Paradise
Directed by John Gallagher
Written by Erica Messer & Debra J Fisher
A roadside motel is run by a serial killer who watches couples have sex before he traps them in their rooms and tortures them to death, then puts the corpses in their car and leaves in a turn on the highway where trucks can hit them.Written by Erica Messer & Debra J Fisher
Hotchner: Thomas Fuller wrote, "A fool's paradise is a wise man's hell."
Tropes
- Argument of Contradictions: The couple fights by the guy accusing the woman of thinking he's stupid or untrustworthy, and her denying it.
- Batter Up!: The UnSub favors a wooden bat as a weapon. Works great when ambushing sleep-deprived civilians in close quarters, not so much when up against armed FBI agents.
- Break Them by Talking: The UnSub tries to verbally break his victims by saying their marriages were unhappy and that the husbands failed to protect their wives from harm. Ian doesn’t fall for the tactic and he manages to fight him off long enough for the FBI team to arrive.
- Defiant Captive: Despite being tied to a chair and possibly suffering from a concussion, Ian doesn’t give the UnSub the satisfaction of seeing him crumble in defeat. Before the man can rape Abby again, Ian pulls up the bolted chair and charges at him.
- Eyescream: When the man in the couple looks through the hole in the door, the Unsub jams a knife in his eye. Luckily, it misses by a quarter of an inch.
- Forced to Watch: Part of the UnSub’s M.O. is tying men to a bolted chair and raping their wives in front of them.
- Foreshadowing: A trailer hits a car with murdered people in it to kick off the plot, and another one almost hits the next couple on their way to the motel. And at the end, one hits the Unsub when he's running away from the cops.
- Go Through Me: Ian has Abby hide behind him multiple times when the UnSub scares them.
- Happily Married: Beneath their bickering, the victim couple are clearly this. It makes it all the more heartbreaking when the stress of the situation starts to erode their trust in each other.
- Hypocrite: The Unsub criticizes the man for not protecting his wife – from him.
- I Remember Because...: The proprietor of a popular diner where two victims stopped at says that with the number of customers she has, they would have had to be "doing cartwheels on fire" to make an impression. However, she does in fact remember them because Mr. Sanders gave her a $10.00 tip two visits in a row.
- Karmic Death: Hansen covers up his murders by making it seem like the couples are struck in their cars by an oncoming truck. He himself gets run over and killed by a truck during the climax after Morgan chases him out onto the road.
- Look Both Ways: Hansen doesn’t during the climax. It gets him hit by a truck.
- Mistaken for Racist: Subverted. The Unsub tells Hotch that he has rooms available, before he shows his badge. Then turns a black man away, who actually wants a room. Judging by his expression, the Unsub really does have something against black people. Considering what he does to white people who he finds attractive, the man and his family were lucky to get turned away.
- The Peeping Tom: The UnSub observes his victims through holes in the side of the cabin before escalating to psychological, then physical torture.
- Red Herring: One man Rossi interviews, who rents ATVs and sometimes lets customers spend the night, seems helpful but a bit creepy (dismissively saying women don't come up there because of how dirty it is), lives and works alone, and his scene lasts fairly long, but he isn't the rapist and murderer. That would be the owner of the next motel the team investigates.
- Running Joke: Garcia's chipper attitude and talking about murder sites like she works for a travel agency has Hotch ask the team to remind him to have her drug tested.
- Sweet Tooth: Becky Sanders' father recalls that she liked donuts and her husband always brought them back for her from a diner near where he took his camping trips.
- Tempting Fate: The killer has a male victim strapped to a bolted chair, and notices that the man is trying to escape. The killer mocks that no previous victim has accomplished what he is trying, to make it seem that it is futile to struggle. Once the victim gets sufficiently enraged, he pulls the chair loose and attacks the smug killer.
- Hotchner: Roman poet Phaedrus wrote, "Things are not always what they seem. The first appearance deceives many. The intelligence of a few perceived what has been carefully hidden."
