
Criminal Minds sometimes struggled to nail the right tone when it came to the more outlandish UnSubs, taking a dull, by-the-book procedural approach to characters who were one step removed from Batman villains. After her scleroderma clears up once she spreads her late husband's ashes over her tomato garden, Emma decides that the sensible, level-headed thing to do is to force-feed captives soil additives, kill them with an axe, and grind them up with a wood chipper to use as fertilizer.

The UnSub is a woman by the name of Emma Kerrigan ( Anne Dudek), a hypochondriac health nut who hallucinates rashes and scabs all over her body. RELATED: 'Criminal Minds' Is Coming Back as a Paramount+ Revival (With the Original Showrunner to Boot!)Ĭriminal Minds pushed the boundaries of its TV-14 rating a lot harder than other procedurals of its ilk, but even for this show "The Good Earth" is gnarly. Here are the top episodes that show Criminal Minds at its best. ( Mandy Patinkin, the show’s original star, agreed, which is why he stepped away.) But it was also capable of some great, tense television, as well as the occasional detour into gleeful insanity.

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They skin people alive! They feed people to rats! They set a house ablaze and put on a fire suit to watch the family burn to death! They tear a woman apart with rabid dogs! And that’s only in the first two seasons! It’s not quite Hannibal levels of disturbing, but it comes pretty close.Īt its weakest, Criminal Minds verged on PG-13 torture porn, relishing the horrible things done to terrified young women and not remotely earning its resolutions. But the killers in Criminal Minds are rarely satisfied with murder methods as pedestrian as stabbing or strangling.
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The sheer number of serial killers the BAU finds over the years is frightening enough, like some country-wide version of Murder, She Wrote’s Cabot Cove. Even the soundtrack, consisting of omnipresent ambient cues and the occasional needle drop, is similar to what one would find on NCIS.īut what sets Criminal Minds apart from NCIS is that Criminal Minds is unhinged. The production has that slick CBS sheen which brings to mind time spent on a couch watching reruns on a Saturday afternoon. The character archetypes are familiar: there’s a stern father figure in charge, there’s a stuttering nerdy genius, there’s a playful tech expert, and over the course of the series there are many no-nonsense women with brown hair.

Every element of Criminal Minds is of a piece with other network procedurals.
