Criminal minds season 8

1 - The silencer - Abilene, Texas. While a prisoner is being transferred to a hospital, there is an accident and he escapes. The guard he kills is found with the lips sewn shut, so they wonder if the prisoner is the Silencer. It wasn’t too clear, so I’ll try: this man was deaf, then his mother had him undergo a highly experimental procedure and he started hearing, only in his head now it’s too loud and it never stops and he just can’t shut it off, and on top of that his mother was a horrible woman that should never have had children. Never a kind word in all his life, he has never spoken a single word, and the constant, loud noise kept driving him crazy. They catch him of course, and when he realizes there is no peace anywhere and there’s no other choice than put him back in prison, he shoots himself. The episode ends with a mysterious figure taking pictures of the entire team! I’m pretty sure s/he doesn’t have good intentions…

Morgan and Garcia are just back from a visit to London, where Emily works now. He was on temporary duty there. Alex Blake is the new girl. Garcia’s not talking to Kevin now, but she tries to start over and make friends with Alex. I understand her here, I love Prentiss and when things are good I wouldn’t want them to change (movie-wise of course; lots of things I’d like to change in my life :-/ ) but Alex is not bad. So far :-p

-As I grow older I pay less attention to what men say, I just watch what they do. Andrew Carnegie

-A man is known by the silence he keeps. Oliver Herford

2 - The pact - San Diego, CA. The victim, after a blow to the head, was chained to a car and dragged to death. Two women did it: the mother of a little girl that was killed, and the sister of a woman who killed herself after her baby boy was killed. They are out for a vengeance. They kill the woman responsible for Sam’s death and two of the four men who took little Kelly. The third is a psychopath who plays them around promising to take them to where the girl is buried, he even gets Ellen to shoot someone in exchange for Kelly's body, but the guy keeps playing with them and smiling until he uncovers a skull saying the rest is somewhere else, until the mother can’t take it anymore and kills him in rage with the shovel. Poor woman. 

They escape to Mexico, but when Sam’s aunt is caught, Darlene is not there, she went to get some drinks. Ellen said they killed five people, so I guess they killed all the four guys that got Kelly. When Rossi asks about Darlene Ellen protects her, she says "she's long gone" and when their eyes meet in the distance (Ellen on a police car, Darlene on a bus) they exchange smiles and nods, and Darlene escapes. It was a significant moment when Ellen saw her, and Darlene shrugged her shoulders as if apologizing for her running away, and Ellen smiles happy that she got away and nods to her approvingly. 

Rossi has an amount of 31 vacation days, but he doesn’t want to use it, he hates vacations - "how about a safari in Africa?" - "too hot" - "how about Italy?" - "too many relatives" :-p, so Alex: “if I were you I’d give your vacation days away to a colleague in need” so Rossi: “Garcia, see how many people in the Bureau have spouses in the military serving overseas”. Still he'll have to take six days he doesn't want...

-Ralph Steadman wrote: evil is always devising more corrosive misery through man’s restless need to exact revenge out of his hate.

-Paul Brown once said: if you win, say nothing, if you lose, say less.

3 - Through the looking glass - Families are abducted, kept prisoner for a few days then killed. They posted regularly pictures portraying a happy family that was only a façade.He makes them reveal their dirty secrets and make choices, and if he’s not satisfied he kills them. They manage to save the second family, though, and stop him.
The  guy kills Vanessa, the son's tutor, because the husband wouldn't say he had an affair with her, but after she's shot he understands the guy knows it all and confesses to avoid more deaths. Then he showed them Darren, the boy their daughter is in love with, and when given the choice: his life or the money, the daughter begs her to save him but she says he's a lowlife and he got her into drugs so she chooses the money saying she doesn't care if he's somebody's son... what a disgrace of a woman.
He even has the face to ask "where's my money?" and then the unsub shows her her son and says to confirm that she wants the money over her son's life... and now she regrets it.

It was a powerful scene when cheating and gambling-husband, controlling and shamely-greedy-mother and their addict-daughter were given a last chance. Kill themselves or young son/brother dies. The father could not sacrifice his wife or daughter, but mum said “it’s all my fault, do it” and when the unsub says “you won’t die for each other, you’re not a good family” or something like that, “so the boy will die” (or so the whole family will die, not sure) the woman screamed NO! and threw herself on the gun and turned it on herself and shot, believing to die, but it was a test, so it was merely loaded with blanks…

Beth tells Hotch she’s been offered a good job in New York, and he says she should take it because it’s good for her, and she thinks maybe that’s goodbye but he doesn’t want to break up at all, he says NY is not far and he can get there any chance he gets :) sweet :)

-The German author Goethe wrote: behaviour is the mirror in which everyone shows their true image

-One of the deep secrets of life is that all that is really worth doing is what we do for others: Lewis Carroll

4 - God complex - A  man abducts men to operate on them and take their right leg, and if they don’t die in the operation he lets them go. What he tries to do is: reattach a leg. 

A man ‘walks’ with crutches into an ER with a leg that is not his own. The unsub’s a respected man with a wife that believes he experiments on mices. She has a prosthetic leg and he wanted to ‘fix her’ because he loves her, but she never wished for that.

Reid apparently has been calling regularly, for six months, a mysterious woman. He tells her that now his headaches are gone, and they have never seen each other. He calls her during the case for medical advice :-p Alex insists on asking him what's going on and he tells her that he reached out to a geneticist for his headaches and talking makes him think better and adds that he doesn't "want them to know about her" referring to Morgan and the others. Alex tells nothing and he whispers a ThankYou :)
Morgan and Garcia think she has a girlfriend but they don’t know who it is. She has a problem, and Reid tells her that his team might help her but she doesn’t want to because “I cannot let him hurt you because if he knew..” and she cries. Then she said Love You before hanging up, and he’s quite shaken by that….

-Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote: when a doctor does go wrong, he’s the first of criminals. He has the nerve and he has the knowledge.

-Body and soul cannot be separated for purposes of treatment for they are one and indivisible. Sick minds must be healed as well as sick bodies. Dr Jeff Miller

5 - The good Earth - La Grande, Oregon. Four men disappeared. A delusional woman sees herself sick no matter what the doctor says, and she also is super-naturalist, like: she buried her daughter, who was perfectly fine, but she saw her full of spots, because “the soil will heal you..”, and she abducted a pregnant woman to eat the placenta (mum and child were released safely) and she also abducted some men and kept them like animals in a barn. Now, I know she killed at least three… but I’m not sure about what she was doing with them… gathering their blood? Eat some parts of them believing it will heal her? The blood was to be mixed, or drank, or poured on the soil… dunno. They catch her and Blake comes up with a trick to make her surrender, just to show us how good she is, so we won’t miss Emily. 

JJ’s son Henry is scared of Halloween because it’s the time when monsters can go out and blend in, and he overheard mum and dad talk and JJ was saying that there was no end to all the monsters walking around… but at the end Henry decided to go treat or treating anyway after JJ told him he should go and figure out which monsters are real and which ones are not. Basically, he dressed up as “his favourite profiler” and came out as a little blonde version of Reid :-) so cute, it was the cutest thing :-)

-I became insane with long intervals of horrible sanity. Edgar Allan Poe

-Alfred Austin said: show me your garden and I shall tell you what you are.

6 - The apprenticeship - Miami, Florida. Young prostitutes are suffocated to death. An adult murderer is teaching a teenager how to be a murderer ; the kid started out by himself torturing and killing dogs. Two psychopaths with a bond, until the kid takes a girl he knows and the other gets angry, and they fight, and the kid hits him so later the adult strangles him. The team takes him out, in the end, saving the girl. At the end, a body is found, killed like Silencer did, and there’s our mysterious figure that keeps taking pictures of them all…

Reid”were there any other victims?” - Garcia”uh actually yes but not of the human variety, in the last month six puppies have been suffocated and beaten and thank God there are no photos because I draw the line at dead dogs”

Morgan wants to teach Reid how to play baseball:-p of course he knows all the theory, so they practice :p At the end he plays with Morgan’s team, and the last winning moment is all for him, hitting and running :p and Morgan shouting You did  it! and hugging him and the whole team is there, cheering and shouting :-))

-Better than a thousand days of diligent study, is one day with a great teacher. Japanese proverb

-The greatest good you can do for another is not just to share your own riches, but to reveal to him his own. Benjamin Disraeli

7 - The fallen - People are being burned and killed in Santa Monica. The unsub is killing the homeless, and at last he takes Scott and the team rushes to save him.

A victim had been there only two months, but her phone shoed only Minnesota numbers, not one from California, and Reid says: “wait, so she lived somewhere two months and didn’t make any friends? I thought that only happened to me”.

Rossi was in Vietnam in 1969, and now he meets his old sergeant, Scott. At the end Rossi tells him that he joined BAU because of him. 

Honestly I didn’t understand much about those war scenes in Rossi’s past. I understand that Marine Hernandez saved Rossi and Scott in some way, but I don’t get how. He died, but I couldn’t understand why he made that move or how it would have been had he not returned to them…

It ends with Rossi dedicating his last book to Scott and Hernandez “two men who saved me so I could save others”

-You never find yourself until you face the truth. Pearl Bailey

-I am not concerned that you have fallen. I am concerned that you arise. Abraham Lincoln

8 - The wheels on the Bus… - Fredericksburg, VA. A schoolbus full of students is abducted. The driver is killed, 14 kids are left at an isolated location that the team finds. The other 10 kids are prisoners, numbered, and sort of used for a real-life videogame. Rossi understands this right away… 

I don’t know this “Gods of combat”, if this game really exists and had a bus, gas masks, shot-collars, teams.. I was thinking more of Battle Royale, where teenagers are forced to fight to the death. 

With Kevin’s help Garcia finds the frequency the two kids are using to speak and give orders to their ‘players’, and she hacks it to interrupt it and speak to a kid [ there is also the Hunger Game’s (another Battle Royale look-alike) I volunteer! :-p ] and she helps him take the collar off. Soon the team gets there with a squad, and the kids are rescued. One of the two unsubs, two brothers obsessed with competition and with this specific videogame (learning that he was dead, his brother said: I guess I won) and two of the kids are the only ones who died: Trent, killed by a girl who was his friend but whose family had also been threatened, and the girl that the volunteer was trying to save but the now dead unsub killed her. 

Kevin is enlisted too, to help. Apparently they occasionally see each other, but are still separated.

Garcia asks him out for a drink but he has other plans, although his face shows regret. I honestly think she made a mess: she didn’t want to get married because she said she believed it would have ruined everything, and by not marrying him she has ruined everything… :-/

She then meets Rossi : R.”how you doing?”- G”have you ever had one of those days that you wanna unplug from anything? Literally?” - he has her give up to him her three phones and the tablet and says “ok, tonight you’re coming to my house, we’re gonna listen to Tony Bennett on vinyl and drink 18 year-old scotch” - G”I don’t drink scotch” - R”you’ll learn” - G”thanks” - R”anytime” 

-French novelist Jean Giraudoux said: I’m not afraid of death. It’s the stake one puts up in order to play the game of life.

-Frederick Douglas said: it is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men

9 - Magnificent light - A man who writes books and gives motivational speeches on “be who you really are and let nobody stand in your way” is the last person to see the victim alive.

The team finds out right away that the last victim had gone to see this Barry Flynn’s show. It turns out pretty quickly that he’s not the murderer: those people were actually killed by a sort of extreme ‘fan’ (Raphael Sbarge). This Carl sees things and is convinced that the people he kills are evil. 

At the end, we see the usual mysterious figure stealing Derek’s glass and hanging up more pictures on his wall.

Rossi mentions the ‘mezzaluna’ type of blade :-D :p

I know they have to close the case in 40 minutes, but seriously Garcia found Carl’s name among thousands of fans? Ok she only looked for those who live in Seattle and had had anger management issues, but come on, all the fans or superfans must for sure appear on her computer?? Anyway, it doesn’t bother me all that much (just a little bit here and there when they go too far) because it’s characters and acting performances I’m looking for in this show.

It ends with Flynn lending his car to Morgan (via Garcia) to get to a ceremony to honor Jason Ryder, his dad’s old partner, and she's there to listen to him. The mysterious figure takes Morgan's glass with his prints...

-A great deal of talent is lost to the world for the want of a little courage. Sidney Smith

-The mystery of human existence lies not in just staying alive but in finding something to live for. Fiodor Dostoveski  

10 - The lesson - Winslow, Arizona. Three months ago a man woke up from a coma, and is now the unsub (Brad Dourif). He wants to turn someone in his perfect marionette-exactly like the two marionettes that didn’t save his father, murdered when he was a child.

Reid is still secretly talking to this girl, who now says that she thinks her stalker has gone, because in two weeks there’s been no mail, no phone calls, and now that she thinks he’s gone she wants to meet him. Reid is scared she won’t like him.

At the end, the team goes to Rossi’s house for a drink, all but Hotchner who wants to go to NY to see Beth and Reid who goes to meet his mysterious girl, but then he sees a man sitting alone and looking around and calls her to tell her he thinks her stalker is there, and therefore not to enter. He was wrong, the man was simply waiting for a friend who was late. We see the girl’s face but he doesn’t, and we see that her gift for him is the same book he was going to give her, and when a waitress gives it to him he sees that inside she has written a quote signed Thomas Merton, the one I wrote down here.

-William Shakespeare once wrote: love looks not with the eyes but with the mind

-Thomas Merton once wrote: love is our true destiny. We do not find the meaning of life by ourselves alone, we find it with another

11 - Perennials - Citronelle, Alabama. Gulfport Mississippi. Pensacola, Florida. This unsub who calls his victims with different names tries to turn himself into Russell Smith, a murderer now dead 25 years. He thinks he’s Smith reincarnated, and is killing those that he believes to be Smith’s victims reincarnated.

It ends with the new mystery: after the silencer-copycat, now the mortician-exchanging-legs-copycat. “someone’s out there mimicking the crimes we’ve solved” says Morgan. Yep.

-I have never yet heard of a murderer who is not afraid of a ghost. John Philpot Curran

-The doctrine of the immortality of the soul has more threat than comfort. Mason Cooley

12 - Zugzwang - When Reid tries to phone his lady friend, someone else is there and he’s crazy scared for her and talks to Hotch first and then to all the team. He’s so touching, like never before. This scene is very well played, when he says “please help me” his begging voice gets to you, and his “help me find her” touches your heart. It touched mine..

Garcia finds her surname quickly, not many geneticists called Maeve. I love that he doesn’t want to see her picture. :-3

Investigating, her parents tell Hotch that they suspect her fiancée (Reid didn’t know about a fiancée) and he turns out to be the man Reid had suspected to be her stalker, that time at the restaurant! He says he was stalked too, though. The solution is pretty easy: not this guy, but his new girlfriend Diane (Michelle Trachtenberg) was the stalker. 

She abducts both him and Maeve, and by this time she’s still alive. She is alive when Reid gets there too. The boyfriend is dead, and Reid tries to make a deal with her, and tells her that he wants her, not Maeve, but when Diane kisses him she understands he doesn’t love her at all. He could not fake that.

Now she’s super dangerous, and when Reid admits he would die for Maeve, Diane can’t accept that and does the worst thing, puts the gun to her head next to Maeve and when she shoots they both die. It ends right there, with Reid crying.

This was painful.

-Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage. Lao Tsu

13 - Magnum opus - A guy kills people to take their blood, then he uses that blood to paint. 

Two weeks have gone by and Reid has not left his flat. Garcia and JJ stop by trying to see him but he doesn't answer and doesn't open the door; Garcia only gets him to 'knock twice if he's counscious'. Morgan always gets voicemail. Morgan tries to help Reid by involving him in the case. He succeeds, and Reid comes out to help. At the end he asks their help in tidying up his place, putting aaaaaall his books back into place; Morgan JJ and Garcia help him, then hug him and leave. The last book, he puts away himself: Maeve's book.

-My blood alone remains, take it, but do not make me suffer long. Marie Antoinette

-Sometimes the hardest part isn’t letting go, but rather learning to start over. Nicole Sobon

14 - All that remains - One year ago a man called 911 saying “my wife is gone” and now the same man calls 911 saying “my girls are gone”, his two daughters. The police believe he killed them all, and more so when they discover how much he drinks and find out about his blackouts (and double personality). The younger daughter is found dead, the older one alive, and she accuses her dad of everything, but her behaviour is odd and JJ senses something’s wrong. Truth is: she killed her mom and her sister because she was jealous (a psychopath, they say); she says her mom loved Katie more.

-Love never dies a natural death. It dies of blindness, and terrors and betrayals. It dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings. Anais Nin

-Alan Lightman said: the tragedy of this world is that no-one is happy, wether stuck in a time of pain or joy

 15 - Broken - Austin, Texas. A gay kid was forced by his father to go to a “rehabilitation center” or whatever they called the place, a sort of prison camp, and ‘daddy’ also paid a prostitute to do it with the kid while he was present in the room, watching and judging, and shouting at him for not doing it right. Basically they broke the kid, and now that he’s all grown up he can’t accept himself. When he sleeps with a man he kills him because what they did was 'wrong', then he tries to do ‘the right thing’ and seeks out girls, but his impotence makes him angry and he kills them too. 

He eventually kills his father and his best friend gets killed by accident. He’s about to kill himself too but they convince him not to, and after his testimony the camp is finally shut down, that horrible place, and the people there are arrested. 

It ends showing that the mysterious figure has a recording of Blake’s lesson, so maybe he was in her class?

We see Blake teaching her class when a text arrives: it’s from Garcia and it reads “Avengers, assemble!” :-p

I don’t know if this counts because Rossi said it during the final showdown, to convince him he’s not an abomination at all; he said “ if you wanna live your life according to a single message go ahead but try John 13:34 instead:

-A new command I give you: love one another. As I have loved you, you must love one another

-The world breaks everyone and afterward many are stronger at the broken places. Ernest Hemingway

16 - Carbon copy - When JJ receives flowers with zugzwang written on the card, the investigation on the Replicator gets more serious. Who said that to Reid, Maeve’s stalker Diane or the Replicator? At this question they answer: if it was him then he knew about Reid’s calls, meaning he’s stalking the team

The unsub leaves a picture of Hotchner on a victim’s body. Pretty quickly they guess who he is: Donnie, a man suspected to be a murderer 15 years ago, and that was later cleared of all charges. Gideon worked on that case and caught the right guy, but Donnie’s name got to the papers and his life was ruined. Now he wants revenge. Once caught, he admits in anger of having killed those nurses, but knows nothing about the other murders, in other states. After a phone call, he kills himself. The Replicator is still out there, clearly obsessed with them

-Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Charles Caleb Colton

17 - The gathering - People with urges to kill or otherwise do horrible things, get together in a support group, where they put their fantasies into stories that will be read aloud, and this process is supposed to take the urges away. One day Peter realizes that his stories have been put into action by the man leading the group, and feels betrayed. Peter confronts Mark and then he kills him. The ep’s murderer has been murdered, and it was the first time for Peter, so now he’s struggling with it. He abducts a woman that knows him only via online chat, he takes her to the pool and eventually throws her in , all tied up to drown. The team arrives. Peter doesn’t flinch when Morgan saves the girl, he simply threatens to cut his own throat. JJ is trying to make him calm down and put down the knife, when Reid starts saying how this urges will always be in him and honestly they won’t be able to help him with that, but he still has to keep trying to fight it. Peter says “I appreciate your honesty” then slices his own throat and falls in the pool.

Hotch confronts Reid about that, and he explains: he had lied to Diane, doing what he was supposed to do, and it hadn’t worked, so now he has tried something different, sadly with the same result. His judgement is compromised because of Maeve’s death. 

Garcia meets Sam, an ex, while she was with Kevin. He’s jealous, but she is clear with him and she reminds him that “it’s no longer any of your business”. 

The episode ends with Kevin and Garcia clearing things up and stating that they want to stay friends even if the romance is no longer there (well, he has been dating other girls, so why shouldn’t she?). Garcia has invited Sam home and plays the ukulele for him (literally, no metaphores here..)

-Barbara Grizzuti Harrison once said: all acts performed in the world begin in the imagination

-Oscar Wilde said: I can resist anything except temptation 

18 - Restoration - Chicago, illinois. It’s Morgan’s city, and we meet again the detective that had suspected him. The unsub was once a kid molested by the same man that molested Morgan, so he has to talk about it to explain the molester’s MO. He even has to go to prison to talk to him, because his young friend didn’t help him, didn’t want to be a snitch, and another man dies. 

After they catch the guy, alive, Morgan speaks to the press saying that he was too one of Carl’s victims, but what happened doesn’t have to destroy you, you can become stronger and fight it. Easier said than done, one might say, but still he IS right.

After hearing the news, all the men in prison with Carl learn about what he did. It ends with Morgan receiving a call: Carl is dead.

-I am dead. Only vengeance can restore me. Terry Goodkind

-For darkness restores what light cannot repair. Joseph Brodsky

19 - Pay it forward - Bronson Springs, Colorado. In 1988 the city buried a time capsule. In 2013 it’s opened, and a head is found inside it. A man arrested for vandalism had heard of a girl being raped, and the whole thing was shut up with money. The unsub started by killing the boy responsible, then in 2013 he killed all those involved, like the journalist that did NOT write about it, then three years later he met the girl who had changed her name and married her. Now she finds out what he’s been doing and reveals the truth: she was 15 and scared, and made it up. He’s now angry at her but the team arrives, saves her and arrest him. 

-A memory is what is left when something happens and does not completely unhappen. Edward De Bono

-There is no present or future, only the past, happening over and over again, now. Eugene O’Neill

20 - Alchemy - Reid is burying himself into work, and he reads lots of local newspapers, and he connects two murders that nobody else has connected. A woman lost her child and a sociopath man takes advantage of her grief and the insanity that went with it. She took men home, trying to get pregnant, because he had told her that her son would come back. They would then kill the guy and cut him to pieces. The man is arrested; the woman goes to drown herself where her son had drowned.

To help the grief, Reid lets himself fall asleep and dream of dancing with Maeve. Agent Stern is played by Claudia Christian. 

-Dreams are true while they last, and do we not live in dreams? Alfred Lord Tennyson

-JRR Tolkien wrote: I will not say do not weep, for not all tears are an evil

21 - Nanny dearest - Each year a nanny is abducted, tortured and killed and always posed on the same day. When this unsub was a child, his little sister drowned in the bathtub and the nanny was declared innocent and he never got over it. In a way it’s the same old story, over and over again, as it is always with humans: one person does something wrong and all the category gets the blame.

When they catch him, he tries to run (leaving the baby there, the baby that in his fantasy replaced his sister…) but JJ shot him twice: one hit him right on the head, she’s a great shot!

Very good the bit of scene at the end, when the little girl’s mum thanked Tara (the only victim who ever escaped him) and hugged her, and Tara finally cried.

It’s always nice to see JJ’s family, they are so cute together :-)

-Children are educated by what the grown up is and not by his talk. Carl Jung

-Alone, all alone. Nobody, but nobody can make it out here alone. Maya Angelou

22 - #6 - Downtown Detroit, Michigan. The unsub abducts a married couple and forces them to stab each other. When he finds a woman alone, without the husband, he abducts another husband alone, the ‘number six’ of the title.It turns out that number six ‘is’ the unsub.

Blake’s husband comes back with shocking news: he’s been offered a teaching position at Harvard, and got one for her too, and she doesn’t know if she’s ready to leave the BAU. Reid tells her that there will always be work, but what is rare is to find someone that makes us happy. She wants to stay at the BAU, she loves him and she'll go visit every chance she has, but she needs this job..

-We are not the same persons this year as last, nor are those we love. It is a happy chance if we, changing, continue to love the changed person. W. Somerset Maugham

23 - Brothers Hotchner - Sean Hotchner calls his brother Aaron on a case. He’s a bartender now and a girl died in his club/bar/pub/whatever. At first it seems ecstasy overdose, but not to Sean. He saw the girl bleeding, from the eyes and the nose, her whole face red. People start dying, from drugs in clubs, or even at home drinking wine. 

This Sean here was kind of disgusting, talking of what his partner Thane (Sean Maguire) does very nonchalantly, as if there was nothing wrong in drugging girls to have sex with them! I call that rape :-/ How come nobody pointed that out?!?

The unsub is targeting only drug users, Thane drugged the wine to give it to girls to drink in the club, and Sean stole a box of wine from the club and sold it privately. They catch the unsub and at the end Sean shows up at Beth’s place to talk to Hotch and then is taken away in a police car.

It ends with the Replicator hacking Garcia’s computer and then we finally see his face when he’s probably on the point of killing Erin.

Garcia : “guys, I have found something stranger than a time traveling police box”, another Doctor Who reference :-D 

-Rarely do members of the same family grow up under the same roof. Richard Bach

-Cruel is the strife of brothers. Aristotle

24 - The Replicator - New York City. Erin is walking feeling very sick and then the Replicator seated her on a bench. He calls Hotch taunting him, remembering when Foyet called him and he was too late. He seats with her so she doesn’t die alone. Erin had figured out before them that the Replicator was inside the FBI and added a note on her report, an infinity symbol cut into the victim’s wrist. So the Replicator cut that symbol on her wrist. The unsub is a genius but also alone, and when he got trouble at work he snapped. He got transferred , Erin ruined his career like she did to Blake. 

He makes their helicopter crash and takes Blake. He chains her with 8 locks, and arms a bomb in there. Blake and Hotch and Reid are locked in a sort of cell. For some reason, he let them go and locked himself and Rossi in, but Rossi expected that and took countermeasures. He can get out but locks the replicator in to blow up. It ends with the funeral and the team sharing memories about Erin, together, because as they always say “that’s what families do”

Kevin is working on Garcia’s computer. 

-Affliction comes to us, not to make us sad but sober. Not to make us sorry but wise. HG Wells

-Richard Bach wrote: the bond that links your true family is not one of blood, but of respect and joy in each other’s life.

End of season 8