In the writers thread we were discussing her motivations and how they never really revealed why she was so hostile toward Hotch and so gung ho on getting him out of the way. I've actually seen situations like that where someone higher up is inept or not as good at the job and they want to shoot down any possible competition and also, when they screw up, they blame it on other people and ruin their careers. Doris Meisner did that in INS. Hell, the only reason she kept her job instead of being fired was because her husband was a close personal friend of Bill Clinton and happened to die just when she was going to get the pink slip. They kept her on because they felt it would be too cruel to fire her after she just lost her husband. But she was even worse than Strauss.

 

There were some interesting deleted scenes where they showed that Strauss was not quite as inept as I'd initially thought. She was a bitch to the team and other law enforcement agents, but she was very good with the family members of the victims. She also listened to Reid when he babbled a bit.

 

I didn't notice Strauss ever bullying Reid. I always got the impression that she liked him. I really wish the hadn't missed the opportunity to show a connection between them over the substance abuse.

 

I've seen quite a few cop shows where people become alcoholics or have been alcoholics. So that is not uncommon. As for the drugs, in the FBI that is an automatic pink slip. They do not tolerate drugs. It used to be that they wouldn't hire anyone who admitted to having tried marijuana EVER. Now they have some rules about not having used drugs frequently or in the past 5 years.

 

And I have to agree that the team all liking Strauss and saying nice things about her at the end just came off as so fake to me.

[Wilowy]

I do think though, when someone passes on, there's a desire to get together and say positive things about the deceased. They all knew her and worked with her for years. To me they didn't sugar coat anything, and even made it look like they might have been struggling to come up with things to say, so it rang true.

 

It's also a way to assuage the guilt of the fact that they are all still alive and she isn't. However misguided that guilt is, it still exists for some survivors. And it's also a way of cheering each other up. No matter what they may have thought of her deep down, they knew she was a successful career woman and mother, and that Rossi spent time with her exclusively for the past year, so they honored that. 

[normasm]

I didn't notice Strauss ever bullying Reid. I always got the impression that she liked him. I really wish the hadn't missed the opportunity to show a connection between them over the substance abuse.

 

She started to, in the 100 inquisition. She backed down a bit when he was so forceful, and i think she believed him. But she started with everyone (except Morgan, whose interrogation we only saw from the middle, and he was her fave, anyhoo), as a harridan, and only asked Garcia "are you OK?"

 

Yes, I think the only acknowledgement of the mutual substance abuse problems occurred in It Takes A Village, where she sat down, offered him a mint, and comforted him with the thought that he had gotten Prentiss back. Missed opportunity.

[Cobalt Stargazer]

She started to, in the 100 inquisition. She backed down a bit when he was so forceful, and i think she believed him. But she started with everyone (except Morgan, whose interrogation we only saw from the middle, and he was her fave, anyhoo), as a harridan, and only asked Garcia "are you OK?"

To be fair, Prentiss was very much giving as good as she got. Her "Ma'am" gives me a pleasant shiver every time, because she was coming off like she was thisclose to telling Strauss to do something obscene with herself.  Rossi was checking stock market quotes on his iPhone or something, and he actually comes out and says, "What's the point of all this, Erin?" So yes, Strauss was the heavy in that situation, but there was antagonism on both sides. In Prentiss' case, delicious antagonism.

[normasm]

Costar, I totally agree, JJ was rattled, Garcia was devastated, Rossi was dismissive and rude, Reid was firm and no bullshit, Emily was nearly combative and Derek was exhausted and resigned. Strauss, tho, was on the warpath from the get-go, but eventually relented to the situation. I think it was pretty well handled from a character pov.

[Wilowy]

Look at his freakin' determined little face in the one right under Strauss! Gahhh! <3

 

I also love how prominent his darkeye is in this scene. 

[zannej]

Willowy, you do have a good point about people speaking well of the dead. But that isn't always the case. I've been to more funerals than I'd ever wanted to attend in the past few months and even though we loved the people who died, it wasn't all positive things that were said. I could see them saying nice things about someone close on the team, but for me personally, I felt that the niceties and pleasant memories about Strauss were not genuine and it just didn't ring true. I wish they had said something about how she'd been a hellbeast to them in the beginning but that she'd come through toward the end instead of just making it seem as if they'd always liked her. And Morgan's story about what a great shot she was... Ugh... I don't know why that bugged me, but it did.

 

I'll have to re-watch the part where Strauss interviews Reid because I don't think she ever took a harsh tone with him. From what I remember she had a patient tone but did not disguise that she was in charge with it. And I believe there was a visible softening in her face when Reid mentioned what it was like to be tortured. I think he knew what buttons to push and reminding her that he'd been tortured softened her up a bit because you could tell she felt sorry for him. I really think Jayne did a fantastic job with that.

 

Still, I found her more interesting as at least a semi-antagonist.

[Danielg342]

I posted this before so I'll just post it again:

My issue with Erin Strauss, early on, was that the show clearly painted her as a "villain" and I hate it when characters are so "cut and dry", because no one in real life ever is. I never understood what Strauss' motivation was for wanting to get rid of Hotch, or even to antagonize the entire team. I also believed the show pandered to political correctness in placing a woman in the role (many shows these days seem to stick a woman in a minor but "superior" role if the central figure is male).

I did like that she got character development- the alcoholism storyline, eventually seeing what the team goes through, becoming sympathetic with the team (and Hotch) and ultimately helping them out (as seen in "The Replicator").

Still, I would have enjoyed it more if her initial presentation wasn't so slanted.

[zannej]

Danielg, I didn't see her as a complete "villain" with no redeeming qualities. She freaked out about stepping on the woman's hair and she actually did care about solving the case. But she was overly ambitious and insecure so she wanted to take out her competition. The deleted scenes made it more clear that she wasn't a straight-up villain because she pulled some strings to get stuff done for the team and comforted the parents of a victim. So she wasn't completely inept or awful, but she wasn't as skilled as she needed to be to do the job or at least lacked some confidence. She didn't care who she stepped on to climb the career ladder. I actually liked a little bit of mystery in terms of seeing her the way the team saw her-- the bitch who came in and made their lives hell if things didn't go right. But the audience could still see glimmers of humanity. At least that's how it was for me.

 

I have to say I feel the opposite about the alcoholism thing. I felt it was a cheap attempt to try to make the audience care about her. Although, I fully admit I'm a bit biased because they did her alcohol story instead of doing a story for Reid and then they had the nerve to put it as one of the "seven stories" on the DVDs. So a minor recurring character got a story when a lead character did not. I found that incredibly insulting to Reid and Reid fans.

 

But even if they hadn't stolen that focus from Reid, I still found the alcohol story to be way too forced and poorly handled.

Edited July 19, 2014 by zannej

[Cobalt Stargazer]

And fuck her. (Strauss) The last scene of the ep is brutal and bullshit. Poor Emily. 

 

As much as I agree that Strauss came off like a bully towards Emily in the end of The Evilution of Frank, from a more removed standpoint she had a small point. Gideon was technically in charge, but it was Hotch that was really the head of the unit due to Jason's, shall we say, personality issues. And given the business with Elle, which wasn't a distant echo just yet, (was Reid's Dilaudid addiction ever made common knowledge?) from the POV of a bureaucrat like Erin there was perhaps a flaw in the slaw.I'm not saying I agree with her, because obviously Hotch knew his job, I'm just saying that as a Suit she'd have taken a dim view of such shenanigans even without underlying motives. I wish they had made it clearer as to exactly why she wanted to get Aaron out of the way, and what she expected Emily to do to make that happen, but again that speaks to underwriting the characters, IMO.