Criminal Minds – Recap & Review – Lauren

photo: cbs

Criminal Minds
Lauren

Original Air Date: Mar 16, 2011

JD – Sr. Staff Writer
jd@thetwocentscorp.com

This is the episode us Criminal Minds fans have been heavily anticipating. The general consensus seems to have been a mix of dread and excitement. What’s going to happen with Prentiss and Ian Doyle? How difficult are they going to make it for Prentiss to come back, should Paget Brewster’s NBC pilot not get picked up? How is JJ going to come into all of this? How awesome is Matthew Gray Gubler going to be directing (again)?

I found myself worried, hoping they were going to do Prentiss’ departure well, and excited at the same time to see JJ, even if it’s our last time. I know I wasn’t alone. We may not have beat out American Idol in last night’s ratings, but we came in a solid second.

So last week, Prentiss walked out of the BAU without telling anyone, in the middle of Hotch giving a profile. We know she’s doing it to protect her team, but the team needs to figure that out. They do it in lightening fast time, too. The names on a list Prentiss gave them all have the initials L. R., then Reid remembers her saying “Lauren Reynolds is dead”, and Hotch discovers she left her gun and badge in her desk. Rossi puts together that Doyle is killing families, and that the team is all Prentiss has (wah!), and bingo! That happened too fast for me to buy it, but I realize there’s a lot of ground to cover in this episode, so I’ll let it slide.

While they do that, Prentiss is out hanging around old haunts, and we get a flashback of her first meeting with Ian Doyle. She met with him wanting to “get into business” with a former IRA Captain named Valhalla. He might know him, he says, and she invites him to have this conversation somewhere more private… which is where the flashback ends as her thoughts are interrupted. Fahey, the guy who introduced her to Doyle, is currently getting kicked out of the bar, and she follows.

Hotch gets the team ready to work the case, telling them they will just have to profile like Doyle is the unsub and Prentiss is the victim, and that he’s brought someone in to help that can shed light on Prentiss’ past. Enter JJ! In spite of the case, I can’t deny that I felt warmed straight through to see her.

That feeling disappeared pretty quick though when we cut back to Prentiss in Fahey’s car with a gun to his head. Fahey’s a rat, and Prentiss wants to know details about Doyle. Apparently he has about 15-20 guys with him, deals with automatic weapons, and still has ties with the IRA, and now the mob. With that info, Prentiss does what she has to to not get caught by Fahey ratting her out. The camera pans out to a wide shot, then BAM!

WOW. What a way to start this episode!

At the BAU, JJ runs down the info on the case, most of which we already know. New info is that Prentiss was part of a team known as JTF-12, which was assembled after 9/11 to profile terrorist. Oh, and the team finds out that Emily was Doyle’s “type”, which answers the question of just how close they got. Rossi and Morgan head to Prentiss’ apartment, where Morgan angsts (understandably) about how he trusted Prentiss, but may have never really knew her, Rossi actually works. He finds Prentiss’ passport, the real one, so she’s not fleeing the country. And it turns out that ring she flushed last episode didn’t quite get flushed.

Rossi says it’s a Gimmal ring, a sort of engagement ring, and that she kept it meant that it meant something to her. The team decides to head to Boston, thinking Prentiss may have gone back to where the Doyle case began.

Flashback number two is next. Doyle’s associates don’t trust Emily, and think Doyle is too blind to see it. And it seems they’re right. We get a little kissy kissy, then Doyle gives her the ring on a chain, because she said she’s not the marrying type. Gee, I wonder why? She accepts the ring, and then he drops the bomb: he is Valhalla. I thought that was really well done, actually. Yes, she was in love with a Bad Guy, but she didn’t know he was THE Bad Guy until it was too late.

The team manages to catch up with Clyde, who is also heading to Boston with a suitcase full of cash. And then we have the most heartbreaking thing ever. Garcia has tracked down an old phone number of Prentiss’ and left a devastated voice mail for her. Hearing Garcia beg Prentiss to come home, or stay alive, and watching Prentiss’ face… I cried. Then I cried again when I watched the episode a second time.

But there’s not much time to dwell when Prentiss spots Doyle’s gang getting into an SUV across the street from the car she’s been sitting in. She quickly assembles an automatic weapon, strides across the street, blasts the SUV, then throws a grenade in the window.

I repeat: She THROWS A FRIGGIN’ GRENADE IN THE SUV. (Okay, yeah, it was a flash grenade, but still!)

Holy crap! That’s insane, and ruthless, and I love it!

One tiny problem, though. When she demands to know where Doyle is from the lucky passengers, he turns out to be right behind her. With a gun. BAM! Prentiss is in trouble now.

Okay, guys, I have to say that I really kind of loved this episode! I love that they kept us on the edge of our seat, torn between being outraged and sympathetic with Prentiss. They would show her doing these horrible things, and then we’d find out later that she either didn’t do them the way we were led to believe, or that she did them for the right reasons.

Her shooting Fahey? Not so much…. Her falling in love with Valhalla? Well, she didn’t really know who he was… Her ”killing an innocent”, as Doyle says? I kinda figured it was a set up, but still, they kept us guessing so much. Even with Clyde, they did. Prentiss didn’t trust him last episode, but he wound up helping the team!

Morgan, of course, is always the doubter and the skeptic, so it made total sense for him to be the one most outwardly upset, and the scene at the end with them in the warehouse was perfect. Now it makes sense why Morgan and Prentiss have been spending so much time together in the build up to this. Not only did it make the “betrayal” more personal to Morgan when he had been trying to reach out to her, but the bottom line about why she did all this is something the both of them have in common: the deep desire to protect children.

We know about Morgan’s history, which explains why he finds it harder to control his emotions when kids are involved in a case. We also know that he connects with kids really well, and we had the whole sub-plot with Ellie in the beginning of the season to underline that. Then we have Prentiss, who still carries tremendous guilt over her abortion at 15, didn’t have a happy childhood herself, and once tried to adopt a teenage girl who was left an orphan (so she thought) at the end of a case. It’s totally in fitting with her character, then, that she did this all to save a kid, and made it okay for Morgan to completely forgive her at the end too. Good thing, too, since he may never speak to her again.

This episode actually makes me feel good about the show, as much as it sucks that Prentiss may not come back. It, at the very least, showed that our writers know how to write someone off of the show WELL when they have warning. Up until now, the departures of casts members have all been sudden and unexpected. This time, they had plenty of time to plan, and they really gave Prentiss a great send off.

Oh, and randomly, Reid sniffing out the hoodrat at Rossi’s prompting was priceless. Also, Seaver actually contributed something useful!

So what did you guys think? Loved it? Hated it? Give me your Two Cents!