Zugzwang
Directed by Jesse Warn
Written by Breen Frazier
An UnSub is obsessed with the topic of suicide, and wants revenge on neurologist Dr. Maeve Donovan for rejecting her thesis.Written by Breen Frazier
Reid: "Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage." Lao Tzu.
Provides examples of:
- Accidental Hero: The Replicator is the one who prompts Reid to confide in the BAU about Maeve and her stalker, leading to the group looking into it on their own time, all because Reid mistakenly believed the one who called him on the phone was Maeve's stalker trying to taunt him. While the BAU ultimately failed to save Maeve, they wouldn't even have been involved had it not been for The Replicator.
- Attacking Through Yourself: How Diane ends her imagined rival's life. She holds Maeve close and shoots them both in the head with the same bullet.
- Bad "Bad Acting": Subverted. Reid and Maeve's voices go flat when they pretend not to understand what Diane's riddle means, but she either doesn't notice or doesn't care.
- The Bad Guy Wins: Diane dies, but it’s a Murder-Suicide which also kills Reid’s girlfriend Maeve, and because Diane killed herself alongside Maeve, Reid will never be able to avenge Maeve’s death.
- Berserk Button: If you ever suggest Diane's testing is flawed, she will stop caring whether she can talk you into committing suicide and just shoot you in the head instead.
- Central Theme: Does suicidal ideation psychosomatically kill you?
- Codename: How Reid knows Maeve is in trouble. They always use character names from the works of Arthur Conan Doyle when they speak on the phone, and the voice that intercepts introduces itself as "Adam Worth" to show Reid that it knows that. (As Reid explains to the team, Adam Worth was the real person Doyle used as inspiration for Moriarty.)
- Cruel Mercy: Reid suggests Diane not kill Maeve so Maeve can live with her inferiority.
- Defiant Captive: Once she realizes who Diane is, Maeve decides she would rather be killed by Diane than commit suicide to satisfy her insane stalker.
- Ditzy Genius: Diane is brilliant. She can make Garcia's job hard. But she also has some weird fixations that make her seem stupid, though it is left up to the viewers whether she just underestimates everyone else's intelligence.
- Downer Ending: Reid's love interest dies at the hand of her stalker, who kills herself in the process. To top it off, Reid went off protocol to save her, and he couldn't.
- Dream Sequence: The wedding in the beginning.
- The Faceless: The bride in the wedding in the beginning.
- It's Personal: There is not enough evidence for a case, so the team searches for Maeve on their personal time. Diane had no idea Reid even existed, though.
- Murder-Suicide: The Downer Ending of the episode has Diane murdering Maeve and killing herself by firing a single bullet through both of their heads.
- Not What It Looks Like: Diane goes through Maeve’s letters and finds one where she talks about buying a blindfold. She interprets it as Maeve being into BDSM when she was talking about using it to make blindfolds fun for Reid.
- Precision F-Strike: When the team is going over why Diane is stalking Maeve, Reid gets so angry over Maeve’s abduction that he calls Diane a bitch.
- Pun: How to flirt with Reid.Maeve: Every Penrose triangle has its thorns.Diane: It's easy as Pi.
- Red Herring: The BAU is lead to believe that the person who called Reid on the payphone, "Adam Worth", is Maeve's stalker, and that their calling of Reid was meant to be a taunt to him. The UnSub makes clear however that they didn't even know Reid existed. After the UnSub is killed, it's revealed they weren't "Adam Worth", The Replicator was.
- Shout-Out:
- A scene is practically a Gender Flipped version of the last scene of The Reichenbach Fall.
- Reid and Maeve use codenames from Sherlock Holmes.
- Maeve's stalker gets compared to John Lennon's.
- Stalking cases remind Garcia of Rosanna Arquette, who inspired two songs by Toto and Peter Gabriel.
- Maeve and Reid are both fans of Thomas Merton.
- Stalker with a Crush:
- Subverted by Diane who stalks Maeve, but develops a crush on Reid.
- The team speculate that Maeve's stalker might be her ex boyfriend, then when they figure out that the stalker is a woman they speculate that it might be an ex girlfriend.
- Stalker without a Crush: …but it turns out she's mostly bitter that Maeve rejected her thesis.
- Stealth Insult: Reid outright compares Diane to Nazi scientists, but she doesn't even notice.
- Take Me Instead: Reid offers himself in exchange for Maeve. Ends up being the thing that gets her killed.
- Test Kiss: If Diane had known Reid better, she might have realized he'd be awkward kissing anyone, but she doesn't know him so she goes with this.
- Title Drop: What the BAU believes to be the UnSub/Maeve's stalker tells Reid on the phone to let him know he can't make a move without losing something. Turns out, it was someone else.
- Wham Line: Bobby realizes Diane's outfit is identical to clothes he has seen on Maeve, and asks where she got them. Diane replies, "From her closet."
- Maeve: "Love is our true destiny. We do not find the meaning of life by ourselves alone; we find it with another." Thomas Merton.
