That's right, 'The Next Day' is back - in video form! The stars of TheAvod bring the aftermath of prominent horror films to life, or at least audio!

The first installment is 2016's 'The Boy'!

It's another new feature here at Castle Vardulon! Check out the video below in which I take viewers on a journey through one of my favorite Golden Age Comic Stories!

And this isn't one of those mistakes in character, like when Martin forgets an eye colour, or an unreliable narrator like Sansa's kiss - this one is just a mistake.

Here's the relevant text, from the second-last Cersei chapter, from the torture of the Blue Bard (real name Wat)-
"His father had been a chandler and Wat was raised to that trade, but as a boy he found he had more skill at making lutes than barrels."

A chandler doesn't make barrels - chandlers make candles. It's coopers who are responsible for barrels.  I can't imagine any way this could be a code or something otherwise meaningful, so it looks like it's just something which slipped by Martin and his various editors.

So anyway, this happened on this week's TheAvod-


So that was fun.

Sorry for the absence - I'll be back soon with more videos!

Check back this weekend for another 'The Next Day', and next week for a new video project!

That's right, it's another episode of The Next Day! And this time, it's also a movie called 'The Boy', which I agree is a little weird!

Enjoy!


Next time, a movie not called The Boy!

Yeah, I'm a little fixated on those books.

Yup, I'm gradually learning more and more about this whole theory video thing - this time it's about Gilmore Girls - specifically Lorelei's bad habit of drinking and driving!

Enjoy!

Cover:

Worst Story: Inferno – I can’t stress enough how unmotivated the villains are in this strip. Why can’t they see that they’re putting their entire syndicate in jeapordy by continually trying to kill people who are no threat to them?

If you enjoyed the Blair Witch review on TheAvod, you may like this video, now fully realized as it was promised last October!

Enjoy!

Cover:

So that’s not a great cover, is it? I’m not sure exactly where I’m supposed to put this review – it’s the ‘1978 Annual’, but the publication date is in 1977. In addition to this a glance at the table of contents reveals that it contains a ‘Harlem Heroes’ story, as opposed to an ‘Inferno’ one. Still, I’m going to slot it here, at the beginning of 1978, and hope that next time we hit a ‘special’ or ‘annual’ there’s a more acurate date somewhere on the thing.


Thrill 1 – Dan Dare

I’m not sure exactly when this story is set – the art suggests Belardinelli, though-

-so I’m going to guess this is after he defeated the Biogs. Which means there might well be a flashback to his beloved living axe, including more than a few tears.

Dan, currently the captain of the patrol ship ‘Orion’ is dispatched to intercept the ‘Andromeda’, which is speeding out of control on a collision course with Earth! After a daring mid-space transfer (which it seems like wouldn’t work at near-light speeds) Dan climbs into the runaway ship and discovers the crew is entirely ‘dead as a Dwarf Star’! Which is a misleading term, since Dwarf Stars are dying, and not actually dead.

Dan diverts the shape away from Earth’s atmosphere Dan discovers he’s got an even bigger problem to deal with: not only are there globs of living slime attacking Dan, but the ship’s clocks are running backwards, which somehow leads to this:

Dan quickly surmises that the ship has been pulled through a wormhole, and the Andromeda quickly sets down in a city next to a volcano. There Dan finds that Mytax, the galaxy’s most evil slave trader, has survived his execution through the timely intervention of Solan, a green space-demon.

For reasons that go unexplained this all-powerful space monster who can generate wormholes with his mind has decided to team up with Mytax, and the two of them send Dan to be sacrificed to the Scar-Ag, a giant spider monster. Dan quickly dispatches it, then confronts Solan, revealing that he’s figured out the source of the green monster’s power.

Logical deduction convinces Dan that Solan and Mytax couldn’t possibly have built an entire city next to a volcano in the six months since Mytax was rescued from his execution, even with an army of slave labour, which they had access to. Confronted with this truth, everyone realizes that Solan was just hypnotizing them, and the city disappears!

Okay, now I’m confused – the planet is real, Mytax is real, the primitive people are real, and even the spider-monster is real… it’s only the city that was fake? How could Dan possibly know this? After all, Solan actually did have the power to move ships across the cosmos, he also lives in a star and flies through space on green wings… but building a city in six months is a stretch?

So how can Dan resolve this situation? By using the same Deus Ex Machina that was featured in the Star Trek episode that story was ripped off of. That’s right, Solan’s dad shows up.

Solan and his Dad fly away into space after teleporting Dan and his ship back to Earth. And Mytax? Dan tosses him to another one of the Scar-Ags, to be horribly devoured by the monster.

The end.

Wait, hold on a second there – how did the slime get onto the Andromeda? Why did Solan grab that particular ship? Why did he team up with an evil slaver?

Man, this was a confusing rip off of a story. But hey, a hell of a lot happened in ten pages, so that’s something.


Thrill 2 – Invasion

This week’s story is called ‘Tank Trap’ and, unsurprisingly, involves Silk and Savage capturing a tank. Some oppressed Britons are protesting the lack of Volgan rations, and a few tanks roll into Wembley to quash the uprising. The Mad Dogs wait for a Nazi tank to get close to a window and jump down into it, then use the captured tank to kill one of the Volgan-operated ones!

A third tank opens fire on Savage, though, forcing him and Silk into the sewers to escape. The fate of the protesters at the hands of the now-angered Volgs goes un-commented-on. The Mad Dogs head back to the Isle of Dogs to meet with the Brigadier, a location and character that we haven’t seen in months and months.

Which is kind of a pity, since the Brig has a plan that might actually harm the Volgan war machine, as opposed to just a few of their soldiers. He suggests that the Mad Dogs make a frogman attack on the supertanker that the Volgs are using to ship refined fuel around the country – this will somehow also destroy the refinery that they’re using to run their British War Machine!

It’s unclear how the two things are connected, but sure enough, after Bill has killed some divers and planted the limpet mines successfully-

The refinery is in flames behind him. For no reason.

Hey, remember when Bill used to talk about his dead family? Seems so long ago now, doesn’t it?

Thrill 3 – Hunted

The third feature in the Annual is a quick shock about an adorable biped alien who wakes in a strange forest full of bizarre creatures – and quickly realizes that, as the title would suggest, he’s being ‘hunted’ by people with rifles! The story is notable primarily for having been drawn by Kevin O’Neill-

He gets caught in a leg trap and menaced by a spider the likes of which he’s never seen, all the while dodging rifle shots! Then he runs over a hill and discovers-

(TAKE A MOMENT TO GUESS THE TWIST ENDING)

(HAVE YOU TAKEN THAT MOMENT?)

(GOOD. OKAY, HERE GOES-)

A glass wall looking out into space! And then he gets shot to death! That’s right, the animal was kidnapped from his own world and brought onto a space station for a caged hunt, the fiends!

Just in case you missed the message of the story the last panel is of Tharg looking crossly at the audience, announcing that if humans want to avoid this terrifying future, they’d better start taking care of the animals on their own planet!

Ah, heavy-handed moralizing. That’s what we go to sci-fi for.

Thrill 4 – MACH 1

Probe’s headed out to Salisbury plain, where, according to fiction I’ve seen, is where the British Military does its military testing. Unfortunately the Brits aren’t the only ones doing testing today, as a couple of sinister figures train a sci-fi cannon at Probe as he plummets from the sky!

Wait, plummets? Why is Probe skydiving to get to the testing range? Oh, right, so that he can get hit with a knockout ray! The villains didn’t count on Probe being able to survive a low-opening drop, though, and the men on the ground don’t see their highest-tech agent malfunctioning just as he arrives at the site of their top-secret weapons test as something worth investigating, so they merely bring Probe over to look at the new missile they’ve invented.

Which is just what the villains were planning on, since their ray isn’t designed just to knock Probe out, but rather control him! The suddenly-brainwashed Probe grabs the missile and runs over to the evil van, which is parked surprisingly close by. After being delivered the missile they try to use their laser to short-circuit Probe permanently – but that proves a poor substitute for a bullet, since the pain the laser causes leads the MACH Man to smash the very computer that was controlling it!

Suddenly free to kill his enemies, Probe proceeds to do the most bad-ass thing I’ve seen the guy do in a year’s worth of stories. When the villains fire the high-tech missile at some pursuing tanks Probe snatches the Missile out of the air, spins it around-

And cooks the baddies with its exhaust! Yeah!

There are two wrapup panels, but after that image, who really cares?

Thrill 5 – Harlem Heroes

So yeah, it’s about Aeroball, the least interesting futuresport to have ever had a comic written about it! And in keeping with my continued disinterest in the story and sport, I’m going to make this my briefest review ever (unless something interesting… yeah, as if).

The Heroes are in Berlin, playing an exhibition game against the ‘Blitzkriegs’, because in the future people aren’t so sensitive about that whole ‘Nazi’ thing any more. So it’s a question of whether the Heroes’ fancy flying can defeat the Blitzkriegers’ brute force… it can.

The End.

Seriously, there were no twists, no robots, no magic, nothing unexpected. Just the Heroes using some unclear tactics to win a forgone conclusion in a game with no stakes.

Thanks, 2000AD.

Thrill 6 – End of Voyage

Are you ready for another twist-shock? I hope so, because that’s what’s happening right now. Wyatt is a successful yachtsman on a charter from Auckland to Tahiti when he draws too close to an Atoll being used as a nuclear test site! He’s the sole survivor of his boat, but unfortunately exposure to radiation has caused him to lose all the hair on his body.

Seriously. That’s the only medical effect he suffers.

Anyhoo, a year later he’s the favorite to win a trans-atlantic boat race – it seems he’s so terrified of being near another nuclear blast that he spends as much time at sea as possible. Which proves to be a good choice, since, during the race, he hears news on the short-wave that World War 3 is about to break out! He angrily tosses the radio overboard and immediately regrets the decision, since now he won’t know if the world has been destroyed before he reaches New York.

Wyatt’s fears are allayed when he finally arrives at his destination and finds that the Statue of Liberty is intact. But then…

(TAKE A MOMENT TO GUESS THE TWIST ENDING…)

(HAVE YOU LOCKED IN YOUR GUESSES?)

(OKAY THEN, HERE WE GO!)

New York is destroyed by a nuclear bomb just after he arrives! Oh, Wyatt, you just can’t win, can you?

Thrill 7 – The Dream Machine

It seems the science has invented a machine that can read dreams, and invited one ‘Mike Clayton’, the smartest man in the UK to be hooked up to it.

Then the most confusing story in the history of comics happens. I’ll try to explain.

Mike dreams that he’s a spaceman who goes back in time and teaches the Neanderthals about fire and science. In detail, over five pages. Here’s where things get confusing. It’s a dream machine he’s hooked up to. The screen is showing things that his mind is creating, and yet-

That’s right. They’re acting like Mike is actually back in time, they’re seeing what life was really like, and that his decisions will effect the world. Hell, one of the scientist thinks the idea of neanderthals worshipping Mike as a god is so blasphemous that he tries to destroy the machine!

Again, pal, it’s just a dream he’s having.

So after the mishegoss has died down they hook Mike up to the machine again, and this time he dreams about taking a spaceship out past the edge of the universe, to discover what’s ‘outside space’. The scientists are incredibly excited about discovering what’s out there despite the fact that, again, this is just what the smartest man in the UK thinks is out there.

Although I really did like the dialogue in this one panel.

Somehow having a dream about the edge of the universe causes Mike to dematerialize, which makes the screen show something horrifying for just long enough for the realization of it to kill the head scientist before the whole thing explodes.

Despite the fact that I liked the last moment going all Lovecrafty, I can’t forgive this story’s basic lack of understanding of what a dream is.

Thrill 8 – Judge Dredd

God, finally. Let’s see what Joe’s up to, huh?

Apparently he’s at a meeting of judges when one of them goes nuts and shoots up the place before Dredd can blast the hell out of him. It seems that Judge ‘Steele’ received a vid-phone call earlier that day which contained a hypnotic message driving him to kill!

Until they can figure out who’s sending the messages Judges are under strict orders not to answer their phones, so Dredd heads back to his apartment, which is apparently #43021 in ‘Complex Omega’ – a fun piece of trivia, but one that I’m sure will be revised really, really soon.

Not one to just sit around doing nothing, Dredd calls the vid-line operator and sets up a really obvious trap. He taps the phone line and sets up a hologram to stand in front of it. So while the hologram acts like its mind is being controlled, Dredd drives over to the source of the call, where the killer, an eyepatch wheelchair guy, proves to be ready to defend himself.

Which, due to a printing error, is apparently in 3D. Dredd uses a loose wire to eletrocute the killer, and the day is saved! Oh, and for people who care about motives, Salty McWheels was killing judges because a judge crippled him.

Judge Dredd Kill Count (42)+2=44

Thrill 9 – MACH 1: Operation Hercules

It’s time for a story about that most ‘70s of crimes: The airline hijacking! Golan sepratists have kidnapped a French airliner and are demanding the release of terrorist prisoners in exchange for their release! There’s only one man who can save them: John Probe!

Probe skydives for the second time this annual, then quickly infiltrates the airport where the prisoners are conveniently being held. I say conveniently because that means the French can land their ‘Hercules’ (Hey, that’s the title!) military transports within fifty yards of the people they need to rescue. That’s going to save some time.

After gunning down the guards Probe escorts the hostages to the waiting transport, then finally has to use his powers in an interesting way for the first time in the story. How does he do it? When one of the hostages is shot in the foot Probe has to hoist the man onto his shoulders and then run after the departing plane, jumping up into it at the last possible minute!

Is it clinging to a pontoon while a guy shoots at you from the cockpit? No, but it’s pretty good action all the same. Not bad, MACH Man.

Thrill 10 – The Buffalo Hunt

Now here’s how you surprise people with a story: The title in no way gives out the story’s biggest surprise. At first glance it just seems to be about American Natives in the year 1820, hunting buffalo for their dinner. The twist happens quickly when, just after a Brave downs a buffalo, he marvels at the sight of it disappearing into the ether!

What happened to the buffalo? It was sucked into the future by the trans-time corporation! That’s right, this is a ‘Flesh’ story! Wow, and I thought we’d seen the end of that particular story, but here it comes again – and better yet, it’s a prequel that lets us get a glimpse at just why Earl Reagan has such a problem with Claw Carver!

It seems that the TTC has a brilliant plan for selling some truly high-end meat to the discerning consumer – steal buffalos from the (comparitively) recent past and jack the price up into the stratosphere! Earl sees a couple of problems with the plan – after all, the whole dinosaur thing happened so long ago that the likelihood of it butterfly-effecting anyone was pretty long (unless you take the word of the short story ‘The Butterfly Effect’, which was actually titled ‘A Sound of Thunder’), going back to the time when humans were walking around and writing down instances in which they saw future humans kidnapping buffalo might well lead to unfortunate paradoxes. Ensuring that things can’t possibly go badly on the mission, Earl is instructed to bring Claw Carver along with him – this is Claw after getting the talon on his hand, but before quitting to start his own trading post.

Making a surprisingly abrupt 180 in his principles, the moment that Earl gets back in time he decides to investigate a nearby campfire, bascially ensuring that he’ll immediately run into the very people he’s supposed to be avoiding.

Yup, tossing aside the concept of non-interference, Earl beats up some cowboys, helps them fight off some indians, then uses ray guns to kill a few people while the ancient people look on. Obviously the Indians are none too happy about this.

White eyes? Seriously?

Earl and company lay down a transmission field around their kills, abandoning the cowboys to be slaughtered by the injuns now that they’ve gotten what they came for. Back in the future the Controller (the future one, not the big-brain guy who fell into the machine that time) is happy with the results of their mission, and reveals how he knew they were going to be successful-

That’s right, they live in a predestined universe, where this has all already happened, and the illusion of free will has been forever pierced.

Sadly, because they’re all just bit players in a drama written by the hand of god some billennia ago, they don’t react to this new information the way they ought to – immediate suicide in the face of the meaninglessness of their life’s endeavours.

The most disappointing thing about this story? We still don’t know why Earl hates Claw so much. At the outset he was already pissed to have been teamed up with him.

Maybe we’ll get another flashback?

Thrill 11 – The Monsters

Yup, it’s future shock time again! In this one a farmer and his young son in a weird future world see news on the television that aliens are landing! Then one of the aliens knocks on the door of their house, so they immediately shoot it for no reason! They’re disgusted by the sight of weird fluids leaking out of the corpse, then shocked when a second alien arrives, kind of pissed off that these farmers just murdered his pal for no reason, he shoots the dad, but catches a bullet at the same moment, revealing the big twist…

(OBLIGATORY SPOILER SPACE FOR THOSE LOOKING TO GUESS THE ENDING)

(IT’S A REALLY EASY ONE THIS TIME)

(SERIOUSLY, JUST GO AHEAD AND GUESS)

The ‘aliens’ are humans, and the farmers are robots on a bizarre alien planet where they speak English for no reason! And also build child robots for absolutely no reason!

Thrill 12 – White Fury

Are you ready to glimpse a return into the world of Shako? Because I sure am. Here’s the best part: It’s an origin story!

Yup, that adorable little cub sitting timidly on an ice block while his mother swims nearby will one day grow up to be Shako, nature’s most efficient killing machine!

But how did he become a Shako? Well I’ll tell you for how: While his mother was teaching him to swim an ice breaker happened by, and one of those contemptible humans shot Mama for no no reason but sheer boredom! Which leads to this heartbreaking scene-

This is just like Bambi, if Bambi had sought immediate and brutal revenge on the hunter that killed his mom. The hunters close to finish off Shako and skin Mama, but the little guy’s having none of that – he sinks his teeth into one of the hunters’ legs, causing him to fall and accidentally shoot his buddy!

In the fracas Shako escapes, but now he’s just one bear cub, all alone against the world! How shall he survive? By hunting seal, of course. His first foray into hunting goes about as badly as it possibly could, though-

Miraculously Shako manages to turn the fight around, tricking the Orca into beaching itself on the ice, then slashing it until it bleeds to death. So the first thing he ever killed was a killer whale. That’s actually pretty hardcore, Shako.

I’ve missed you.

But Shako can’t enjoy the meal for long, as he’s been found by the second hunter and his eskimo guide. The hunter’s rifle jams at an inopportune moment though, giving Shako a chance to claw the eyes out of his head. Things get even more brutal when he bites out the eskimo’s throat, and then-

Yikes. Remind me to never, ever go near a polar bear. Shako’s not done with the humans yet, though – he waits by the bodies for their friends to arrive, then follows the party as they carry the bodies back to the icrbreaker. Which is considerably more planning than I’d expect from a polar bear, but hey, it’s Shako.

While the humans are busy preparing to set sail Shako sneaks below decks and slaughters the two men in the engine room, ensuring that the ship would never be able to free itself from the ice. In point of fact the ice murders the ship a moment later, freezing so fast that it crushes holes into the hull! Shako escapes through one of these as the ship sinks into the freezing arctic sea, taking all hands with it.

So that’s the origin of Shako. I’ve got to say, I wasn’t disappointed. This wasn’t something I ever expected to read, and while it had a little of the sloppy ‘No, here’s an even earlier awesome thing that character did’ writing that plagues these stories, attempting to give Shako more of a motive for hating humans than he needed, I enjoyed the hell of the strip’s writer’s continued insistence on not really anthropomorphizing that big lug at all.

Thrill 13 – Judge Dredd

Speaking of returns I never thought we’d see, this second Dredd story has something to do with ‘Whitey’, the Judge-Killer from the very first Dredd story!

Dredd is headed out to investigate some UFOs, and finds a series of hoverpods that can use disrupters to crumble whatever it is those Mega-City 1 skyways are made of! After narrowly avoiding a fatal plummet Dredd hears the hoverbots’ request – they want Whitey sprung from prison and four million credits! In order to prove they’re serious they make something… unfortunate happen.

So… yeah. We all saw that. Let’s move on.

Faced with total destruction of the city if they refuse the Judges have no choice but to deliver Whitey into the hands of his elder brother, a particle physicist. Who I’m guessing was the white sheep of the family until just now.

Sadly for the Whitey brothers this reunion is just what Dredd had in mind. Big Whitey thought that his impenetrable armored silicone shell would protect him, but he didn’t count on Dredd using his own disruptor ray against him! With Big Whitey disintegrated to death all that’s left to do is drop Whitey back off on Devil’s Island, to await his inevitable next escape.

Judge Dredd Kill Count (44)+1=45

Thrill 14 – The Symbiote

Yes, we’re back to the future shocks – but this one seems more promising than the last few, so give it a chance, huh? Marko and Cora are space-theives, introduced killing crew members as they steal a space-ship! They blast off, but are quickly caputred by the space-cops when their Symbiote pilot informs on them!

Quick note – I wrote symbiote because that’s the title of the story and the term they use, even though what they’re talking about – a dude’s brain being hooked up to a computer body – is actually a cyborg. Which is the term we’ll be using from now on.

Speaking of cyborgs, after being quickly tried both Cora and Marko are sentenced to become cyborgs! Ironic, huh? But that’s not your twist ending. No, we witness Marko being hooked into a space-cop patrol ship, and learning to pilot it under threat of having the pain centres of his brain activated by remote control.

Then, on his very first mission out Marko is dispatched to stop a smuggler attempting to flee sector 43. He fires a shot into the cockpit, killing the pilot-

(YEAH, I DON’T REALLY NEED TO EVEN PRETEND YOU DIDN’T GUESS THIS TWIST, DO I?)

Turns out to be his girlfriend Cory!

Oh, tragedy, thy name is Future Shocks.

Thrill 15 – Death Bug

Last story folks – kudos to those of you who made it to the end! This one concerns a group of ‘death bugs’ that attack Salvation City, California. Although with a name like that, they were just asking for this kind of thing.

Yup, that’s them. They’re introduced when they kill a picnicing family’s dog, and we next see them in the lab of doctor Huxley, who announces that they’re likely mutant bed bugs that the government engineered to attack the Viet Cong in their tunnel systems!

It isn’t long before the death bugs are besieging the town, held back only by a wall of fire that the doctor creates with the help of a conveniently-located gasoline truck. It seems the bugs aren’t smart or skilled enough to simply fly over the wall of fire, and with the careful application of a flaming tanker into their midst, doctor Huxley is able to save the day!

The End.

Yeah, I know that’s a really glossed-over review, but what do you want? Bugs show up, they get set on fire. It’s not exactly Cyrano. Sure, there’s a subplot about a criminal being transported through town who has to be rescued when his car crashes in a bug attack, but after the rescue the character is never seen again, and the plot doesn’t come to anything, so what’s the point? You know, you could have used those pages to let us know where the bugs came from (the vietnam thing was just a guess by the characters).

Just saying.

Final Thoughts

Best Story: Shako – I didn’t realize how much I missed the little guy until I had him back. And now I’m probably never going to see him again. Please excuse me while I tear up a little.

(Although this story kind of played with continuity - in the first Shako story, he didn't know if people were edible because he'd never eaten one before. Ahem. Who knows, maybe he'd forgotten?)

Worst Story: Death Bug – I’m only calling it the worst story because the other bad stories were so forgettable that they’ve already slipped from my mind. Oh, except for the Harlem Heroes. Maybe that’s the worst one? No, I’m sticking with Death Bug, the most perfunctory killer animal story I’ve ever encountered.

That's right, Count Vardulon has created a Quiz to test how well you know Last Week Tonight - take it, if you dare!

Watching the first two seasons of Narcos, I was amazed by just how many ways you can translate the curse 'Hijo Di Puta'. This video is the logical outgrowth of that fascination!

Sorry about all the swearing, but this really did make me curious!

The episode opens on a schoolbus, in which a bunch of teenagers are preoccupied with teenage things. Flirting, video games, plans for the upcoming winter formal, because in America I guess there's like two proms a year?

The school bus is waved down by a red-haired gent next to a range rover, and I immediately have to stop and question this whole setup.



That a limited-access, six lane divided highway. The fact that there's a schoolbus full of kids on it means that this is either 7:45AM or 3:45PM. How on earth could there be a road that huge anywhere in America at those times of day so empty that a guy can literally stop in the middle of the road (he's not pulled over to the shoulder or anything) and no one has stopped or called the authorities? Did he get there and pull out just five seconds earlier? Wouldn't that mean he had to blast passed the bus at something like twice the speed limit? And if he did, how could he know that another car wouldn't pass the bus and spot him?

What I'm saying is, whatever he's planning to do, this is the worst possible way to start it off.

Because everyone's awful at their job, the bus driver and teacher (maybe it's a middle-of-the-day field trip? In any case, there's still no excuse for the empty road.) decide not to call roadside assistance, or find it suspicious that a guy who possibly ran out of gas stopped in the middle of the road. The bus driver thinks it might be a flat tire, and says they shouldn't call the cops, but that's insane, because a car in the middle of the road is a huge safety hazard that has to be dealt with immediately. Also, you can tell if a car has a flat tire by looking at it.

Once the bus driver opens the door - are they not told that they should never do this? You can just have the guy come around to the window if you want to talk to him - a second guy runs out of the woods and shoots the driver in the leg, then threatens the passengers to not use their cell phones. Ominously, both men are now wearing gas masks! Although the shooter has long, unkempt hair that suggests that he's pretty young.

Of to Quantico, where Penelope runs into Xander, then avoids some kind of an awkward conversation with him by dragging him into the war room! They need all the help they can get to deal with this abduction!

The team is running down the facts for a couple of featured extras-



And before I get to the actual briefing, can we just comment on how weirdly lazy the costuming has gotten on the show? Why does that guy have a badge and gun on his hip? The badge type suggests that he's a DC cop, so it's odd that he's here for a briefing, and why on earth does he have his gun on him? They don't let you keep those in federal buildings. If he works there it would be locked away with his stuff, if he's a visitor it would be downstairs in the gun lockers. Were they that afraid we wouldn't know he was law enforcement just based on context?

So, the abduction happened in the DC area at 1PM, so yeah, the lack of traffic is completely insane/inexcusable. The bus has disappeared completely, with helicopters and patrol cars being completely unable to find it! Also, they've apparently called every phone on the bus and nobody answered... shouldn't they have found out that all of the phones had their batteries removed? Because unless the villains took that step, wouldn't they have been found already?

They also mention that the kids dropped off at the first two stops got home just fine, so I guess this was the regular bus home? At 1PM? I mean, I know I've been out of high school for a long time, but do teens normally go home at 1PM?

Credits!


We get a fill-in for the standard plane briefing as the team races to the scene in their SUVs! Which means the briefing has to happen over cell phones with speakers on them, because apparently their FBI SUVs can't sync phones? Maybe it's a data security thing.

They try to guess why a particular bus was targeted, but it's just random theorizing at this point, since they have no information. All of the cell phones are accounted for, though, tossed out a window in a backpack, it seems. No one mentions how weird it is that a bus was stopped long enough for a bunch of criminals to subdue a bunch of teens and two adults, but I think that's mostly because the writers were hoping we wouldn't notice. It's honestly weird that they couldn't find a rural road to set this scene on. Would have made so much more sense.

Turns out the bus driver had a record of altercations with teens, and the lady on the bus was a monitor assigned to that particular route... but why? We'll find out soon, I'm sure.

Meanwhile, the teens have been shoved into a panel truck, and had tracking necklaces put on. Weird.

Over at the high school, the team is spending their incredibly valuable time interviewing the parents of the missing kids. Which seems like something the local police could do. Although, at this point I'm not sure what the team really has to offer. They have zero evidence to start basing their wild jumps to conclusion on.

Penelope and Xander work the tech angle, and find a photo taken during the kidnapping! It's just of the girl's face, though, so I don't know how much help it's going to be. Maybe a reflection in her eye?

6:50 case reference

Over at the crime scene, Reid and Jeanne try to do a little backfill, explaining that this is the best part of the highway to abduct people, since there's no buildings at the sides of the road to notice them. Of course, it's still a highway, and presumably other cars than school buses drive on it. More importantly, why are they out here at all? They're not at the place where the bus was stopped - they've stated that they have no good idea where that is, so what's this random bit of highway they've chosen to get out and walk around on? The place where the cell phones were found?

Or maybe they've just gone to the place where the bus was when its GPS shut off, which would be a pretty logical move, although I have no idea what profilers could possibly do out there. It's not like they're good at picking up traces of tire tracks or identifying leaking vehicle fluids.

Greg interviews a school functionary about the bus driver, and she assures him that there's nothing suspicious about him driving even after getting a reprimand - after all, he'd completed behaviour classes! Then before Greg can finish asking if the driver is the one who was being monitored, or if it was a troublesome student (how was that not his first question?) a cop comes in and announces that they've found a body!

So who is it, the driver or the monitor? Probably the driver, right? He's already been shot, and all.

It is the bus driver, of course. Joe starts off the scene with some nonsense dialogue about him being shot twice, a 'clean' shot in the leg, and another in the chest. The cop wonders they they didn't go for the 'kill shot' first, and Greg explains that they probably still needed him to drive the bus.

Um... okay, first off, I'm not sure what a 'clean' shot is, as opposed to a 'dirty' one, that just sounds like nonsense. More importantly, though, shooting someone in the leg and then asking them to keep driving a bus is a terrible idea. Legs bleed a lot, and both of them are vitally necessary to drive a bus of that size. Honestly, the leg shot makes no sense whatsover, except for adding drama to the opening scene.

Then they discuss the possibility that the two unsubs split duties - with one keeping a gun on the driver so he'd take them where they wanted to go, while another managed the kids. No one's asking the big question, though: what happened to the killers' car? They couldn't have walked out there - it's the middle of nowhere, and a bus driver wouldn't have stopped without radioing it in had a couple of teens in masks just been standing out in the middle of the road. If both killers were in the bus, as they're assuming, where's the third member of the gang who got rid of the car, and why isn't that a priority?

Then Penelope pops in with new info - the truck's GPS wasn't turned off, just masked! And she descrambled it! Now they can find the barn where the truck has been hidden? Gotta ask, though, the killers had the expertise necessary to 'scramble' a GPS signal, but not the skills to just cut the wires going to it?

The team goes in along with SWAT to check out the barn, because they want to make the SWAT people feel redundant, and then bloodhounds track most of the teens to an outbuilding! They're all fine, but ten are still missing! Joe and Greg wonder why so many were left behind. Joe exclaims that if it were a 'child trafficking ring' they would have taken everyone, no matter the risk!

So, fun fact, that's not a thing that exists. Are children trafficked? Sure, absolutely. Are entire busloads of kids from middle-class suburban America stolen to be enslaved? No, and that's such an insane suggestion it shouldn't have even been mentioned.

I have a question before we move on, though - why did they dump the bus driver before they got to the barn? That's when they were taking everyone out of the bus anyway, right? So why not just wait and do it then? Maybe he died from blood loss while still in the bus, but isn't pulling over to dump out the body a huge risk while you're on a timeline? Especially since they didn't just kick him out into a ditch, but instead dragged him off the road into a copse of trees. There's not even a clear story reason for this, as finding the body didn't give the team any clues or lead them anywhere.

Over to the remaining kindapees, who are being brought into a bunker! They're the necklace ones, BTW. The two young kidnappers - who now have their masks off, and they never actually used gas, so that was a weird choice on their parts - rough one of the teens up and toss everyone into a dark room.

All of the teens are placed into a giant cage, with earpieces on. Time for some kind of social experiment, I guess, where they're forced to compete in order to survive? Although the show already did that way, way back in one of their SAW episodes with the kidnapped cheerleaders, and then again in the kidnapped family who fail to be perfect episode, so it would be a weird well to go back to a third time.

After shocking them to prove dominance, the killers send a boy and a girl out to 'play a game', because apparently these guys are gamers who've grown bored torturing virtual victims? What form will these games take, I wonder?

Back at the farm, Jeanne is trying to interview a girl about the abduction, getting the details we already saw. One new detail? When all the teens were lined up, the killers each picked five, like they were building teams!

Note that in no part of this sequence does Jeanne use her doctorate of linguistics to figure out anything about the killers. She doesn't even ask what they sounded like. Thanks, Jeanne.

The two teens who've been picked to be the first players are led into a dark tunnel, where they find a set of flashlights! Um... good? Each killer is 'controlling' a different teen, ordering them to do things via earpiece, and after leading them down a tunnel and promising they're going to be set free if they can get through, the killers split them up.

Back at the school some parents are happy, some are sad, and they're still not following up on why that monitor was on the bus. Was she really just their for the driver? That would be incredibly anticlimactic.

While the team is talking about the details of the case, trying to figure out the significance of kidnapping a select group, Joe realizes something - the details of the case are eerily similar to a video game he's familiar with: Gods of Combat! Joe explains the rules of the game - players kidnap people from public transportation, then make teams of five and have them fight to the death.

This sounds like a terrible video game.

The real-life version of it isn't proving to be very compelling, either, as one of the teens gets freaked out by a rat, and then stumbles across the monitor's body. Isn't this supposed to be a battle royale type of situation?

Over at the school, Greg wins this week's Prentiss award for stupidest thing said by an FBI agent:



You're worried that there will be copycats? You're worried that other people obsessed with a videogame will go on a high-tech kidnapping and murder spree in the most preposterous way possible? What is wrong with you, Greg?

Then we get a scene of the team blaming video games for the crime, so let's not bother recapping that, okay?

In a great moment where the people who make Criminal Minds reveal that their knowledge of videogames is largely superficial, Penelope announces that she just got off the phone with the people who 'produce' Gods of Combat. No, Penelope, TV shows are produced. Video games are developed, published, or if neither of those sound right to you, 'made'. Nice try, though.

They do make one solid observation, though - anyone crazy enough to murder a bunch of people to get their game going in real life were probably big enough jerks to be banned from the actual game online. Nice catch, team!

The teens are led into a room where they're told to find guns and shoot the other one if they want to escape. In a massively unfair twist, the boy has to actually assemble a stripped gun, while the girl just has to load hers. Again, this seems like a pretty bad game.

So with one guy dead, the next player is brought into the killing field! It's girl! A guy tries to do the decent thing and volunteer to take her place, so the killer whose player won the last round shoots her? Um... what? The other player is understandably upset, since his opponent has just stolen twenty percent of his roster, but they keep playing anyway, instead of the annoyed killer doing the only logical thing and demanding to have one of the cheating killer's players reassigned.

Back at base, Xander and Penelope have tracked down two guys who were banned on the same day! And they have the same IP address, so they're probably roommates or related! Also, they should be able to get IDs on these guys like right away. Gods of Combat is an Xbox game, so that means they had easily checkable XBL accounts with credit cards and physical addresses attached to them! Looks like Penelope is going to get the job done again this week!

Yup, she immediately finds out who they are, although weirdly they pretend like it's necessary to gain some insight into their personality to do so. There's a spiel about how at different times of the year they'd be playing at one IP address, but at other times they'd be on opposite sides of the country. Apparently guessing that their parents were divorced was all it took for Penelope to find their names - although, again, their Microsoft Gamertags should have handled that without any trouble at all. But hey, we've got to pretend that the rest of the team is there for a reason, right?

There's more tsuris with the teens being forced to shoot each other, but I don't care, so let's move on.

A search of the brothers' house reveals that the killers just left the game running on their console when they went out to murder people - which is a great way to brick your XB360, in case you're wondering. Then we get a patented 'jump to conclusion', where Greg asks why they'd have wireless headsets-



When they play the game sitting right next to each other on a couch. Joe comes back with 'it's what they're using to communicate with their players'.

So... yeah... first off, it's not, because they left them right there in the house. You're holding them in your hands, so obviously they're not using them for that. Also, they don't just play with each other. It's an online game, and those earpieces are the things you need in order to scream profanities at people over the internet. I thought you were a gamer, Joe, how do you not know that?

Armed with the supposition that they're using radio signals to contact their players, and that the game is being played in some kind of urban area, Penelope searches for low-frequency radio signals until she finds a bunch of them in an abandoned papermill!

Again, it's like there are six superfluous people on the team, and all of them are profilers.

Penelope hacks into the radio signal and starts talking to the one of the players, trying to get them to stop killing each other and wait for the authorities to arrive. In the killers' den, the losing killer pulls a gun on the cheater, assuming that his inability to talk to his player is another one of the cheater's underhanded tricks. Which is a pretty fair assumption, actually. I mean, he's wrong, but it's understandable how he got there.

Eventually they figure out that the cops are on the way, so the two killers grab assault rifles and prepare for their arrival. If by, prepare for their arrival, you mean go out into the maze and try to kill a specific one of the players, and then not do it when you have the chance, so that the team has time to come and rescue her.

So yeah, pretty bad at planning, these guys.

Then there's a ludicrous scene where the boy Penelope was communicating with comes across two armed guys in FBI vests and doesn't immediately fall on his knees and thank them for rescuing him.



It's especially preposterous because this guy knows that there are only two criminals, both of whom are white guys in their twenties, and Penelope has already specifically told him that the FBI about to bust in and save the day - but he's still dumb enough to suggest that this could all be 'part of the game'.

Um... the game is about making you and your friends kill each other. It's not about having two fake FBI
agents come in and - instead of just shooting you - ask you to put your gun down. Idiot.

But then Derek gets to shoot the other killer to death, so we ended up with half a happy ending!

Wrapup! Penelope asks Xander out for a drink so they can talk, but he's already got plans! Can't those two crazy kids just get back together already?

1 - Was profiling in any way helpful in solving the crime?

Kind of! Making the logical inference that people this mentally damaged would have been booted from the game was a good catch, and it helped them solve the case! Then again, the whole way they solved it was based on Joe coincidentally knowing about this terrible online shooter, which was pretty contrived, so I can only offer partial points.

2 - Could the crime have been solved just as easily using conventional police methods given the known facts of the case?

Well, since the plan revolved around not being spotted on a highway in the middle of the day, I have to assume real cops would have been able to track them pretty damned easily. Honestly, they probably wouldn't have even made it to the farm drop-off point.

So, on a scale of 1 (Dirty Harry) to 10 (Tony Hill), How Useful Was Profiling in Solving the Crime?

4/10

Um... I'm still not sure what happened to the car they drove out there in. There were only two of them, after all, and both of them were necessarily on the bus... so where's their other vehicle? Seems like that would have been a good way to track them, without all of the coincidences. The episode is actually pretty clear about their movements otherwise - they drove their car and a panel truck to the barn, drove their car to the highway, did the preposterous 'stop in the middle of the road' thing, then drove the bus back to the barn, stopping along the way to dump out the driver's body.

So where's their car?

Also, 'The Wheels on the Bus'? Not a great title, guys. The thing from which the teens were kidnapped had essentially nothing to do with the story, and is a strange thing to focus attention on. But now I'm just being petty. (Just now?)

We open on a flame flickering in a brazier, as a voice talks about the inevitability of death and how it can motivate people to do exceptional things. Like join a serial killing cult, presumably? I found the voice distractingly familiar, and wonder if it's Chuck's law partner from Better Call Saul. I can't wait to find out!

Turns out that the 'cult speech' was the opening of a motivational seminar, and it absolutely was Hamlin from Better Call Saul.



Hamlin goes into his patter about how everyone has something inside of them that they can share with the world in order to fully actualize themselves. So, is he a serial killer, or is he just to inspire a serial killer to go out and become his best self? By, you know, serial killing. I don't feel like there's any other options for this story.

After the show, Hamlin glad-hands a fan from the audience, then avoids autograph seekers in hopes of having some private time. We follow the fan home to her humble abode, where she's immediately murdered! That was quick. Was Hamlin the killer, since he left the building right after her, or did he simply inspire the killer to start living in the now?

I kind of hope it's the second, because then this would be essentially the exact same episode as the Vampire Rock episode, in which people think that a celebrity committed a crime but it was really just a deranged fan.

At Quantico, Derek gets an invitation to some sort of ceremony at the British Consulate, but he doesn't want to go - Penelope wants to find out why, so it's presumably snooping time! Penelope then announces the case - two people dead in Seattle, with the same message plastered on the wall: Hear Your Evil, See Your Evil.

Its obvious similarity to another famous saying gives Jeanne a chance to show off her complete useless linguistic profiling skills, suggesting that the 'mistake' could be the result of someone being a non-native speaker of English. Sadly, the form that the mistake took offers no clues as to what the person's first language might be. Jeanne essentially used two sentences to say that she has no information to offer. So... I guess that was a useful ten seconds for all involved?

The team tries to figure out what the message might mean - I wonder if anyone bothered Googling it... Then use some of the widely-discredited 'organized/disorganized' jargon to talk about how weird it is that the killer was able to break into the apartments so expertly, but then seemingly went nuts, stabbing his victims dozens of times. I don't see any real contradiction there - vicious overkill stabbing is what the guy is into, and he broke into the house carefully because he didn't want to get caught. It's not like you found evidence of random, mindless carnage - destroyed rooms, fingerprints everywhere, defiled bodies. There was a lot of stabbing, but then careful drawing on the wall in blood, and a general lack of evidence. What seems disorganized about this to them?

We then get a look at the killer's hidey-hole, where he's writing notes about his latest murder!



So apparently the victim said 'oh god, it's you!' which suggests that she recognized her killer. That might seem like it's pointing to Hamlin, she obviously extensively talked with someone else working at the show in a pre-interview, because Hamlin was able to single her out from the stage and talk about her most profound dreams. He's not pretending to be a psychic, so there's at least one person who's more likely to know where she lives than Hamlin is.

I'm weirdly invested in him not being the killer. Huh.

Also, in a possibly related note, when we see the flashback to her attack, she said 'oh my god, what are you-', as opposed to what's written on the note. Will that be significant? Let's find out after the Credits!
On the plane, the team is baffled by the fact that the two victims had so little in common. Black man, white woman, living in different parts of the city, working in unrelated industries - how could the killer have chosen them both? What's the commonality? Also, the first victim lived on the fourth floor of a building with only stairs, and the second lived in a secure building that needed a RFID keyfob to get into. Which makes it kind of crazy that there were no witnesses. Especially in the second case - wouldn't a building like that necessarily have a callbox so visitors can get into the building? And if that's the case, it would also certainly have security cameras - so where's the footage?

At the morgue, Reid and Joe discover that the killer used some kind of bizarre, half-moon shaped blade. Does that mean the killings are part of an occult ceremony? That might be a bit of a stretch... I mean, we know that the killer is obsessed with the occult based on sketches of demons in his lair, but I don't see profilers getting there based on knife shape. Unless it was one of those Kris blades, but that's a gimmie.

Over at the apartment, we learn that the messages weren't written in blood at all, but rather in red paint that the killer brought with him! This leads to a series of weird and kind of dumb conclusions, culminating in Greg and Jeanne sharing tonight's Prentiss Award!



Okay, so much to unpack there. 'If he brought the paint then the message was probably premeditated'? Was that up or debate? Did you think that he'd planned an elaborate and brutal murder, then, when he was done, thought 'hey, maybe I should write something on the wall?' And about it being a misdirect, fun fact: You can only 'misdirect' if you're 'directing' it's right there in the title. That nonsense message isn't obviously leading anywhere, so it can't be leading away from the most likely killer - because there isn't one.

In the MacDonald case, the idea is that the most obvious suspect, the husband and father of the victims, had to aim suspicion elsewhere, so he wrote Manson-style messages on the wall. Here, there's no suspect, and the messages seemingly mean nothing, so what purpose could that serve?

Also, not for nothing, it's kind of weird that you're saying Jeffrey MacDonald is definitely guilty. It's a super-shaky case and always has been - to the point that when you guys did a MacDonald episode, Kyle Secor was innocent.

They do find at least one piece of evidence, though - the victim's ticket to Hamlin's show!

So Derek and JJ rush over to the theatre, which is kind of weird... Why wouldn't Greg and Jeanne go? They found the clue, the fact that the victim seemingly walked home suggests that it's super-close... More importantly, where were Derek and JJ until they got the call about this new location? Just hanging out at the police station? Normally in episodes when they get off the plane they'll break into three pairs and go to three different sites related to the investigation, but this time there were only two, so that left Derek and JJ hanging until something came up. Which creates the impression that they were just kind of hanging in null-space until they were needed for a scene.

Hamlin's manager explains that people who attend the show fill out questionnaires, and that's how he's able to pick people from the audience out during the show and invite them up for 1-on-1 counseling sessions. It's also obviously how the killer knew where they lived, although nobody mentions that just yet. The manager doesn't know where Hamlin is - on show days he ditches his phone and just shows up right before the performance, then disappears right after!

We know where he is, though - at a bar, looking to pick up a guy! Which is what happens.

Penelope offers background on Hamlin: he had a humdrum life until he threw away the rat race, got a divorce, and fled to the desert, where he meditated until he came back a self-help guru! The team ponders if he could be the killer - after all, celebrities and politicians are often psycopaths, according to Reid. Jeanne offers the suggestion that, since Hamlin is a native English speaker, the phrases on the wall might not be gibberish, they might mean something!

I know I say this every episode, but why are you here?

Then we cut back to Hamlin, who's handcuffed to a bed in the killer's lair! Just to be clear, the killer is not the guy who picked him up in the bar. Just some random guy:



The team find Hamlin's car in the parking lot of the bar, along with blood and his personal alarm! He must have been abducted! They try to figure out the significance of the other kills - was he working up to Hamlin? Were the other people just in the way? They also point out that there are plenty of volunteers helping out at his events, so a stalker/killer could have gotten close to Hamlin without much trouble. Still no one questions who had access to the questionnaires with the addresses on them, which is odd, considering what a great lead that is.

At the hovel, the killer wants to talk to Hamlin about how the self-help tapes and seminars turned him from a go-nowhere loser into a fully actualized serial killer! Hamlin is, understandably, unenthused about the prospect.

Time for the profile, which proves to be one of the most useless ever in the show's history! They believe that the killer has an obsession with Hamlin (duh) and that he killed the other people because of how jealous he was that they'd gotten one-on-one time with the object of his psychosis. Which is great, but not super-useful when it comes to finding the guy. Rather absurdly, they announce that the sophistication and patience required by his crimes means that he must be in his mid-30s to mid-40s. Which is just nonsense. He hid in houses and stabbed people to death. There are 20 year olds who could do that, and there are 60 year olds who can't. M.O. tells you nothing about age, the writers just wanted to make the team seem impressive.

Really, given how incredibly efficiently he killed people without being noticed or tracking blood all over the place, their profile should assume that these aren't his first two kills - there's no hesitation or practicing evident - just expertly-executed brutal crimes. They should be scouring the local records for crimes with a similar weapon or wounds, because the idea that these are this guy's first two crimes goes against literally everything the show has ever had to say about serial killers.

Also, I'm still unclear on how he got into the victims' houses. The show has seemingly suggested that he was waiting for them when they got home, but now they're saying he's just a stalker, who wouldn't have had access to their information. But if he followed them, how did he get past their apartments' security features! I'm so confused!

How did no one notice this creepy weirdo lingering around the apartments:



There's another scene with the killer and Howard, in which the killer talks about his brain damage birth defect that has given him a kind of synesthesia - he sees words when people talk.


He describes it as seeing 'the truth', because he's crazy, but I feel like if they wanted to demonstrate that, the should have had the words and the dialogue be in some way different, or even at odds. Maybe that will come up later?

The team questions how a socially maladjusted misfit could have gotten Howard out of the bar with him, so they figure he must have had a partner. The guy was paid to pick up Howard! Of course! Then again, I don't really like how they got there - the conclusion is based on the idea that all stalkers are socially maladjusted weirdos, which isn't accurate at all. I'm sure some of them are, maybe even a majority, but at this point they just know that he's a stalker, and have no other information, so poor social skills are a weird thing to jump to.

A much more logical way to get to this plot point is to just have the bartender notice the guy leaving with Howard. More believable, too.

Garcia starts to search for people who attended the seminar and have anger management issues, which is a great idea that they should have already been doing. She also badgers Derek some more about why he wants to avoid the party, and this is so profoundly not the time for that.

The killer drops by his old workplace (he was recently fired, natch) to steal some data! Then he's confronted by his old boss, who tries to be nice, but admits that the killer is just way too creepy to work anywhere around other human beings. Partially because, you know, he reads the things they say by glancing around their heads. There's another scene of that, and once again, it's just exactly what the guy says. Weird oversight.

The male escort who lured Howard out of the bar comes to the police, and tells them that the killer was a crazy weirdo who kept babbling on about a 'magnificent light'. Which is what's written on the van that the killer has Howard tied up in! That was a jarring cut, huh? Anyhow, the killer has printed out a list of every customer who was ever mean to him, and now he wants Howard to help him kill those people! So just a run-of-the-mill postal guy, I guess?

Hey, do you think they're going to show the escort security footage from the seminar until he points out which one is the killer? I suspect they won't!

While chatting about the details of the massacred people, Reid makes the observation that the overkill might have something to do with the fact that the killer legitimately thought the people were monsters. Well, the painting on the wall did seem to call them 'evil', so that's not too much of a stretch. But is it a useful observation? You already know that the guy is super-crazy, after all.

Then we get another kill, as the killer manages to both teleport into a woman's house and drag the bound-and-gagged Howard along with him to witness the crime. Seriously, how is he doing this? Do people not lock their doors in Seattle?

The team makes it to the crime scene the next day and tries to figure out why the woman was targeted by the killer. The word 'evil' in his message has been replaced by the word 'red', which is weird, but not helpful. It does give Jeanne another chance to be of no help whatsoever, so that's something! They find a credit card from the company the killer was fired from, and a phone bill revealing that she'd called their customer service line a bunch in the last month! Pretty convenient thing to leave lying around the crime scene, I'd say.

Cross-referencing the bank with histories of violence and people who went to the seminar turns up the killer, so once again Penelope (really her database) has solved the case! The team rushes to his office and finds out about the stolen kill list. The boss also mentions that the killer was clearly hallucinating all the time, and a recording of him prominently features the line 'I can see your words', so now they know about the synesthesia as well! Although that's probably going to be of less use in finding him than the addresses that he downloaded from the computers.

Speaking of, the killer and Howard go to the next person on the list, but it turns out that a new family has rented the house and the guy he's looking for is nowhere to be found! But the killer doesn't believe the father of the family when he says that he won't call the cops, so they all have to die anyways. Howard tries to save the day by asking for the gun, but that makes the killer think he's evil as well! Which, you know, excellent judge of character there, killer, he was obviously going to immediately betray you.

The team goes over the list of potential victims, and is daunted by its length - 150 names! Of course Seattle has more than a thousand cops, so it really shouldn't be that hard to track them all down. They don't bother doing that, though, since it's super-obvious who he's going after. His previous victim was the last person he talked to at his job, so they can make a pretty solid assumption that the next person on the list is where they should go.

Instead of just trusting that instinct, though, they find out who is both near him on the list, and lives closest to the previous victims. Um... why? He killed that woman 12 hours ago. He could be in San Francisco by now. Why would you possibly assume he's staying in the neighborhood?

Howard tries to talk the killer down, and winds up stabbed for his trouble. Then the team busts in, and saves the day by pointing out to the killer that he's not infallible! Which he immediately believes them about, for some reason? There's some backstory about him calling the police to tell them that he was sure he knew who killed a mother and her baby, but then he was wrong about it, and the right guy wound up in prison. I'm not sure why any of this convinces him, but it does, and he's taken into custody.

Howard gets the medical attention he needs, and lends Derek a sports car as a way of thanking him for saving his life! It's just the push Derek needs to go to the event celebrating his deceased father's old partner!

Happy Ending!

Except, you know, he goes to the even and makes the whole thing about his dead father. He tries to offer an excuse for this, but really it's not a good speech.

More importantly, though, a person pretending to be a waiter steals Derek's glass, netting his fingerprints and DNA! Then the glass is brought back to a stalker lair, where in addition to stalker photos of the team, there are shots of a couple of the victims of Ray Wise and Michael Myers from earlier in the season! hich I'm pretty happy about, actually, since it's been enough episodes without movement on this storyline that I was starting to wonder whatever happened with that stalker who was taking pictures of the team, and the housebound woman Reid was talking to on the phone. Maybe she's the one pretending to be a waiter?

I'll probably have to wait three more episodes before we get any more, right?

1 - Was profiling in any way helpful in solving the crime?

Kind of? They caught him by running a list of attendees to the seminar against a list of people with anger management issues. I'd say it took some special amount of insight to figure out he had an anger problem, but the dude stabbed people like 80 times, so that's not really impressive. I guess psychology came in when they were talking him out of killing Howard, but then again, they could have just shot him.

2 - Could the crime have been solved just as easily using conventional police methods given the known facts of the case?

They had an eyewitness who met and talked to the killer. They could have just shown the guy pictures of everyone who was at the seminar and had an ID way earlier. Had they done it this way, they may have even kept Howard from being stabbed!

So, on a scale of 1 (Dirty Harry) to 10 (Tony Hill), How Useful Was Profiling in Solving the Crime?

4/10 - Pedestrian observations and lots of bad guesses. But I have to give them credit for using the guy's disability to effectively manipulate him.

Hey, we never learned how the guy managed to teleport into houses silently. Why make a point to mention how high-security the places were unless you're going to actually explain how he defeated those systems? Especially since we're supposed to believe he just followed people home. Both of them lived in apartments - how did he know which units they were in?

Shoddy work, everybody.

But hey, here's some profoundly not-shoddy work: remember that picture above of the killer looking super-creepy at the seminar? If you go back to the first scene and check out the crowd, he's clearly visible waiting for an autograph!



Great work, everybody!

So it's stocks (2 pieces of wood with half-circles cut out + plus some fasteners), rope (which you can buy anywhere), a wooden frame with a pulley on it (say five more pieces of wood), and a giant cartoonishly elaborate wooden winch. Out of all of those, the winch is the only thing that would require any specialized ability whatsoever, and honestly, he just made that thing to show off - you could just go to a store and buy/steal a way better winch if he wasn't obsessed with getting the old-timey look right.