Criminal Minds – Recap & Review – Amplification

photo: cbs

Criminal Minds
Amplification

Original Air Date: May 13, 2009

JD – Associate Staff Writer
JD@thetwocentscorp.com

Wow. That’s my one word review right there. Reactions to this episode seem to be all over the map and some have said this episode bored them, but luckily for you guys, I was not one of them. I fell into the opposite end of the spectrum. I was hooked through the whole thing. Even the part of me that thinks Reid has been through enough torture, thank you very much, wasn’t bothered by what happened to him. Well, I was bothered, but in the way that I should be, not in the ‘I’m going to start throwing things at my screen if they don’t stop heaping on the Reid angst’ way.

We jump in this week in Annapolis, Maryland, in your average neighborhood park: children with their parents, teenage boys playing football, girls drooling over said teenage boys. Of course, Criminal Minds won’t let us live in the warm fuzzy place too long, so along comes a faceless bad guy to send white powder off in the wind towards the crowd. By the end of the night, all the happy frolicking people wind up in the hospital coughing up blood. The show has already officially pushed my internal panic button.

Reid, Morgan and Prentiss get called into the BAU to find their bullpen practically flooded with Army and other official types, and head straight for the conference room where JJ gives them the bad news. Twenty-five people were hospitalized from the park the day before and within ten hours of being at the park, the first victim died. The death toll as of the briefing? Twelve.

They are suffering lung failure and black lesions, and Morgan guesses Anthrax. Wrong, Reid says, because Anthrax doesn’t kill that fast. Or maybe it does. Dr. Kimura, the Chief of Special Pathogens at the CDC, says this is a different strain. Hotch tells the team they’ll be working with military scientists from Fort Detrick, and that there’s a media blackout, with which Prentiss is not happy, and they are off… as soon as they all dose themselves with Cipro.

Reid and Dr. Kimura head to the hospital to interview the victims, but first Reid stops by JJ’s office for files, where he thoroughly messes with her head by telling her a seven-month-old baby got hit in the 2001 attacks. Cue JJ’s recent ‘I am a mother and now I react to everything differently’ routine. I get it; it makes perfect sense here and works for the episode, but I’m getting tired of every storyline with a kid involved dragging that in. I get it. Can we move on?

Garcia has a list of the victims. None have high profiles, and the team starts going through the list of potential unsubs: anyone who can profit from the attack and anyone with access to weaponized spores. The General shows up, and isn’t very pleased when Hotch and Rossi imply it could be one of his scientists, but says he’ll get them a list anyway.

Meanwhile, Reid and Dr. Kimura are interviewing one of the girls at the park to see what she remembers. Before they get much from her at all, she starts talking gibberish, and Dr. Kimura puts a stop to the interview. Once she gets Reid out of her room, she tells him several of the other patients had speech disturbances right before they died, and none of the drugs they’re using to treat the infections are working.

Morgan and Prentiss are at the crime scene with Hazmat, where Prentiss is oddly confrontational with the guys cleaning up they scene. They try to work out why the unsub might have chosen that park, but come up with nothing, all while another victim is dying at the hospital.

Talking to Dr. Kimura, Reid has a lightbulb moment, and realizes this couldn’t have been the unsub’s first test with humans. He would have built up from small animals to a small test run on humans, then to this larger attack. We cut back to the BAU, where JJ is freaking out even more. JJ’s expression as she stares out over the bullpen, by the way, gave me chills.

Once Hotch convinces her to do the smart thing, they get Reid on the phone, who gives them his theory about the test runs. He also tells them that two days ago, three people got admitted to local ERs, slipped into comas and died. The cause of death was listed a meningitis, but Reid thinks it might have been a larger dose of the toxin, shutting down their organs before the other symptoms presented themselves. He gives the team the names of the victims and Garcia quickly links two of them together. One victim made a purchase at another victim’s bookstore the day they died, and finally the team has something to work with!

This episode is so packed full of stuff it’s overflowing! I usually like to cut the recaps off before I get to any major spoilers, but I barely scratched the surface here. I guess that just means you all have to see the rest yourselves, which is really the point of why I do it anyway. It just happens that I feel like I’m cheating a little here. You all will live, though, right? I thought so.

Prentiss seemed oddly belligerent this episode, and that bothered me a bit from someone who’s usually so together, but otherwise, I really liked the relationships in this one–the way Hotch dealt with everything by compartmentalizing and getting the job done, how Morgan talked Reid into not quitting once he was infected, JJ asking Garcia if she would break rules to save her family, and Prentiss’ “Don’t Emily me” to Rossi. There was so much to be happy about in this episode when it comes to how the team works together. Reid’s phone call to his mother was a beautiful touch, too, but I am a Diana fan, all the way.

I find it interesting that so many people got on the ‘too much Reid torture’ soap box after this episode, though. If you’ll recall, I was unsure about The Instincts and Memoriam for that very reason. I think the difference, however, is that in those episodes, it was not only all about the Reid torture, but it was extraneous. Reid’s mom unwittingly becoming accessory to murder was extra Reid backstory that was unnecessary angst. In the case of this episode, it was part of the job. Someone had to be in that house to find the cure, and I think Reid was the most logical choice. The Reid storyline also didn’t completely overtake the rest of the episode either. It heightened the tension, but it wasn’t the only tension. I thought it was really very well done.

The very tail end bothered me a little. It was a little trite, and I get what they were trying to do by saving the resolution of the Reid storyline for the last one, but in the process it made everyone else on the team seem strangely uncaring. After all that, no one but Morgan seemed concerned? Huh.

I really enjoyed Amplification a lot, though. It sufficiently freaked me out and gave me panic attacks in the best way. What about you guys? Give me your two cents!