Under the Skin
The team is at Matt's wife's baby shower. She's due in eight weeks. Rossi is late because he is looking for Everett Lynch, who he thinks has changed his tac from taking the faces of pretty women to flaying skin off the torsos of men. Grace Lynch is in prison refusing to believe Rossi's Captain Obvious claims that her father doesn't care about her.Meanwhile, an Affably Evil gentleman invites gay men to his home, drugs their wine, and cuts a wifebeater-shaped patch of skin off their torsos with a scalpel. He sews them together to an apron that can cover up his own chest scar. In the end Rossi catches Dr. Hurst himself, although he wasn't supposed to. Turns out Hurst once was a victim of Roberta Lynch's con artistry.
Everett breaks Grace out of prison by posing as her lawyer. JJ arrives first and gets shot in the stomach.
Tropes present in this episode:
- Call-Back: Played with. Rossi theorizes that Lynch changed his victimology from middle-aged mother of college-age kids to young men in their twenties with zero baggage because of the incident three episodes ago where he decided not to kill Rossi. He's wrong about the UnSub being Lynch this time, but he is right that it has something to do with him representing a father-figure to Lynch — that father-figure being the UnSub.
- Freud Was Right: Mocked by Reid and Lewis discussing a recurring dream of hers that Reid thinks Freud would have diagnosed as "a disguised fulfillment of a repressed wish".Tara: That was why that guy was a genius.
- Idiot Ball: Having both Lynches at gunpoint in the garage, JJ assumes they only had one gun and bends down to pick up the gun Everett kicked over. Grace has another gun in her pocket.
- Improbable Aiming Skills: Grace manages to shoot JJ in her side between where her bulletproof vest was protecting her from several yards away.
- Irony: Rossi is taken off the case so he can focus on the Everett Lynch case. He goes to talk to Lynch's former stepfather — and discovers that he is the UnSub in the case he was taken off.
- It's Personal: Rossi is losing perspective because of his obsession with Lynch.
- Loss of Identity: Rossi thinks Everett Lynch has no sense of identity.
- Recurring Dreams: Tara has a recurring dream where she gives someone a gift and they open it only to burst into tears.
- Red Herring: Arthur Terrell. Garcia identifies him as almost fitting the profile, so they go to his house, but it turns out to be the house Hurst has been using for his "dates", and Terrell the lawyer Lynch is impersonating.
