Trivia / Criminal Minds: Beyond Borders

• Actor-Shared Background: Agent Simmons is, like his actor Daniel Henney, the child of a Korean-born mother and white American father.
• California Doubling: There are second units taking the Establishing Shot footage, but the actors never leave Los Angeles. In addition, the first season had the misfortune of being shot during one of the worst droughts in California in recent memory, so be ready to see brown hills in the background even when the team goes to tropical, evergreen countries.
• Completely Different Title: In the French version, though the show's name is more or less the same ("Criminal Minds: Unit without Borders"), the episodes are completely different:
  • "The Harmful One" -> "The World is the Limit"
  • "Harvested" -> "Bad Karma"
  • "Denial" -> "The Unsubmissive Ones"
  • "Whispering Death" -> "Seppuku"
  • "The Lonely Heart" -> "Paris at Night"
  • "Love Interrupted" -> "Moon of Honey and Hell"
  • "Citizens of the World" -> "The Blue Men"
  • "De los Inocentes" -> "The Massacre of the Innocents"
  • "The Matchmaker" -> "Of Love and Hate"
  • "Iqiniso" -> "Pretorius"
  • "The Ballad of Nick and Nat" -> "The Killer Lovers"
  • "El Toro Bravo" -> "The Matador"
  • "Paper Orphans" -> "For a child's life"
• Fake Nationality: Well, there is some effort to avoid it, but it can only go so far in non-cable TV.
  • Korean-American actor James Kyson plays a South Korean police detective. However, he was born in South Korea.
  • Fake Russian: In "The Ripper of Riga", you may recognize Nick Vera from Cold Case - who spoke of his Russian grandfather and claimed to speak a very poor, mostly-profanity version of Russian - as Jack's Russian cop friend, and the Jewish Ukrainian mobster Manny Horvitz from Boardwalk Empire as an incarcerated Russian serial killer. The other Russian characters with lines are played by actual Russians, Ukrainians and first generation Russian-Americans.
• Out of Order: The premiere was aired first, but the following episodes are not aired in order for some reason. "Harvested" was the fourth episode produced, "Denial" was the seventh...
  • This is particularly obvious when you see "Love Interrupted" in order of airing. Though it was released in sixth place, it was the second episode produced. The result is a bigger attention to Character Development than in other "previous" episodes and the continuation of several minor plots Left Hanging from the premiere (Jack's reluctance to shoot the UnSub, Matt's biking, Clara's dead husband, Mae trying to know Clara better, etc).
  • Results in an Orphaned Reference in "De los Inocentes", which begins with the IRT returning home from a recent mission before being redirected to investigate a murder in Mexico. This mission was originally the one in Belize in "Love Interrupted", which was the episode supposed to precede "De los Inocentes". With the episodes out of order, it is now an unspecified mission offscreen.
• Playing Against Type: Gwendoline Yeo playing as a Singaporean.
• Screwed by the Network: Came close. The first season was delayed twice. Then, except for the premiere and the final three episodes, it was aired Out of Order. Fortunately, due to a deal with ABC Studios, the studio came to a rescue and the show got renewed for Season 2. But then, CBS cancelled the show due to low ratings.
• Translation Correction:
  • The Spanish dub of "El Toro Bravo" changes the name of the Pamplona cathedral from "Cathedral of Saint Francis Xavier" to its real name, Santa María la Real ("Royal Saint Mary"). They still left all references to Saint Firmin being Pamplona's patron saint untouched, however.^note Saint Saturnin of Toulouse is the patron saint of Pamplona. Saint Firmin and Saint Francis Xavier are the patron saints of Navarre. Only very few people in or outside Pamplona know or care, though.
  • In the same dub, Esposito gets promoted from "lead detective" to police commissioner, because there are no detectives in the Spanish police. Then he's sometimes back at the equivalent rank, Inspector. And everyone now pronounces his name as Expósito, not only him like in the original version.
  • And showing that Westworld fans are not alone, Simon Alonso's mother's name is changed from Delores to the correct Spanish spelling, Dolores.
• What Could Have Been:
  • This was the second of Messer's proposals for a spin-off. Her plan A was a prequel dealing with the origins of the BAU and featuring young versions of Rossi and Gideon.^note If you want to get a taste of what this other spin-off would have been, watch the Criminal Minds Season 10 episode "Nelson's Sparrow."
  • Whatever the initial show had in store for Anna Gunn's character Lily Lambert, which judging by the pilot, was going to be co-main character with Sinise's (if not the main character, distancing the spin-off further from the mother series and the previous one, Suspect Behavior), since Lambert was female and non-action oriented:
    • Possibly a bigger emphasis on international law and diplomacy, since Lambert was introduced as an expert on it.
    • A possibly recurring, long-time arc involving Lambert's brother, said in the pilot to have been wrongfully imprisoned in Thailand years before, and served as the catalyst for Lambert's career choice.

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