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i really like this moment for its reminder that nathan is a child. anton yelchin was seventeen when this episode aired (not sure when it was filmed), and given that nathan is said to be a highschool sophomore, he's even younger. fifteen, maybe sixteen? (i was fifteen at the start of grade ten, sixteen when it ended, and i was almost always the oldest person in the class)

i think sometimes that's missed. not than nathan is very young, because that's an important part of the episode, but fifteen specifically. not so much a young man frightened by his own desires but a child. i couldnt get a screenshot of it because it's a very quick and subtle movement, but nathan's statement in the second screenshot is provoked by reid simply nodding in response to his first. he's so young that reid is the older authority figure he's looking up to and seeking reassurance from.

and judging by reid's expression after nathan leaves, he's just been reminded too.

the thing thats so funny to me about morgan and garcia is that their relationship would be significantly more normal if they fucked. because if they did you could be like “oh okay cool theyre fwb! got it. this is a relationship dynamic i see regularly."

but when theyre flirting incessantly and have petnames they only call eachother and dropping INSANE lines like these and never sleeping together. then you have no choice but to go “okay. wtf is going on here."

yes i know people flirt with their friends. but i feel like there is a line and calling your bestie your “god-given solace” crosses it. (at least in fiction. real-life relationships have too many variables to make statements like that about). especially coming from derek “complicated relationship with god” morgan.

basically. if morgan and garcia slept together it would put their relationship into a category. but because theyre so weird about eachother but never sleep with eachother it puts their relationship into the undefinable category of “idk man theyre morgan and garcia. theyre just like that.

ive seen a lot of minimal loss aus where reid is the one who confesses to being the fbi agent, and while it's an interesting concept and one i've enjoyed when it's done well, i always have to suspend my disbelief a bit when that doesn't lead to things ending...poorly.

in the episode, cyrus specifically aims at reid while he questions them both, and had reid confessed, i absolutely believe he would have pulled the trigger. ultimately, i think that's why emily confesses. (not that she wouldn't have if he aimed at her. in any scenario, i think it comes down to who confesses fastest because they're both dumbass martyrs. it's moreso that emily beats reid to the punch in this scenario because of the whole "held at gunpoint" thing)

i dont recall it being confirmed in the episode (i have like twenty minutes left of my rewatch) but cyrus comes off as a misogynist to me, and i think that's why he aims at reid while ostensibly questioning them both. he could have aimed between them, or swept the gun back and forth, but he aims specifically at reid. maybe there's an argument that he keeps the gun focused on one of them because having even a split second where the gun isn't trained on one of them would feel too risky for a very paranoid cult leader, but even then, his choice to aim at reid still means something, i think.

specifically that he views reid as more of a threat than emily (which is. kind of hilarious), whether that means he believes reid is the fbi agent until emily confesses, or he isn't certain, but believes that reid would be the bigger threat if he was. and that's because a woman couldn't possibly be a threat. woman are subservient to him! the woman couldn't possibly be the fbi agent, and in the unlikely event that she is, she can't be that much of a threat. so he zeroes in on the man.

i've seen some aus where he aims at emily instead, which makes a little more sense. because. yeah. in the episode, had reid confessed...that gun would have gone off. but i still have to suspend my disbelief a little, because i don't think the benjamin cyrus we see in the episode would aim at emily.

(im not saying these aus are bad. ive liked several of them. this is just interesting to me!)

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 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.

hey cm? why would you follow a scene of a woman talking about how her husband's job destroyed him until she had to divorce him with hotch on the phone with haley. why would you do that. im ill.

i have so many feelings about the "why mess with perfection" scene. im going to analyze it in a way it was probably never intended to be. fuck you silly crime show i can overthink ANYTHING. this got long so it's under a cut. please please read it though im actually very proud of this one.

personally i count this line as being more evidence that william reid is a scumbag. this is how diana describes her pregnancy with spencer in the episode immediately proceeding this:

"I went off my medication when I was pregnant with you. I spent every day in terror, but I made it. And it was beautiful. I had you."

it's a bit of a mixed bag, because she clearly considers it to have been worth it, but. i mean, maybe this is just me, but if my wife went off her antipsychotic medication for the duration of her pregnancy and "spent every day in terror", i wouldn't be raring to put her through that again. "I made it" also feels quite charged to me, like there were moments where she wasn't sure she would.

from what i could find, there's still no real consensus on whether antipsychotics are safe for use during pregnancy (as much as any medication can be) and i imagine there was even less certainty during the early 80s. any subsequent pregnancies would likely have also involved diana going off her meds, and pregnancy is difficult enough when you AREN'T also skipping your antipsychotics.

and diana's expression here—to me, that's not the expression of a woman who had one kid and was then just like "nah im happy with this one." it's a woman who had an extremely difficult pregnancy and whose husband then tried to convince her to do it over and over again. there's resentment in the way she delivers that line.

as sweet as this line is, i think it's ultimately diana protecting spencer. she can't say "my pregnancy was incredibly difficult, i couldn't bring myself to do it again" because spencer will get a complex about it. so she says this, although that doesn't mean it isn't also true. in a perfect world where diana's pregnancy was as smooth sailing as pregnancies get (because i don't think there's really such thing as an easy pregnancy), i think she still probably would have only wanted one child. it's not that this isn't why diana wanted to stop at baby number one, but i do think there's a second reason she's leaving out because she knows the truth will make spencer feel guilty.

but i think he sees through it. not that he'd ever tell her. (she knows anyway. not that she'd ever tell him.)

here's the jordan analysis i promised. it got really long so it's under a cut </3 also to any jordan fans jsyk this is more a meta analysis of the role she serves rather than an in-universe analysis of her character, so. no major character insights if that's what you're hoping for.

as i've said before, i also don't understand the vitriol i've seen directed towards her when she was in eight episodes and occasionally mildly annoying at worst. i think most of the people who hate her do because she was a. being shipteased with morgan b. (temporarily) replacing jj and c. a woman of colour who breathed. i don't love her, although i do think her and emily should have fu— uh. who said that? anyway:

what i do really like is the narrative role she serves during her episodes, and especially during this one. with any long-running show with dark themes, there's always a risk of the audience becoming desensitized—a guarantee, even, if it goes on long enough. i think a lot of these shows (including cm, on occasion) fall into this trap where they think the solution to that is to constantly escalate, which i think is a huge mistake. you'll desensitize the audience faster when you're just showing them increasingly awful things; at a certain point you'll even bore them. also, it will inevitably become extremely unrealistic, and you'll start to sensationalize if you aren't already.

i think jordan's introduction was a really fantastic early effort to prevent the audience from becoming desensitized. we're following a cast of characters who have all been embroiled in awful things for years or decades. it's their job and it has been for a long time. the characters are already varying degrees of desensitized and they're the ones we're identifying with as the protagonists.

and then jordan. right away she's out of her depth and overwhelmed, and in this episode, she says outright that she can't do the job. i think it was also a great choice that the case in the episode isn't a particularly horrifying one (obviously they all are and the revelation at the end of this episode is really tragic, but jordan saying "im out" after this case reads very different than if it had been after something like no way out where it's clearly among their worst cases).

she's a reminder to the audience that the people we're watching are not normal. no normal person could do the job they do. the vast majority of the audience, if transplanted into the show, wouldn't be reid or emily or morgan or hotch—they would be jordan.

goddddd motel scene time. i have a lot of thoughts on it and hopefully i'll be able to put them into some kind of order.

ELLE: After he shot me, he reached into my wound so he could write on the wall in my blood. I was barely conscious, but I...I could feel his hand in there. And sometimes it's like I can still feel it. REID: Elle, he's dead. You're...You're right here. You won.

obviously this is an unhelpful thing to say. i dont think that makes reid evil, or a bad friend, i think it makes him a twenty-four-year-old who's struggling to understand a situation he's never been in.

i dont think elle resents him for it. im sure there's frustration, deservedly so, but i dont think it's targeted at reid, more at the general sense of Nobody Is Getting Me. especially this expression here:

in the moment, this doesnt read to me as anger. it's certainly not a happy smile; she's not comforted by what reid says because it's not a comforting thing to say, and i think it sort of develops into anger later, but in the moment, she doesn't resent him for not being able to say the right thing. again, there's frustration, because he doesn't get it. he can't (not yet, anyway). a part of her wishes he did, a part of her wishes somebody did, and yet a different part of her hopes none of them ever do, because it's an awful, awful thing to understand.

i headcanon that reid and elle stay in contact after elle leaves, but i dont think its immediate. i flipflop between two reasons

reid doesnt reach out because he feels guilty, like if he had just said the right words in the right order in that motel room, she would have stayed. i think this is generally how reid responds to abandonment (and sometimes just conflict in general). if i had just said the right thing, done that differently, been better, i could have fixed it. boy is...a little emotionally stunted. if he was a stage of grief he would be bargaining. do you get me.

reid does reach out, but elle doesn't respond. maybe she's still angry about him not being able to Get It, maybe she wants to distance herself from the bau in general, maybe him not Getting It hurts in particular because they were quite close, etc.

either way, they get back in contact post s02e15, when reid texts her a barely coherent rambling apology for that night, how it was an unsympathetic and unhelpful thing to say, and he does get it now, and he's sorry, there is no winning—

she calls him.

now that i've rewatched this episode i can finally add this point: matthew benton is absolutely part of the reason emily confronts reid when nobody else is. she says in demonology that she feels like he saved her but that said saving was the catalyst for his issues. so this is at least partially emily repaying matthew for his kindness by trying to help someone who reminds her of him. she couldn't save matthew, but she can save reid. i can't see any way the parallels aren't intentional, especially when you consider that matthew shares a first name with reid's actor. i don't think that was a coincidence.

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.

I think rossi's drive with reid went better than he thought would.

this is really the first scene where we see a mentor-mentee dynamic developing between rossi and reid, and i think it probably happened on the drive up to philadelphia (a drive that would have taken about three hours according to google maps).

rossi's line in the second gif is especially telling for two reasons. first, he's giving reid advice on how to present evidence to a court, positioning himself as a mentor figure. (to my understanding, court testimony is most of what the real-life bau does. a lot more court testimony and long-distance consultations and lot less fieldwork). second, he says when. to me, this is rossi accepting reid as a Real FBI Agent for the first time. to him, reid testifying in front of a courtroom as to the psychology of an unsub is an inevitability. (which, again, i know in real life would be a given, as that would be the majority of his job. but cm appears to take place in a parallel universe where the bau's job description is Yes.)

and then reid responds to this by adding on more information. im not 100% sure he was originally going to say that—there's a pause between the end of his first line and the beginning of rossi's, so it's not as if rossi interrupted him, and he stammers a little in the beginning, as if he's nervous and adding more info in an attempt to impress rossi, or the hypothetical judge. ("see! i can do it!")

and rossi compliments him on it, and reid smiles. partially because he has daddy issues, partially because rossi is one of his heroes, and partially because this is the beginning of their dynamic.

anyway. now im wondering what that drive was like, if it appears to have (at least slightly) changed rossi's opinion of reid. sound off.

happier with these gifs, so feel free to critique. i know the subtitles are hard to read when they're against the white paper, sorry! should have made them darker.

the day i stop thinking about the ending of s02e11 sex, birth, death is the day i die.

like. reid coming extremely close to needing to be dragged away from nathan?

both garcia and reid's expressions here? reid, who cares for and identifies with nathan, garcia, who has (i believe) never seen a dead body* in person? (also, you can't see it here because it's a still image, but reid's breath is hitching here and he looks close to hyperventilating)

*i know nathan is not dead here, nor does he die at all—the point im making is that having never seen a dead body in person before would make you more unprepared for seeing the aftermath of an unsuccessful suicide attempt than someone who has

reid makes no movement to clean the blood off his hands until gideon is right in front of him. he just stands there and stares like hes dissociating until gideon comes up and, in my opinion, sort of startles him into acting.

and gideon putting an arm around reid and taking him away from the scene while morgan does the same to garcia. hhhh.

this is the most emotional we see reid get up to this point. he's yelling while he's trying to keep nathan arrive, enough to strain his voice. i dont think hes so much as raised his voice at all up to this point.

i wonder how long he washed his hands for before he deemed himself "clean".

i need to talk about the goalpost scene or i'll explode. tw for the sexual assault of a minor, because. that is what reid is describing here, honestly:

i tried to gif it but the scene is quite long (especially because reid is constantly pausing to compose himself :(( ) and i realised while doing it that it's hard to gif a monologue, so instead here it is in text.

REID: I was in the library and, um... Harper Hillman comes up to me, and she tells me that, uh... Alexa Lisbon wants to meet me behind the field house. Alexa Lisbon's like, easily, the prettiest girl in school. MORGAN: So what happened? Alexa wasn't there? REID: No, she was there. So was the entire football team. They... stripped me naked and tied me to a goalpost. So many kids were there, you know, just watching. MORGAN: Nobody tried to stop it? REID: I begged... I begged them to, but they just... just watched. And... finally, they got bored and they left. It was like midnight when I finally got home. And my mom had... mom was having one of her episodes, so she didn't even realize I was late. MORGAN: You never told her what happened? REID: I never told anybody. I thought... it was one of those things that I thought if I didn't talk about it, I'd just forget. But I remember it like it was yesterday. MORGAN: Oh, Reid, you don't need an eidetic memory for that. You know, we forget half of what they teach us in school, but when it comes to the torment and the people who inflicted it, we've all got an elephant's memory.

i think about this a lot and honestly it makes me feel ill. because correct me if i'm wrong, but this is sexual assault, no? like yes reid is relating to owen as someone who was also severely bullied but he's also relating to owen as someone whose bullies committed a sex crime against them

something that i think gets missed a lot—reid was at the very oldest, twelve. again, correct me if i'm wrong, but football teams are big, right? reid even says "so many kids were there". just an unnecessary amount of people to restrain a pre-teen and a horrifying amount of people capable of standing there and watching. that is some stephen king level bullying honestly. not that ""normal"" bullying would be okay, of course, but just. jesus.

the implied length of the ordeal hurts too. a few things:

"they got bored and they left" to me implies that they left without untying him. had they done so, it would have made more sense to say "they got bored and they let me go." the phrasing reid uses implies they left him there and he had to get himself free. how long would that have taken?

reid also uses the word "finally" which. yeah. you know what the word finally means

the part that hurts the most is where reid says "[my mother] didn't even realize I was late." late. not gone. as in reid didn't go home inbetween speaking to harper and going behind the field house. this wasn't a "hey alexa wants to meet you behind the field house. nine pm" and the whole ordeal is "only" three hours. at best, it was right after school let out. at worst, he left the library and went straight there. so, at best, we're looking at...what, eight hours between going behind the field house and getting home?

this all happens in nevada. specifically vegas, which, from my understanding, is surrounded by desert. if it's winter/fall, the sun goes down relatively quickly and reid spends several hours freezing (i think? wikipedia says nighttime winter temps in vegas average at 4.4C/39.2F. is that cold in that region? canadian, sorry). if it's spring/summer, the sun takes a longer time to go down and reid spends several hours in the heat. ive usually headcanoned the second but the first is equally painful. but anyway, point is: take your pick. preteen reid gets either hypothermia or heatstroke. (also part of the reason i hc it was spring or summer is because i headcanon the goal post, which would have gotten very hot in the sun, scarred him. sorry to anyone whose day i just ruined <3)

sidenote: im always a little surprised by how calmly morgan reacts in this scene. not that he has a bad reaction, or isn't visibly troubled, but given how protective of reid he is normally...the first time i watched this scene i expected him to pull out a pen and paper and ask for names. so im headcanoning that the reason he's so calm in this scene isn't because he is calm, but because he's a good friend who knows that that isn't a productive response at the moment. and then he goes back to the bau and has garcia hunt them down (without telling her why) and uh. i dont know. maybe she destroys their credit scores or something.

ohhh boy i forgot about this plot point.

i don't think kevin applying for an overseas job is wrong. i don't even think him suggesting that penelope apply with him is wrong. he's allowed to want to move forward in his career and he's allowed to ask his girlfriend to come with him.

what i do think is wrong is that he doesn't bring it up until right before the final interview. i'm hesitant to suggest this because i know kevin gets a little bit of a ron the death eater* treatment from the fandom, but it feels almost calculated. that's a major life decision you're forcing someone to make very quickly. he says he "didn't want to say anything to [her] until it was real" but even if it's not calculated (which i don't actually interpret it as being, the possibility just crossed my mind) i still think it's a shitty thing to pull on your romantic partner. it's softened a little by the fact that he says he's known for "a few weeks" so it's not like she would have had tons of time to decide in the first place, but like...dude. you don't spring that on your partner while literally dressed for the final interview. are you twelve?

*i believe some, if not all, of the ire kevin lynch gets is because of some stuff that happens later that i'm mostly unfamiliar with, so it's very possible that the vilification i see has more justification. but i do think at least some of it is because he gets in the way of other, more popular garcia ships. (that's not to say i like him or that i like him with garcia. i don't lmao).

can't stop thinking about how morgan and garcia must have felt listening to reid cough and sound visibly ill over the phone in amplification. how they were probably hanging on to that little bit of hope that the cipro was enough and that he was fine. and then they hear him. and they know it wasn't and he isn't.

this exchange is so good and funny and gay. the line delivery is great and the way morgan's eyes dart down a little is hilarious. but i just can't laugh at this scene because i have worms in my brain.

all i can think about in this scene is how incredibly dehumanizing this would feel. for anyone, but especially for reid, given the goalpost incident*. i wonder if that crossed morgan's mind as well—he leaves entirely when he could turn his back.

*is there a better way to refer to that? i'd refer to it as "his SA" but a. a decent number of people would probably assume i was referring to the theory about his dad and b. not a lot of people seem to see the goalpost incident as SA

this exchange is so good and funny and gay. the line delivery is great and the way morgan's eyes dart down a little is hilarious. but i just can't laugh at this scene because i have worms in my brain.

all i can think about in this scene is how incredibly dehumanizing this would feel. for anyone, but especially for reid, given the goalpost incident*. i wonder if that crossed morgan's mind as well—he leaves entirely when he could turn his back.

*is there a better way to refer to that? i'd refer to it as "his SA" but a. a decent number of people would probably assume i was referring to the theory about his dad and b. not a lot of people seem to see the goalpost incident as SA

i really like this moment for its reminder that nathan is a child. anton yelchin was seventeen when this episode aired (not sure when it was filmed), and given that nathan is said to be a highschool sophomore, he's even younger. fifteen, maybe sixteen? (i was fifteen at the start of grade ten, sixteen when it ended, and i was almost always the oldest person in the class)

i think sometimes that's missed. not than nathan is very young, because that's an important part of the episode, but fifteen specifically. not so much a young man frightened by his own desires but a child. i couldnt get a screenshot of it because it's a very quick and subtle movement, but nathan's statement in the second screenshot is provoked by reid simply nodding in response to his first. he's so young that reid is the older authority figure he's looking up to and seeking reassurance from.

and judging by reid's expression after nathan leaves, he's just been reminded too.

ive seen a lot of minimal loss aus where reid is the one who confesses to being the fbi agent, and while it's an interesting concept and one i've enjoyed when it's done well, i always have to suspend my disbelief a bit when that doesn't lead to things ending...poorly.

in the episode, cyrus specifically aims at reid while he questions them both, and had reid confessed, i absolutely believe he would have pulled the trigger. ultimately, i think that's why emily confesses. (not that she wouldn't have if he aimed at her. in any scenario, i think it comes down to who confesses fastest because they're both dumbass martyrs. it's moreso that emily beats reid to the punch in this scenario because of the whole "held at gunpoint" thing)

i dont recall it being confirmed in the episode (i have like twenty minutes left of my rewatch) but cyrus comes off as a misogynist to me, and i think that's why he aims at reid while ostensibly questioning them both. he could have aimed between them, or swept the gun back and forth, but he aims specifically at reid. maybe there's an argument that he keeps the gun focused on one of them because having even a split second where the gun isn't trained on one of them would feel too risky for a very paranoid cult leader, but even then, his choice to aim at reid still means something, i think.

specifically that he views reid as more of a threat than emily (which is. kind of hilarious), whether that means he believes reid is the fbi agent until emily confesses, or he isn't certain, but believes that reid would be the bigger threat if he was. and that's because a woman couldn't possibly be a threat. woman are subservient to him! the woman couldn't possibly be the fbi agent, and in the unlikely event that she is, she can't be that much of a threat. so he zeroes in on the man.

i've seen some aus where he aims at emily instead, which makes a little more sense. because. yeah. in the episode, had reid confessed...that gun would have gone off. but i still have to suspend my disbelief a little, because i don't think the benjamin cyrus we see in the episode would aim at emily.

(im not saying these aus are bad. ive liked several of them. this is just interesting to me!)

here's the jordan analysis i promised. it got really long so it's under a cut </3 also to any jordan fans jsyk this is more a meta analysis of the role she serves rather than an in-universe analysis of her character, so. no major character insights if that's what you're hoping for.

as i've said before, i also don't understand the vitriol i've seen directed towards her when she was in eight episodes and occasionally mildly annoying at worst. i think most of the people who hate her do because she was a. being shipteased with morgan b. (temporarily) replacing jj and c. a woman of colour who breathed. i don't love her, although i do think her and emily should have fu— uh. who said that? anyway:

what i do really like is the narrative role she serves during her episodes, and especially during this one. with any long-running show with dark themes, there's always a risk of the audience becoming desensitized—a guarantee, even, if it goes on long enough. i think a lot of these shows (including cm, on occasion) fall into this trap where they think the solution to that is to constantly escalate, which i think is a huge mistake. you'll desensitize the audience faster when you're just showing them increasingly awful things; at a certain point you'll even bore them. also, it will inevitably become extremely unrealistic, and you'll start to sensationalize if you aren't already.

i think jordan's introduction was a really fantastic early effort to prevent the audience from becoming desensitized. we're following a cast of characters who have all been embroiled in awful things for years or decades. it's their job and it has been for a long time. the characters are already varying degrees of desensitized and they're the ones we're identifying with as the protagonists.

and then jordan. right away she's out of her depth and overwhelmed, and in this episode, she says outright that she can't do the job. i think it was also a great choice that the case in the episode isn't a particularly horrifying one (obviously they all are and the revelation at the end of this episode is really tragic, but jordan saying "im out" after this case reads very different than if it had been after something like no way out where it's clearly among their worst cases).

she's a reminder to the audience that the people we're watching are not normal. no normal person could do the job they do. the vast majority of the audience, if transplanted into the show, wouldn't be reid or emily or morgan or hotch—they would be jordan.