Sex Birth Death
Written by Chris Mundy & Andrew Wilder
A high school kid stops Reid on the metro and asks him what it would say about someone if they were to kill prostitutes and chop off their hair. When Reid hesitates, the young man clarifies that he's wondering if it would be a sex thing or a punishing them for being dirty thing. Then he excuses himself and disappears into the crowd.
Reid and Garcia track him down, and Reid and Morgan pay him a visit to ask him about his habit of looking at prostitutes and fantasizing about having sex with them. Nathan gets annoyed and explains that he doesn't fantasize about having sex with them, he fantasizes about killing them. Nathan's mother, who works with corpses, says he's just a smart boy who lives in his head a lot.
A congresswoman asks Hotch to keep it on the down-low. He and Gideon track down a congressman's wife and go looking for her husband, who turns out to be the killer. Nathan still hasn't figured out what his deal is and feels suicidal over being admitted to a psychiatric hospital tomorrow. He solicits a prostitute and stabs himself in front of her.
This episode provides examples of:
- Bait-and-Switch Comment: When Nathan tells Morgan and Reid that he fantasizes about prostitutes, they ask if is fantasies are about having sex with them. Nathan replies "no" in the most "duh" tone – he thought he had made it clear that he fantasized about murdering them.
- Call-Back: Nathan brings up the Mill Creek killer and the Hollow Man when asking Reid's expert opinion about the murder victim he saw earlier.
- Character Focus: On Reid, of whom the main suspect is a fan.
- Companion Cube: Garcia introduces Reid to her car, Esther.
- Disposable Sex Worker: Coroners didn't notice the killing pattern in the dead prostitutes, so took their time realizing it was a serial killer.
- Driven to Suicide: Nathan Harris slits his wrists in front of the prostitute. He nearly dies, but Reid shows in time.
- Fanboy: Nathan is a huge fan of Reid.
- Freudian Excuse: Nathan the Red Herring is given one. He's afraid he's a serial killer in the making because he is obsessed wih death after he saw naked dead female bodies in his mother's pathology class as a child.
- Hollywood Psych: Nathan seems to have some kind of pure OCD from seeing his mother handle corpses when he was younger, but the profilers generally treat it as some kind of psychosis.
- Hypocrite: Discussed. Two young prostitutes comment that the politicians who publicly decry the existence of prostitutes are the ones most likely to pay them a visit. They find it odd, but Prentiss says that's pretty much how people work.
- It's All My Fault: Reid blames himself for not immediately suspecting some awkward kid who spoke to him on a Metro station of being a serial killer.
- Manifesto-Making Malcontent: Ronald Weems, the killer, writes furious articles ranting about prostitutes, and how they are filth that needs to be cleaned up.
- Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Discussed. After saving Nathan's life, Reid notes that he just saved a boy who may become a serial killer.
- Red Herring:
- Nathan fits the profile, and claims he found out about the murder because he saw the body, but in the end he's not the killer, or even a killer, except of himself and a bird.
- The messages the killer carves are not pleas to help him stop killing, but to help him kill people.
- Refuge in Audacity: Nathan gets visibly irritated when federal agents think he wants to have sex with the prostitutes. He has explained that all he wants to do is kill them.
- Reid: T.S. Eliot wrote, "Between the desire and the spasm, between the potency and the existence, between the essence and the descent, falls the shadow. This is the way the world ends."
