Profiling 101
Directed by Felix Enriquez Alcala
Written by Virgil Williams
We learn how Rossi spends his birthdays: visiting serial killer Tommy Yates (AKA "The Womb Raider") in prison. Yates has convinced him to take him off death row in exchange for a partial list of his victims every year. The BAU discuss him as a case study in a lecture.Written by Virgil Williams
Rossi: The philosopher Voltaire wrote, "To the living, we owe respect. But to the dead, we owe only the truth."
Tropes in this episode
- Bastard Bastard: The killer Thomas Yates is this. He was born after his mother, a sixteen year old girl, was raped. This also makes him a Child by Rape.
- Birthday Hater: Rossi. Yates chose his birthday as the day he'd tell him of his victims, leading Rossi to really not look forward to the day.
- Continuity Nod: Several flashbacks reference the team's history with the BAU:
- The first flashback shows Rossi working on the case by himself, as he mentions he used to do in "About Face".
- The 1997 flashback has Hotch working out of the Seattle field office, which he references in "Extreme Aggressor".
- In the 2005 flashback, which takes place sometime before or during the first season, Morgan asks Hotch if he's calling Gideon, who left the team at the beginning of the third season.
- Deal with the Devil: Rossi makes a deal with the killer, Thomas Yates. The death penalty is stopped, and every year Yates tells Rossi the name of one of his victims.
- Disposable Vagrant: During his active years, Yates always started with easy "prey" such as runaways or prostitutes when he moved to a new area, specifically because they wouldn't be missed and his killings would go undiscovered longer.
- Flashback Episode: The episode is a series of flashbacks to the investigation of "the Womb Raider", which the BAU is talking about to a profiling class.
- Freudian Excuse: His hellish upbringing warped Yates and turned him into a monster. His signature of cutting out the wombs of his victims was a fixation caused by the knowledge that his mother died from an emergency hysterectomy during childbirth.
- Gruesome Grandparents: Yates was raised by his abusive grandmother who hated him and considered him to be cursed from birth thanks to being a Child by Rape and the death of her daughter during childbirth. This included beatings, starvation and being forced to sleep in the doghouse.
- Kick the Dog: Yates makes a deliberate show of rubbing in that Rossi has to arrive on the date of his birthday to get the name of so much as a single name of his victims, writing the info on a birthday card and singing "Happy Birthday", even.
- Whole Episode Flashback: The episode tells the story of how Rossi and later the BAU investigated and caught the killer, using flashbacks from as far back as 1992, with the Framing Device of them explaining the case to students at college.
- Rossi: Irish statesman and author Edmund Burke once wrote, "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing."
