Criminal Minds / Tropes A to D

Tropes A To D | Tropes E to H | Tropes I to N | Tropes O to S | Tropes T to Z

A-B

• Abandoned Hospital: In "Heathridge Manor," a woman's body is found in an abandoned asylum.
• Aborted Arc: A first season episode ends with Reid asking JJ on a date. The next episode opens with Morgan asking Reid how it went and Reid refusing to give any details. It is never brought up again. In fact, the entire concept of romantic feelings between Reid and JJ is abandoned until Season 14.
• Abortion Fallout Drama:
  • In "The Crossing," a stalking victim admits to having had an abortion about a year earlier, and though her fiancé is upset when he finds out, it does not seriously damage her or her relationship with him.
  • In the fourth season, we find out that Prentiss had an abortion when she was fifteen. Though this fact is mentioned in the context of revealing why she's screwed up, the abortion is never treated as the reason; it is instead the negative reaction of her priest which damages not her, but her friend. In neither of these cases does the character revealing the abortion or the character hearing about it imply that abortion is an immoral act.
• Abusive Parents: Show up often, and aren't limited only to UnSubs. It's strongly implied in an early episode (and subsequently repeatedly hinted at) that Hotch's father abused him and that that's one of the reasons why he pursued a career in law enforcement.
• Acceptable Breaks from Reality:
  • In real life, the BAU rarely leaves Quantico.
  • The FBI has a forced retirement age well bellow Rossi's.
  • The BAU in general. The real life BAU has nowhere the success rate the show has, and in fact several studies indicate Psychological Profilers perform no more accurately than regular police officers or students at profiling criminals. Here for the sake of the show, the BAU is correct and its methods work.
• Accidental Aiming Skills: Invoked in "L.D.S.K." when Reid claims, after shooting an UnSub in the head, that he was "aiming for his leg." Reid recently failed his gun test, so it would be easy to believe this explanation. Except that Reid was lying just a few feet away from the UnSub at the time, and it had been previously established that anything less than a headshot would probably result in the deaths of half the people in the room. Reid was making his first joke of the series, and fittingly, it was a morbid and obscure one. The joke is also a call back to the opening of the episode when Reid was practicing with Hotch for the not-yet-failed test and aims for the target's head but hits the groin. Potentially a Shout-Out as well, since Reid is a sci-fi fan. Criminal Minds began three years after Firefly first aired.
• Action Film, Quiet Drama Scene: Viewers can always tell when the scene shifts from the BAU to the UnSub because the former is always more dialogue-heavy while the latter is punctuated by less talk and more action.
• Actor Allusion: Reid finding Morgan and Rossi watching The Young and the Restless in his hotel room is an allusion to Shemar Moore's tenure on the show.
• Adults Are Useless: A number of UnSubs have the Freudian Excuse of being subjected to horrifying abuse or bullying as kids/teenagers that the authorities were well aware of and did nothing about.
  • One of the most violent UnSubs was a former bullied teen who spent years learning MMA and bodybuilding to take revenge on the bullies who tormented him and his only friend, which led to his friend committing suicide. He beat them all to death with his bare hands, but he reserved his worst beating for the principal, who never punished the bullies any further than making them give a blatantly insincere apology and shaking the victim's hand every single time:
    "Shake their hand!? Did you actually think that would work?!" (hits him again)
  • Owen Savage is the poster boy for this trope: Abusive cop father, bullied due to being in special ed classes, beloved mentally handicapped girlfriend was raped by a boy who got off scot-free, tricked into making a video of himself masturbating which other kids put up on the internet and escaped without consequences, all under the eye of an apathetic police force and school staff. When Reid reviews his life, he is truly enraged at all the opportunities the authorities had to intervene and probably prevent Owen's spree but chose not to, under the assumption that bullying is part of growing up:
    Detective: Look, boys have ways of taking care of these things.
    Reid: Yeah, they sure do. Right now Owen is out there sorting it out with an assault rifle!
• Adventures In Coma Land: Has happened a handful of times.
  • After Elle is shot by the Serial Killer of the week she is left unconscious and bleeding to death. Throughout the remainder of the episode while emergency workers attempt to resuscitate her, she is in a dream version of the BAU jet, where she is visited by her police officer father who died when she was a child. During their conversation, Elle's father tells her that the decisions she makes in the plane will make the difference as to whether she lives or dies in real life.
  • When Hotchner is critically ill after the scars from George Foyet's attack cause problems. He dreams he is in a theater with his late wife Haley and Foyet, who killed Haley. Haley sends him back to raise their son Jack and gives him her blessing for his romance with Beth.
  • While it is not a coma, Morgan goes through a similar experience when he disassociates from being tortured. Later he passes out from the pain and returns to the world he uses as an escape to figure out how to survive the abduction/torture (and to figure out some of his daddy issues)
  • The final episode gives Reid a turn after he collapses from injuries suffered in the previous episode.
  • Though not an "adventure" per se, Garcia says that she heard David Bowie's song "Heroes" playing while unconscious after being shot. This prompts her to question whether Bowie is actually god.
• Affectionate Nickname
  • Morgan and Garcia have dozens of these for each other. "Babygirl" is Morgan's personal favorite.
  • J.J. is also the only person (in the world, apparently), who calls Reid "Spence." Later in the series more characters use it.
  • Reid is also called "kid" and "pretty boy" by Morgan and "boy wonder" or "boy genius" by Rossi. Penelope has many nicknames for Reid.
• Alas, Poor Villain: Each episode shows the motivations of the UnSub and why they do what they do, and often include traumatic experiences from their past. While most UnSubs throughout the series are unrepentant monsters, there are a few that — though their actions are not excused — garner sympathy. One such example being the killer from "Devil's Night", who was horribly disfigured in a car accident and left by his lover, who we later find out was pregnant with his son.
• All Women Love Shoes: In "From Childhood's Hour," Morgan cites that a woman is definitely depressed because she only has four pairs of shoes. Reid doesn't get it. At the end of episode, Reid is talking to J.J., Prentiss, and Garcia about it. J.J. comments that even 10 pairs isn't enough, and Prentiss says that reminds her... she needs new boots.
• Alone with the Psycho: Numerous times. This is a show about serial killers after all.
  • Hotchner, at the end of Season 4 and beginning of Season 5. However, Hotchner, stabbed multiple times, is not rescued by his teammates, but rather by the Serial Killer (called the Reaper) who ambushed him. The Reaper even takes Hotchner to the hospital to make sure that Hotchner survives to suffer more.
  • Will in "Hit and Run," the two part Season 7 finale, is forced to get in the runaway car with the bank robbers, who know he's a cop and that his girlfriend is FBI and plan on using that for their own purposes.
  • Reid in Zugzwang insists on going in alone to try pulling a Take Me Instead, knowing that the Unsub is attracted to him.
• Always Murder: Well, they are the FBI's Behavior Analysis Unit. But if there were actually that many serial killers out there, no one would ever leave their houses.
  • This may be Truth in Television — the FBI estimates that at any given time, there are somewhere between 20 and 50 active serial killers in the United States. Rough calculations suggest they may have either dealt with half of the active serial killers in the U.S., or considerably less than that depending on how you think the statistics work (i.e. new killers replacing the old ones, old ones not getting caught or worst of all patterns not even being noticed). Also, most of the murderers they run into are actually spree killers, not serial killers
    • The team also deals with child abductions, serial rapists, terrorists, and spree killers, none of which are included in the FBI's estimates. Only about half of any given season's cases are actual serial killers. The seriously unrealistic element here is that one team would work all of those types of cases; in reality, the BAU has separate units to deal with separate kinds of specialized crime.
    • Other divisions specializing in things like the Mob and child exploitation have shown up occasionally.
  • J.J. once said that the BAU picks cases where they believe lives are at stake. In another episode, it was expressed that the BAU gets sent the "weird" cases.
• Amazing Freaking Grace:
  • "A Real Rain". The Cop of the Week even lampshades how much of an Ear Worm it is, and invokes some horror when she says anyone who kills cops should have to hear "Amazing Grace" being played for eternity.
  • "Fear and Loathing" has this play over the detective's funeral after the UnSub is apprehended.
  • In place of its usual end-of-episode quote, "Outlaw" has this song performed over the victims' funeral.
• Amicable Exes: Hotch and his girlfriend Beth, whom he starts dating in season 7. They make a Long-Distance Relationship work for quite awhile when she takes a job in New York, but do split up in season 10 when she gets an offer to go work in Hong Kong — he doesn't want to hold her back, but it's clear they still love each other.^note In real life, this was because Bellamy Young had landed a starring role in Scandal and couldn't return to the show.
• An Arm and a Leg: Lara, the killer's sister in "Heathridge Manor", had her arm chopped off by her mother during a psychotic episode when Lara was a baby.
• And I Must Scream:
  • "Uncanny Valley" has the UnSub, a mentally ill woman, kidnap young women, use drugs to paralyze them so she can dress them up as dolls. While all of this is going on, the victims are still alive and can hear, see and presumably feel everything — including the wigs being sewn into their scalps, and the slow deterioration of their bodies under the influence of the drugs.
  • There's also what Frank did to his victims: injecting them with a drug that left them completely paralyzed, but fully conscious, as he very slowly vivisected them. With mirrors in the ceiling.
  • And the Pittsburgh suicides that weren't suicides. The UnSub was using support groups to make friends with grieving parents of a local tragedy, then would follow them home, inject them with a paralyzing drug, and set up the fake suicides, all the while explaining to his fully conscious victims that he was just doing what they wanted him to do.
  • The UnSub from "Proof". Holy shit, the idea of being immobilized, feeling the torture someone's putting you through, getting acid dripped on various parts of you, and having it all videotaped with a running childlike commentary.
  • The victims from "Boxed In" were locked in a small box buried a few feet underground for a year.
• And Starring:
  • Thomas Gibson, after Joe Mantegna joins the cast in season three.
  • Jeanne Tripplehorn received a “With” credit during her tenure on the show in Seasons 8 and 9. This would carry over to Jennifer Love Hewitt in Season 10, and Adam Rodriguez in Season 12.
  • Paget Brewster upon her return to the series in Season 12.
• And the Adventure Continues:
  • Three extremely dark inversions of this. One is in "Bloodlines," where it's revealed there are other families perpetuating the cycle of murder and abduction; the second is in "Solitary Man," where it's heavily implied there are other serial killers using trucking as a cover; the third is in "Awake" where we discover that the man that everyone assumed the UnSub imagined kidnap his daughter is real.
  • Played straight in the series finale, which ends with the team (minus Garcia) flying off to solve their next case.
• Anguished Declaration of Love: In Season 14, an UnSub forces JJ to tell Reid her deepest secret. She tearfully admits she was in love with him since the beginning and was too chicken to do something about it. Later, she admits that while Reid had been her 'first love' and she still cares deeply about him, she's moved on with her own family and apologizes for dropping that awkward bombshell on him.
• Arch-Enemy:
  • Frank to Gideon, the Reaper to Hotch, and Doyle to Prentiss.
  • Seasons 11 and 12 have seen Mr. Scratch become this for the entire team.
• Arc Villain: Certain antagonists only appear in person a few times, but their presence is felt throughout a season.
  • The Reaper in season 5.
  • Ian Doyle in season 6.
  • The Replicator in season 8.
  • The "Dirty Dozen" hitman ring in season 11.
  • Sicarius in season 16.
• Artistic License – Biology: in episode "Magnum Opus", the UnSub turns out to be a hemophiliac suffering from Christmas disease. When the team ask García to pull up a list of people suffering from Christmas disease in San Francisco, we see a list with 15 matches, at least 3 of which are women. However, Christmas disease is extremely rare in females, as in, females can carry the disease but it is very rare that they suffer from it. And yet it turns out that at least 20% of San Francisco's B-hemophiliac population are women? Unless they are trans women, the odds for that are so close to 0 that Dr. Reid wouldn't even bother to calculate them.
  • A small example in Episode 4, Season 8. When Reid calls Maeve, she asks him if he is taking his riboflavin and magnesium. Reid replies "yes, and the occasional shot of B2". Riboflavin is vitamin B2.
  • In the first episode of Season 4 it is said that humans are born with 300 bones in their body, though the real number is closer to 270.
• Artistic License – Geography:
  • In "It Takes A Village", it appears that Criminal Minds takes place in a universe where you can get from Quantico, VA to Baltimore, MD in an hour.
  • In "Fear and Loathing", the team travels to Groton, NY, which is said to be in Westchester County, outside of New York City. Groton is actually in Tompkins County and is way upstate, closer to Cortlandt and Ithaca.
  • In "Angel Maker", Lower Canaan, Ohio is transported over 100 miles southwest from its real life location.
  • And Quantico is apparently right in DC or the immediate surrounding area, as in the episode "Sex, Birth, Death," where Reid thinks he meets the UnSub as he's exiting the Metro to work. In reality, Quantico is over an hour away, separated by two highways.
  • The Season 7 episode "Dorado Falls" is perhaps the worst example of Virginia distances and locations. Garcia says that Charlottesville is "practically our backyard" in reference to Quantico, despite the two being about 80 miles apart. A similar distance issue comes up when the UnSub seemingly drives from Charlottesville to Bethesda to Quantico within half an hour — despite the real-life drive being almost two hours.
    • A similar mistake is made in the Evolution episode "Memento Mori", where Renton, Washington resident Elias Voit refers to Yakima as his backyard. The two cities are 142.5 miles and 2 hours 22 minutes apart.
  • The episode "Birthright" takes place in Frederickburg, VA, which the show portrays as a rural, country area. Virginia viewers were quick to point out that Frederickburg is actually very urban and commercialized.
  • "Beyond Borders," the Poorly Disguised Pilot for a(nother) spinoff, is set in Barbados. Actual Barbadian viewers felt the only thing the show got right about the place was the flag. It didn't help that some Stock Footage for an establishing shot of the island actually showed Port Douglas - which is in Australia.
• Artistic License – History: In "I Love You, Tommy Brown", the titular underage student in a Teacher/Student Romance Gone Horribly Wrong (well, more wrong) is starting to have doubts (after the teacher in question shoots his classmate/neighbor), and she tries to calm him down and justify their love by saying that in medieval times, 12-year-olds marrying their elders was not unusual (this was only true of the aristocracy, and still wasn't very common); that when Henry VIII married Catherine of Aragon she was a much older woman (she was only 5 years his senior); and that Romeo and Juliet were 13 (true of the play, not of the original story; also, the point of the play is that they are too young and their love is childish; also, it's a play). Possibly justified since the teacher is a manipulative, Ax-Crazy sociopath trying to control a not-very-smart teenage boy, and she doesn't have to know a lot about history or English literature anyway.
  • Much of what she said is frequently cited incorrectly in references to medieval times. Most people uninterested in that time period would make the same mistake, and those who are interested wouldn't really bother to correct them.
  • Oddly enough, it was true of Henry VIII's grandmother, who gave birth to his father at the age of 12 — and was rendered sterile as a result. Aside from the inherent horror of this, many families thus had practical concerns not to marry girls that young, because of this happening.
• Artistic License – Medicine: In Season 4's Amplification, the UnSub is killing with a highly modified form of Anthrax. Among other errors, the most egregious of these is Morgan and Prentiss walking around the park where the bacterium was released without any protection, with the assurance that the hot zone was non-existent. Anthrax can survive for literally decades. An entire island off the coast of England had to be quarantined from the 1940s to the 1980s after having Anthrax bombs tested on it during WWII, and was only declared decontaminated after having been sprayed with formaldehyde. Almost nobody wears a hazmat suit, and those that do don't keep the face masks on.
• Artistic License – Religion: The episode "Minimal Loss," which deals with a hostage situation involving an isolated, self-sustaining religious commune which is similar to the real incidents at Waco and others, states the group was begun as libertarians, before turning religious — because, "Libertarians aren't religious." Uh, no; many libertarians are, though granted, the movement itself is not religious. While a group could go from being libertarian to authoritarian regardless of having religious beliefs or not, the scenario the episode lays out seems pretty unlikely to shift from libertarian community to apocalyptic cult.
  • In the episode "Perennials" (Season 8), the suspect believes himself to be the reincarnation of a serial killer who died the day he was born, in the same hospital, and is killing the people he believes are reincarnations of the dead killer's victims, placing fly larvae by their bodies in the belief that it will make their souls be reborn into these instead of humans, so ending the cycle. Morgan states that "See, a fundamental tenet of reincarnation is that you can come back in any life form, not just human" (as part of Karma). In some reincarnation beliefs, such as Hindus', this is true; however, others, such as the Druze, believe people are only reborn in human bodies, not animals. They also differ on whether people can be reborn into different sexes than they had in their previous life, along with the concept of karma, which is primarily Hindu belief.
• Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: Rossi in "Demonology" says "...evil and the soul and scuff marks on the floor."
• Art Shift: In "True Night," the UnSub was a comic artist who unknowingly acted out scenes from his own violent comics by murdering gang members. The audience knows in real life, he wears a hooded sweatshirt, but while "on camera" within his delusion, he's wearing a hooded Badass Longcoat that seems to come standard issue from Organization XIII, wielding a pair of scimitars. He moves in slow motion, smooth techno music in the background. The entire scenes are in highly contrasted black and white, with highly sharpened raindrops and super slo-mo splashes when he steps in a puddle or slashes one of the "werewolves" he's fighting, with occasional bright splashes of blue or red. The entire style is deliberately evocative of something directed by Frank Miller, like the film versions of The Spirit or Sin City. Which makes it Fanservice for those familiar with those movies, as both Frank Miller and the UnSub (in-universe) are both highly successful and revolutionary comic authors. Garcia actually compares the UnSub to Frank Miller.
• Asshole Victim: A few:
  • In "Pleasure Is My Business," the UnSub is a prostitute killing Corrupt Corporate Executives who are cheating their ex-wives and children out of alimony.
  • In "Elephant's Memory" — the UnSub of the episode is profiled as an "injustice collector," killing people who've caused him or his girlfriend pain: her abusive father, his neglectful father, school bullies, etc.
  • The victims in "True Night" — the UnSub is murdering the gangbangers that were responsible for the murder of his fiancée, who was carrying their baby.
  • "Lockdown" has corrupt prison guards, gambling on Forced Prize Fights between inmates, and launching a cover-up when one such inmate ends up dead.
  • One of the victims in "The Big Wheel" is an stupid gangbanger that unknowingly picks on a Serial Killer. Despite the victim being as far from his victimology as he can get (a male black teen vs white women in their thirties) the killer has little trouble taking him out.
• As You Know: All too often, the Mr. Exposition scenes will have the profilers telling someone something they already know about. Examples include "Mr. Scratch", where the team tell each other about the Satanic Panic in the 1980s and the FBI response to it, or "False Flag", where J.J. gives some examples of popular conspiracy theories to a crowd of Conspiracy Theorists.
  • There's also an element of this to the case briefings at the beginning of each episode. Supposedly, J.J. (until Season 5) or Garcia (after Season 5) is presenting the information to the team for the first time, but as soon as they open their folders, they begin splitting the exposition. It's probably done to spread the dialogue around, but the way the team flip open their files and begin stating information as if they're already aware of it feels like this trope. Sometimes this is replaced or accompanied by a scene (usually on the plane or in the Precinct of the Week) where they're explicitly reviewing the information they're already familiar with, for a double dose.
• Attractive Bent-Gender: This is how Adam/Amanda lured his victims in "Conflicted".
• Auction of Evil
  • Second season episode P911 involves the online auction of a young boy to members of a pedophile website.
  • A human trafficking ring appears in several episodes in Season 10; they specialize in kidnapping people (mostly women) to be auctioned to serial killers.
• Awesome by Analysis:
  • Hotchalanches.
    Defense Attorney: The fact is, behavioral analysis is just intellectual guesswork. You probably can't even tell me the color of the socks I'm wearing with no greater accuracy than a carnival psychic.
    Hotchner: Charcoal gray. You match them to the color of your suit to appear taller. ... You also wear lifts and you've had the soles of your shoes replaced. One might think you're frugal, but you're having financial difficulties. You wear a fake Rolex because you pawned the real one to pay your debts, my guess is to a bookie. ... Your vice is horses. Your Blackberry's been buzzing on the table every twenty minutes, which happens to be the average time between posts from Colonial Downs. You're getting race results. And every time you do, it affects your mood in court, and you're not having a very good day. That's because you pick horses the same way you practice law — by always taking the long shot...
• Ax-Crazy: A vast majority of the UnSubs that the BAU arrest.
• "Awkward Silence" Entrance: In Season 2, the BAU is investigating a militia in Montana. Rossi sends Morgan and JJ to the local watering hole. The presence of a black man and a white woman together brings the gathering to a silence, Rossi's intention. However, in an aversion of expectation, the group says they're more offended by the fact that feds are in their bar than by Morgan's race or JJ's gender and authority.
• Back for the Finale: By reusing old footage while Reid is in a coma, nearly every past BAU member makes an appearance. Played straight with Maeve and Foyet, albeit only in the coma vision.
• The Bad Guy Wins: Unfortunately happens fairly often.
  • "North Mammon," essentially. The UnSub's entire plan went perfectly, and he obviously didn't care that he was caught in the end, and may have even wanted to get caught, since he likely could have gotten away with it if he had bothered to cover his face when letting the remaining two girls go.
    • His entire plan likely hinged on getting caught anyway, since he wanted to use the girls to put the town through the same kind of pain the town put him through, which wouldn't work if he didn't get caught.
  • "No Way Out" and "No Way Out II: The Evilution of Frank". The first ends in Frank invoking Crazy-Prepared to flee with Jane; the second, despite him finally being Out-Gambitted and killed, still gives him the last laugh: not only does he die how he wants and get to be Together in Death with Jane, but his murder of Gideon's own lover soon sends the man over the Despair Event Horizon and out of the BAU forever.
  • "Into The Woods," where Shane gets away. Whether he's gotten away for good, however...
  • "Lauren," where Doyle escapes after capturing and stabbing Prentiss. She does survive, but since she must go into hiding, Doyle has arguably made good on his earlier threat to "take the only thing that matters to you: your life". Technically, her life as Emily Prentiss is indeed over.
  • "Out of the Light", where not only does a bad guy get away, but the team thinks he's innocent.
  • "3rd Life," sort of, though the Bad Guy who wins isn't the Worst Guy in the episode. The Worst Guy loses big time, mostly due to the Not-as-bad Guy shooting him in the head, but the Not-as-bad Guy is still pretty bad, and gets away with absolutely everything due to being a valuable witness against more Worse Guys.
  • "Zugzwang" has Reid's girlfriend, Maeve, captured by her stalker, requiring Reid to enlist the team to find her. The team eventually does, and Reid goes in to negotiate with the UnSub to release Maeve, but fails as the UnSub shoots herself in the head and holds Maeve's head right next to hers so that the bullet kills her as well.
  • "...And Back." Mason Turner gets away with all his crimes because, as Rossi points out, no one would believe that a quadriplegic could be responsible for the deaths of 93 people, all of his murders are pinned on his now deceased brother (who he manipulated and abused all his life), and while he does die in the end, it's on his own terms and the world will see him as a victim and his killer a murderer.
  • In "Mr. Scratch," the BAU finds the UnSub only after he gets his revenge, and he even gets to Mind Rape Hotch before being caught.
• Badass Bookworm: Reid occasionally has his moments.
• Badass Longcoat: The fantasy/noir sequences in "True Night".
  • The UnSub in "Elephant's Memory" is a big Johnny Cash fan and dons a Badass Longcoat when shooting folks.
• Bad People Abuse Animals: Animal cruelty is consistently mentioned as one of the signs of a sociopath or future killer, and several of the killers are seen abusing animals as well as people onscreen.
• Bait-and-Switch:
  • After the team profile that the UnSub in ".. A Thousand Words" has a partner, it cuts to a scene of a man ominously walking through the grass while a woman is tending to her garden... only for it to turn out that he's passing her a package. The woman then enters the house and room where the latest victim is being kept, revealing herself as the second UnSub
  • The team start their investigation in "Safe Haven" by deducing that their UnSub has to be someone outwardly harmless and trustworthy enough that a parent would invite them into their house and leave them alone with kids without a second thought. In the next scene, a man in a priest's collar talks a young boy walking alone on the side of the road into getting into his pickup, offering him a ride to wherever he's going. Cut to the truck crashed in a ditch the next morning with the body of the priest still inside.
  • The opening scene of "Rabid." An attractive young woman in somewhat-revealing clothes is taking the bus home at night. A guy on the bus looks at her in a way that makes her uncomfortable. She gets off the bus and starts walking down the dark street to her home, visibly nervous, then she realizes the guy from the bus is following her. It seems obvious that the girl is being set up as a victim... but the guy just wants to give her something that fell out of her shopping bag, then he leaves. He's the one who gets targeted by a killer. The girl makes it home safely.
  • Throughout "Final Shot," the narrative frequently shifts away from the BAU's investigation to a South African mercenary's attempts to protect an African-American woman from the UnSub. It's eventually revealed that the mercenary is the UnSub, he's a hitman hired to kill the woman, and the entire scenario has been taking place in his imagination. He's using a mental exercise called "Fantasy Integration", a technique that military snipers use to keep themselves awake and focused for long periods while they wait for a clear shot at their target.
  • The opening of "Pariahville" shows a man loading a shotgun in his kitchen in the dark and switches to a First-Person Shooter-POV. It's the town sheriff (with a body cam), who discovers the victim's body and her distraught husband.
• Ballistic Discount: The UnSub in "Hanley Waters" already has the ammo and intends on simply purchasing the corresponding gun, but resorts to this trope when she learns that she can't do it right away because of a mandatory waiting period. With the gun still sitting on the counter, the clerk gives her the gun license application and walks off to deal with another customer, giving her time to load before he notices what she's doing.
• Bank Robbery:
  • The UnSub in "Psychodrama" started out as a simple bank robber, but as the episode progresses he grows steadily more insane.
  • The Season 7 finale "Hit"/"Run" dealt with bank robbers and a hostage situation.
• Based on a True Story: "25 To Life" was based on the case of Dr. Jeffrey McDonald, the subject of the book (and The Film of the Book) Fatal Vision, convicted of killing his wife and children, with the premise that his story of the events (intruders killed his family) was true, which turns into Clear Their Name.
• Batter Up!: "The Boogeyman", "Paradise", "Reckoner" and "Middle Man".
• Beam Me Up, Scotty!: The trope is referenced In-Universe by Reid in "What Happens at Home".
• Beneficial Disease: One of the abducted women in "The Uncanny Valley" is diabetic, which somehow allows her to metabolize the paralytic drugs she was given at a faster than usual rate.
• Berserk Button:
  • Certain agents will have That One Case, or certain types of cases that set them off more than others (for instance, Prentiss and cases involving sexual abuse). One particularly notable instance was the episode "Psychodrama", where the usually unflappable Hotch was severely rattled because the UnSub started forcing children to act out his revenge fantasies. As a general rule, violence against children sets Hotch off more than anything else.
  • The UnSub from "Scream" lived a normal adult life despite witnessing his abusive father kill his mother then commit suicide, until his audio tape of the incident — his only memento of his parents — was destroyed, prompting him to try and "recreate" it.
  • The UnSub from "Fate" is said to suffer from intermittent explosive disorder (basically real-life Hulk Smash syndrome) due to brain damage from a car accident, although in addition to sudden homicidal rage she also calmly and quietly sneaked into her victims houses hours after they triggered her (she apparently blacked out for those).
  • In "The Night Watch," a street artist known as "Morpheus" pressed a big one after using her last memento of her dead son in art installation (in tribute to another mother and child who had died), which drove her ex-husband (who still blames her for said son's death) to ruin her reputation by killing three people and abducting an infant, and ultimately commit murder-suicide by flinging them both off a roof.
• Beware the Nice Ones: J.J. and Garcia, especially J.J.'s Boom, Headshot! through a plate-glass window to Garcia's shooter. Played for Laughs with Reid who takes pranking up to eleven.
• Big Brother Is Watching: In "Pariahville," a community of non-violent sex offenders monitors themselves by agreeing to have GPS microchips implanted in their bodies (though the chips are removed if the residents go five years without issues).
• Bigot with a Badge: Deputy Roland Boyd is a raving, racist Serial Killer who has Mexican immigrants hunted down and then killed with a machete.
• Bilingual Bonus: Prentiss speaks several languages and some of her languages scenes aren't dubbed. However, "Catching Out" becomes an unintentionally funny episode when you hear Prentiss speak Spanish. To Spanish speakers it is blatantly obvious that her pronunciation is atrocious. Her Russian is barely intelligible, although to be fair, she says it's not her best language. Her French is understandable, but awkward.
• Birthday Party Goes Wrong: Agent Rossi's coworkers throw a surprise party for him only to find he is a Birthday Hater who doesn't celebrate his birthday. The day has been spoiled for him by a serial killer he captured, Tommy Yates, who made a deal with the FBI to reveal one of his victims' locations each year on a specific day — purposely picking Rossi's birthday. Naturally, that leaves him in no mood to celebrate.
• Bit Character: Agent Anderson and Tech Gina Sharp, who have made a number of appearances, but never really do anything that noteworthy. Anderson hasn't even been given a first name.
• Bittersweet Ending: The operation in "Entropy" is a complete success: the UnSub is captured ( as is her accomplice) with no loss of life, and the hitman ring targeting Garcia is eliminated. It's marred by the revelation that Reid's mother is deteriorating due to Alzheimer's, and it's possible that Reid may face a similar fate in the future.
• Bland-Name Product:
  • In the episode "Hashtag", the social media sites Instagram and Vine are replaced with the bland sounding 'Instant Pictures' and 'Video', which have similar layouts/colors.
  • The episode "Drive" has a Uber-like ride share app called Zimmer. The UnSub used to be a driver, and currently pretends to be one to lure his victims.
  • Subverted in "Sick Day" were the UnSub tries to lure a victim by claiming to need help with his cellphone. He mentions an app called "Snaptalk" but the victim corrects him saying it's called "Snapchat".
  • Averted in "Saturday" where one of the suspects is stated to be a Twitch streamer.
• Blind and the Beast: "The Big Wheel" with the little blind boy and the UnSub of the week, but played with in that it's not anything about the man's appearance that's frightening... but the boy would see him as a monster if he could see, because he would recognize him as his mother's murderer.
• The Bluebeard: The UnSub from "The Fox" could be seen as a variant.
• The Book Cipher: "The Fisher King" features an Ottendorf cipher brought to the Behavioral Analysis Unit by the UnSub via Hotch's wife. The cipher is part of a larger puzzle to find a girl who's been missing for two years. The key text is The Collector by John Fowles.
• Book Ends:
  • Season 7's premiere episode and two-part finale episode has the BAU facing off against a three-person team of UnSubs with some sort of link to international organized crime: all three UnSubs in the premiere were various professionals in the Irish underworld, while the de facto leader in the finale was a hitwoman with a trail of victims that spanned much of the world. Both episodes also involved a fourth UnSub who directly factored into the team's crimes: in the premiere, Ian Doyle, the Big Bad of the previous season, was the group's target due to him crossing them in some way in the past; in the finale, the fourth UnSub was operating behind the scenes, with his presence being known to only one of the other UnSubs. Both teams were eventually defeated, partially because of dissent and infighting that breaks out among their ranks, thus leading to members killing one another. And finally, both the premiere and the finale involve a child in danger from the groups: in the premiere, it was Doyle's son Declan; in the finale, it was JJ's son Henry. Moreover, the premiere sees Prentiss rejoining the team, while the finale sees her leaving the team for good until Season 12.
  • Season 9 both begins AND ends with a two-parter episode. The first part features what appears to be a typical chase after a serial killer, while the second part reveals something even more sinister beneath the surface of the case. Both the premiere and the finale also addressed Reid's dashed hopes of starting a family with Maeve, which is one of the events that helped trigger Blake's departure at the end of the season.
  • Season 10 starts off with Hotch interrogating Kate in his office and accepting her into the BAU team. Then, the season ends with Kate informing Hotch of her decision to take a maternity leave in the same office.
  • The opening scene of Season 12's premiere episode, "The Crimson King", features a semi-truck nearly ramming into a man who escaped a serial killer. The ending scene of Season 12's finale episode, "Red Light", features a semi-truck ramming into the BAU's SUVs with them inside, while they are about to face off against the season's Big Bad (who had been completely responsible for the events of "The Crimson King").
  • The opening scene of Season 13's premiere episode, "Wheels Up", had the lives of many of the BAU hanging in the balance, with Reid and Garcia being the exceptions. The ending scene of Season 13's finale episode, "Believer", had the exact opposite scenario happening, with Reid and Garcia's lives being the ones at stake while the rest of the BAU was relatively safe.
  • The series as a whole: In the pilot episode, Gideon was haunted by a mistake he made not too long before, that ended with six FBI agents losing their lives in a bomber situation. In the series finale, Reid has a coma dream featuring dead people after he misread a situation that ended with six FBI agents dying in an explosion.
  • The third episodes of the first and last season have a mailbomber UnSub.
• Boom, Headshot!: In "L.D.S.K." the UnSub shoots a cop in the head; later, Reid shoots him in the head.
• Bottle Episode: All but two scenes of "Seven Seconds" takes place in the same shopping mall.
• Brainwashed and Crazy: The Big Bad of the fall 2016 premier figured out how to force people with associative identity disorder to create a new identity, in this case another serial killer (the "original" serial killer he was copying was left with amnesia). He gets away information on every DID sufferer in Arizona and the whole team, with whom he has a massive grudge.
• Break the Cutie: Poor Reid can't seem to catch a break.
  • After the Reaper case and the events of "Nameless, Faceless", it's only a matter of time before Hotch crosses the Despair Event Horizon... which is confirmed by "100": Hotch beats Foyet to death using his bare hands. Understandable crossing of the Despair Event Horizon, but still a crossing of it.
  • "Lucky"/"Penelope", "House on Fire", "Exit Wounds" and "The Internet is Forever" for Garcia.
  • The Doyle arc (beginning in "The Thirteenth Step" and ending with "Lauren") for Prentiss.
  • J.J. being tortured in the Middle East by someone she considered an ally made her more reckless (she has PTSD and blames herself for not recognizing how dangerous he was to the point that she's almost committing suicide by UnSub), and despite a Dead Person Conversation with her torturer where she realizes what "he's" doing to her it's not clear if she's getting better or not.
• Break the Haughty:
  • Rossi gets broken in "Limelight", "Damaged", "Zoe's Reprise", "From Childhood's Hour", and "Epilogue".
  • Morgan is subjected to Cold-Blooded Torture in "Derek".
• Breaking Speech: In "Identity" Morgan receives one from Conspiracy Theorist Harris Townsend. Townsend is told to shut up.
• Brick Joke: In "Penelope," Garcia muses about having heard David Bowie singing "Heroes" in her head while being driven to the hospital. Three guesses what piece of music plays at the episode's end.

• Brother–Sister Incest:
  • The episode "House on Fire" touches on this: after losing his parents as a small boy, the UnSub became fixated on his sister. When they were teenagers, rumors spread about his attachment to her being on the verge of this trope; the rumors led to his being beaten, then sent away to boarding school for his own protection. As an adult he returns, kills several townspeople (including his sister's new husband), and freaks out when she rejects his overtures.
  • Two members of the Feuding Families in "Blood Relations" are revealed to be brother and sister, who secretly had a child together.
  • The UnSub in "Taboo" lusted after his extremely promiscuous older sister (it was due a severe head injury) and thought it was OK because he's adopted and besides she slept with all of his other friends so why not him too? Unfortunately(? well, maybe he wouldn't have killed her or anyone else) her symptoms were getting better with treatment and even if they hadn't she wouldn't have screwed family — especially since her "baby brother" was actually her son. The Awful Truth triple-whammy — he's in lust with his adopted sister, who's actually his biological mother, and his (grand)mother lied about his whole existence — triggers his hunting of innocent single moms.
• Buffy Speak: Usually averted, what with this being a team of highly intelligent agents, but sometimes...
  Morgan: Come on, genius. Do something... genius-like.
• Burn the Witch!:
  • The UnSub in "Heathridge Manor" first tries to drown them (if they're witches, they'll revive and if they drown, they're innocent), then sews them into poisoned dresses, but before he even finds them, he paints creepy portraits of them surrounded by flames.
  • Leland Duncan in "In The Blood" is descended from one of the prosecutors of the Salem Witch Trials and hallucinates that others are witches, whom he must punish. One is thrown from a cliff, one is pressed to death by rocks, one is hanged, and he attempts to burn a mother and daughter at the stake, but is shot before he can pull it off. (Though they mention the in-universe Artistic License – History, saying that even though this killer wants to burn witches, the actual Salem trials didn't.)
• Burying a Substitute: Emily Prentiss is apparently killed off and buried due to real-life budget cuts. However, at the next season's opening episode she turns up very much alive, with an explanation that she'd really been shot, but the hospital saved her and the BAU leaders arranged for her funeral to be faked as part of a covert op. (Her coffin was full of sandbags.)
• Bullying a Dragon: After more than ten seasons, any killer that decides to go after the BAU members or their families should be considered this.
  • One of the victims in "The Big Wheel" is a robber that makes the mistake of choosing a Serial Killer as his next victim. The killer isn't even planning to commit murder at the time, and the robber is as far from his victim type as he can get (he is a black male teen, the killer preys on white women in their 30s), but he has little trouble adding him to his count.
• Bunnies for Cuteness: The last words of the first victim in Gatekeeper, while telling his friend about how he thinks he's fallen for his one night stand, is that she really likes bunnies.
• The Butcher: The UnSub of "Remembrance of Things Past," in Season 6, is actually called this. He killed close to two dozen women 20 years ago, then stopped after Rossi got too close. After he develops Alzheimer's, he and his approval-seeking son start killing again while he can still do it right.

C-D

• Cain and Abel:
  • Zig-zagged at the end of "The Inspired": one of the twin UnSubs, Jesse, intends to kill his brother Wallace (at the behest of their mother), but can't go through with it and turns on the mother instead. This in turn provokes Wallace, a standoff ensues, and Jesse ends up dead. Which of the two is Cain and which is Abel is left to debate, though Wallace has an insanity defense in his favor.
  • The UnSub of "Dust and Bones", which is also combined with You're Not My Mother. She was horribly abused as a child by her mother, who had her as a teen, by being locked in a shed filled with snakes and called ugly. The mother was eventually caught and forced into parenting classes, and her second daughter was treated well. But the damage was already done to the UnSub, who grew up hating both her mother and sister, and finding a substitute family in snakes. By adulthood, she's taken her rage on other women by disfiguring them, before kidnapping her sister and almost kills her with a snake bite.
• The Calls Are Coming from Inside the House: "Somebody's Watching." Justified because the caller was using a cell phone.
• Call-Back: The jet scene in "The Performer" has two, one to the team's previous case in L.A. (complete with teasing Reid about Lila Archer) and one to the vampire subculture "dressing like Prentiss did in high school."
• Cannot Spit It Out: Gideon deliberately provokes the stuttering Footpath Killer until he gets so angry that he can't talk.
• Can't Get Away with Nuthin': In "In Name and Blood", "It Takes A Village" and "The Storm" Hotch gets called out for previously covering up Elle Greenaway shooting a man dead for no valid reason, faking Emily Prentiss's death and using government funds for her fake funeral and to hide her in Paris and letting Rossi shoot Jason Gideon's killer for no valid reason by Erin Strauss, Senator Cramer and the DOJ respectively.
• Captive Date: "Charm and Harm" opens with the killer having a one-sided conversation with a bound-and-gagged woman over a gourmet dinner in a fancy hotel room.
  • One episode focuses on a killer who treats his victims to a romantic evening complete with rose petals, though they're not tied down. He means no harm until they turn him down once they reach the bathtub part of the date. The rest fits to a T, though.
  • In another episode, a guy was stalking a woman and ended up kidnapping her. One scene shows them sitting at a table and talking, until the woman raises her hands and it's revealed that she's tied up.
• Car Fu: "Roadkill" involves a serial hit-and-run driver. Justified because the man lost his ability to walk in a car accident, so his car is the only weapon he has and he obviously can't pursue any victims to places the car wouldn't be able to reach.
• Casting Gag: The kid who plays a smart-aleck 13-year-old sociopathic serial killer from "Safe Haven" played essentially the same character on an episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.
• Catapult Nightmare: Played straight with Rossi at the beginning of "Damaged" (waking up from a nightmare involving lots of blood and screaming children) and with the UnSub in "Hanley Waters" (haunted by dreams recalling her son's death). Averted in "The Instincts" with Reid, who wakes up reasonably calm, despite his nightmare being rather creepy.
• Cat Scare: "The Angel Maker"; it even gets lampshaded when the soon-to-be victim actually finds her cat ("Geez Bo, you scared me half to death... such a cliche"). Also, in "Sense Memory," a paranoid Prentiss is startled when her new cat, Sergio, jumps in her lap.
• Ceiling Corpse: In one episode, the UnSub kills three people in a fit of rage and lies down to go to sleep; when he feels a blood drop in his face and opens his eyes again he sees the bodies of his victims stuck above him on the ceiling, blood pool and all. ^ContextThe victims are hallucinations haunting him, and all he wants to do is sleep, but they keep him awake until he kills someone.
• Celebrity Paradox: Justine Ezarik appeared in the Season 6 episode "Middle Man" as one of the murdered exotic dancers. She was later mentioned in the Season 10 episode "Hashtag".
• Censorship by Spelling: Played for Drama in "100". Hotch is on the phone with his wife Haley after learning that she and their son Jack are held in hostage by George Foyet ,aka The Reaper.
  Hotch: He's just trying to make you angry.
  The Reaper: Well she should be! She's gonna (covers Jack's ears and lowers his voice) D-I-E because of your inflated ego!
• Central Theme: Why do people do terrible things?
• Character Blog: Garcia's Twitter account. Several of the team members also have Facebook accounts.
• Character Catchphrase:
  • "UnSub", short for "unknown subject," a bit of real-life FBI jargon.
    • Amazing Fun Fact: UnSub was also the title of a short-lived series aired in 1989, which the Other Wiki tells us was "centered around an elite FBI forensic team that investigates serial murderers and other violent crimes."
  • Reid: "Actually..."
  • Garcia: "Off the grid" and other techie/gamer/Internet slang.
    • Also: "Jinkies" and "Yahtzee."
  • UnSub Stanley Howard from "Scared To Death": "Is it worse than you thought?"
  • Hotch: "Wheels up in..."
    • In the later seasons, it is almost always "Wheels up in thirty."
  • Mostly Hotch, sometimes someone else: "We need to/We're ready to deliver the profile."
  • "I'm the UnSub." —team member who takes it on him or herself to reenact the UnSub's crime to imagine their thought process. Originally Gideon's.
• Character Focus: The BAU Team members each get a few episodes that either explore their backstory or in other cases where they take it seriously.
  • A lot of the Season 1 and Season 2 episodes tended to focus on Gideon (he even narrates the quotations on all of them), but the most notable ones have to be:
    • "Extreme Aggressor"
    • "Won't Get Fooled Again"
    • "What Fresh Hell?"
    • "Riding The Lightning"
    • "Unfinished Business"
    • "Secrets and Lies"
    • "Lessons Learned"
    • "No Way Out"
    • "No Way Out II: The Evilution of Frank"
    • "Nelson's Sparrow"
  • Elle Greenaway
    • "The Fisher King, Part 2"
    • "Aftermath"
    • "The Boogeyman"
  • Hotch
    • "Natural Born Killer"
    • "The Tribe"
    • "Ashes and Dust"
    • "In Name and Blood"
    • "Scared To Death"
    • "Pleasure is my Business"
    • The Reaper Story Arc (starting from "Omnivore" and ending with "The Slave Of Duty")
    • "Brothers Hotchner"
    • "Route 66"
    • "A Place at the Table"
    • "Internal Affairs"
    • "The Storm"
  • Morgan
    • "Profiler, Profiled"
    • "Brothers In Arms"
    • "The Fox"
    • "Hopeless"
    • "Our Darkest Hour"/"The Longest Night"
    • "25 to Life"
    • "Cradle to the Grave"
    • "Big Sea"/"The Company"
    • "Foundation"
    • "Lucky"
    • "Restoration"
    • "The Edge of Winter"
    • "Derek"
    • "A Beautiful Disaster"
  • Reid
    • "L.D.S.K."
    • "Somebody's Watching"
    • "Sex, Birth, Death"
    • "Revelations"
    • "Distress"
    • "Jones"
    • "Memoriam"
    • "Elephant's Memory"
    • "Conflicted"
    • "Amplification"
    • "The Uncanny Valley"
    • "Corazon"
    • "Coda"
    • "True Genius"
    • "Zugzwang"
    • "Magnum Opus"
    • "Entropy"
    • "Spencer"
    • "Green Light"
    • "Red Light"
    • "And in the End..."
  • Rossi
    • "About Face"
    • "Damaged"
    • "Zoe's Reprise"
    • "Masterpiece"
    • "The Reckoner"
    • "Remembrance of Things Past"
    • "The Fallen"
    • "Profiling 101"/"Profiling 202"
    • "The Replicator"
    • "The Road Home"
    • "Anonymous"
    • "Target Rich"
  • Prentiss
    • "Honor Among Thieves"
    • "52 Pickup"
    • "Demonology"
    • "Valhalla"/"Lauren"
    • "It Takes a Village"
    • "Tribute"
    • "Wheels Up"
    • "Miasma"
  • JJ
    • "North Mammon"
    • "Risky Business"
    • "In Heat"
    • "The Crossing"
    • "JJ"
    • "Mosley Lane"
    • "There's No Place Like Home"
    • "Hit"/"Run"
    • "200"
    • "The Forever People"
    • "Sick Day"
    • "The Bunker"
    • "The Tall Man"
  • Garcia
    • "Blood Hungry"
    • "Lucky"
    • "Penelope"
    • "House on Fire"
    • "The Internet Is Forever"
    • "Exit Wounds"
    • "Compromising Positions"
    • "Reflection of Desire"
    • "Hope"
    • "The Black Queen"
    • "Burn"
    • "Lucky Strikes"
  • Todd
    • "52 Pickup"
    • "Normal"
  • Seaver
    • "What Happens at Home"
  • Blake
    • "The Silencer"
    • "#6"
    • "Bully"
    • "Demons"
  • Kate Callahan
    • "A Thousand Suns"
    • "The Hunt"
  • Lewis
    • "Pariahville"
    • "Mirror Image"
    • "False Flag"
    • "Broken Wing"
  • Stephen Walker
    • "Scarecrow"
    • "Unforgettable"
    • "Wheels Up"
  • Alvez
    • "The Crimson King"
    • "Dust and Bones"
    • "Luke"
• Character Overlap: The character Penelope Garcia is the technical analyst in both Criminal Minds and its spin-off, Criminal Minds: Suspect Behavior.
• Character Title:
  • "Penelope," "JJ," "Derek", and "Spencer"
  • "Lauren" is titled after the name that Emily Prentiss used while undercover as an arms dealer.
  • From the revival we have "Sicarius", "Moose", and as a wordplay, "Forget Me Knots" (the internet name of the character being forgetmenot).
• Charity Workplace Calendar: Referenced in a flashback when Garcia first met Morgan (she's actually under investigation for hacking at the time), she says "Hey, when they do a Men of the FBI calendar is it just 12 pages of you?"
• Chekhov's Gag: At the beginning of "Rabid", a man gives a banana to a man who appears to be homeless, not knowing he's actually a serial killer who in turn abducts him. Later in the episode, said unsub eats the aforementioned banana while listening to the man scream.
• Chekhov's Gun: In the beginning of "L.D.S.K.", we're shown that Hotch has a gun in an ankle holster. When Reid and Hotch are being held hostage at the end of the episode, Hotch tricks the UnSub into letting him kick Reid around, so Reid can get the gun out and shoot the UnSub.
  • In "Valhalla," Reid notices Prentiss is agitated because she's been picking at her fingernails. In "Lauren," this turns out to be the key to uncovering Prentiss' secret: that it's her hand holding the gun in the photo of Declan Doyle's fake assassination. The reason this actually works well is that Brewster herself apparently has this tendency, so if you go back to earlier seasons, Prentiss can indeed be seen picking at her nails in times of stress — and it's never pointed out.
• The Chessmaster:
  • In the first 2+ seasons, Jason Gideon, one of the most experienced profilers in the BAU alongside Hotch, was both a literal example (he beat Reid in chess every time except once) and a figurative one as a master interrogator, utilizing strategies of Out-Gambitting and Lying to the Perp.
  • Fittingly, Gideon's replacement, the equally experienced David Rossi, proved to be one of these as well, using the same strategies listed above for Gideon, and he displays it in absolutely epic ways in numerous episodes. (See "Minimal Loss," "Zoe's Reprise," and 'especially' "Masterpiece" for good examples.)
• Children Are Innocent: Most of them, but it is subverted at least twice (in "The Boogeymen" and "A Shade of Gray").
  • In "Safe Haven," Nancy thinks this and tries to convince Jeremy of it even though this is a kid who has already killed two whole families, plus a minister in his car, threatened her two kids, and is holding her at knife point in her car, only not killing her because he needs a ride to his mother's house to kill her. In fact, her insistence on it ends up being part of what gets her stabbed before he gets out of her car.
• Child by Rape:
  • In the episode "Birthright," the team suspect a serial's killer's son is carrying on his legacy... only to discover there's also a second son, whose mother was raped by the killer. The episode avoids the second part of this trope in that the child by rape, while not a stellar human being (he's a bit of a bum), isn't evil — because he's known for most of his life that his father was a bad man and loved his mother for caring for him despite it. The child by marriage, however...
  • In another episode, this was the UnSub's motivation, though he does not succeed (the only victim he impregnates is unwilling to have an abortion, but also unwilling to carry the child, and ultimately commits suicide.)
  • The killer in "Profiling 101" was conceived through his mother's rape, after which she died giving birth to him. He then was raised with the horrible abuse of his cruel grandmother who resented him being born, saying he was conceived in sin and that her daughter's "womb was cursed," ultimately leading him to murder women and cut out their uteri.
  • The husband and wife UnSubs of "Cradle to Grave" perpetuate a string of these. The wife lost her infant son Michael, then later contracted breast cancer and became desperate to have a son. She and her husband, who has a long history of sexual abuse, proceed to kidnap runaway teenagers who resemble her as a young woman; the husband then rapes the victims to get them pregnant. As long as the girls give birth to sons, they're allowed to live (and keep getting put through the same thing); but if they give birth to daughters, he kills the mothers and drops off the baby girls at a church. By the end of the episode, there are three known children to have resulted from this bizarre scheme.
  • In the episode "Red Light," Cat Adams tries to convince Reid that she's pregnant with his child due to her lover's rape of him in Mexico in order to get a sperm sample.
• Child Soldiers: Having to kill one was the Start of Darkness for the UnSub in "Distress."
• Christianity is Catholic
  • Played straight in "Demonology" and "Public Enemy."
  • Averted in at least one episode, with an appropriate depiction of a Protestant Christian survivalist enclave.
  • Crisscrossed with the UnSub of "The Big Game" and "Revelations;" his preaching is pure fundamentalist Protestant, but the mythology surrounding his dissociated personalities comes from the Book of Tobit, which is canon for Catholics but not Protestants.
  • In one episode, a man identified as a Catholic priest was said to have celebrated mass in Washington National Cathedral. Washington National Cathedral is Episcopalian.
• Chronic Villainy: "The Big Wheel"
• Chuck Cunningham Syndrome:
  • Though never appearing or heard in the series, Garcia's four brothers mentioned in the Season 2 episode "P911" mysteriously disappeared from existence by the Season 6 episode "Safe Haven," where she says she was an only child. (However, since she has a stepfather — Mr. Garcia — both scenarios could arguably be true at once.) We finally meet one of Garcia's step-brothers, Carlos, in the Season 13 episode "All You Can Eat".
  • An early episode has JJ mentioning that she has a young niece, around seven or eight years old. However, we later find out that JJ sister is dead and has been since JJ has been young.
  • Mateo Cruz, Strauss's replacement after her death, disappears after Season 10, his only appearance, before getting mentioned in Season 12 once.
• Church of Happyology: The cult in "The Forever People" has hints of Happyology — obsession with "levels," love of lawyers, separation of families, dangerous physical activities. Their leader looks more like Jim Jones, with his Sinister Shades, than El Ron.
• CIA Evil, FBI Good: Played straight as far as the FBI being good:
  • Averted the one time the CIA shows up in Season 1's "Secrets and Lies". They're portrayed as just kind of inoffensively shady, and although the UnSub of the episode is a CIA agent, he's explicitly a rogue one. The victim, also CIA, comes across as almost saintly.
  • However, in the Season 7's "Dorado Falls", an episode that dealt with the Navy SEALS, they're portrayed as being pretty awful. The UnSub had to kill two kids during a mission, and this guilt combined with brain damage from a car crash makes him think the people he knows are imposters. He then goes on to shoot up his former team leader's workplace and kill his parents.
  • In Season 10 episode "Mr. Scratch" were the UnSub Peter Lewis is part of the NSA, and uses his position to hack the BAU. Deputy Director Tony Axlerod is not willing to give up the name of the hacker, only after being pressured is willing to subtly slip them the name, but he tells Hotchner that he owes him a favor.
  • Played with in Season 11's "Internal Affairs", in exchange for this favor, Axlerod sends Agent Hotchner to investigate the DEA. The NSA and DEA have a joint operation to find "George Washington", the mysterious leader of the internet drug ring called the Libertad Cartel, but Axlerod believes that DEA Deputy Director Bernard Graff is this man. When Graff finally opens up to Hotchner, he reveals that he thought Hotch was the cartel's leader. When Graff dies in an apparent suicide, Hotch then questions Axlerod, thinking he is guilty from a mysterious file transfer authorized by the NSA. Axlerod states he has an alibi, then reveals the man who pointed out Graff as a suspect, his boss NSA Director Brian Cochran.
• Clear Their Name: Becomes the plot of 25 To Life when it turns out that a man who's just been paroled didn't commit the murders of which he was convicted, and the hunt for the real killers begins.
• *Click* Hello:
  • Rossi pulls one during a Mexican Standoff in "Exit Wounds".
  • Most of the team in "Cradle to Grave" where the UnSub walks out of his bathroom and looks up to discover his kitchen is now full of FBI agents and SWAT pointing guns at him.
  • The UnSub, a former Navy SEAL, pulls one on Rossi, Morgan, J.J., and Reid in "Dorado Falls" — in the bullpen at Quantico.
• Cliffhanger:
  • "The Fisher King, Part 1" (S1 finale): Elle walks into her house and lies down on her couch. The UnSub walks over to her with a gun. We hear a gunshot and it fades to black.
  • "The Big Game": JJ attacked (offscreen) by rabid dogs who'd just finished tearing apart another woman, and Reid held at gunpoint by the psychotic UnSub, both miles away from the rest of the team.
  • "Lucky": Garcia is shot.
  • "Lo-Fi" (S3 finale): Each team member is seen getting into a car. One car blows up.
  • "...And Back" (S4 finale): Hotch walks into his house and is greeted by the Reaper with a gun. We hear a gunshot and it fades to black.
  • "Our Darkest Hour" (S5 finale): Billy Flynn kidnaps Ellie and leaves Morgan incapacitated and Spicer dead.
  • "Brothers Hotchner": Strauss is killed by the Replicator.
  • "The Inspiration" (S9 opener): The UnSub's (unknown) twin brother is arrested in his place, leaving the real killer free and aware he's being hunted.
  • "The Road Home": J.J. and Cruz are both abducted.
  • "Protection": Kate's niece and her friend are both abducted.
  • "A Badge and a Gun": Morgan is drugged, beaten, and abducted.
  • "The Sandman": Savannah is shot, complete with Smash to Black.
  • "The Storm": One prison break is foiled, but three more follow it; thirteen serial killers escape in the chaos, among them Peter Lewis ("Mr. Scratch").
  • "Red Light": the BAU is on the way to find Mr. Scratch when they are involved in a serious car accident.
  • "Face Off": The episode ends with Reid alone in his apartment, piecing together that Everett Lynch is still alive. As he goes to the phone to tell the rest of the BAU, he collapses from internal injuries suffered in an earlier explosion.
• Clock Discrepancy: The profilers trick a captured terrorist into revealing his co-conspirators' target by gradually adjusting the clock in his cell, then letting him think the planned attack had already taken place.
• Clueless Aesop: "Machismo" — the Aesop is that male chauvinism in Mexican culture is bad. The problem is that male chauvinism has no role in why the episode's killer acts or why the local law enforcement fails to catch him sooner.
• Cold-Blooded Torture: This is a show about crazy serial killers. It comes up.
• Competence Porn: A hyper-competent team that catches the bad guys by using their own thinking against them.
• Con Man: "Parasite"
• Consulting a Convicted Killer:
  • Once when Mad Bomber Adrian Bale was called upon to help stop a copycat bomber. Bale was unable to resist the opportunity to try and trick the team into blowing up a potential victim. Gideon caught on to this and stopped it.
  • In another episode a serial hostage taker was asked to help stop a group of copycats. It turns out the guy hired the copycats so the BAU would have to consult with him, which gave him an opportunity to escape.
  • Third time's the charm in "Outfoxed," where the team has to consult with Karl Arnold when a new family annihilator emerges. When they get in contact with Arnold, they find out that it seems as though the new killer has contacted him. Turns out she didn't and the note was actually from a much worse source: The Boston Reaper. Still, Arnold does give them a key insight that provides an important fact about the killer.
  • Antonia Slade in "Devil's Backbone".
• Contamination Situation: "Amplification," at the end of Season 4. Reid is exposed to anthrax by a serial killer.
• Continuity Nod:
  • In the Season 5 episode "Exit Wounds", Emily and J.J. are discussing the difficulty of maintaining relationships with their jobs. Emily starts to come around when J.J. says that she and Will make it work, but when they are called into work less than a minute later Emily dejectedly remarks that she should get a cat. In her Ian Doyle story arc in the sixth season, her new cat, Sergio, can be seen wandering around her apartment and even figures into the story a bit. Also, in an early seventh season episode, Hotch calls Emily out on lying to her therapist about Sergio, a wonderful guy she's become involved with. Emily states that he's the perfect man... his qualities include the fact that he doesn't hog the covers and poops in a box.
  • The UnSub from "About Face" is referenced in "Fatal".
  • When the BAU is hunting an UnSub in Wichita in "The Sandman", the local coroner notes that it's not the first time the team has shown up in his neck of the woods, having previously worked with them in "There's No Place Like Home".
  • The Season 13 premiere has J.J. mentioning that Prentiss would know if her death was being simulated because when she died before, it was cold and dark, a point mentioned all the way back in Season 7.
• Continuity Snarl:
  • Across the series, details about Reid's father keep changing. At first he left when Spencer was ten, later he was about four and it was to protect his wife from prison, later yet it was because of Diana's schizofrenia and her trouble staying on her meds.
  • In "Birthright," Rossi mentions that his unsolved case is 21 years old. A couple of episodes later in "Damages," the main plot centers around the 20th anniversary of the crime.
• Contract on the Hitman: The UnSub in "The Job" survives a botched one of these (said contract taken by one of his former clients, who grew suspicious of him), and proceeds to hunt down all of his former clients in retaliation.
• Cop Killer: Several UnSubs. Possibly the most memorable was the one in "Brothers in Arms" who targets policemen. In another episode, there was a cop-killing UnSub who turned out to be a cop himself.
• Couldn't Find a Lighter: In "Natural Born Killer," Morgan and Gideon imagine the killer lighting a cigarette with a blowtorch before using it on his victim.
• Courtroom Episode: "Tabula Rasa"
• Crazy-Prepared: The Reaper/George Foyet. In the ten years after he stopped killing, he memorized the schematics of every jail, holding facility and courthouse in Massachusetts... so that when he got caught (which was also self-organized), he would escape to taunt and terrorize another day.
  • He also lampshades it when he says to Hotch: "Do you know how much you have to study the human body to stab yourself repeatedly and not die? I don't want to brag, but I'm something of an expert.", referring to the manner in which Foyet faked his own attack and threw the police/FBI off the scent for ten years.
  • More than that: he has his entire Season 5 arc with Hotch planned out to the last, down to the details of getting members of the BAU interviewing Karl Arnold. It's a Batman Gambit with a heavy reliance on Flaw Exploitation, taken to a power of ten.
  • How Frank gets away in "No Way Out".
• Creator's Culture Carryover: Mexican Captain Navarro mentioning "maiden names" in "Machismo," despite the fact that there aren't maiden names in Mexico since Mexican women don't take their husband's name after marriage. Maybe he was using the words for the benefit of his colleagues at the BAU, but seeing how the episode failed Spanish naming customs right after despite the victim names being the clue that caused the team's "Eureka!" Moment...
• Criminal Mind Games: Done a number of times.
  • In "The Fisher King," by the UnSub of the same name, who mostly just wants to send them on a quest. Some of the team work on it like a normal case, some of the team follow the breadcrumbs. The trail of breadcrumbs solves the case, and not following the rules nearly gets one of the BAU killed.
  • In "Masterpiece" by Professor Rothschild/Henry Grace, who uses clues and a "live video feed" of torture to lead the team into a trap. Luckily, Reid's Good with Numbers combined with Rossi's OutGambit turns the UnSub's severe OCD around to figure that out.
  • And then there's George Foyet/The Reaper, who stalked the cop who called him off, tried to guilt Hotch into taking the same deal, tortured Hotch, got his family taken away, stalked him for months, and sent the team clues through Karl Arnold, knowing that they would go to him when he got mail about a new string of crimes.
  • Before all those there was "Unfinished Business." The BAU teams up with a retired profiler to track down The Keystone Killer, a serial killer who has started killing again after almost twenty years and whose signature was sending complicated word puzzles to the authorities.
• Cruel Mercy: In "The Crimson King" there's a conversation about why they prefer to capture the killers alive instead of killing them; Hotch says it's so they can live with their failures instead of dying thinking they accomplished something.
• Cult: "The Tribe," "Minimal Loss," "The Forever People." In the latter case, the eponymous Church of Happyology turns out to not be responsible for the murders — a serial killer within its ranks is killing off members who want to leave (and thus wouldn't be missed, making them easy targets). Subverted in another episode, when it turned out the Satanist "cult" are atheists who just want to annoy the conservative locals.
• Cure Your Gays: Turns out horribly for all involved in "Broken." Considering their methods include telling gay teenage boys they were abominations and getting a female prostitute to "rape them straight," they really shouldn't be too surprised that a former student freaks out and starts killing people after he has sex with a man.
• Curiosity Killed the Cast
• Daddy Had a Good Reason for Abandoning You: Reid, as well as Jack Hotchner in Season 5.
  • Reid would disagree. Despite promising to forgive his father in exchange for help on a case, Reid remains (rightfully) unappeased. In "Public Enemy", in response to a case related statement, he bitterly quips that "There are lots of ways that sons defeat their fathers. I just kept getting Ph.D.s."
  • You could even call Gideon's departure from the team this.
• Damsel Fight-and-Flight Response:
  • "Open Season": Damsel in Distress decides to fight back against a pair of Siblings in Crime when she gets ahold of a knife. She manages to stab one repeatedly, then after a little baiting, waits for the other one in a tree, pouncing on him when he gets close, stabbing him twice in the back. She then gets off of him and runs away, not remembering taking his bow away and leaving him very pissed off. Lucky for her the FBI arrived Just in Time.
  • "Reflection of Desire": The victim breaks the UnSub's nose and immediately flees for a door only to discover it's locked. Later, in a second escape attempt, she finds out she wouldn't have wanted to go in there anyway.
• Dark Is Not Evil: Everyone in the BAU wears dark clothes and dark suits, but they're the good guys.
  • Conversely, more than a few UnSubs have worn white or light-colored clothing.
• Daydream Surprise: Appears on "Final Shot". The Scary Black Man protector of the UnSub's target seen throughout the episode is in reality the UnSub himself, a mercenary Cold Sniper using a kind of "focusing technique" so as to keep alert until the time the victim exposes herself.
• Dead All Along: Occasionally, an UnSub's companion(s) throughout the episode will turn out to be this: "Reflection of Desire", "Normal", and "Protection", among others.
• Dead Artists Are Better The UnSub in "Magnum Opus" commits Suicide by Cop for this reason.
• Dead Guy on Display:
  • The "Art of Dying" chapter from the PC game.
  • "The Lesson," where victims are left on display inside of a box.
  • "Magnum Opus," where victims are posed (with their eyelids cut out) looking at selected murals in San Francisco.
• A Deadly Affair:
  • Season 6 episode "Compromising Positions": The first victim of the killer's career was the man that impregnated his wife. When talking to the wife Reid shows her pictures of male murder victims and, despite Rossi and Hotch's skepticism, she turns on her husband when she sees the photo of the man who fathered her child.
  • Season 10 episode "The Witness" has Charlie Senarak go after the man his wife was sleeping with. When he confronts the man, a struggle ensues, and Senarak kills the man. The man's half-brother, anti-government terrorist Mitchell Crossford, blackmails Senarak with this knowledge and tries to frame him for a sarin gas attack.
  • During Season 12, Reid is sent to prison for a crime he did not commit. There he meets Calvin Shaw, a former FBI Agent who murdered his confidential informant. He claims that she was blackmailing him, but he actually was having an affair with her and killed her to prevent her from speaking and to destroy evidence of her pregnancy.
• Deadpan Snarker: Everyone on the team has their moments of this, but the most prominent examples are Hotch (with an emphasis on deadpan, and combined with The Comically Serious), Rossi, and Prentiss (and the latter two are especially snarky when teamed up together).
• Deal with the Devil: Essentially what keeps the Reaper at bay for ten years.
• Death by Childbirth:
  • The second UnSub (the first UnSub's lover) in "A Thousand Words".
  • Played with in "Cradle to Grave", where the UnSub and his wife are killing the girls after they give birth, if the baby is a girl.
  • The killer's mother in "Profiling 101" not only died while giving birth to him, but he was a Child by Rape. This, along with the horrific abuse he received at the hands of a cruel grandmother who resented him being born, saying he was conceived in sin and that her daughter's "womb was cursed", helped lead him to murder women and remove their uteri.
• Death by Despair: Johnny, the younger unsub of "Open Season", passes away from his injuries a few seconds after he hears his brother being gunned down by Morgan, realizing what happened.
• Death by Irony: End of "Paradise," and what happens to the main UnSub in "Minimal Loss."
• Death Course: The meatpacking plant in "Legacy." Highlights include gas vents, vicious dogs, a room with the floor covered in broken glass, and the body parts of previous victims suspended from the ceiling.
• Deceptive Disciple: "Amplification"
• Desconstruction: Season 16 deconstructs many tropes from the original series, such as Rossi's stoicism.
• Defiant Captive: Meg, Kate's niece/adopted daughter (who was taught a lot of FBI techniques by Kate), becomes this once she realizes that playing along with the killer won't work. Generally considered a bad idea as defiance makes UnSubs more agitated.
  • Prentiss has a habit of antagonizing her captors, notably in "Minimal Loss" when she states "I can take it" while being beat up, and in "Lauren" when captured and interrogated by Doyle about the death of his son, Declan.
• Despair Speech: Some UnSubs do this while confessing. The episode "Hopeless" shows how much this applies to the whole cast by having Hotchner using the Once an Episode after-action quote moment to deliver one of these, prefacing it with "sometimes there's no fancy quotes that can be said".
• Desperate Plea for Home: In the episode "Submerged," a disturbed young man has been murdering people by binding them, tying cinder-blocks to them, and submerging them in bodies of water. At one point, he makes friends with a young boy by the name of Timmy, who unfortunately buys into the psychopath's pirate fantasy; this leads to the poor kid being bound and gagged as well, awaiting his turn to be the killer's next victim, during which he manages a muffled "I want to go home!"
• Didn't See That Coming: Said word-for-word by Morgan in "Zoe's Reprise," after he and Prentiss seemingly stop the UnSub in the process of killing his next victim, only to discover that they are, in fact, a couple simply about to initiate a bout of very kinky sex.
• Died on Their Birthday: The episode "Hanley Waters" centers around a woman whose son died a year prior on his birthday.
• Dies Wide Open: In "A Shade of Gray," Kyle Murphy dies this way after his older brother Danny shoves plane parts down his throat.
• Dirty Cop: An entire squad, bar the chief and likely the former chief in "Demons."
• Disappeared Dad: Much of the cast, most notably Reid and Morgan.
• Disappointed by the Motive: Although there's other examples throughout the series, "Hopeless" is an especially notable one; the discovery that the killers of the week are out slaughtering entire families just because they think that it's fun leads to the BAU walking away and leaving the cops to kill them.
• Disobeyed Orders, Not Punished: "Elephant's Memory", Reid violates protocol to try and talk down a Spree Killer whom he empathizes with, deliberately putting himself between the killer and a police sniper. Reid is successful, but Hotchner does read him the riot act for endangering others, though Reid ultimately isn't punished any further.
  Hotchner: You knowingly jeopardized your life and the lives of others! I should fire you! You're the smartest kid in the room, but you're not the only one in that room. You pull something like this again, you will be! Am I clear?
• Disposable Sex Worker: Happens a lot on this show (e.g. "Legacy", "Sex, Birth, Death", "The Last Word"), but subverted in that the prostitutes are treated like people too, and the team takes crimes against them just as seriously. Inverted by "Pleasure is My Business", where the UnSub is a prostitute.
• Disproportionate Retribution: Maeve's stalker is eventually revealed to be working off of this. Maeve rejected her thesis years ago because the study she did on suicide and couples included her own dead parents in the sample group, which was also implied to be too small to hold up. For this slight, the UnSub decided to make Maeve's life a living hell and prove herself better by dating Maeve's old boyfriend, then trying to seduce Reid, again to one-up Maeve. She is only happy when being assured that Maeve is not as good as she is. And the real kicker? Maeve actually thought her hypothesis might have merit, but thought she needed to improve her sampling techniques in order to present it properly.
• Distracting Fake Fight: At one point, a serial killer has Hotch and Reid hostage, and Hotch says he's been hoping to kick the crap out of "this kid" since forever so could he do that? Serial killer says okay, Hotch kicks Reid a bunch while hurling insults at him (which include reminders of how to properly fire a gun), then gets out of the way... and just when the killer barely catches on, Reid shoots him in the forehead with the little gun he pulled out of Hotch's leg harness.
• The Dog Bites Back: "Machismo"
• Doom Magnet:
  • "Divining Rod": A woman was told that has a knack for "finding the evil in men" by her dowsing dad, and two serial killer boyfriends can't be wrong! Super-Empowering: The ending implies that she might have been "encouraging" them — possibly unawares to the first (executed) boyfriend, but when your copycat boyfriend kills four women in one day just to make you a nice wig you may as well embrace your "gift."
  • This trope extends to the BAU as a whole often. Each of them have had so much stuff in their personal lives, both as part of their backstories and as a result of their profession.
    • Spencer Reid probably takes the cake. Reid's parent separated, his mother has schizophrenia and Reid struggles with the knowledge that there is a genetic component to schizophrenia and that as a male he's likely to also develop it as he ages. In her middle age she gets Alzheimer's, which could also be genetic and thus potentially passed down to him. As a child Reid was approached by a pedophile, then one of his friends was raped and murdered, which led to his own mother killing the culprit when he invaded their home, which Reid then suppressed the memories of till years later when they surfaced and he thought it was his dad who raped and murdered the kid. Reid was also bullied extensively as a child, being the only kid under twelve in his high school, where several bullies at one point tied him to a pole, took his clothes, and left him there overnight. On the show Reid has been kidnapped and drugged at least twice (one of them he was tortured too), been shot in the leg, struggled with painkiller addiction, has seen a girlfriend murdered right in front of him literally the first time he actually got to see her in person, has been the target of another murderer he arrested, has been framed for murder and arrested in Mexico. And that's only SOME of what he's been through.
    • Derek Morgan: As a child, Morgan witnessed his father shot in the line of duty. Later he was sexually abused by the man who was a father figure for him. He was also frequently harassed by a police officer. His cousin was kidnapped and made someone's sexual slave for about a decade. On the show Morgan has been kidnapped and tortured once. He's also arrested and framed for murder at the behest of the man who once abused him. His wife was been shot by a sniper when in her third trimester.
    • Hotchner's wife was murdered by a serial killer while Hotchner himself was injured. Then his son was targeted by another forcing him to retire and go in witness protection. Hotchner also lost a friend to car bomb and suffered some hearing damage.
    • Then there's Gideon who got soul crushed by an Unsub he let go in exchange for a bus full of child hostages, forcing his retirement, and eventually was murdered.
    • Even Garcia, who is rarely in the field, and therefore rarely exposed to UnSubs still wound up getting shot by a man she'd dated who liked to cause crimes and report them because he thought she was on to him.
• Double-Meaning Title: Several examples.
  • "Derailed" is an episode about a man having a psychotic break... on a stopped train.
  • "Empty Planet" refers to an in-universe science-fiction novel and also to what the UnSub thinks the world is becoming, due to the proliferation of machine technology — courtesy of his delusions inspired by the aforementioned book.
  • "Revelations" has an UnSub who believes he is living out the Biblical Book of Revelation, and also contains several major, more mundane revelations about Reid's backstory.
  • The Story Arc of Reid's drug use is developed in "Jones"; the title is the name of a bar in New Orleans which is a crime scene, and also a reference to an addict "jonesing" for his next fix.
  • "Open Season" refers both to what the UnSub team is doing with the victims, who appear to have little in common, and to the fact that the UnSubs are hunters.
  • "In Name and Blood" refers to various fathers or father figures, and their respective tribulations with their sons (or sons-in-spirit): Hotch, who loses his son when Haley leaves him; the UnSub, Mr. Smith, who is dying of a malignant brain tumor, has been using his son to lure murder victims, and structures his abductions and dumpings around his son's school schedule; and Gideon, a father-figure to Reid ("in name"), who left the team due to his inability to handle the work, but only explained himself to Reid.
  • "About Face," while referring to the UnSub who is sending his victims and the local media "missing persons" fliers with their faces manipulated in and then cut out, is also the episode where we meet Rossi, Gideon's replacement. Rossi's character is an "about-face" (180-degree turn) from Gideon, egotistical and ruthless where Gideon was cerebral and team-oriented.
  • "In Heat" involves an UnSub who kills because of his sexual impulses, and takes place in the very warm city of Miami.
  • "Tabula Rasa" refers to both the presumed serial killer's memory, which has been wiped by coma-induced amnesia, and to the fact that, due to time-degraded evidence, the team spends the episode working primarily from the profile.
  • "Cold Comfort" refers to both the cold comfort of false hope, and the cold comfort of necrophilia.
  • "Demonology" refers to both the personal demons faced by Emily Prentiss over the course of the episode, and to demonic exorcism.
  • "Conflicted" refers to both the conflict between Adam Jackson and his alternate personality, Amanda and the fact that Reid is still conflicted about his experiences with Tobias Hankel.
  • "Haunted" refers to the psychological haunting of the UnSub by his father's career as an UnSub, and of Hotch by the Boston Reaper.
  • "Outfoxed" brings back the serial killer from "The Fox," who reveals at the end of the episode that the Boston Reaper has outfoxed Hotch and is threatening Haley and Jack.
  • "The Slave of Duty" deals in part with Hotch's decision to return to the BAU after the Boston Reaper kills Haley; the title is both a description of Hotch's personality and the alternate title of The Pirates of Penzance. Hotch met Haley when they were both in a high school production of Pirates.
  • "Risky Business" refers to and darkly twists certain plot elements of the Tom Cruise movie of the same name — privileged, apparently straight-edge kids get into trouble behind their parents' backs, to hilarity in the film's case and to their deaths in the episode — as well as echoing the notion of a victim being high or low risk, which is brought up several times over the course of the series.
  • "JJ" Agent Jareau having to leave the team as well as the potential nickname for the victim of the week. Her mother says they were considering naming her Jennifer instead of Kate.
  • "Compromising Positions" refers to the sex the UnSub forces his victims to have before killing them, as well as the swinger's parties he's finding them at. It also refers to Garcia "compromising" both her usual role as technical analyst and taking on J.J.'s former job as media liaison, and finding it impossible to do both to an acceptable standard.
  • "Safe Haven" refers to what the families who are killed are trying to give the UnSub, not knowing what he's planning for them, as well as being the name of the law under which the teenage UnSub was given up by his mother, precipitating his descent into murder. On top of all that, you also have little Ellie Spicer, from "Our Darkest Hour" and "The Longest Night," looking for a safe haven away from her neglectful foster family in California by running away to Virginia to see Morgan.
  • "Profiling 101" refers to both the undergraduate class the team walks through the case in the episode and the UnSub's whopping 101 victims.
  • "Hope" can be unintentionally comical at times, as it deals with a woman's hope on the return of her long-kidnapped daughter... also named Hope:
    UnSub: I'm the man who took Hope.
    Mother: You took my Hope??!!
• Double Standard: In "Psychodrama" the family treats the father like he let the UnSub have their way with them while the UnSub held them at gunpoint with a Mac 10. Stating he should have fought back to protect them despite doing such action would have been suicidal.
• Double Standard Rape: Female on Male: No, it is not okay. This either occurs or is a concern in "I Love You Tommy Brown" (along with Double Standard: Rape, Female on Female), and it's treated with as much horror as it deserves.
  • This trope is actually invoked in-universe during that very episode, acknowledging the double standard. A damn rarity for television. Shame as that is.
  • The episode "Psychodrama" also indicates that a mother sexually abused her son and daughter. It's a relatively minor plot point, but is treated as being appropriately horrific.
  • Also averted in "The Angel Maker". The team initially assumes the UnSub is male as the victims are being raped and murdered. They later learn the killer is a woman, and while they make a comment that she would had to have used an object to commit the rape, it is still clearly not okay.
  • A "conversion therapy" center in "Broken" hired a prostitute to have sex with gay boys against their will in an attempt to "cure" them of their sexuality. This is treated appropriately as just one more of the center's many crimes, such as chaining them to chairs and keeping them drugged awake to watch heterosexual porn for the same purpose.
• Downer Ending:
  • "100" most notably, since it's where Hotch crosses the Despair Event Horizon.
  • "North Mammon" is also pretty bad, since they don't find the three missing girls before they make the Sadistic Choice offered to them by their kidnapper — kill one and the other two go free.
  • "The Fox" — Sure, Karl Arnold is caught and tricked into a confession, but then Hotch finds a little box in which the UnSub keeps the wedding rings of the men he kills. There are eight rings, which mean Karl has killed many more people without raising any suspicion before being caught.
  • The end of the case (but not the episode) in "Normal" — Norman's family was Dead All Along, and he'd been hallucinating that they were still alive the whole time. Even worse, the time of death was confirmed to have been before the BAU's involvement, meaning there was absolutely nothing they could have done to save them at all.
  • "Honor Among Thieves" — The victim's daughter turned out to be the UnSub's girlfriend, and was working with him to extort ransom money from his father, a Russian mob boss. In the end, the only justice that gets handed down is Mob justice.
  • "Aftermath" — Elle's pent up resentment and rage over how she believes the team abandoned her during the events of "The Fisher King" ultimately causes her to snap and brutally murder an unarmed man, effectively destroying her career in the FBI and horrifying her teammates.
  • "Doubt" — Hotch's mishandling of the case leaves three people dead and his career with the BAU in jeopardy. Gideon, already heavily traumatized by the events of "No Way Out Part 2," blames himself for the case's failure and resigns from the BAU for good.
  • "Revelations" — Reid is rescued from his kidnapper... but he's now a drug addict.
  • "3rd Life" — Reid is Forced to Watch as the teenage UnSub is gunned down by the kidnapped girl's father, who is revealed to be an unrepentant hitman who will continue to go on killing.
  • "True Night" — "Hey, this is Vicky! I can't come to the phone right now because I'm out living my life!"
  • "Bloodline" — The Romani family has multiple branches, which will continue to kill families and kidnap girls to maintain the bloodline.
  • "Conflicted" — Adam is completely consumed by his female split personality, Amanda.
  • "A Shade of Gray" — The BAU may have caught a predatory pedophile who killed two young boys, but he was framed for the murder for which they were after him. The victim's real killer turns out to be his older brother, and his parents conspired with their police detective friend to stage it as a murder by the pedophile, for whom the cops were already looking anyway. In the end, the boy is implied to be on his way to an institution, and the detective has been forced to resign and will likely face charges.
  • "The Big Wheel" is a pretty huge downer, although there is some goodness in the fact that the UnSub actually did have a breakthrough that enabled him to finally clasp the hand of his friend.
  • As Hotch himself points out in the narration, "To Hell and Back" — Lucas is gunned down by the team, and Mason is killed by the brother of one of the victims, leaving no one alive to face justice for the crimes they committed. The fact that the episode, and season, ends with Hotch being ambushed by The Reaper makes it an even bigger downer ending.
  • "Into the Woods" — The UnSub gets away. Rossi, however, denies that this is the case, because they still saved the children, and that's what matters the most.
  • "What Happens at Home," because the killer murders his own wife, while his own daughter begs him to stop. Later he attacks Hotchner, who has no choice except to shoot him, though not before the murderer apologizes to his daughter, leaving her alone.
  • "Lauren" — Subverted: Although there are wrenching hospital and funeral scenes, and the team suffers a terrible loss, Prentiss is shown to be alive at the very end.
  • "Dorado Falls" — The UnSub opens his eyes, triggering his mental illness and making him want to kill his wife and daughter, whom he now thinks are impostors.
  • "From Childhood's Hour" ends with Rossi's first ex-wife telling him she has ALS and asking him to help her commit suicide. The very next episode, Carolyn, the ex-wife, kills herself and dies in Rossi's arms. Then he's shown at the cemetery, staring at a headstone that belongs to their son, who died the day he was born. Poor Rossi.
  • "Heathridge Manor" — The UnSub's sister ends up succumbing to the same mental illness as her brother, and hallucinates Satan arriving at the house to take her away.
  • "Zugzwang" (see The Bad Guy Wins, above). It was such a downer that many fans got upset with the ending, and Breen Frazier, the writer of the episode, said that the anger was his goal all along.
  • "The Edge of Winter" — The UnSub utterly broke one of his kidnapping victims, to the point where she aided him in killing his victims and cleaning up afterward. The episode takes place in a mental institution (her story told through flashback), and it's unlikely that she'll ever recover.
  • "X" (Season 10 premiere) — The UnSub was just one of a network of bad guys who kidnap innocent people and sells them on the darkest parts the internet, and the end of the episode shows another victim being taken. This particular revelation is left hanging until the end of the season ("The Hunt"), where said network is discovered and dismantled.
  • "The Night Watch" — While the infant kidnapped at the beginning of the episode is found safe, Morpheus' ex-husband, who killed three other people, flings himself and her off a roof, killing them both just as the team starts to negotiate with him.
• Dream Sequence: One of the victims in "Awake" escapes from his captor and later reunites with his wife, and then is forced awake each time.
• Driven to Suicide: A number of UnSubs kill themselves at the end of their episodes.
  • This was actually the original plan for how to write Gideon out, but Mandy Patinkin refused. You can still see echoes of it in "In Birth and Death", particularly in the shot where he contemplates his gun before putting it on the table with his badge instead.
  • Done literally in "Roadkill" by an UnSub who targets people driving red coupes and runs them over with his pick-up, because his wife died from an accident involving a red coupe. When the team discover that the red coupe was her car, and he was driving it when the accident happened and confront the UnSub about why his memories of the tragedy are so vague, he drives off a cliff.
• Dueling Hackers: How Garcia and Kevin meet.
• Dysfunction Junction: Let's count them off, shall we?
  • Morgan was sexually molested from childhood through adolescence by an authority figure, and his father was killed in front of him when he was very young.
  • Prentiss had a neglectful mother and had an abortion at age 15. One should note that the abortion itself is never played for angst; rather the consequences of it — her isolation from the baby's father and the guilt heaped on her by her Catholic upbringing — is. She also went under deep cover to catch Doyle, to the point of feigning a relationship with him. We see that Doyle fell for her, but whether she did or didn't have some feelings for Doyle is unclear. In any case, they wind up trying to kill each other. Her resulting psychological issues are referenced throughout Season 7, notably in "Unknown Subject" where she is seen in counseling and talks to a rape victim about what it's like when "the monster from your nightmares" comes back for you.
  • Rossi has three ex-wives as a result of being Married to the Job. He also had the Galen case ("Damaged") and the Butcher case ("Remembrance of Things Past"), which haunted him for more than ten years and didn't get solved until he came out of retirement. And in "From Childhood's Hour," his first ex-wife, Carolyn, returns to ask him to help assist in her suicide, not wanting to go through the deterioration of ALS. He turns her down, and she kills herself anyway. The same episode reveals that they had had a son who died the day he was born.
  • Garcia's parents were killed by a drunk driver when she was 18. She "went underground" and became one of the most dangerous hackers in the world. She was forced to join the FBI to avoid prison and was once shot by a narcissistic UnSub. She also worries that she's getting desensitized by all the horrible things that she sees.
  • Hotch is trying to raise his son after his ex-wife — his high school sweetheart — was murdered by the Reaper, who made him listen over the phone while she died. Hotch was so grief-stricken that he beat the Reaper to death with his bare hands. Oh, and this was after he got stabbed and possibly raped by the Reaper, and had his son taken into protective custody. And after that time he nearly got blown up by a suicide bomber, lost an old flame in the same attack, and had painful hearing problems for some time afterwards as a result of it shattering his eardrums. And it does not stop there, as it's implied at the end of "Natural Born Killer" that he was abused by his father.
  • J.J. had an older sister who committed suicide by slitting her wrists and grew up in a stifling small-town environment. She also had a miscarriage during her assignment in the Middle East.
  • Reid has a schizophrenic mother, a dad who walked out on them, drug addiction and social isolation. And his father figure up and left without even saying goodbye in person. He also lives in fear of the day that he might experience his own schizophrenic break.
  • Both Gideon and Elle were so messed up by the job — Gideon by the serial killer who killed his girlfriend in his own home (after he'd already had to get over the trauma of losing his previous team to a Mad Bomber); Elle by the serial rapist on whom she went vigilante executioner — that they up and left the team. Gideon didn't even resign in person, he just left a letter behind for Reid and took off. Elle, though, only resigned when Hotch made it clear he would never trust her again and would arrest her like anyone else if he had evidence of her crime.
  • Seaver's father was a serial killer.

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