Criminal Minds / Tropes T to Z

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

• Take Me Instead: Prentiss does this for Reid in "Minimal Loss".
  • Reid offers himself to Diane, his girlfriend's stalker-turned-kidnapper.
• Take Our Word for It: The more gruesome activities the UnSubs partake in and their effects on the victims are often only shown through the horrified or disgusted looks on the team's faces. Probably well-justified because the UnSubs commit all sorts of depraved actions that won't make it to home TV without keeping them offscreen.
• Take That!:
  • Upon arriving at a crime scene in Las Vegas, this exchange between Rossi and Prentiss in "The Instincts": "Not exactly a well-preserved crime scene." "It's the crime scene investigators. They all want to play cop instead of being scientists and they end up trampling on everything."
  • "JJ" is an episode-long Take That!. J.J.'s voiceover during the "goodbye montage" makes it quite clear that she, the actress portraying her, and the rest of the cast and crew don't want her to leave, but "people above her pay grade" (the studio) are forcing it.
  • To Fifty Shades of Grey in "Breath Play": A woman who arranges BDSM meet-ups makes it clear that the not-FSOG romance novel isn't an accurate portrayal of the lifestyle, which is supposed to be freeing and life-affirming not terrifying and abusive ^note  to be fair while the killer uses the victims' love of the book to get them in a vulnerable state his real fetish isn't in either novel.
  • "L.D.S.K." features a surgeon that has "the worst narcissistic personality disorder" Gideon has ever seen.
  • "Lessons Learned" is an episode-long Take That to the use of torture in Guantanamo Bay and shows like 24, presenting it as both clueless and useless, and it does it without making the terrorists look good or sympathetic.
• Taking You with Me:
  • How the UnSub of "Ashes and Dust" meets his end.
  • The villainous variant appears in a few episodes, with a cornered UnSub pulling a Murder-Suicide to take their last victim with them; examples include "The Night Watch" and "Zugzwang". The Replicator tries this on Rossi at the end of Season 8, but Rossi out-gambits him and leaves him to die alone.
• Talking the Monster to Death: In some standoff situations, the BAU manage to talk the UnSubs into surrendering. Also occurs literally in one instance where the detective working with the BAU accidentally prompts the UnSub to kill himself by breaking his delusion. And at the end of "The 13th Step" the team defuse a hostage situation by pushing the UnSub's buttons so that he ends up killing his partner then committing suicide by cop.
• Tattooed Crook: "A Thousand Words", given attention in "Honor Among Thieves", "Valhalla", and "Lauren".
• Teacher/Student Romance: In "I Love You, Tommy Brown," which also brutally deconstructs the idea that it's okay if it's a teenage boy with an attractive woman.
• The Team: The BAU, of course. Not only are they all True Companions and several of them Heterosexual Life-Partners / Platonic Life-Partners with each other, but they're also all a surrogate family, with a Team Mom (Hotch), Team Dad (Rossi), surrogate big brother (Morgan) and big sisters (JJ and Prentiss), a surrogate little brother / Team Pet (Reid), and a Morality Pet (Garcia). Further emphasized by the fact that several of them don't have a close relationship with their families and/or don't have family living nearby.
• Team Pet: Reid.
• Tear Your Face Off: The victim in "About Face" is killed this way.
• Television Geography: Often.
  • "Normal" begins with an aerial shot of the Civil Engineer's wet dream that is the Four-Level Interchange◊, subtitled "Orange County, CA". The Four-Level Interchange is not in Orange County though... it's 20 miles away in Los Angeles. Orange County's freeway interchanges are not nearly as pretty from the air. They look a lot more like a Freeway Full of Crazy◊.
  • In "Limelight," the UnSub is somehow able to get from police headquarters (which is in downtown Philadelphia) to a house where his next victim is (the design of which can only be found in parts of West Philadelphia), and then deposit her next to what is supposedly the Schuylkill Expressway near Conshohocken (which it's clearly not, considering the complete lack of a river nearby) in what has to be less than an hour. Any Philadelphia native will laugh at that above description. Repeatedly.
• Temporary Substitute:
  • When JJ Jareau (and her actress A.J. Cook) took maternity leave on Criminal Minds, she picked Jordan Todd (played by actress Meta Golding) to fill in for her.
    • An interesting case, this one. Since everyone had lots and lots of prior notice about AJ Cook's leave (her pregnancy storyline started the season before), Todd's role is not just a re-writing of scripts written for JJ: she has her own character, arc, and thematics, all of which are very different from JJ's. At the same time, she fills the same role in the team bureaucracy that JJ does.
  • Tara Lewis (played by Aisha Tyler) fills in for JJ in season 11 when she goes on maternity leave. Unlike Todd, she joins the BAU full time after JJ returns; she was originally planned to be Kate's temporary substitute, but Jennifer Love Hewitt decided to leave the show instead of returning in season 12. So Lewis gets a Promotion to Opening Titles in said season, after being the Fake Guest Star for all but four episodes of season 11.
• 10-Minute Retirement: Hotch and Prentiss, in the beginning of Season 3. They don't even make it through the episode.
  • Averted with Elle and Gideon.
• Terminally-Ill Criminal: The Big Bad of "Reckoner" is a judge who, having been diagnosed with terminal cancer, decides to hire a hitman to kill a number of criminals who got Off on a Technicality on his watch (the judge also puts his name on the list, accepting that what he's doing is monstrous, and is the last person the hitman kills before getting the hell out of Dodge).
  • "Fatal" also has one; the killer snapped after receiving a bad medical diagnosis too early in his retirement to actually enjoy it, especially by taking his do-over trip to Greece. His particular obsession was the Greek mythological idea of fate and how no matter who you were or how you lived, your life could be cut short for no reason. (In a heaping helping of Dramatic Irony, the BAU look up the flight he was meant to be on fifteen years ago and tell him that it crashed, meaning his not being on it saved his life.)
• Terms of Endangerment: The killer in "Natural Born Killer" puts himself on a First-Name Basis with Gideon while being interrogated.
• Terrorist Without A Cause:
  • "Empty Planet"
  • The cell from "Lo-Fi"/"Mayhem" claims to have a cause, but neither the characters nor the viewer ever find out what it is. Their racially diverse membership and their target being a high government official implies a radical leftist organization of some kind.
  • Hayman Vasher from "A Thousand Suns" just wants to kill people.
• That Man Is Dead: "Identity" and "In Heat".
• That One Case: Multiple ones, in this show:
  • Gideon had Frank ("No Way Out" and "No Way Out II: The Evilution of Frank")
    • Not to mention the bomber in Boston, which led to his nervous breakdown. He caught the man, but lost 6 agents and a hostage immediately afterwards.
  • Rossi had the Galen case ("Damaged") and the Butcher ("Remembrance of Things Past"). In the latter we briefly see the Butcher case is just one of several old cases he still hasn't solved.
  • Hotch had the Reaper case ("Omnivore", "To Hell..."/"...And Back", "Nameless, Faceless", "100").
  • Reid had Tobias Hankel, the UnSub with DID from "The Big Game" and "Revelations"), and who sticks with him for a few reasons: first, the drug addiction Story Arc that comes from being shot up with Dilaudid, a painkiller, to help him survive the torture (physical and psychological) that the alter personalities were putting him through. This plotline is developed in "Fear and Loathing," "Distress," "Jones," and "Ashes and Dust," comes back for further development in "Elephant's Memory," and is referenced in "Amplification" and "Proof." Second, he feels a connection to the primary personality, Tobias who showed him empathy, including providing the aforementioned Dilaudid, which despite the long term consequences, clearly helped Reid cope with the torture at the time. As seen in "Conflicted," this allows him to make the connection that Adam is switching personalities, and that the alter is the more aggressive partner they have been looking for. In the aftermath of that case, it results in him feeling guilty for failing to save the (relatively innocent) primary personality, Adam. This leads him to maintain a relationship with Amanda in hopes of bringing Adam to the surface.
  • Reid also has the Riley Jenkins case ("The Instincts," "Memoriam"), from before he even "knew" it was a case.
  • The Prince of Darkness ("Our Darkest Hour" and "The Longest Night") became this for Morgan.
    • Lampshaded by Morgan in "The Longest Night", telling Hotch that he needs to go after Billy Flynn personally:
      "We were there for you when you needed us. This one's mine."
  • The Doyle case for Prentiss, haunting her from her previous assignment and coming back to bite her in the ass in a big way.
  • Recapturing "The Crimson King" for Alvez on account of the "King" gutted his partner. He does, but the "King" is rendered amnesiac so Alvez doesn't even get the satisfaction of knowing he'll live the rest of his life as a failure
• That's What I Would Do: "Elephant's Memory". Reid empathizes with the UnSub and says this almost word for word regarding how he figured out the UnSub's next move.
  • To further the point, the UnSub looks a lot like a younger Reid, right down to the hairstyle.
• The Bus Came Back: Numerous, but most prominently JJ and Emily, who both came back as regulars and in the case of the latter, twice.
• There Is No Kill Like Overkill
  • The Boston Reaper.
  • Numerous other UnSubs: "Natural Born Killer," "True Night," and "Hopeless" for example.
  • In "100," Hotch does this to Foyet. With his bare hands.
  • Unintentionally done in "Normal" after Norman shoots the first victim her car crashes and flips over in an over dramatic way. She still survives albeit in critical condition and paralyzed from the waist down.
• They Look Just Like Everyone Else!: Aside from the usual From Nobody to Nightmare UnSubs several "buyers" of the internet kidnapping ring look perfectly normal, including a pair of grandparents in what appears to be a Big Fancy House and a suburban father with a bunch of girls caged in his basement.
• 13 Is Unlucky: Thirteen serial killers escape from prison at the end of "The Storm". By the season premiere the list is reduced to five (four by episode's end) thanks to new character FBI Agent Alvez.
• This Is Gonna Suck: Prentiss, word for word, in "52 Pickup."
• This Is Reality: In Season 6, walking out of a movie theater, Morgan comments that the protagonist should have known the UnSub was hiding in the attic, and Reid informs him that in movies, UnSubs are called villains.
• Thousand-Yard Stare: Hotch gets this a lot in early Season 5 after Foyet's attack, especially in "Haunted."
• Through the Eyes of Madness: A lot of mentally unstable UnSubs, most recently with the Vigilante Man in "Protection," who imagines his victims wearing different clothes and saying completely different things (a girl wearing a wholesome pink dress calling for the death of her rapist is really a girl in a black tank top and jeans screaming "Stop, he's my boyfriend!"). Interestingly, when the victims show up in his delusion at the end they're dressed as they really were, not how the UnSub imagined them.
• Title Drop: Happens a lot with episode titles.
• To Know Him, I Must Become Him: Count the times Morgan says "I'm the UnSub ... "
  • Also, Reid in "Elephant's Memory".
  • Hotch and Rossi use this to break the case in "Identity".
  • Subverted by JJ in "The Longest Night", when she can't empathize with Billy Flynn, and instead, talks to him about what his mother should have done for him.
  • Morgan and Prentiss play "you're/I'm the UnSub" in "Compromising Positions".
  • At the end of "Open Season" Emily relates to Morgan that the victim asked her how killers can do such things, and she replied that UnSubs think differently... But she goes on to say that the BAU, who also hunt down people (the UnSubs they catch) may not be as different from their prey as they'd like.
• Too Dumb to Live: The guy in "Psychodrama" who continually refuses to take his clothes off, even after the UnSub starts hitting him and shooting the floor around him.
  • The woman in "Our Darkest Hour" who, despite seeing her door is now wide open even though there is no wind, goes in anyway.
  • The woman who goes to see Vincent in "The Big Wheel". Think before you point out that the guy whose house you're alone in with looks just like that serial killer they're talking about on TV.
  • The victims in "Roadkill". The victim in the garage was especially stupid. He had ample opportunity to escape from the UnSub by dodging behind columns or other cars, but instead he tries to outrun the truck. Becomes even more apparent when it is revealed the UnSub had no legs and couldn't have caught his victims if they had got away
    • All the first victim had to do was get out of the road and behind a couple of trees in that dense wooden area. On the other hand, she seemed to be a rather vapid airhead.
  • The first thing Hotch tells Agent Seaver is to never go anywhere by herself. Granted, the person she went to see was a grieving father and his young daughter, but he was also a Serial Killer like Seaver's own father. Fortunately the dad was distracted because he needed to know why Seaver mentioned apologizing in the killer's family's place, but she was still chewed out by Hotch.
  • A victim in "Divining Rod" who fails to notice her full wine glass is now empty and her back door's open.
  • The young hostage in "Derailed" who constantly speaks up and only agitates the hostage taker. He continually says things that only makes the situation worse and it's his fault the psychiatrist is shot. In his defense, he is a known alcoholic and presumably drunk at the time.
  • "Haunted" might have ended bloodless if anyone in that pharmacy had one ounce of common sense.
  • In the episode "Blood Relations," the team pulls up to an old barn and the guy inside starts shooting at them. He claims he thought they were his hillbilly-feud rivals. Pulling up in a fleet of brand-new black SUVs? Really?
• Took a Level in Badass: J.J.'s at four and counting — shooting the dogs in "The Big Game"; shooting Garcia's attacker in "Penelope"; bashing an UnSub upside the head with a shovel while just having been concussed in "The Performer", and talking Billy Flynn down over the Emergency Broadcast System in "The Longest Night." Pretty damn good for the team's communications specialist.
  • Now she's up another, with her fight with a professional killer in "Run."
  • Reid definitely had one between Seasons 6 and 7. Just watch the Season 7 premiere if you don't believe me.
  • Prentiss took a monumental level in badass during her Doyle arc, especially in "Valhalla" and "Lauren," when she donned a leather jacket, grabbed an MP-5, and led her colleagues to discover that she wasn't quite so much a desk jockey as a professional spy — and one of the best, according to Clyde Easter — before joining the BAU.
• Too Spicy for Yog-Sothoth: The UnSub in "Lucky" said he stopped killing and devouring prostitutes since most of them were drug users, and they "taste funny."
• Tonight, Someone Dies: "Lo-Fi": Kate Joyner
  • And in "100": Haley Hotchner. Also Foyet, but no one really cares about him.
  • "Demons": subverted; everyone lives, but Blake leaves the team for personal reasons. Chalk it up to Never Trust a Trailer.
  • Subverted in "Lauren," since the team only thinks she's dead.
• Town with a Dark Secret: The town they investigate in the Season 9 finale "Angels" and "Demons" have an entire squad of CorruptCops, lead by the deputy, trying to cover up the murder of several sex workers who were witnesses by framing the local priest. By the end of the episode, it ends up with the BAU in a shootout with the local police.
• Tragic Hero: Elle, Gideon, and Prentiss.
• Trap Master: Many UnSubs, but The Replicator stands out most.
• Trauma Conga Line: Not a very long one compared to victims who were kidnapped for days or even years, but last victim in "Pariahville" was almost assaulted by a friend who then abandoned her on the side of the road. She was then picked up by another friend who turned out to be the cheerleader-murdering UnSub.
  Victim: Um, that's my stop...
  Perpetrators: Huh, yes it was... (x 2)
• Traumatic Haircut: Inverted in "Divining Rod": A man kills four women in one day just to make the woman he loves a nice wig, which he lovingly places on her head. It wouldn't have been quite so bad if the last victim hadn't been scalped.
• Troubled Toybreaker: When the BAU is called in over the abduction of a girl at a local mall, they do a search of her home. They discover severely disfigured dolls, which clue them in that the girl was being sexually abused by her paternal uncle, and that the girl's aunt blamed her for the troubles in her marriage and left her to suffocate and die. The girl is found in time to save her life, but is implied to be severely injured from the murder attempt, on top of the abuse she's already suffered.
• True Companions: The Team. Perhaps shown best in "100". Which makes J.J.'s and Prentiss' departures all the more heartbreaking. It's as though the BAU family is torn apart.
• Truth in Television: While Hotchner promptly shuts the guy down, the defense attorney's criticism in "Tabula Rasa" that profiling is just "intellectual guesswork" is actually a common opinion expressed by real-life detractors. There have been studies that suggest that observers not specifically trained in the profiling process can sometimes notice the same details and make the same inferences as trained profilers. Furthermore, even some of the most experienced and well-known profilers will concede that the profiles they build are to be used as a tool to aid criminal investigation, not as a substitute for it, as often happens on the show.
  • It's also not uncommon, even on the show, for the team to have to drastically revise their profile when new information comes up or they have some sort of "Eureka!" Moment... or both.
• Two Decades Behind: About half the offenders are modeled after criminals from the 1980s, give or take a decade. It is sometimes jarring to watch that the local LE has seemingly never heard of high profile serial killers like Ted Bundy or Richard Chase, and cannot see the parallels with their current case before they are told them by the BAU.
• Two Lines, No Waiting: Crops up on occasion, most notably the Season 3 episode "Damaged." Morgan, Prentiss, J.J., and Garcia help Rossi tackle a cold case that's been haunting him, while in the B-Story, Hotch and Reid interview a serial killer on death row.
  • Also used in "The Crossing," another Season 3 episode, where Hotch and Rossi investigate a woman's abuse claims while the rest of the team goes after an erotomaniac stalker.
• Ugly Guy, Hot Wife: Kate's husband is chubby, homely, and graying, completely the opposite of her last TV husband(s).
• Uncertain Doom: Bruno Hawks in "Secrets and Lies" supposedly died in a car accident just after the events of the episode. While this is obviously a cover, it's uncertain if it's for the CIA killing him or his death being faked to put him in witness protection.
• Underground Railroad: One of these that helped battered wives escape their husbands was central to the episode "Sniper, Sniped".
• Unexpected Genre Change: The comic-based scenes in "True Night," featuring someone who looks like Al'tair fighting werewolves. They're actually a metaphorical representation of a comic artist killing gang members who killed his girlfriend; he's unknowingly drawing his crimes.
• Unflinching Walk: At the end of "Hopeless," where the UnSubs decide to commit suicide by cop, and the policemen outside are so frustrated and angry they happily oblige. Knowing that they can do nothing to help, Hotchner, Rossi, and Prentiss walk away, while the hell breaks loose behind their backs.
  • And promptly declare I Need a Freaking Drink, as we see in the final montage.
• Ungrateful Bastards: In "Painless," this fueled the UnSub's anger, as not only did the media ignore his survival to focus on a top ten list of survivors, but one of them stole his story and took all the credit for his actions.
• Unholy Matrimony: "The Perfect Storm," "Mosley Lane," and "The Thirteenth Step." Also, possibly "Divining Rod".
• Unusually Uninteresting Sight:
  • In "Compulsion," the UnSub is setting fire to buildings all over campus. By the time the episode starts, three buildings have already been destroyed by this psychotic arsonist. And yet, every student continues to go along with their merry lives, worrying more about their homework and relationships than their lives, parents aren't arriving in hordes to take their children home, and the administration is doing little to protect their students other than helping the BAU and pulling the fire alarms.
  • Near the end of "Psychodrama," no one (up until the birthday party scene, and even then it takes a bit) notices the UnSub, who is wandering the streets in broad daylight, tweaked out of his mind and brandishing a MAC-10 machine pistol.
  • In "Mayhem" as well... no one on the streets of New York gives much thought to guys dressed all in black with hoods completely covering their faces, even though the clothing worn by other civilians suggests it is not winter. Even after said UnSubs shoot strangers execution-style in broad daylight, they still manage to get away undetected 6 out of 7 times. Because by the time they round a corner, and put the gun in their pocket, they're don't look all that out of place again.
• Unreliable Narrator: "Normal" and "Reflections of Desire" most notably. their family members were dead the whole time.
  • For "Normal" this is actually a Call-Back to earlier on in the episode when they come to the inevitable conclusion that he was going to kill his family eventually, after killing all those other victims, but they had no idea when. This is further proven when they go into the last room and you can see near-fresh blood stains on the bed sheet.
  • If you figured out "Normal" then it's the same for "Protection" The tenants the UnSub was hiding from a dangerous man were actually delusions, he had killed them a while before.
• Unseen Pen Pal: In Season 8, Reid is in a relationship with a geneticist named Maeve (whom he had been consulting about recurring headaches) in which they only communicate via phonecalls. This is due to Maeve being something of a recluse because of a stalker, whom she also fears could harm Reid. They do attempt to meet in person at a restaurant, although Reid tells Maeve to leave at the last minute because he believes her stalker is present. Despite this, they have a genuinely caring relationship; Reid even tells his colleagues it doesn't matter to him what she looks like because "she's already the most beautiful girl in the world to me", although he is worried she will find him disappointing. Sadly, the first and only time they get to see each other is when Reid attempts to rescue Maeve from her stalker, only for her to be killed in front of him.
• Unwitting Pawn: The Serial Killer in "Internal Affairs" was unknowingly having victims funneled to him: undercover agents, sent to their doom by a Mole in Charge boss.
• UST: Increasingly between Garcia and Alvez, until he finally asks her on a date in the very last episode. As of the end of the first season of the rebooted series, it's still there, especially after Garcia's heart and trust gets broken by her love interest during the final episode.
• Vagueness Is Coming: At the end of "Devil's Backbone", Antonia Slade warns Hotch of "a coming storm". The following episode is titled, naturally, "The Storm".
• Vengeance Feels Empty: New character FBI Agent Alvez helps the team specifically so he can re-arrest a serial killer called "The Crimson King" who gutted his partner. When he finally catches him he's been rendered amnesic by another serial killer and doesn't remember anything about his past much less killing an FBI agent. Alvez thinks/hopes he's lying or will eventually regain his memory but it's doubtful. Rendered doubly (tripley?)-empty since Hotch told Alvez earlier as long as the killers are alive they can live with being a failure instead of believing they died for their cause. "King" doesn't even know what he failed at and is now the victim of a worse serial killer ("King" didn't kill unnecessarily, his attacker is doing everything just to get back at the BAU.
• Verbal Tic: Reid's preference for highbrow synonyms: "exceedingly" instead of "extremely", "consume" instead of "eat", etc. Also, his tendency to say "actually..." and then go on a long-winded explanation of something to correct someone.
• Very Special Episode: More than a few occasions.
• Vigilante Execution:
  • At the end of "3rd Life," the vengeful father of one of the victims indirectly does this by giving the main Papa Wolf — a known ex-hitman — information that allows him to kill them all on the UnSub and his gang, who also have said ex-hitman's daughter.
  • "Reckoner" has the UnSubs, a hitman and a corrupt judge client, kill people who got away with crimes, ending with the man who killed the judge's wife in a car crash. The Judge then ends up on the receiving end of this as he put his own name on the list.
  • Tim Curry's character Billy Flynn's death came across as one part this and one part Suicide by Cop. He wanted Derek to shoot him and was going to shoot the hostage to get him to do so, but Derek seemed a little too eager to give him what he wanted.
  • "True Night," where the UnSub is a vigilante getting revenge on gang members for his girlfriend's murder, only without knowing that he is doing so.
  • The UnSub in "Brothers In Arms" is killed by a gang member who was avenging the death of a fellow gangster.
  • "Hostage" has the UnSub killed by the mother of the girl who died in captivity.
  • Pablo Vargas being castrated and beaten to death by an angry mob.
  • "The Pact" revolves around two vigilantes abducting and murdering the people responsible for killing their daughters.
  • Also occurs in "A Real Rain", "Demonology", "Ashes and Dust", and "Aftermath".
  • Averted in "Tabula Rasa" and "Exit Wounds."
• Villainous Breakdown: The UnSub in "52 Pickup" who had been using pickup artist techniques to lure his victims. When Austin the bartender recognizes him trying to lure a victim and takes measures to separate them, he targets her instead ambushing her and grabbing her by force.
• Villainous Lineage:
  • Subverted in "Birthright"; while it turns out that the killer's father was also a killer, this is not portrayed as being genetic, and rather the result of a teenager who was raised to worship his dead father finding his dad's old journal and deciding to carry on the family tradition. Meanwhile, the father's other son, who's known for years that he was born out of rape, is a perfectly nice guy.
  • In another episode, the UnSub claims that he has an inherited chromosomal disorder that makes him predisposed to violent crimes. This is met by Rossi pointing out that the study linking that particular disorder to violent crime had been debunked years ago.
• Villain Episode: "True Night"; other episodes prominently feature the killer, but none of them have the spotlight shine as brightly on them as this one.
  • In the opening of most episodes you see what happens to the victim, and then follow the BAU as they slowly uncover who the killer is and why he kills. In "True Night" this is reversed: You know immediately who the killer is, and over the course of the episode you find out who he killed and why.
    • That might be because "True Night" starred Frankie Muniz.
  • "The Longest Night" is one for Billy Flynn.
  • "The Big Wheel", though not quite to the same extent as "True Night".
• Villains Want Mercy: Some of the UnSubs go into this once they are cornered or beaten on in order to stop them from carrying out their crimes. The worst cases are Foyet the Reaper and Mr. Scratch, but both get their pleas rightfully ignored considering everything they've done and are killed off for good.
• Vomiting Cop: "No Way Out," "Valhalla".
• The Watson: Usually the role of the local cops of the week.
  • In early seasons, prior to her becoming a profiler herself, J.J. served that purpose too.
  • Seaver is normally seen as this.
• Wacky Marriage Proposal: Garcia's boyfriend runs a few of these past Morgan, but ultimately proposes in her office while giving her her favorite foods. Sadly, she's not interested in taking things to the next level because she knows terrible things can happen out of nowhere (or the possibility that she might be a doom magnet).
• Western Terrorists: "Lo-Fi"/"Mayhem," "Amplification," "The Witness", and "Valhalla"/"Lauren."
• "Well Done, Son" Guy: The son of The Butcher, to the point where, at age ten, he knocked out his dad's victim to help his dad kill her, then started helping his dad go hunting. It didn't help that, even if The Butcher showed approval, he'd just forget it due to his Alzheimer's.
• Wham Episode: "Profiler, Profiled," "Lucky," "The Big Game"/"Revelations," "Lo-Fi"/"Mayhem," "...And Back"/"Nameless, Faceless," "100," "Valhalla"/"Lauren," "Brother's Hotchner/"The Replicator," and "200."
  • "The Boys of Sudworth Place" is an interesting example in that, for the vast majority of the episode, it plays out as your standard episode. However, in the very last minutes of the episode, it is revealed that Kate's daughter has been targeted by a sexual predator.
• Wham Line:
  • "There. Were. Rules!" Randall Garner, right before shooting Elle in her home at the end of "The Fisher King: Part 1".
  • "Hey, Garcia? I've been thinking about doing this all night." (Jason Battle to Garcia, before shooting her in "Lucky")
  • From "Lucky":
    Father Marks: God is in all of us.
    Floyd Feylinn Ferell: So is Tracy Lambert.
  • From "3rd Life":
    Reid: When does it end, Jack?... When does it stop?
    Jack Vaughan: Tomorrow. *BLAM!*
  • "Don't tell them about your brothers." (The mother to the young son of a family of killers in "Bloodlines")
  • In "Memoriam", the line Diana Reid says to her son:
    It could have been you.
  • "Did you get all that?" (Rossi to Garcia in "Masterpiece")
  • "You should've made the deal." (Foyet to Hotch, in "...And Back")
  • "She never made it off the table." J.J. breaks Prentiss' death to the team, in "Lauren"
    • And then, even more so, "Good luck." "(Emily's voice) Thank you."
  • From "Divining Rod":
    Helen Garrett: Have you ever read 1001 Arabian Nights?
    Dylan Kohler: No, what's that?
    • Everyone thought a copycat sent letters quoting the book to the original killer, who died reciting the quote; turns out the letters were from the original's wife who has since decided to embrace her "ability" to amplify serial killing tendencies after the copycat fell in love with her.
  • The closing quote in "The Inspiration'' manages to be one:
    Hotch: Josh Billings once wrote, "There are two things in life for which we are never truly prepared: twins."
  • "Supply and Demand": "Welcome back everyone." (one of the supposed Human Trafficking victims reveals herself to be the leader)
  • From "Fate":
    • To Rossi: "I'm your daughter."
    • And then later: "You've got a grandson who's running a fever."
  • The heartbreaker from "Nelson's Sparrow," as the team stands over a body:
    Hotch: It's Gideon.
  • "Rock Creek Park": "What you did was unforgivable. But it worked." Said by a rising young senator to his mother, who (apparently (?)) unbeknownst to him had his wife kidnapped, had her ear cut off, and was about to kill her so his popularity would rise a la The Smiler. Indeed, after his wife's safe return, his popularity is through the roof, the BAU has no inkling that the senator knows about his mother's plans beyond what they discovered in the episode, and the last scene shows she's still able to pull her son's strings from prison.
  • Fall 2015 opened with an assassin who revealed he's a member of a group of professional killers whose latest target is a group called "The Dirty Dozen". Some episodes later "The Dirty Dozen" is revealed (paraphrased):
    Morgan: You're "The Dirty Dozen"?
    Penelope: I use twelve search bots, they traced me back to the FBI. They killed an assassin and a guard in a supermax prison, no one can stop them, they're coming for me, I'm so scared....!
• What Happened to the Mouse?:
  • Did we ever find out who the target was in the hospital (which the Secret Service had locked down) in "Mayhem"? We're given little context to draw from, and the Secret Service guards many different public figures, not just the President and Vice President. We're clearly supposed to know the individual in surgery is very important, but the writers neglect to name who it is, and leave viewers hanging.
    • To be important enough to cause literal "Mayhem" and be the target of a terrorist attack, it would have to be, most likely, the VP or the President. However, with no hints within the episode besides their political importance, it's difficult to say which of those two it would actually be.
  • "In Name and Blood," the Hotchners' home phone rings, so Hotch picks it up, but after saying "Hello?" once or twice, gets no answer. Immediately after whoever was on the other end hangs up, Haley's personal phone starts ringing, but she doesn't answer it, and after talking to Hotch, leaves with it. What was up with this is never given an explanation.
    • While never explained, it is implied by the suspicious look on Aaron's face and the guilty look on Haley's and her defensive behavior that the phone call is from whomever Haley is having an extra-marital affair with.
    • Or it could be Haley's lawyer, calling her to discuss divorce options and didn't want Hotch to know about it.
  • The scarification inflicted by Ian Doyle in "Lauren" evidently disappears without a trace, though since we only know its approximate placement, it may just be too far down on her chest to be seen. (But at least we did find out What Happened to the Cat, i.e., Sergio.)
  • In the episode "Identity," Reid is working on a map that would help narrow down where the UnSub lives. Rossi asks how the map is coming along and Reid replies that he's almost finished with it, then it's never mentioned again.
    • Of course, it becomes irrelevant once they find the UnSub's ex-wife, who can just tell them where he lives. She points to a spot that is, in fact, at the edge of the area Reid marked off.
  • In Season 1, we meet Hotch's little brother for a single episode — he is never seen nor mentioned again. At the end of the episode, it is shown that he has left to become a cook / chef in a New York restaurant; the team has worked several cases in New York since then, but Hotch still hasn't bothered to drop in.
    • Explained that Hotch was kind of tired of dealing with him — Sean finally re-appears at the end of Season 8, then just as quickly disappears as the Replicator Arc climaxes and concludes.
  • In S 1 E 21, it's shown that Morgan has a dog named Clooney... who is never referenced again.
  • In "Lockdown," while the BAU stops all the dirty prison guards, we still never know who all helped the Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds inmate kill two of said guards and their inmate ally at the start — sans an Anti-Villain guard seeking Revenge for the dirty ones threatening his daughter.
  • JJ's self-destructive PTSD crops up for a few episodes before disappearing.
• What You Are in the Dark:
  • In "Legacy," Detective McGee receives an award for reducing the number of local vagrants. The real reason there are fewer homeless people around is that they're being abducted and murdered. Rather than accept the praise and do nothing, McGee tries to get first his superiors, then the BAU interested in investigating the disappearances.
  • Kidnapping victim Tara Rickover provides a minor example in "Birthright." She arrives at a market to buy food and finds the owner absent. Tara still bothers to pay for the fruit that she takes.
• Whole-Plot Reference: All the time, usually as a method of deconstruction.
• Who's Laughing Now: "Elephant's Memory".
  • And "52 Pickup," only for the first victim.
• Wicked Cultured: Some UnSubs can paint themselves as this, though they usually break down at some point. In the Season 1 finale, the Fisher King hid a music box that played "Fischerweise" by Schubert in the wall of an apartment where he left a body to show the BAU how much he enjoyed playing with them.
• Wicked Toymaker: The unsub in 'The Lesson' who kidnaps people to turn into living marionettes.
• Wire Dilemma: "Won't Get Fooled Again".
• Wrong-Name Outburst: A truly heartbreaking example is the Title Drop of "I Love You, Tommy Brown". You see, the kid that is the underage lover of the deranged teacher that is the killer of the week? Nope, that is not his name. That's the name of the previous boy that she had a relationship with, died, and she became even more deranged as a result. The moment she mutters it while struggling with the cops arresting her and looks like she is professing her love for the kid is the moment he finally gets that a Teacher/Student Romance was a seriously stupid thing.
• The Worf Effect: Morgan, usually an UnSub-beating machine, has been Worfed in both the sixth and seventh season finales, in the former by The Dragon and in the latter by the Big Bad. He managed to turn the tables on the first, but actually needed Hotch to save him from the second.
  • He was also taken out by The Reaper in "Omnivore" and didn't even get the chance to recover. This was apparently done at Shemar Moore's suggestion, who thought Morgan needed to finally lose a fight.
  • He was also knocked out by a taser-wielding UnSub in an early Season 1 episode. He had yet to be established as the team's powerhouse at that point, however.
• Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds: "True Night," "A Real Rain," "The Thirteenth Step," "Pleasure Is My Business," "The Perfect Storm," "Elephant's Memory", "Jones", and especially "The Uncanny Valley."
  • Later episodes like "Self-Fulfilling Prophecy" and "Lockdown" have UnSubs on suicidal Roaring Rampages of Revenge for their dead relatives and/or friends against dirty leaders and their Mooks.
• Workplace Romance:
  • Averted with Garcia and Alvez, since he waited until she quit to ask her out. When she returns, it's revealed that the date was a one-off, continuing the UST.
  • Subverted with Tara and Rebecca. They met at a support group for family members of alcoholics, and only come to work together during a case in season 16.
• Wounded Gazelle Gambit: The UnSubs from "The Perfect Storm" and "Supply and Demand" and The Reaper pull this. "The Uncanny Valley" has an UnSub luring victims by pretending to need help with their wheelchair, but subverted as she actually is disabled, though not in need of a wheelchair.
• Writers Cannot Do Math: Usually averted or justified, but occasionally they slip up, such as in Season 8, taking place in 2011-12, when Reid says the UnSub must be in his mid-to-late-twenties, therefore being born "between 1987 and 1992", although that's early to mid-twenties.
• Xanatos Speed Chess: The sting operation in "Entropy" turns into a spectacular one, with Reid and Catherine Adams revealing plans and counterplans all throughout the episode.
• Yandere: A good percentage of UnSubs are romantically obsessed or possessive of their targets, which leads to them stalking their obsession and killing people they believe to be a threat. This can lead to Love Makes You Evil or Love Makes You Crazy, depending on their character.
• You're Not My Mother: The UnSub of "Dust and Bones" grew to resent her mother for abusing her as a child, and showing extreme Parental Favoritism towards her second daughter, even outright having an article about her that implies she's disowned the elder one. She even goes to lure her mom into a trap to disfigure her and kill the sister via a snake bite before being shot dead.
• You Bastard!: The team is rather disturbed at the public fascination with serial killers. Rossi encounters it more frequently, through his books and author appearances, and still seems baffled every time.
  • Reid might qualify as an exception; he seems to be the only one of the team who is interested in criminal psychology for its own sake rather than just as a means to stop dangerous people. For example, he describes the near-unique psychological traits of the UnSub from "The Big Wheel" as "absolutely fascinating".
  • Special mention should go to the UnSub's audience in "The Internet Is Forever."
• You Did the Right Thing: In "Hashtag", Morgan briefly angsts about shooting a teenage Unsub until Hotch points out his doing so is the only reason the woman the Unsub was holding hostage survived.
  Derek Morgan: I shot a kid on national television.
  Aaron Hotchner: You shot a serial killer, and if you hadn't, that hostage wouldn't be in surgery right, she'd be dead. You did the right thing.
• You Got Murder: "Won't Get Fooled Again". Played with in "Poison", where the UnSub tries to kill his former bosses by poisoning the glue strips of envelopes they are using.
• You Have Outlived Your Usefulness: "Poison," "The Fisher King," "Honor Among Thieves" and "Middle Man".
• You Killed My Father: The UnSub in "Protection" wants to kill the man who killed his mother: he had no idea the killer was already arrested in another city hours away.
• You Kill It, You Bought It: In "The Witness", a man discovers that his wife is having an affair, confronts the other man, and ends up killing him in a fit of rage. Said man happened to be one of a pair of brothers who had plotted a terrorist attack, and the other brother blackmails him into becoming his new accomplice.
• Your Princess Is in Another Castle!: Probably would be easier to count the number of times the profile is accurate enough to lead to the killer in the first couple of acts (and then they have to prove it), because often it is just broad enough that some other poor bastard gets arrested first.

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