And In The End
The team regroups to finish off Everett Lynch and their run in prime time.
Tropes
- Adventures in Comaland: During Reid's Near-Death Experience.
- And the Adventure Continues: The team heads out on a new case.
- Arbitrarily Large Bank Account: Mere weeks later, they already have a new jet!
- Back for the Finale: Played with. Most of the past members of the team show up, but only in flashbacks. The other memorable reappearances happen during Spence's Near-Death Experience. The one clear example is Diana Reid, last seen in “Awakenings.”
- Bait-and-Switch:
- When Reid's near death dream begins, it looks like Garcia will be the one guiding him through it, as was the case with Morgan in season 11. Then she turns into Erin Strauss.
- In the third segment of his dream, Reid finds himself in his apartment, and a blond woman is sitting on his couch with her back turned, leading us to think it's Maxine. She turns around, and it's Maeve.
- The going-away party at the end is for Penelope, not Rossi, who was contemplating retirement at the beginning of the episode.
- Bittersweet Ending: Penelope leaves, but will continue on.
- Bookends:
- The first episode of the season had Grace Lynch shoot Jennifer with a hidden gun, very nearly killing her, then driving away. The series finale has Jennifer dig a flare gun out of the car and fire it at Everett Lynch's plane as he tries to take off, killing him.
- In the pilot, Reid's father figure Gideon was haunted about having misread a bomber situation and inadvertently caused the death of six FBI agents not too long before the start of the series. In this episode, Reid is literally haunted because of a situation he misread which caused six FBI agents to die in an explosion.
- Breaking the Fellowship: Minor example, but still, the episode ends with Penelope leaving the BAU to become IT for another FBI department.
- Bulletproof Vest: Rossi is forced to remove his before getting on the jet. Good thing he's Crazy-Prepared.
- Call-Back: Lots, most heartbreakingly when Penelope, over Spence's inert body, remembers the last time she was in a hospital watching over Spence.
- Continuity Nod: Garcia mentions to Diana that Reid has been in the hospital before, as have Morgan, Hotchner, herself, and JJ earlier this year.
- Crazy-Prepared:
- Rossi's redundant Bulletproof Vest. Though he was going to that situation with open eyes, so he probably doesn't always wear two vests.
- Also, according to Prentiss, from the very first requisition from the BAU for a private jet, they planned for the exact type of hostage situation Rossi finds himself in with Lynch. Good thing, too.
- Defrosting Ice Queen: Of all people, Penelope has this with Alvez when he asks her out. Obviously a case of Belligerent Sexual Tension.
- Extra points for the fact that when he first joined the team, Alvez called Penelope the "queen of ice," because of her treatment of him.
- Don't Celebrate Just Yet: Where this episode begins, as the team thinks both Everett and Roberta Lynch died in the explosion.
- End-of-Series Awareness: "Next week we won't all be together like we have been."
- Expository Hair Style Change: Apparently, in the afterlife, Maeve is a blonde.
- Flare Gun: J.J. grabs one from the SUV's emergency kit and lights up the night sky.
- Flashback: Plenty. Almost everyone who was ever a part of the BAU team appears on screen at some point, however briefly. Even Hotch. Exceptions are Jordan Todd, Ashley Seaver, Stephen Walker, Alex Blake, and Kate Callahan.
- Good Angel, Bad Angel: Reid surmises that while late Team Mom Erin Strauss represents the good angel, the serial killer who killed Hotch's wife and who Hotch beat to death in return represents the bad angel. His inner representation of the Boston Reaper takes offense to that.
- Grand Finale: Focusing appropriately on Spence and Penelope, the only two characters still around since day one. Despite being absent for most of season six, JJ has also been around since the first episode, and gets her moment in the finale, being the one to finish the last Unsub.
- Hidden Depths:
- Inverted with Maeve, who reveals her "deepest, darkest secret": she loves '90s rom-coms.
- Everett Lynch isn't merely a shallow gold-digging serial killer conman, he is also a pilot, who when he was 19 taught himself Spanish.
- Who'd have guessed that the jet had secrets yet to be revealed? Namely, a gun hidden in a secret compartment that has never been mentioned before.
- Hollywood Healing: Averted. It's a few weeks before Spencer is ready to come back to work.
- Hypocrite: The ghost of George Foyet thinks it's hypocritical that people he kills are dubbed "victims" while the people Reid kills are called "casualties".
- I Have Your Wife: Lynch's final play against the team is to take Krystall hostage.
- I Know You Know I Know: Lynch let's Krystall know who he really is. She pretends she needs to call David, but he stops her because he saw her realize the truth.
- Married to the Job: Even Krystall understands by the end that Rossi is.
- Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: That Gideon and Maeve and presumably everyone else live on in the afterlife.
- Non Sequitur:
- When she arrives at the hospital where Reid is hovering between life and death, Diana is ashtonished that Garcia is almost as tall as herself.
- When the nurse asks Diana what to do about Spencer, she replies that she can't say, since she thought it was Tuesday.
- Play-Along Prisoner: Rossi takes Krystall's place as Lynch's hostage armed with (1) a hidden shim he can use to get out of his handcuffs, (2) the knowledge that the jet has at least one weapon hidden on board, and (3) a secret backup bulletproof vest.
- Riddle for the Ages: What did Penelope write on that slip of paper?
- Shout-Out:
- Both the episode title and a speech given by Penelope quote "The End" by The Beatles.
- Maeve's favorite movie is City of Angels.
- Maeve and Reid quote E. E. Cummings at each other.
- J.J. goes all Die Hard 2 on the team jet.
- Stock Footage:
- Early in the episode, footage from "The Fisher King (Part 1)" is used, allowing Hotch, Gideon, Morgan and Elle to come Back for the Finale.
- Footage of J.J. and Will’s wedding from the end of "Run" is used as Rossi reminisces over the previous parties he’d thrown at his home.
- Strictly Formula: Averted. This episode lacks an UnSub, there's no meeting to discuss the case and head out to the crime scene, and the profilers never deliver a profile. It's an entire O.O.C. Is Serious Business episode.
- Survivor's Guilt: Unconscious Reid feels bad about the agents who died in the explosion he failed to predict, briefly expressed by his inner representation of the Boston Reaper.
- Take Me Instead: How Rossi winds up a Play-Along Prisoner of Lynch.
- Time Skip: A brief one toward the end, in order to avert Hollywood Healing.
- Trash the Set: Well, the jet, anyway.
- Unspoken Plan Guarantee: Apparently, some of it was even unspoken to the team, as it seems only Prentiss and Rossi knew what the endgame was once he was on the jet.
- Verbal Backspace: Rossi almost says to Krystall that he wants to retire, but backspaces, forcing her to figure it out.
- Villain Ball: Lynch's decision to let Rossi take Krystall's place. Letting an experienced, savvy FBI profiler onto his own jet was sloppy, sloppy villaining.
- Workplace Romance: Subverted. Alvez can finally ask Penelope out, since they won't be working together any more. Her enthusiastic response hints at a coming Relationship Upgrade.
