Fun With Keywords: Apocalypse of the Preppies Edition

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 some are and some aren’t. Carrying around extra weight doesn’t invalidate anyone’s preppy membership card.

how do preppies feel about debt
They don’t care much for it.

thomas gibson last starfighter
Nope. Gibson has been in a whole lot of movies, ranging from totally awesome (Love & Human Remains, the finest gay-themed independent movie to come out of Canada in the 1990s), to kind of awesome (Psycho Beach Party, Barcelona), to run-of-the-mill awful (Men of War), to hilariously awful (The Lost Empire). He’s acted with Tom Cruise twice (Far and Away and Eyes Wide Shut). He gets around… but he’s not in The Last Starfighter. You know who is in that, though, in a tiny background role? Wil Wheaton. Weird, huh?

criminal minds best hotch episode
Speaking of Thomas Gibson... As someone who could probably write a pretty decent dissertation on The Great and All-Encompassing Awesomeness of Hotch, I should have a simple answer, and yet I don’t. It sort of depends upon what you’re looking for. Do you like Hotch for his unsmiling, unfussy gentleness? I’d vote for “Pleasure is My Business” or “Ashes and Dust.” Are you partial to cyborg ninja Hotch, who can take out a horde of heavily-armed killers armed only with a baton and who wanders into burning buildings and volatile hostage situations without protection? Go for “The Tribe,” “Haunted,” or “Devil’s Night.” Scary Hotch? Watch him chewing out Jordan Todd in “52 Pickup” or provoking a murderous death row inmate in “Damaged.” Stealth bitch Hotch? Can’t beat him methodically shredding the condescending defense attorney who tried to embarrass him on the witness stand in “Tabula Rasa.” Batshit crazy Hotch? Well, that’d be him beating Foyet to death in “100.”

criminal minds jjs top episodes
This is easier. I’m partial to the climax of “Penelope,” in which J.J. fires through a glass wall and shoots Garcia’s attacker smack in the back of his head. Talking down serial killer Tim Curry over the public address in “The Longest Night” was a nice moment for her as well. I also dig her cool little ghost story to Reid and Morgan in “Boogeyman”

least favorite criminal minds episode
My go-to answer for this one is “The Fight,” though it gets strong competition from the wretched “Reflection of Desire.” “Jones,” “Machismo,” and “Somebody’s Watching” are also at the bottom of my list.

elle, an artist, finds an old canoe in woods behind her property. her neighbors consider it abandoned. elle cleans it, paints scenes on it depicting native american rituals, and displays it in her art gallery. flo, the canoe's original owner, claims it, but a court grants elle title.
…I’ve got nothing.

psych shawn and gus dress up and perform song
You probably want the Season Two premiere, “American Duos,” in which Gus and Shawn dress up as, respectively, Michael Jackson and Roland Orzibal from Tears for Fears to perform on an American Idol-esque variety show, judged by Tim Curry, Gina Gershon, and Cristian de la Fuente. It is, of course, awesome. Also worth a look: Shawn and Gus (plus Juliet, Chief Vick, and Lassiter) doing their very best Hall & Oates act in a promo last season.

ralph macchio in psych season 5
Not yet. Probably just a matter of time. Doesn’t he just seem like he should be a Psych guest star, joining the august ranks of Ally Sheedy, Judd Nelson, Lou Diamond Philips, and C. Thomas Howell? (Edited to add: Macchio will appear in the December 8th episode, which is described as "a tribute to the Police Academy films." Sounds awesome.)

volume five of heroes, what is it called and sylar will be around right?
Oh, dear. Well, here’s the good news: Volume Five was called Redemption. It aired last season (September 2009-February 2010), and Sylar featured prominently in it. There’s some confusion, because Volume Five was actually Season Four -- Season Three was, for some damn reason, split into Volumes Three and Four. So if you’re actually looking for Season Five, I’m afraid you’re out of luck: Heroes was canceled in the spring.

which hardy boy is more emotional
That’d be Joe.

who was singer in hardy boys meet dracula
1970s singer/songwriter Paul Williams, who, among many other insanely catchy hits, wrote “Rainy Days and Mondays” and co-wrote “The Rainbow Connection.” The song he sang in the Hardy Boys episode is “The Hell of It,” which functions as the world’s most blistering eulogy: “Good for nothing, bad in bed, nobody likes you and you’re better off dead, goodbye…”

young swingers party laughing naked swimming feeling each other
I’m clearly getting invited to all the wrong parties.

two kids kills a kid a kid steals a brain from his fathers lab and brings him back to life
movie where female aliens steal sperm
I’m also clearly the last to hear about all the really good movies.

who is morgan from the slammin salmon
My spiritual sister, 1970s-1980s bombshell Morgan Fairchild.

reid/hotch corporal punishment fanfics
Oh, dear. I’m all for a little latitude with fanfiction, but I can’t wrap my head around a set of circumstances that would lead to quiet, soft-spoken Hotch and brainy, emotionally-distant Reid breaking out the straps and canes and whacking away at each other. Tell you what: If anybody writes it, I’ll write the sequel, in which Hotch and Reid get booted out of the FBI for conduct unbecoming.

arnold vosloo covert affairs
Nope. Oh, hey, you might be confusing him with Oded Fehr, who did indeed appear in Covert Affairs. Not that the two are twins or anything, but they’re both good-looking men with strong noses and beautiful eyes, and they both have somewhat similar television/film careers. I could see where someone could get them mixed up.


arnold vosloo's plans in the future?
No idea. Probably something along the lines of working to differentiate himself from Oded Fehr.

heroes +"samuel sucks"
I’m not going to stick my neck out to defend Samuel, but I’ll mildly point out that, compared with all the things that were so horribly wrong with that ghastly final season of Heroes, Samuel and his motley carnival buddies were actually pretty entertaining.

ioan gruffudd fake nude
Well, there’s no shortage of real Ioan Gruffudd nudity out there. Have you seen Hornblower?

jai/arthur
Heh. Whichever of you Googled this and followed it here just because I groused in my last Fun With Keywords post about the complete lack of Jai/Arthur searches, thank you very much.

just when my coil was reaching the green line
Akira is my mostest favoritest movie ever, and the first version I ever saw was the bizarrely-translated 1989 US theatrical release, so I have to admit, I get a little thrill whenever anyone finds my site by searching for that enigmatic and borderline-nonsensical phrase.
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Psych: In Plain Fright

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, with Ken’s help, Shawn and Gus break back into the haunted house and get apprehended by security.

The carnival’s security chief, Eve (Nora Dunn), doesn’t believe Shawn’s story about seeing a murder. Even Gus has his doubts about Shawn’s powers of observation:

Gus: Last week, you thought a sponge in the Psych office was an owl.
Shawn: If you’d stop buying them in bird colors, this would stop happening.

When the carnival’s president, David Wayland, is reported missing, Juliet and Lassiter arrive and search the haunted house. They find Wayland’s body, though the cause of death appears to be accidental strangulation. Shawn insists it was murder: “We have a bona fide Scooby Doo case!”

The carnival’s vice-president, Frank Holloway (Rob LaBelle -- hey, he was in Watchmen!), claims the ghost of Johnny Ricketts, who has been seen haunting the carnival ever since the announcement of the return of Scare Fest, murdered Wayland. Shawn initially suspects that Holloway posed as the ghost and killed Wayland himself. He reconsiders this theory after Holloway is found drowned in a water attraction.

Shawn and Gus break into Eve’s files and discover that, despite previous reports, the carnival was at fault in Johnny Ricketts’s death. The carnival secretly paid $350,000 in a settlement to Ricketts’s family and another $350,000 to a girl named Jamie Emerson, who was wounded in the same accident -- the latch on their seat on the Ferris Wheel broke, and Johnny plunged to his death when he tried to save Jamie.

Jamie Emerson turns out to be the tour operator, Carol. She murdered both Wayland and Holloway out of rage at the return of Scare Fest, with the aid of her boyfriend, Todd. Shawn unravels the whole mess, and Juliet and Lassiter swoop in and arrest Carol and Todd before they can murder Eve.

And Shawn and Juliet come clean about their new romance to Gus, though they prudently decide to keep it hidden from Lassiter for a while longer. Good call, guys.

Awesome Eighties references:
Shawn (explaining to Gus that their partnership dynamic will change now that Juliet is a part of his life): Now it’s more like the “Say Say Say” video.

Shawn: Clyde, Lugs, and Pembrook! Johnny Ricketts did kill Wayland!
Gus: Did you just use the characters from Stroker Ace as an interjection?
Shawn: Don’t interrupt.
Gus: But you did use Stroker Ace.

Lassiter-based awesomeness
(Upon finding Wayland’s corpse in the haunted house): “Well, it just goes to show that kids should be scared by the law, not adults in costumes.”
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Criminal Minds: Into the Woods

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.)

Reid goes back through records of young boys reported missing along the Appalachian trail and finds twelve possible victims over the past twenty years. The unsub appears to travel the entire length of the trail, from Georgia to Vermont, on a yearly basis. He’s been sticking to a smaller area in recent months, suggesting his ability to move has become somehow limited. He keeps his victims captive over the winter, then murders them in the spring.

The unsub is a grizzled, bearded man named Shane Wyland (Gill Gayle), who stashes Robert and Ana in a cave along the trail. While Shane is occupied with poor Robert (grim, grim, grim), Ana manages to escape. She runs into the search party, but by the time she leads Prentiss and Morgan back to the cave, Shane has already fled, taking Robert with him.

Among Shane’s possessions, Prentiss and Morgan find pain relievers and herbal remedies for swollen joints. Ana confirms that Shane walked with a limp, which indicates he has some kind of degenerative condition.

Shane takes Robert to a flophouse, where they visit his creepy crony Brandon (David Trice), who supplies Shane with more painkillers. As payment for the drugs, Shane gives Robert to Brandon for an hour (grim, grim, grim, grim, grim). Brandon chases Robert around his apartment and accidentally knocks him out. Worried that Shane will be furious with him for hurting the kid, he drags an unconscious Robert down the basement of his building and tries to smother him with a pillow. Er… there’s a flaw in his logic somewhere.

(Wow, I hope the fresh-faced and likeable young actor who played Robert was treated really, really gently and carefully by everyone on the set, because man, this is rough stuff to put a kid through. It’s rough to watch, for that matter.)

While trying to track down Shane, Garcia compiles a list of sex offenders in Pennsylvania in the early 1990s, which is when the abductions first started. She finds that eleven men convicted of abusing minors lived in the same building: the flophouse. This suggests to the team that the sex offenders banded together to form their own protective cluster.

Morgan and Prentiss raid the flophouse and rescue Robert before Brandon can murder him. However, Shane spots the police outside the building and escapes unnoticed. He returns to the Appalachian Trail, presumably to rape and murder more kids. Meanwhile the team flies back to Quantico, nervously reassuring themselves that they can consider the assignment a success, since they at least managed to rescue Robert.

No new episodes for a couple of weeks -- Criminal Minds is going on a brief winter hiatus. I’m planning on spending the time watching lots of bright, fluffy, happy stuff, where absolutely no kids get hurt or raped or murdered. Should be easy enough.
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Criminal Minds: Reflection of Desire

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.)

A Senate page named Kelly Landis is kidnapped in DC. Her strangled body is found three days later in a Georgetown alley, her lips sliced off with a razor blade. The day prior to her murder, a photograph of Kelly, styled as a glamorous old-time movie star, was anonymously delivered to a local newspaper. In other words, there’s a super-gimmicky unsub on the loose.

The unsub turns out to be Rhett Walden (Robert Knepper), who lives with his faded movie-star mother May (Sally Kirkland, bringing the crazy), with whom he has an incestuous relationship. Rhett kidnapped Kelly, dressed her up as the character May played in her sole big-screen role in a film called Reflection of Desire, forced her to act out scenes from the movie, then murdered her when he found her performance insufficiently convincing, suffocating her with a plastic bag and stuffing a page from the screenplay down her throat.

(Oh, Robert Knepper. I try not to hold that horrible last season of Heroes against you -- really, you were one of the few bright points in a lot of misery -- but nonetheless, you’re dredging up some bad memories here.)

Kelly’s ordeal is intercut with hyper-stylized scenes of Garcia acting in a play, wearing a black bobbed wig, delivering chunks of portentous dialogue and shooting a rapist onstage. Points for trying something new, and I dig the idea of Garcia having this odd, hidden side interest in theater, but as to the execution, they cranked up the pretension level to eleven. Anyway, when Hotch inadvertently finds out about her secret life as an actor, she begs him not to tell the rest of the team, claiming she needs to keep her job and her personal life separate.

…You can see where this is going to go.

Rhett kidnaps another young woman, Penny Hammond (Whitney Able), from DC’s Union Station (which, in a bit of typecasting, is played by Los Angeles’ Union Station) and starts doing his whole old-time movie-star shtick with her. Penny, who is awesome, gamely plays along for a while, then breaks Rhett’s nose and dashes for freedom. Rhett knocks her out with chloroform and slices off her toes as punishment.

While investigating Penny’s disappearance, the team finds surveillance footage of Rhett trailing her at the train station. Since he loitered at the station for several hours while scoping out potential victims, they figure his parking permit is valid for the surrounding neighborhood, suggesting he lives in the immediate area. They theorize that he keeps the women alive for three days to correspond to the three-act structure of a screenplay, and you know what? I just changed my mind. This is a worse episode than the backdoor pilot, just on the basis of that snippet of random idiocy.

After a glamorous headshot of Penny is dropped off at the newspaper offices, Hotch asks Garcia to call a press conference about the kidnapping. He also asks her to don a blonde wig (she’s been a redhead this season) and tart herself up as a glamorous movie star first. This is either because he wants to lure Rhett out into the open by having Garcia play into his old-Hollywood fantasy, or because Hotch has a heretofore unrevealed wildly self-amusing streak. I prefer to think it’s the latter.

Worried she’ll screw it up, Garcia refuses to go through with the press conference. Hotch gives her a pep talk about viewing it as a performance, and in the process manages to spill the beans about her secret thespian life to the rest of the team. Good one, Hotch! Garcia gives the press conference, in which she claims the police know where Penny is being held.

Rhett watches the conference and panics, thinking he’s about to be arrested. He drugs Penny and tries to go on the run with her. While patrolling the neighborhood, Rossi and Hotch spot Rhett suffocating Penny with a plastic bag in the front seat of his van. They rescue Penny, though Rhett escapes. (Hotch, whom we saw in an early episode shoot someone on top of a moving train from a moving car with deadly accuracy, fires four or five shots at Rhett at close range and only manages to, like, nick his shoulder or something. Hotch is usually an unstoppable force of awesomeness, but you’d never know it from this episode. Perhaps he read the script and figured it wasn’t worth bringing his A-game for this nonsense.)

Police surround Rhett’s house and demand his surrender. Rhett emerges and goes full-tilt Norma Desmond, mistaking the police lights for the flashbulbs of an adoring public. He’s carrying May’s desiccated corpse -- May, it turns out, has been alive only in Rhett’s delusional brain. As an especially nice touch, he’s placed Kelly’s severed lips over May’s own rotted ones.

(I’m picturing the pitch meeting for this episode: “It’s Sunset Boulevard meets Psycho! It can’t possibly fail!”)

Tag ending: The rest of the BAU team decide Garcia was kidding about this whole “stay the hell out of my personal life, you pack of slavering jackals” business, and show up for her play en masse.

Did you make it through the episode? Reward yourself with this: It’s John Barrowman singing “Sunset Boulevard,” and doing an outstanding job of it. You’ve earned it.
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Psych: Extradition II: The Actual Extradition Part

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.

Shawn and Gus hightail it to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police headquarters, where they run into their super-agreeable friend, Corporal Mackintosh (Peter Oldring), and his gruff boss, Commissioner Dykstra (Ed Lauter). Shawn claims his psychic powers have warned him of Despereaux’s jailbreak, but when Mackintosh calls the prison to check, his absence hasn’t even been noticed by the cheerfully lax guards (“They do a rough numbers count in the A.M.”).

The RCMP respond to a report of an art theft at the home of Crown Prosecutor John Santee, who was responsible for sending Despereaux to prison. Shawn and Gus tag along. They find Despereaux’s signature lit cigarette at the crime scene… as well as Santee’s dead body.

Furious that Despereaux apparently used them to break out of jail so he could murder Santee, Shawn and Gus return to the prison… and find that Despereaux broke back in and returned to his cell before his disappearance was even discovered. Despereaux is initially smug about having pulled off the perfect crime, though he’s genuinely shocked to find out about Santee’s death. He admits to stealing the artwork, but claims someone is framing him for the murder. Shawn is highly skeptical about this: “I don’t love you anymore.”

Anxious to clear his name, Despereaux breaks out of prison again. When Shawn and Gus return to their hotel room, they find him sipping a martini and frolicking with Valeria, the beautiful wife of a man he met in prison. Despereaux wants to hire them to prove his innocence.

Lassiter and Juliet pop up in Canada, prepared to extradite Despereaux to the United States to stand trial for his past crimes there. Juliet drops by Shawn’s hotel room, anxious to have a private word with him about the status of their relationship. After impulsively kissing Shawn at the end of last episode, she broke up with Declan Rand (does this mean no more guest appearances by Nestor Carbonell? Say it isn’t so!) to investigate her feelings for Shawn. Afraid she’ll find out he’s helping Despereaux, Shawn abruptly dismisses her.

Shawn and Gus discover Despereaux was hired to steal the artwork by Frank Crossley, noted crime lord and Valeria’s husband. Crossley is the main suspect in the murder of a Mountie named Breitling, who had sent evidence of Crossley’s criminal deeds to Santee right before his death. When Shawn and Gus arrive at Crossley’s house, suspecting him of murdering both Santee and Breitling, they find him dead in the swimming pool, with Despereaux’s signature cigarette left at the scene.

Shawn and Gus head off in pursuit of Despereaux, who is being held at gunpoint by Valeria. When Breitling discovered she was the true mastermind behind her husband’s misdeeds, she murdered him and Santee, framed Despereaux for Santee’s murder, and killed her husband for good measure.

The usual joyously messy climax ensues. Shawn manages to overpower Valeria and rescue Despereaux. While Lassiter prepares to extradite Despereaux, Shawn tracks down Juliet to apologize for blowing her off. And they end up kissing. A whole lot.

Nice to have you back, guys.

Gus’s Shawn-granted alias:
Yasmine Bleeth

Awesome Eighties reference:
(Shawn, after Despereaux fires a grappling hook up to the top of a building and whisks himself to safety, Batman-style): “Where does he get those wonderful toys?”

Lassiter-based awesomeness:
Lassiter: I swear, I’m going to leave you to rot in this backward, rain-drenched den of politeness. No offense.
Mackintosh: None taken. I like your suit.
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Criminal Minds: Middle Man

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, all while somehow managing to maintain his soft-spoken and almost deferential demeanor. Hotch is an awesome force of nature.

The unsubs turn out to be a nasty trio of college students: the dominant leader, Michael (Steve Talley), his loyal sidekick Chris (Michael Grant Terry), and new recruit Scott (Jake Thomas). The episode devotes a whopping lot of screentime to watching these three rape and terrorize Stephanie, who spends most of the episode sobbing and pleading for her life while blindfolded and handcuffed to a pole in her underwear. Hey, Criminal Minds? Knock it off. We get it -- they’re bad guys. Four weeks ago, we had another episode (“Remembrance of Things Past”) that featured long, indulgent scenes of bound and scantily-clad young women getting tortured, raped, and murdered. Obviously, we need to spend enough time with the unsubs to set up their complicated pack dynamic -- Michael is the primary instigator, with Chris and Scott as more reluctant participants -- but once that’s established, there’s no plot-necessary reason that viewers should see more than one scene of Stephanie being abused. We see several.

Prentiss and Reid hit the strip club where Stephanie worked and interview her coworkers. One stripper defensively asks Reid if he has any problem with her occupation. Vaguely bewildered by the question, Reid replies, “I’m from Las Vegas.” Aw, Reid, never change. The schedule of the killings -- they started in the fall, and the victims are held over weekends -- leads the team to conclude the unsubs are college students.

DNA found on one of the victims is a match to the unidentified culprit in a series of rapes in Louisiana. The team theorizes that the same pack leader -- i.e. Michael -- worked with two different accomplices in Louisiana before killing them both and moving on to Indiana, where he formed his current pack.

It turns out that Chris and Scott were both (somehow) unaware that Michael was murdering the women after each weekend of rape and torture. After seeing a news report on the killings, Scott doesn’t want anything more to do with this, so Michael orders Chris to beat Scott to death with a baseball bat. Chris obeys, thus demonstrating his loyalty to the pack leader.

Scott’s body is found. He’s soon identified as a student at a nearby college. Garcia searches through student records to find any that match the profiles of the two remaining unsubs. The likeliest candidate is Chris, who turns out to be Sheriff Salters’s son, whose extensive juvenile criminal record was sealed and erased by his father.

Hotch confronts Salters about Chris. He accuses Salters of badly abusing Chris as a child, thus making him more inclined to hang out with alpha-male ne’er-do-wells like Michael. I don’t think much of this episode as a whole -- for the most part, it’s well-traveled territory -- but the Hotch-Salters scenes are all pretty bang-on. Hotch, who has an established low tolerance for parents who hit their kids, somehow still manages to treat Salters with compassion, while Salters, beneath his angry bluster, slowly begins to realize that: a) his kid is a bad egg, and b) it might be at least somewhat his own damn fault.

While going through Chris’s school records, the team discovers both Chris and Scott were kicked out of the same fraternity… as was Michael. Having identified the third unsub, they swarm Michael’s place, where they find Michael and Chris holed up with Stephanie.

A huge, messy standoff ensues. Prentiss negotiates with Chris, pointing out that Michael killed his accomplices in Louisiana and was undoubtedly planning on killing him as well. Michael goes to shoot Chris, so Salters shoots and kills Michael. Chris tries to shoot himself in the head, but Salters pegs him in the arm, then arrests him and rescues Stephanie.

Denouement: Hotch gives Salters a few gentle parenting tips (mostly along the lines of “don’t beat your kids, jackass”), then shakes hands with him and jets off into the sunset.
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