Ive Had This Thought Rattling Around In My Brain For A Thousand Years But I Wanted To Wait Until I Got

ive had this thought rattling around in my brain for a thousand years but i wanted to wait until i got to diana's introduction to share it. do you ever think about how reid's life would have changed if he'd had any siblings? particularly younger ones?

how it would have changed the kind of person he became, how much worse the parentification would have been. how much more of a scumbag it would have made his father. if he had custody or if he lost them to the system or to family he barely knew (whenever i think about this sort of au i always think of the first, maybe because the latter two are just Too Real). do you ever think about it. i do.

maybe controversial opinion? whiie the directing of true night is fantastic and different and jonny is tragic and sympathetic, i really dislike this episode. this is probably my most critical cm post so far, so if you love this episode and don't want to read about someone hating it, maybe scroll away. if not, my complaining is under the cut:

post 3x01 there's this really frustrating trend of the show revealing who the unsub is and how they act early on, rather than showing them only when the team learns who they are. i want to guess at what the unsub is like. i want to guess at who they are. i want to guess when the team is wrong, i hate that they start handing that information to the audience so instead of learning things with the team, they're waiting for them to catch up.

and i think this episode is one of the worst offenders. it feels like the team gets hardly any screentime, which is a shame, because when they are onscreen, there are some great character moments! but they don't do anything, we barely see any profiling in the profiling show because the episode is too dedicated to showing us jonny. they're completely useless; they find out that jonny is the unsub because his agent calls the tipline.

and it's not a situation where the team being useless is intentional and tragic, like in north mammon (a, from what i've seen, deservedly beloved episode where the team also doesn't get a lot of screentime and the case also ends because of the actions of a non-team member). in this episode, the team is useless because everything useful they do is offscreen, which, to the audience, is the same as them doing nothing at all.

one of the most frustrating moments to me is the reveal that jonny's girlfriend is dead, he watched her be murdered, and is going after her killers. when do we find this out? not slowly. not alongside the team. we find out when they confront jonny with the information. why is the team figuring things out off-screen on the show about a team of people figuring things out? it's possible to guess that jonny's girlfriend is dead from the (imo, largely unnecessary) scenes we get with him, but the details are a surprise. at least to me—i'll admit i spent the bulk of the jonny scenes waiting for the team to show back up, so maybe i missed foreshadowing there.

i really think that had the episode not devoted so much time to showing us exactly how the unsub acted and more time to showing us the team figuring that out, i would have loved this episode. could even have been one of my favourites. i want to watch the version of true night where the team actually profiles, finds jonny...and then reads his medical records and realises what's happening. i dont want to watch the team explain what they found out after they already have, i want to watch them find it out! that's the point!

why would you cut these scenes like this if not to cause me unbearable pain.

if i can be a film nerd for a second: they use a technique in this called a "J-cut" where the audio from the following shot starts during the picture of the preceding shot (an L-cut is the inverse). these are both extremely common and a lot of the time just function to make the cut more seamless, but they can serve a narrative function as well, and i think that's what the j-cut is supposed to be doing here.

jj says "she made me promise not to talk about her like a victim" and then we hear hotch say "victimology" while we're still looking at jj and therefore still thinking about what she's just said, which i think serves to emphasize the irony and make you more likely to notice it than if they'd cut the audio and picture at the same time. they keep us in the scene where garcia has just asked not to be talked about like a victim while we hear hotch doing just that

i love you dr spencer reid and your strange, exaggerated facial expressions common in autism spectrum disorder

rb to relieve the back pain of the person u reblogged this from

Criminal Minds 3.08 | Lucky