I Agree! If I Could Cut Either Reid's Expression Or Hotch's Line That Immediately Follows It, I'd Cut

i agree! if i could cut either reid's expression or hotch's line that immediately follows it, i'd cut hotch's line. the expressions are very good (especially the last one where it looks to me like he's trying not to be sick) and i generally like subtler moments.

man i remember liking no way out a lot more than i did. i think my issue was that yes, frank breitkopf is scary. yes, his MO is horrifying. yes, the concept is disturbing. but the characters would not stop commenting on that. i dont have an issue with them being horrified, because obviously they would be, but it just felt excessive. we don't need a close-up on reid's horrified face as they enter frank's trailer and hotch saying "i thought i'd seen everything." i dont mind them establishing that this is the worst case they've had, or that "even these people, who deal a lot with things too fucked up and weird for local law enforcement, find this too fucked up and weird." my problem was that they kept establishing that every five seconds. like. okay. i get it.

i did really like the framing device/use of in media res, though. if you haven't seen it, the episode starts with gideon meeting frank in the diner, then it goes back to the beginning and continues in chronological order with occasional returns to the diner scene, continuing until we reach the diner scene itself and continue from there. i especially liked the way they repeated the beginning of the opening to establish that we were back where we started—i got excited when i saw that waitress again lol. i like it in general when cm plays with the formula.

something that i think is Very funny about the first scene with reid and ethan is that reid jumpscares ethan (and the audience) and to me it seems like it was intentional. like yes he's smiling because he has dumb gay feelings but hes also smiling like "haha i got you >:)"

do you think he did this regularly when they were friends (or together, depending on how you read their relationship). do you think ethan was scared every time he turned a corner because half the time reid would be standing there like 🧍‍♂️

call me sadistic but i really wish we'd gotten the rest of the team's reactions to reid Actually Fucking Dying. in the episode, only garcia and gideon actually watch it happen, then we cut to tobias deciding to perform cpr. there's a gap between these scenes during which the rest of the team is filled in but we don't get to see it.

i think there are a few reasons reid is so particularly hostile towards emily post-2x15:

most simply, she was the newest member of the team, and therefore the one he knew the least and could most easily project onto. he doesn't know her well, so it's easiest to construe her actions as whatever he wants them to be in order to have someone to direct his anger at. he'd also feel less bad about attacking her over the other members of the team, who he knows far better (this is not calculated. im saying he needs someone to be angry at and he latches onto the closest person who he knows the least)

she replaced elle. i do ship spencelle (as a tragedy) but even if you take shipping goggles off, i do think they were quite close platonically. and even if you don't think he was close with elle, he definitely feels particularly guilty about her leaving. (he says so out loud with his mouth at the end of 2x6, when he's talking to morgan about the conversation he had with elle shortly before the case took a turn, and starts to obsess over what-ifs until morgan shuts that down). so not only is emily the newest member of the team, she's also replacing someone whose departure he explicitly feels particularly guilty about

she's calling him out on his obvious issues when none of the rest of the team are. ironically, i think its her newness that makes her feel like she can, and her newness that makes him respond so irately. i think the rest of the team feels uncomfortable and unsure of how to act—they know they need to confront him, but they worry about how to go about that without the friendship imploding. i'm not saying "well emily is new and doesn't gaf about him, so she doesn't care if confronting him makes him hate her." she wouldnt confront him if she didn't care about him, but she has less to lose. tying back to the first point, i also think emily being the one to confront him while also being so new to the team lets reid project whatever motivation he wants to onto her in a way he couldn't with the rest of the team. he can pretend she has an ulterior motive and therefor disregard her concern, while that would be a lot harder to do if someone he knew very well did the same. (again—this is not calculated).

i hope this makes sense 😭 i have a Lot of feelings on their friendship (as you can probably tell from my fics about them) and its rocky start. final thing: step 8 and 9 of NA concern making amends with the people you've hurt as a result of your addiction, and i think sometimes about the conversation he probably had with emily when he got to those.

hahahaha i wonder why they have a close-up of reid eating a rice krispie treat in this episode. its not like that will be the only thing he gets to eat for the next couple days. haha. ha. hh.

oh that cannot be comfortable