Bully
Directed by Glenn Kershaw
Written by Virgil Williams
A novelist and former English teacher is found beaten to death and dressed in womens underwear, a murder which Alex Blake's father (a retired Kansas City police officer) deduces to be connected to two similar deaths a year earlier. He's right, as the UnSub is a former high school student seeking revenge on the people, both students and faculty, who he blames for a bullying incident that led to the suicide of his best friend. He seeks to humiliate his victims the same way his friend had been, before brutally beating them to death.Written by Virgil Williams
Blake: "Brothers and sisters are as close as hands and feet." Vietnamese proverb
Tropes in this episode
- Adults Are Useless: The reason why the killer is going after his old teachers and principal, as they barely even tried to stop the bullying and mostly seemed to want to ignore it as much as possible. The principal made the victim and the main bully shake hands as if that would solve anything.
- Bully Hunter: The UnSub is hunting and killing those who bullied him and his best friend in high school. In cases where he could not locate the former bully, he killed their parents instead.
- Dysfunctional Family: Blake's on the lighter side of the scale. Her mom died a while back, and her older brother was a police officer who died on duty. She hasn't been back to her hometown in five years, and her younger brother is kind of antagonistic at first. They make up by the end of the episode.
- Karma Houdini: The jock who is directly responsible for the bullying is in army service in Afghanistan, and therefore unavailable as a target. The UnSub can’t go after his parents because they moved out of state. He decides to go after the parents of the bully' girlfriend, because she is attending the University of Missouri. It goes into Misplaced Retribution territory because the girlfriend wasn’t even part of the bullying (she was even appalled by it) and broke up with the jock because of his attitude.
- No-Holds-Barred Beatdown: The UnSub beats his victims to death with his bare hands.
- Revenge by Proxy: The killer becomes signifigantly less sympethic due to going after people who are barely even tangentially related to the original incident, just because he can't get to the ones he actually wants to kill.
- Blake: "Alone, we can do so little. Together we can do so much." Helen Keller.
