PREPPIES OF THE APOCALYPSE

Here's a fresh new batch of search phrases used to find this site in recent months. Oh, Google Analytics. What did I ever do without you?


neal wandering around shirtless
Yeah, that’s pretty much every White Collar episode, ever. I love White Collar. Come for the snappy dialogue and cheerful shenanigans, stay for the shameless Nealsploitation.

apocalypse of the preppies
Just switching those two words around adds a whole new universe of meaning. I’m changing my blog name, posthaste.

are cadillacs looked down on by preppies?
Bear in mind that I am, at best, an imitation preppy (no disposable income, no impressive pedigree, I don’t golf, and my backhand is total crap. Got myself a decent preppy name, at least). From my perspective as someone who doesn’t own a car and is wholly immune to car culture, I neither look down upon nor feel any affinity for Cadillacs or any other car. However, I do have a secret fondness for the Mini Cooper. It’s cute.

preppies are not fat
Eh. I’m sure so…

So Shawn and Juliet are officially a couple, though they’re hiding their relationship from everyone, Gus and Lassiter in particular. Meanwhile, Shawn and Gus celebrate the return of something called Scare Fest -- a monster-themed festival -- at a local carnival. Why, yes, Halloween was almost three weeks ago, but Psych was off the air throughout October, so they’re playing catch-up. Scare Fest used to be a much-beloved annual tradition, until the carnival canceled it fifteen years ago after the death of a kid named Johnny Ricketts on the Ferris Wheel.

At Scare Fest, Shawn and Gus eat bacon-wrapped churros, which actually sound kind of awesome, and run into their former assistant Ken (Jerry Shea), who is now working as a janitor at the carnival. Ken! Aw, I like Ken. Good to see him back. While touring a haunted house, Shawn spots someone murdering an elderly man and stuffing him inside a coffin. The tour operator, Carol (April Matson), can’t be bothered to investigate, so, w…

The bodies of two young boys are found buried along the Appalachian Trail in Pennsylvania. One of the boys disappeared two years ago, the other a year. The kids were evidently murdered several months after their respective disappearances. After the BAU jets up to Pennsylvania to investigate the killings, ten-year-old Robert Brooks (Gattlin Griffith) and his younger sister Ana (Emily Alyn Lind) are kidnapped in the immediate area while camping with their parents. The team members don their coziest fleece pullovers, and a massive search begins for the missing kids.

(As tends to be the case when dealing with hurt and murdered children, this is a spectacularly grim episode. Grim, grim, grim, grim, grim. The only bright spot? The adorable zip-front pullovers that Hotch and Rossi and Prentiss all wear. Seriously, they’re like a walking LL Bean catalogue.)

Well. We’ll just mark this one down in the “failed experiment” column, shall we?

I was going to boldly proclaim this weak, watery, silly Sunset Boulevard tribute and/or knockoff to be the Worst Episode Ever, and then I remembered that nothing can really touch last season’s “The Fight” in terms of sheer awfulness. For those who missed it, “The Fight” was the backdoor pilot for the still-upcoming spinoff and consisted of forty-two minutes of our BAU members standing on the sidelines and cooing about the awesomeness of Forest Whitaker’s team of hipper, grittier FBI profilers. It was breathtakingly stupid.

That said, this episode ain’t good. Criminal Minds, I like you a lot, but you’ve fallen off your game this season.

(Note to self: Write a script for a porn film about a horny aviator and title it Backdoor Pilot.)

Psych is back! Psych is back!

Excuse me. I’m a little excited about this. Fall television has been pretty dismal thus far, but Psych rarely disappoints.

Shawn and Gus head up to Canada, land of “smoked salmon, poutine, and Coffee Crisp,” to visit dashing art thief Pierre Despereaux (Cary Elwes), last encountered in the fourth-season episode “Extradition: British Columbia.” Despereaux, who is serving out his sentence in a minimum-security Vancouver prison, has footed the bill for their entire trip. Gus is suspicious about his motives in wanting to see them, but Shawn claims they’ve become friends: “I follow him on Twitter.”

Despereaux makes bold claims about his intention to prove to Shawn that he’s the world’s greatest criminal. Shawn and Gus scoff at this, but as they drive away from the prison, Despereaux pops up in the back seat. He steals their rental car, luggage, wallets and passports, and leaves them by the side of the road.

Three exotic dancers are found dumped in an Indiana cornfield after being raped, beaten, and strangled by multiple assailants. All three women were abducted from their workplaces on a Friday night, tortured over the weekend, and murdered on a Sunday. A fourth woman, Stephanie (Cherilyn Rae Wilson), is still missing.

Back at Quantico, the Behavioral Analysis Unit reviews the case file on their shiny new iPads, which come courtesy of Garcia. Reid, who remains stubbornly old-school, leafs through a hard copy of the file instead. It always seems vaguely improbable that a genius in his mid-twenties would be a die-hard technophobe, but it’s one of his established character traits, so let’s roll with it.

The team flies to rural Indiana and meets with the local sheriff, Jeff Salters (Robert Newman), who immediately gets on Hotch’s bad side by implying the women were asking for their grim fate by working as strippers. Hotch responds by calmly ripping him into a pile of shredded cabbage, a…