This Scene Makes Me Need To Lay Down. Goddddd.

this scene makes me need to lay down. goddddd.

sometimes i get the sense that reid is more attached to gideon than gideon is to reid. obviously they both serve as surrogates for the family member each is estranged from (gideon is estranged from his son and reid is estranged from his dad) but.

you know. reid clings to gideon, not physically but emotionally, and i think a lot of his wellbeing at the start of the series relies on gideon's presence. gideon almost certainly knows the most about reid out of anyone on the team—i don't think canon ever says that reid has told gideon about diana, but i would imagine he has—and i think reid feels understood by him in a way he doesn't by other people, even compared to the rest of the team who (mostly) try their best. i think he also tends to try to be as good and deserving as possible of gideon's presence, since he definitely at least partially feels like his father left because he wasn't good enough.

on the flipside, while gideon definitely sees reid as a son, he's...not the best dad. i think we see him repeating a lot of the mistakes that drove a wedge between him and stephen with reid, and i think that had mandy patinkin stayed on, we would have gotten a larger parallel there. he holds him at arms length, trying not to get too close, although he definitely cares about him more than he lets on and the mask slips sometimes, like this moment and on the plane after ldsk.

I've always been a little thrown off by the way the characters (the team and the passengers) react to Reid trying to talk down Ted, and I've never liked that the episode ends with Ted being shot (although I appreciate that he survives).

I'm not saying this to be critical of the characters: the team doesn't have audio, and the passengers (save for Elle and the incapacitated psychologist) don't have the knowledge to see Reid getting through to him, but:

I don't know. Look at Ted's face. I'm bad at reading expressions, but at the very least, this doesn't seem like the expression of someone unaffected by what's being said to him, or the face of a man who's about to start shooting people. During the conversation, Ted stops aiming the gun at Reid, and yells at Leo to shut up when he tells him to shoot Reid.

I really think that Reid was on his way to talking Ted down, and I wish he'd gotten to do it. I don't think Elle hitting Ted while Reid is talking him down makes a lot of sense*. She's one of the few passengers who can understand that Ted is calming down, and I think she's at the right angle to see his changing expression. I wish Reid had gotten the chance to keep talking, because I do think he was close to ending it without anyone else getting shot.

One other thing I noticed while watching this episode—throughout the episode, Leo has always been onscreen while he speaks, either in the same frame as Ted, or the camera cuts to him while he speaks. However, if you rewatch the scene, notice that whenever Leo speaks during it, not only is he always offscreen, but his voice has an echo to it that wasn't there before. I don't think most of the analysis I post is reflective of the writer's intent, but that seems very intentional to me, symbolizing that Leo is becoming less real to Ted and therefore losing his grip on him.

*this is a criticism of the writing, not the character. yes, elle is impulsive, but the choice to hit ted while he's being talked down and is no longer aiming the gun at anyone seems like a strange and risky choice.

I think the language the man Ted is hallucinating ("Leo") uses to refer to Ted throughout the episode is really interesting (he calls him "sport" a few times, I think) especially coupled with the role he takes.

This just occurred to me while watching the episode, but I wonder if he's maybe hallucinating his father? Not as he currently is, the age gap wouldn't make sense (there's only a thirteen year age gap between the actors) but maybe his father passed and this is what he looked like at the time of his death, or this is what he looked like at some other important moment.

(I don't think this was the intention. I just like to overthink things)

so nice of reid to offer to do elle's files for her. what a gentleman! <3 no takebacks!

(Not included in the subtitles on the last image: Cross-talk with Reid saying "What?!" while Elle is saying "four of mine" and Elle following "Yep," with "Mmhm."

also:

Hotch smiling! twice in one episode!

underrated jj moment. do you think he cried over this.

not pictured: jj's various smiles and her tugging on his tie (i think that's what she's doing? the angle makes it a little hard to tell)

Reid's little laugh when Cory asks him if he plays ball is so funny. Does he look like he does? That man was the ball.