All That Remains
Directed by Thomas Gibson
Written by Erica Messer
An alcoholic writer with DID is a suspect in the murder of his wife and disappearance of his daughters.Written by Erica Messer
Hotchner: "Love never dies a natural death. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings." Anaïs Nin.
Tropes in this episode
- The Alcoholic: Bruce is an alcoholic who turns violent when drunk.
- Alone with the Psycho: JJ brings Sera home after she was "rescued". Then she realizes that Sera is way too calm about Katie's death, and starts snooping in the basement while the girl is supposedly taking a shower. Right after JJ finds trophies that Sera kept from killing her mom and sister, Sera corners her with a gun.
- Cain and Abel: It's revealed at the end that the older daughter killed her younger sister. JJ is able to figure this out because Sera seems oddly uncaring about having just lost Katie, and Sera admits that this lack of grief is one thing she just couldn't fake properly.
- The Dog Was the Mastermind: It turns out that the older daughter is responsible for both her mother's and her sister's deaths, and was planning to pin it on her father.
- Everyone Is a Suspect: Averted. The episode had only two or three characters as murder suspects.
- Foreshadowing: Sera was an aspiring writer, and the team notes how dark and bleak her written stories were. She is later revealed to be a psychopath, with a cold and unemotional manner of speaking.
- Green-Eyed Monster: Sera's motive. She believed that her mother loved her sister more than her, so she killed them both.
- Hollywood Psych: Bruce seems to have DID, but apparently it only came about after his mother died and his father began abusing him when he was ten.
- Jekyll & Hyde: Bruce when he gets drunk and angry is a different person than when he's sober or not angry, to the point of amnesia.
- Missing Time:Bruce remembers having an argument with his older daughter on Monday night, and his next memory is him trying to perform his chores on Wednesday morning. He soon realizes that he has no idea what happened between these two moments.
- Never the Obvious Suspect: Bruce was a domineering father, and an angry drunk who tormented both of his daughters since he stopped taking his medication. He also owned the murder weapon. However, he has little to do with Katie's murder, as he left the two girls alone in the wilderness at some point before the murder.
- Shout-Out: Bruce's alter ego Johnny has similar mannerisms to the character of the same name in The Shining. He also talks to Sera through a closed door to the room she is hiding from him in.
- Also, the fact that the guy with the angry alternate personality is named Bruce.
- Split Personality: Bruce is revealed to have one named Johnny. Unlike most cases of this in the series, though, while Johnny is far meaner and more violent than Bruce, he's not the murderer; the real killer, Bruce's daughter Sera, was attempting to pin the murder on him.
- Spot the Thread: JJ brings Sera home after the team "rescues" her and does her best to comfort her, but still has a feeling that something isn't quite right. Reid calls to check on her, and JJ notes that, while she herself could barely even be in her own house after her sister committed suicide, Sera hasn't mentioned Katie a single time since accusing their father of killing her, and seems composed about her death to the point of being cold. JJ soon finds evidence that Sera herself was the one who murdered her.
- Teens Are Monsters: The UnSub of this episode is a teenage girl who murdered her mother, murdered her younger sister a year later, and tried to frame her unstable, alcoholic father for both killings, all because she was convinced (incorrectly) that her mom loved her sister more than her.
- Wounded Gazelle Gambit: Sera tries to pull this when Reid and Morgan come to her house and find her pointing a gun at JJ by acting like she's suffering from PTSD and thought JJ was trying to hurt her. Fortunately, Reid and Morgan already knew that JJ was in danger after Reid called her, so they don't buy it; they pretend to believe Sera long enough to get the weapon away from her, then arrest her.
- Hotchner: Alan Lightman said, "The tragedy of this world is that no one is happy, whether stuck in a time of pain or of joy."
