Am I Making Any Sense? - Tumblr Posts
this episode breaks me every single time. im too devastated by what i know is coming to be especially coherent but. i dont know. there's something about this specific line that makes me need to lay down. she's so quickly established as an almost unwaveringly kind person. days away from her death and she almost immediately compliments one of the agents sent to interview her. maybe it's something about this line being addressed to reid, who, while loved dearly by his mother, doesn't have the most conventional relationship with her.
(here's this screenshot brightened up because the lighting is Not Great:)
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.
JJ: It's something we call the buddy system. That means, you always go everywhere with a friend. MORGAN: That's right, because bad men and women are more likely to talk to us only when we're by ourselves
this is likely unintentional, but i like to read into things, so.
for context, they're speaking to a room full of children in a town with a serial child murderer, and are giving them some precautions to follow to stay safe (on a lighter note: the scene is intercut with a scene of gideon doing the same to a room of adults, which i really like)
jj addresses the children as "you" while morgan addresses them as "we". i dont like the term "freudian slip" because i hate freud, but thats the shortest way to describe what i think/headcanon is happening here. im sure they had a script, and i think morgan's part was "bad men and women are more likely to talk to you only when you're by yourself" and the "us/we" came out accidentally. or i could believe that morgan wrote his part of the script and wrote "we" because he sees himself in the victims.
obviously the way morgan was victimized during his childhood was very different to what's happening here (there is no sexual assault and we later learn that the violence was done by a peer, not an adult) but it's made clear several times that morgan takes any case where children are harmed very personally. they all do, because that's just how people are, but again, morgan specifically sees himself in the child victims they encounter. he was victimized differently, yes, but he knows what its like to face violence as a child, he knows the fear they felt, and, considering in this case they profile that the children know their attacker, he knows the feeling of betrayal
having Thoughts about gideon comforting johnny mulford while he dies, mostly "why him?" neither of the mulfords are what i would consider to be among the ranks of the "sympathetic" unsubs, although johnny is definitely more sympathetic and they're not among the least sympathetic either—there's a definite "never had a chance" feeling about them both (particularly johnny)
it might just be that at the moment, all gideon is seeing is a kid who's afraid to die, because johnny is only twenty-two. i wonder a little bit if it's partially because there are some very slight similarities to reid. (both have abandonment issues, both had a severely mentally ill person as their primary caregiver, and johnny specifically shares some (again, very slight) physical similarities with reid. this is also only six episodes after gideon watched reid (temporarily) die and could do nothing about it, so maybe he's projecting reid onto somebody he can comfort. but i'll be honest im not super confident about that analysis lmao. i think it's largely just that johnny is super young and afraid and all gideon is seeing at the moment is a frightened kid, with his relationship with reid possibly contributing. regardless i just think it's an interesting action for gideon to take.
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.