Criminal Minds / Tropes E to H

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

E-F

• Early-Installment Weirdness: The pilot. Hotch smiles. Repeatedly. On the job. There's also some tonal differences, like having multiple voice-over quotes throughout the episode instead of just as bookends; and characterization weirdness, like Morgan's wardrobe and Reid's "autistic tendencies" being decidedly more pronounced. This all gets smoothed over within the first four episodes or so. Some of the early episodes, in particular "Won't get Fooled Again" only have one quote at the start and no quotes at the end.
• Earn Your Happy Ending: Morgan goes through hell in the episodes leading up to his departure, but comes out intact by the end, along with his wife and newborn son.
• Eco-Terrorist: One episode had an arsonist who began murdering men involved with corporations accused of being heavy polluters, as well as their families. It turns out he was acting alone, and was nothing more than a sadistic psychopath (he used a suit that allowed him to watch his victims burn up close). His actions disgusted the local environmental group whose website he was using to find his "justifiable" victims, especially the leader, who kills him in an instance of Taking You with Me.
• Eldritch Location: The team briefly discuss the possibility that the titular "Heathridge Manor" might be this, given that all three of its residents end up going completely insane.
• Electric Torture: "Charm and Harm", "Limelight", "Remembrance of Things Past", and a variation in "Lauren".
• Endangering News Broadcast: The BAU often tries to control media information to prevent the UnSub from learning what they know, but it doesn't always work and sometimes information gets leaked anyway, causing either mass hysteria or the crimes to escalate.
• Enfant Terrible: "The Boogeyman" and "A Shade of Gray".
  Jason Gideon: Why did you hurt those kids?
  Jeffrey Charles: Because I wanted to.
  • In "A Shade of Gray," a little boy named Danny kills his younger brother because he broke one of his model planes. When his parents discover what he has done, Danny only feigns remorse so he won't get in trouble, secretly content his "annoying" brother is dead.
    "He shoved plane parts down his brother's throat."
  • Some of the adult UnSubs were also pretty screwed up as children. A partial list: Mark Gregory from "Charm and Harm" drowned his mother; Floyd Feylinn Ferell from "Lucky" tried to eat his baby sister; Peter Redding from "A Higher Power" slashed his brother's wrists; Colby Bachner from "Remembrance of Things Past" unwittingly helped his father murder his mother when he was ten; and The Reaper killed his parents and made it look like a car accident.
  • Jeremy, the budding sociopath in "Safe Haven".
  • In "All That Remains," Sarah Morrison kills her sister and mother, and had meticulously planned out their demise while setting up her dissociative identity disorder afflicted father to take the blame. She even tries to convince the BAU unit that JJ wants to hurt her!
• Engineered Heroics: The shooter in "L.D.S.K." is a nurse in the ER where the victims are brought, which allows him to 'heroically' help the victims. Here, it is again called "Hero Homicide."

• Entertainment Above Their Age: A flashback scene shows profiler Spencer Reid recalling that as a child, he once brought his mother a copy of Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust for her to read to him. She, knowing he was a child prodigy, merely complimented him on his choice.
• Epunymous Title: The season 16 episode "Forget Me Knots" is a play on a character's screen name on a forum: ForgetMeNot. He likes tying people up.
• Even Evil Has Standards:
  • It is mentioned several times throughout the series that pedophiles are considered scum even by hardened criminals.
  • Some criminals make it a point that while they've done horrible things, they will draw the line at some point.
  • The killers in "Identity" were loathed by even the other members of their Right-Wing Militia Fanatic coven for how badly they treated women.
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones:
  • Some criminals do genuinely care about their friends and family.
  • William Harris in Soul Mates. Even though he's raped and murdered girls that were about his daughter's age, he will not stand anything happening to his daughter. Bitterly ironic when Morgan and Rossi pointed out that the girls he and his partner killed were other people's daughters.
• Evil Cripple: "The Fisher King", "Roadkill", "To Hell..."/"... And Back" and "A Family Affair"
• Evil Desires Innocence: Frank Breitkopf was a Serial Killer who had killed numerous people across the continent, evading not only capture, but even detection because he doesn't have a victim preference. At one point, he abducts Jane Hanratty, preparing to vivisect her the same as he had all his previous victims. However, Jane was under the delusion that Frank was an alien, and so she was unafraid, even telling him "You have the most beautiful eyes." Frank, realizing she won't show him fear, which he craves, releases her. He comes to view his connection to her as "love", and ultimately he ends up committing suicide with her when on the verge of capture by the BAU.
• Evil Laugh: "Lucky" and "Outfoxed".
• Evil Gloating: Foyet to Hotch in "Nameless, Faceless": "Like my scars? Yours are going to look just like them." He does it again in "100": "I'm going to find that little bastard son of yours and show him your dead bodies and tell him it's all your fault."
  • The second example was something of a mistake on the gloater's part.
• Evil Is Petty: Maeve's stalker is entirely motivated by the fact that Maeve rejected a thesis of hers since the girl had poorly conducted her sample by including her own parents' suicides. She then shaped her entire life around being better than Maeve, began dating Maeve's ex-boyfriend, and then tried to take Reid when she realized Maeve loved him.
• Evil Twin: Parodied in "The Angel Maker", where Reid suggests they're dealing with an Evil Twin and an Eviler Twin. Needless to say, they're not.
  • Played magnificently straight in "The Inspiration," where it's not revealed to be that until the very end. And then subverted the next episode, when they turn out to be equally evil.
• Evil Versus Evil: Okay, maybe not evil, but the Guantanamo guards detaining the Big Bad in "Lessons Learned" are portrayed as little more than brainless, brutish thugs themselves. This was likely partly due to the perception of the facility in the public eye and partly to contrast them with the protagonists.
• Exact Words: Weaponized by the UnSub in "JJ". The team are trying to figure out how he beat a polygraph. They then realize he used this. He threw her overboard to be eaten by sharks. "Did you kill her?" No, sharks did. "Do you know where her body is?" No, because it could be anywhere now.
• Expanded Universe: A trilogy of books (all of which take place mid-Season 3) and a computer game.
• Extra Y, Extra Violent: Played with; one killer claims that he's XYY, and that's why he kills. However, Rossi replies that the study linking that condition to criminal behavior was debunked years ago.
• Eye Scream: "The Eyes Have It"
  • Particularly disturbing is a part where Reid mentions that sometimes "enucleators" (eye gougers) eat the eyeballs they take. Hard cut to a scene of the UnSub eating something small and round and white... and it takes the viewers a couple seconds to realize he's just eating eggs.
  • For a more subdued example, there's the killer's habit of gluing his victims' eyes open in "Plain Sight."
  • "Proof" features a killer who dribbles acid into his victims' eyes. We get to see a lovely view of the corpses' vacant eye-sockets.
  • "To Bear Witness." The idea of a microscopic camera installed in your eye via a lobotomy. Also, the way the spaces around Dana and Sam's eyes were red and almost sunken was horrifying.
• The Faceless: The UnSub from "A Thousand Words".
• Face Death with Dignity:
  • Averted with Strauss, who dies terrified and crying for her children. Running contrary to the trope, this actually makes her more sympathetic and human.
  • Played straight with Haley. "Show him no weakness. No fear." "I know."
• Facial Recognition Software: In "Derailed," Garcia uses this, plus her standard Omniscient Database, to successfully identify every single passenger on a train using grainy security camera footage.
• Fair Cop:
  • J.J. and Prentiss are just overall criminally beautiful.
  • On the male side we have Reid.
  • Hotch.
  • Even Rossi, despite being an older man, is pretty handsome.
• Fairy Tale Motifs: "The Fisher King", "Solitary Man", "If the Shoe Fits".
• Fake Guest Star: Kirsten Vangsness, before her Promotion to Opening Titles in the second season.
• Fake Kill Scare: Haley's death scene was set up as this in the show's 100th episode. And then it was terribly, horribly averted...
• Famed In-Story: SSA David Rossi, who's made a boatload of money from his books, is one of the founders of the BAU, and apparently has a big following "when Manilow's not in town".
• The Family That Slays Together:
  • "Bloodline" is about a family (a mother, father, and young son) who kill another family to abduct their daughter as a future mate for the son. Gets very creepy when it turns out that this is how the family continues; they've been doing this for generations. And then at the very end of the episode, it turns out that the family has other branches, and the last shot of the episode is another similar set (mother, father and young son) preparing to kill some other people.
  • "Open Season" has brothers who hunt people for sport, having been taught to so by their uncle, a paranoid psychotic who had died some time before the events of the episode.
  • Two borderline examples are "Mosley Lane" (the first kid abducted by the couple was kept alive, because he developed severe Stockholm Syndrome; the couple treats him sort of like a son, and he even helps them abduct other kids) and "A Thousand Words" (a near example because the father committed suicide, and the mother dies giving birth to their son.)
  • "Remembrance of Things Past" plays with the trope. The UnSub had started as a serial killer years before, and only as he'd started to lose his memory due to Alzheimer's Disease did he grudgingly take on his son as a partner.
  • "The Longest Night" also plays with the trope. Billy Flynn is so messed up in the head that, because he left her father alive, he believes himself to be responsible for Ellie Spicer's being born. In fact, he's come to see himself as a grandfather figure to her of sorts, and actively tries to invoke this trope. Needless to say, it doesn't work.
• Fan Disservice: Doyle opening Prentiss' shirt and showing her bra when branding her.
• Fanservice Extra: The episode "Supply & Demand" has a lot of cute brunette women in their underwear.
• Fatal Family Photo: "Fear and Loathing" and "Our Darkest Hour".
• Fetus Terrible: The unsub's mother in "Safe Haven" believes he was this. As she put it, "I was pregnant with twins, and then I wasn't." He counters that her hatred of him since his birth is what turned him into a monster.
• Feuding Families: The "Blood Relations" episode involves two West Virginian families that have been in a feud that dates back to when they were working as rival Hillbilly Moonshiners in the times of prohibition.
• Fictional Counterpart:
  • In "Lockdown," a series of murders take place in a private prison run by Citadel Corrections Company, a fictional version of Corrections Corporation of America.
  • In "Breath Play," an UnSub becomes motivated to kill after reading the bestselling erotic novel 'Bare Reflections', an obvious expy of Fifty Shades of Grey.
• Fictional Document: Several examples:
  • David Rossi is the author of several books on criminal psychology; an UnSub quotes from them in an interrogation scene in "Masterpiece" and Rossi himself reads from one in the opening to "Zoe's Reprise."
    • Reid has also quoted from them, including once early in Rossi's run on the show. Rossi was surprised at the direct quote. No one else shared this surprise.
  • A new book on the Keystone Killer induces the UnSub to resume his murderous ways in "Unfinished Business."
    • The spin-off novel Criminal: Killer Profile has another book written by the former profiler featured in the episode — Serial Killers and Mass Murderers: Profiling Why They Kill. Near the end, it's discovered the UnSub is using it as a guide to his copycat murders.
  • A reporter who wrote a book on the Boston Reaper is a character in "Omnivore."
  • Professor Ursula Kent's SF novel in "Empty Planet."
  • Jonny McHale's comic book Blue in "True Night."
• Finger in the Mail: The Season 1 finale features a variation on this trope; SSA Jason Gideon receives, at his cottage, a baseball card and a head in a box via courier, which sets the BAU's targets on this new case.
• Firefighter Arsonist:
  • In "Ashes and Dust", it is mentioned that serial arsonists are often firefighters or other first responders who use their job as an opportunity to revisit the scenes of their crimes. The killer in this episode is also seen wearing full fire gear when he commits arson - but, in a subversion of the trope, he's actually not a fireman. He just likes to stand in the flames and watch people burn.
  • The serial killer of the episode "The Fallen" is revealed to be a firefighter who was kicked out of the service for becoming infected with a drug-resistant strain of tuberculosis when saving homeless people from a fire. Already having a severe case of OCD and germ phobia, the firefighter decided that homeless people were a plague and had to be exterminated, with his victims drowned in bleach and then used as kindling for setting abandoned buildings ablaze.
• Flashback B-Plot: The series' present-day stories about FBI agents solving crimes are intertwined with flashbacks detailing the crime itself and the people involved.
• Foot-Dragging Divorcee: Hotch hesitates for several episodes to sign the papers that divorce him from Haley.
• Forced Euthanasia: Unsurprisingly for a show that deals with the broad spectrum of types of Serial Killer, there have been a few examples of "angels of death" (also occasionally called "angels of mercy"):
  • In "Broken Wing", the killer iss a recovered drug addict who targeted fellow addicts in rehab centers believing that he was helping them prevent the inevitable relapse.
  • In "Children of the Dark", one member of the foster-brother tag-team of family annihilators poisons the children to give them peaceful deaths, in direct comparison to his brother who bludgeons the parents to death with anything he can get his hands on. They targeted families that they believed to be abusive (as theirs were, both of them), believing the murdered children were going to a better place.
  • In "Closing Time", the killer is a bartender who targets customers who were on a downward spiral because their wives had become unfaithful and they were unable to find good work, just like had happened to him. He claimed that he was helping them take "the way out" that said spiral was not letting them choose.
  • In the episode "A Higher Power", the criminal of the week is targeting the grieving families of fourteen children who died in a fire, thinking that he is helping them move on from their grief and be Together in Death with their children. Ironically, the "suicide" that put the BAU on his trail was an actual suicide he was totally uninvolved with, and the agents had to inform the detective brother of the dead man, who spent the whole episode hoping that There Are No Coincidences.
  • In "Miasma", the killer is a man who murders sick people (with symptoms similar to the sickness his own mother had) believing that he is doing them a favor by giving them a quicker and less humiliating death. Of course, he also decides that he had to do something about preventing the disease from spreading, namely setting their homes on fire.
• Forced Prize Fight: The backstory to "Lockdown", taking place inside a prison.
• Forced to Watch: If the UnSub is particularly sadistic. Though a couple go further and force them to participate.
• For the Evulz:
  • "3rd Life". The three thrill killers from "Hopeless" and the (unrelated) rioters in the same episode.
  Morgan: You know what gets me? All this time we figured you guys were down and out. But here you are working? What the hell is so so God-awful about your lives that you have to take it out on everyone else?
  J.R. Baker: It was fun, boss.
  • Syd and her husband in "The Thirteenth Step," though they have a reason. It's leading up to killing their sexually abusive fathers. Syd's especially, since she's the leader of the two and all but one of the attacks happen in places that remind her of her dad.
  • This seems to be the case for the Reaper George Foyet as well. The core of his character is that he gets off on manipulating and having power over people.
  • Adrian Bale in the early episode "Won't Get Fooled Again". He agrees to tell the BAU how to disarm a complicated bomb, and in exchange he will be transferred from his maximum security prison to a mental hospital, and Agent Gideon will have to apologize to his victims' families, and admit that it was entirely his fault their respective relative died. When the inevitable Wire Dilemma occurs, Bale, even though doing so completely invalidates his deal, purposely tells them to cut the wrong wire... because the bomb blowing up will give him some kind of "emotional release".
  • It's a TV show about FBI profilers who hunt down (mostly) serial killers using psychological analysis to develop profiles of the likely unsub (unknown subject) so, obviously, most episodes avert this. However, some unsubs do still fall into this trope, making a particularly tricky case for the BAU.
  • Subverted in the episode "To Hell And Back". The team profile someone who is abducting random drug users and homeless people as someone who is killing For The Evulz — but it is actually a Manchild who is carrying out orders of his crippled Manipulative Bastard brother, who says he was using the victims to perform horrible human experiments in the hope of finding a cure for his condition. Then a Double Subversion when Rossi calls bullshit on that and says he's just a sadist, who enjoys forcing his brother to torture and kill people while he watches, since none of the equipment he has on hand is remotely suited to advanced medical research.
  • Ben Bradstone from "Proof". He doesn't understand why people ask why someone would do these horrible things. He says its the same reason people do anything, because it's fun. That's why he kicked his dog as a kid.
  • In the Season 2 episode "The Boogeyman", Gideon asks young Jeffery Charles why he killed three children and almost killed another one. His response? "Because I wanted to."
• Found Family via Work: Over 15 seasons, the members of the BAU definitely come to see each other as family, in large part because they spend almost all of their time together due to their heavy workload. Over the course of the series, each member either falls in mortal danger, is framed for a crime that would cost them both their job, their freedom, or both. And the team pulls out all the stops to rescue their teammate and/or clear their teammate, making it clear that they're doing it because that's what family does for each other.
• Freak Out: Most of the spree killer episodes, most notably "Haunted". Really, any time one of the UnSubs devolves.
• Freudian Excuse:
  • The hitman in "Natural Born Killer" got sloppy in the triple murder that opens the episode because one of the victims was a woman and he identified her with his mother.
  • Also a main issue for Frank Breitkopf and Billy Flynn.
  • The insane mother of the UnSub in "Heathridge Manor" convinced her son from beyond the grave thanks to "infecting" him with her delusions that he had to destroy "the devil's brides" to save his sister.
• Freeze-Frame Bonus: You can see the whole list of victims at the beginning of "Reckoner". Of course, it will mean nothing to you unless you know The Reveal.
  • In one episode, some fraud is happening via fake businesses that all have the formula "Video Game Character + Innocuous Business" as a name; most of these are called out, but you can see an extra one as a freeze-frame bonus: Ezio's Flower Shop.
• Friendship Moment: Any ending scene on the jet, or when the team hangs out off the clock.
  • Special mention to the one from "The Performer," where Reid mothers J.J., Morgan and Prentiss pick on Reid, and Hotch and Rossi argue about music and do their best married couple impersonation.
  • The ending of "Proof" when the team gathers at Rossi's for a cooking lesson
  • Multiple instances of the women being shown out shopping, getting coffee, or gossiping together about their personal lives.
  • The team (minus Reid, who is with his mother) having dinner together in "The Instincts," which is heartbreakingly reprised in "JJ".
  • Hotch and Rossi coaching Jack's soccer team at the end of "Out of the Light."
  • Rossi teaching Garcia, as well as the rest of the team, to cook Italian food at the end of "Proof." Bonus points to J.J. for just wanting to drink the wine and Hotch being the most knowledgeable besides Rossi.
  • The implications that J.J. was Prentiss' lifeline while Prentiss was in hiding and presumed dead by the rest of the team.
• The Fundamentalist: "Scarecrow" features an UnSub who had a violently homicidal hangup about sex and "penance" that could be traced back to his upbringing; notably, trying to trace his motives and modus operandi, they find a slightly weird-looking local prayer group that he had been part of and then left off from because they weren't practitioners of the kind of ritual self-harm he'd had on his mind.
• Funny Background Event: In "Compulsion," a student is telling to Hotch about his physics project and, rhetorically, asks 'Do you know how to solve the Three-Body Problem?' Behind them, Reid nods with a serious look on his face.
• Furnace Body Disposal: "Moseley Lane" has this, but there is also definite overlap with Murder by Cremation. The child abductors are shown to want to kill their most recent, troublesome victim by putting her in their furnace (while still alive). However, they are also shown to place all their victims' bodies, regardless of how they died, in the furnace and spread their ashes on their garden.

G-H

• Gayngst: "In Heat"
• Gender-Equal Ensemble: Comes extremely close.
  • This show does get a fair bit past the radar in daytime hours, but Sky Living's censors don't seem to notice, let alone care (but no Ofcom rules are broken, at the time of writing.)
• Generation Xerox: "Birthright" has Robert and Charlie Wilkinson, father and son serial killers. Both are alcoholic, misogynistic men who started murdering women when both were 28-years-old. Both abuse and kill at least five women, and both are murdered by their pregnant spouses when they discover what their husbands had done.
• The Glasses Gotta Go: Fabulous subversion: After J.J.'s departure, Garcia tries dropping her usual distinctive style of dress for boring dark dresses, and (in a complete flip of Purely Aesthetic Glasses) gets contacts so that she can look serious when dealing with victims' families and such. When she's starting to lose it, Morgan actually gets her to put the glasses (and her old wardrobe) back on.
• Go into the Light: In "Epilogue," the UnSub resuscitates his victims so he can find out what they saw and compare it to his own Near-Death Experience. During the investigation, Reid reveals that he saw a bright light before Tobias Hankel resuscitated him; but the trope is subverted for Prentiss, who counters that she flatlined in the ambulance after being impaled by Doyle and only felt cold and darkness.
  • Becomes useful in "Wheels Up", where Scratch doses Emily with a drug and gives her hypnotic suggestions that she's having an NDE standing in front of her own grave with two death dates on the headstone. That's how she figures out that she's not really in excruciating pain.
• A God Am I: The original bomber from "Painless".
• Gollum Made Me Do It: "The Big Game"/"Revelations"
• Gone Horribly Right/Gone Horribly Wrong:
  • "Hero Worship" A guy rigs a bomb to play hero and impress his girlfriend, whose dead husband wasn't just his best friend but a heroic soldier. The bomb cracks a gas line, accidentally killing a bunch of people, and then another bomber gets pissed that he's getting all the attention. (Perhaps needless to say, the first bomber's relationship with his girlfriend does not survive)
  • The Vigilante Man in "Protection" is determined to find the man who killed his mother and terrorized his tenants and clean up the streets in the meantime. Actually, the criminal was in already in jail in another city; the schizophrenic UnSub killed the tenants and has been living with delusions of them (ironically said delusions want him to take his meds), and one of his victims was not only innocent, he was also a star student who was on his way out of the bad neighborhood when the UnSub imagined he was a mugger.
• Good Cop/Bad Cop: Hotch (Bad Cop) and Prentiss (Good Cop) do a fairly spectacular version in "Bloodlines."
  • Again with Morgan (Bad Cop) and Gideon (Good Cop) in "The Boogeyman", although it should be noted that Morgan had every reason to believe the guy was the UnSub, while Gideon was aware that he was innocent (but covering for the real UnSub) just before he took over the interrogation from Morgan.
  • Rossi (Bad Cop) and Reid (Snarky Good Cop) in "Lauren," against a weaselly mook that Rossi keeps calling a "hood rat".
• Good Girls Avoid Abortion: Subverted by Emily Prentiss, FBI agent who had an abortion at fifteen and is never shown to have angst over it. She does regret the division it caused among her friends — such as when Matthew's family cut all contact with him because he supported her — and that it's affected her faith and relationship with the Catholic Church. She is never once shown to have been "punished" or seen as "bad" because of her abortion.
  • Also subverted in the episode "The Crossing": it's revealed at one point that a stalking victim had an abortion, but although this causes some problems between her and her boyfriend, it's not connected in any way to the stalking and her abduction is not positioned as narrative punishment for having it. The episode also subtly implies, entirely non-judgmentally, that newly-pregnant JJ has been considering an abortion up until the point where she calls her boyfriend in the final scene.
• Goth:
  • "The Performer" involves a series of murders seemingly associated with a Goth rock star and his fans' subculture.
  • "Tabula Rasa" tells us that Prentiss was a goth in high school, and there are pictures to prove it.
    Prentiss: You obviously altered it in Photoshop or something. That hair?
    Garcia: Oh, no, Pussycat. That — that's all you. Garfield High, Class of '89.
    Prentiss: You really didn't change anything?
    Garcia: I hacked it, as is. You're seriously trying to tell me you don't remember rocking that look?
    Reid: Perhaps your lack of recognition stems from a dissociative fugue suffered in adolescence. Say, at a Siouxsie and the Banshees concert?
  • "Doubt" featured a Goth/Emo college student who copycat-killed a dorm-mate so the UnSub would be released. She wanted the UnSub to kill her because she didn't have the nerve to kill herself.
  • "Risky Business" gives us the Goth kid the team believes runs the "choking game" site. He's actually not the UnSub. His father is.
  • "The Popular Kids" had a group of Goth kids who were viable suspects. They were innocent.
  • One of the unsub's fellow bullying victims in "The Anti-Terrorism Squad" is a soft-spoken girl with black cloning and eyeshadow.
• Gorn: Mandy Patinkin supposedly left the show due to his belief it was becoming something like this.
  • Lampshaded in the third episode of Season 14, when Rossi tells the team how Gideon felt about Rossi's aspirations to write books about their solved cases.
    Rossi: He was concerned was that by telling these stories it would create a prurient interest that would be more about consuming… pornography.
• Gory Discretion Shot: This is a show that’s not afraid of getting truly disturbing, but the constraints of its rating makes this a necessity. One aversion occurs in "Jones", which features a particularly nasty throat slitting.
• Goths Have It Hard: In the episode "In Name and In Blood", the person that makes things go awry to the point that Jason Gideon, completely fed up, quits the FBI and goes on a journey so he won't be found, is a goth girl who, upon finding out that there is a Serial Killer on campus and that he's been apprehended and hoping he'll kill her (she can't bring herself to commit suicide), kills someone imitating his style so the cops will let him go and approaches him.
• Greater-Scope Villain: Once in a while, the actual UnSub is only a Disc-One Final Boss in contrast to some bigger Villain of the Week. Examples include "Self-Fulfilling Prophecy," "Lockdown," and "Killer App."
• The Greatest Story Never Told: What motivates the UnSub, a social pariah, in his Roaring Rampage of Revenge in "Painless". By the grace of God, he stared down the original bomber; by the disgrace of God, he did not get to appear in TV like other survivors did; in fact they not only claimed one of them did it, they didn't even remember him, if they knew who he was in the first place. Worse is that the title refers to the fact that, because of the injuries he incurred from the explosion, he can no longer feel any pain due to brain damage, and is the only one who has any kind of long-term injury like that, so he suffered more than the rest too.
• Grief-Induced Split: Appears in the backstories for multiple UnSubs and is also heavily implied for Rossi and his ex-wife Caroline. She ends her life after a diagnosis of ALS and asks Rossi if "he'll be there." The "he" she talks about is the son that they lost on the day of his birth.
• Groin Attack:
  • A victim briefly gets away by delivering one to her attacker in "Fear and Loathing". The UnSub's rape victims in "Machismo" also castrate him.
  • The sole female victim in "Haunted" gets knifed right below the belt.
  • In "Strange Fruit," a white woman claims she was raped by a black man when she misses her curfew. Her brother, a Klansman, and five Klansmen friends of his capture him and castrate him in retaliation; after finding out what happened, he goes and kills two of them, and later kills the daughters of two others who have died.
• Group Power Walk: The team doesn't get as many of these as you might think, but special mention has to go to Hotch, Rossi, and Prentiss's in "Hopeless".
• Guest-Star Party Member: Generally the head of the local police force acts as an extra member of the team while they investigate the case. Some episodes play with this — maybe the local police chief is a Mauve Shirt, maybe they're a Sixth Ranger Traitor.
• Guile Hero: Jason Gideon and David Rossi.
  Prentiss: When did you know you were going to have to trick him?
  Gideon: The first time I talked to him.
• Hacker Cave: Garcia's workstation.
• Halfway Plot Switch: The UnSub of "Hostage" is captured and his last captive is rescued before the episode's halfway point. The remainder of the episode revolves around breaking said captive out of 15 years' worth of Stockholm Syndrome, and tracking down her daughters, who were being kept at another site.
• Halloween Episode:
  • "About Face," sort of. It takes place near Halloween and the UnSub's MO is fittingly creepy. Also, "Devil's Night."
  • "The Good Earth" is a minor example, premiering on Halloween of 2013 and with a B-story about JJ's son not wanting to go trick-or-treating.
  • "Machismo" first aired on April, but is set in Mexico during the Day of the Dead. Which is November 2.
  • "The Performer" premiered the week after Halloween. The victims are Perky Goth fans that were apparently drained of their blood by a vampire.
• Harmful to Minors: A lot. Besides things that happen during the cases themselves, some Harmful to Minors events form various UnSubs' backgrounds and Freudian Excuses.
• Hate Crimes Are a Special Kind of Evil: Being a crime procedural show, actual hate crimes show up from time to time.
  • One epside has a gay man luring in and killing other gay men because of a deep rooted self-loathing.
  • In the episode "The Tribe", a man wants people to believe that a series of grisly murders (including skinning the victims), were conducted by a group of Native American activists, hoping to trigger a race war between Native Americans and Caucasians. A number of his victims belonged to a group known as the "American Defense Unit", and when his attacks failed to generate the race war he was looking for, he and his followers took ADU weapons to make it look like that group had attacked the Native Americans, going after a school on a nearby reservation. He is caught and stopped by Hotchner and a member of the Apache Reservation's police force, John Blackwolf.
• Hate Sink: A good majority of all the unsubs are these as they are nothing but irredeemable assholes who kill for their own sick pleasure if for any reason at all. The worst ones are those who are dirty cowards who enjoy killing but are afraid of dying themselves.
• He Who Fights Monsters: The original quote is used first as one of the quotes in the pilot, "Extreme Aggressor", though it's shortened. It's used again, this time as the full version, at the beginning of "100." For a reason.
• Heel–Face Reincarnation: Played with in the episode "Perennials." The unsub believes himself to be the reincarnation of serial killer Russel Smith, due to having been born in the next bed at the emergency room as Smith died from his injuries in a police shootout. All his life, he's had an inexplicable urge to do bad things, but he believes reincarnation is his chance to be a better person, so he doesn't act on it. Then one day, the brakes on his car fail, and he believes one of Smith's victim's reincarnations is responsible. So he sets about locating the people who were born after the deaths of the victims so that he can kill them to stop them from coming after him again, "forcing" them to reincarnate into harmless maggots. By the end of the episode, he apparently no longer believes in this trope, since he plans to commit suicide in a maternity ward so he can reincarnate to finish his work, rather than continue to atone for it.
• Heinousness Retcon: Season 1's "The Fox" saw the team facing Karl Arnold, a family annihilator who took families he considered dysfunctional hostage, forced them to treat him as the head of the household for three days before killing them. He's presented as living out a fantasy (his own family leaving him due to his obsessive-compulsive behavior) and killing them in the end due to subconsciously understanding it can't last. Come his return in season 5's "Outfoxed" Arnold is now also a pedophile who sexually abused the children he took prisoner and it's stated his crimes were purely sexually motivated.
• Hell Hotel: "Paradise"
• Hero Insurance: We find out that Prentiss's fake funeral and real hospital expenses cost the government more than $650,000. Imagine what sort of tab the BAU has run up altogether over the years with their not-quite-by-the-book antics (see Screw the Rules, I'm Doing What's Right!, below).
• Heterosexual Life-Partners: Most of the main characters on the show have this with at least one of the other team members. Most prominently:
  • Aaron Hotchner and David Rossi, who have known each other for longer than they have the other members of the BAU, and serve as the Team Mom and Team Dad.
  • Derek Morgan and Spencer Reid, who have a very brotherly bond.
  • Jennifer Jareau, Emily Prentiss, and Penelope Garcia are a trio version, who are very frequently shown spending time together off the clock.
• Hidden Depths:
  • The hitman in "Reckoner" is portrayed as a brutish thug, but his signature weapon is a gun that he built from scratch and his nickname is cribbed from a relatively obscure 17th century play.
  • Emily Prentiss. A new agent, straight from a desk job, with a relatively comfortable upbringing... but she copes really well with the things the BAU deals with. It stands out enough that both J.J. and Hotch remark on it, but that's the only hint we get for quite a while!
• Hoist by His Own Petard: The killer in "Paradise".
  • A depressing heroic variant occurs in "Mayhem". Kate Joyner has been badly injured by a terrorist bomb. The FBI alerted authorities to the terrorist tactic to bomb emergency responders, and so though they arrive on the scene quickly, they stay back until they know the area is secure. The delayed medical response may be why she died.
• Holding the Floor: In one episode Hotch and Reid are locked in a room with a serial killer and the guards won't be back for fifteen minutes. Hotch prepares to fight the guy, but then Reid, true to his nature, starts babbling about all of the possible factors contributing to the killer's sociopathy. For fifteen minutes.
  Chester Hardwick: Is that true? I never had a chance?
  Spencer Reid: I dunno... maybe. (scurries out the door)
• Hollywood Autism: One episode featured an autistic kid, whose portrayal would have been extremely offensive had it not been so ridiculous.
• Hollywood Board Games:
  • "Extreme Aggressor": The serial killer employs and names himself after a Go strategy called "extreme aggressor". Its difficulty signals not only intelligence but great determination. Its name also highlights the way he treats human lives.
  • "Spectator Slowing": Matt stays home to look after his pregnant wife and kids. It occurs to him to play a board game he bought in Thailand years ago with his children. Cool Old Guy Rossi jokingly warns him that if he deviates from video games, it would be at his own peril. This references how kids these days prefer video games over more traditional games. Fortunately, Matt and his family still have fun.
• Hollywood Hacking: Not quite as egregious as some shows in the genre, but still pretty out there. There's a lot of Rapid-Fire Typing, questionable GUIs with impractical flashy bits and ridiculous jargon.
• Hollywood Healing: Averted for the most part. Injuries suffered are dealt with for weeks afterwards. Only occasionally enforced by actual cast injury.
• Hollywood Law: "Collision Course." The judge denies bail/bond for Reid on the basis of "actions speak louder than words"^note Spending his off-duty time sneaking across the Mexican border to get unlicensed medicine for his mother.... despite so many more factors in his favor (his decade-long track record, his mental illness history, his schizophrenic mother at home, his willingness to surrender his passport and submit to monitoring, and the support of several high-profile FBI figures). In Real Life, said judge might as well have just committed career suicide. Being an FBI agent, Reid would also be put in protective custody assuming they did jail him like here, for protection against fellow prisoners if they found out (which happens, with him only being narrowly rescued).
• Hollywood Provincialism: In "Exit Wounds", the BAU travels to a remote Alaskan town to help the local Sheriff department catch a spree killer. In real life there is not a single sheriff department in Alaska: their duties are covered by the Alaska State Troopers, who are never mentioned in the episode.
• Hollywood Psych: Despite the show's heavy focus on criminal psychology, the trope shows up.
  • In particular the show treats Multiple Personality Disorder / Dissociative Identity Disorder as an actual universally recognized disorder, while in real life it's one of the most debated and controversial psychological disorder (its rarity making any wide study nigh-impossible) with some even doubting it exists, thinking that instances where it is diagnosed are errors, or suffer from a bias due to the relative fame of the condition (i.e. a patient or doctor's view of what is happening being shaped by the condition).
  • The Macdonald triad (sometimes called the triad of sociopathy or in the show "the homicidal triad") is often quoted by the team, a set of three factors that has been suggested if any combination of two or more are present together, to be predictive of, or associated with later violent tendencies and perhaps a precursor sign of sociopathy. The three factors being persistent bed-wetting in late childhood, animal cruelty and an obsession with fire-starting. The Triad has long been debunked (and nowadays, is generally held, at best, as a potential indicator of child abuse, which in turn is considered a potential factor that might cause violent behavior later in life).
  • Some episodes (such as "The Thirteenth Steps") has the team refer to Psychopathy and Sociopathy as two distinct, recognized psychological conditions. While the history of Sociopathy as a medical condition is complex, no psychiatric or psychological organization has ever sanctioned a diagnosis titled "psychopathy" or recognizes it as a specific condition.
  • Then there's the premise of the show itself. Psychological Profiling here is something accurate, that works every time. There wouldn't be a show otherwise. In real life profiling is highly controversial, with no case ever solved by profilers, no empirical study proving its effectiveness, and profilers themselves scoring no better than regular law enforcement personnel or even chemistry students in a test to profile solved crimes where their profiles were compared to the crime's actual perpetrator.
• Hollywood Satanism: Averted and invoked in "The Popular Kids"; the Lords of Destruction are a local "satanic" group who not only didn't commit the murder but discuss their approach to "Satanism" which matches a very popular real-life one: "aggressive atheists" thinking for themselves and combating the abuses of religion, using Satan as a metaphor rather than an actual object of worship. The murderer turns out to be one of the "popular kids" of the title, using Hollywood Satanist elements to frame the LOD and not get caught.
• Honor Before Reason: Prentiss in "Valhalla" and "Lauren"
• Hope Spot: The UnSub in "Legacy" promises his victims their freedom if they can escape his Death Course... only to knock them out if they reach the exit, and kill them anyway.
• Hostage-Handler Huddle: One episode is about a trio of boys who kidnap a lawyer that abused them as children. Having heard that one of their close friends committed suicide due to the shame that resulted from the abuse, they decide to get a verbal confession from the lawyer. Unfortunately for them, he's a manipulative and very Soft-Spoken Sadist. The group's resolve diminishes rapidly and they find themselves unable to decide what to do next. The lawyer manages to convince one of them that if they release him, the two of them can go to the police together and sort the whole mess out amicably. This is a suggestion the other boys despise and fight breaks out culminating in one of them killing the other. While this ultimately ends in Shoot the Hostage, nobody ever got that confession and the hostage had them wrapped around his fingers the entire time.
• Hostile Hitchhiker: "Safe Haven" features a teenage sociopath called Jeremy, who is hitchhiking his way back to his home and exploiting his innocent looks to be allowed to spend the night on the houses of the people who pick him up... where he goes on to annihilate them and their entire families.
• How We Got Here:
  • "Minimal Loss" starts with an explosion at the cult compound, then jumps back to the events leading up to it.
  • Reid spends much of "Entropy" explaining to Catherine Adams how the BAU managed to track down her cohorts and lure her into a trap.
• The Hunter Becomes the Hunted: Bobbi, the girl being hunted by the two Unsub of "Open Season", realizes that she can't escape her pursuers. So she decides to turn the tables on them. Setting an ambush she stabs one of them in the guts taking him out, and with a second ambush stabs the second unsub in the shoulder, injuring him enough to throw off his aim by the time Prentiss and Morgan find them.
• Hunting the Most Dangerous Game: "Open Season", "Rite of Passage" (though to a far lesser extent), "Exit Wounds".
• Hypocritical Humor: In "The Internet Is Forever," Rossi makes fun of social networking sites like Twitter. Almost every single member of the cast has a prolific Twitter presence.

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