My Issues With Criminal Minds S16/17 As Someone Who Likes But Doesnt Love Them

My issues with Criminal Minds s16/17 as someone who likes but doesn’t love them

- unsubs take multiple episodes, or if you’re Elias Voit then multiple seasons and they’re not even lurking in the background either like they’re the main show

- it takes them entire episodes to figure out what used to take them a few minutes. In the first episode the fact that there was two unsubs was staring us right in the face yet it wasn’t until the last minute that they acknowledged it

- it feels like there’s some sort of weird vengeance against the old cast, specifically Thomas Gibson and Mandy Patinkin; they have done the latter dirty

- Rossi and Jill I mean there’s absolutely no need

- Luke and Tara are mainly used to boost other people’s storylines

- it feels quiet for some reason, I miss the constant dialogue. It feels like I’m watching one of those crime miniseries’ that are on channel 4 in the daytime at times

- more time is spent on cinematic shots than engaging storylines. Insane, amazing storylines used to be every single episode and now it’s just one spread across an entire season but it’s okay because we now have a wide view of Rossi’s house

- they’re trying too hard to make us like characters that we already love

- again I just need to hate on the entire Elias Voit storyline because Why please

I can't stop thinking about the relationship between Jon and Helen as perhaps one of the most important ones in the entire show. They are narrative parallels for each other, and they both know it. They've both known it from the very start!

Helen walks into the Archives, paranoid, unsure of who to trust, and Jon sees himself in her. And he thinks "If i can help her, maybe there's hope for me too." Then he can't save her. The next time they meet, she's a monster. They're both monsters. There was never any other way their stories could have gone, their fates entwined from the very start.

And Helen answers his original thought with one of her own: "Maybe if we can help each other, there's hope for us both." But Jon looks at her and sees everything that he fears becoming, and so he turns her away, and refuses to accept that their stories are still one and the same.

Helen went to the last person who was ever kind to her, the only person who both knew her as a human and had the context to understand what she'd become, and he hated her. He hated her because he liked Helen, and told her that she couldn't be Helen.

So she stopped trying to be Helen, and embraced being a monster. Reveled in it even. Then Jon wakes up from a six month coma, more monster than person, and tries so hard to cling to the things that mattered to him when he was human. Even with no support, even with the entire archives staff against him, he chooses humanity and compassion over and over again.

And this is a direct threat to Helen's world view. Their stories are entwined. If Jon can continue to be a person even after everything he's been through, then she could have clung to her humanity too, if only she'd tried a little harder. And that terrifies her! She wants to conceptualize herself as someone who was completely overwhelmed by forces beyond her control, who never had a choice but to become a monster. She want's to be an innocent victim. But Jon argues with his actions that they'd both had choices.

And, Jon, in turn, holds out hope that she might make better choices until the very end.

This is the conflict between them for all of season 4 and 5. Jon wants to prove that they can both be decent people, and Helen wants to prove that they were never going to be anything but monsters. This is why she's so devoted to trying to goad Jon into enjoying his newfound godhood. She knows that they are the same, and wants that to mean that he has a spark of evil inside of him, and not that she was always capable of doing good.

When Jon kills her, she loses her life, but wins the argument. Helen is nothing but a dangerous monster who needs to be killed for the good of everyone, and in the moment he decides that, Jon dooms himself to the same fate. Their stories are one and the same. "If i can help her, maybe there's hope for me too." he thought. But he couldn't help her, refused to, even, in the one moment when it actually mattered. And thus, there was never hope for him.

i live in fear of mullet reid

Unsub spence is so amazing but also kinda sad like if u watch some of the episodes there's so much that could relate to him becoming an unsub, especially with how he identified with some of the actual unsubs - especially in elephants memory.

I really wish they'd bring him back just to pull this off.

Are cats people?

Cats are silly little gentlemen.

listening to horror podcasts is so silly because ill be having the worst day of my goddamn life and ill be like.. you know what i need? to listen to this sad wet cat british man have an even worse day and ya know what it actually helps