Family Tree
Emily is short-listed for the position of leader of the FBI. Jennifer is considering a job in New Orleans. Someone who has been killing prostitutes and cutting off their ears, tongues and left hands is asking for help to stop, but makes that harder by keeping his identity secret.
Tropes
- All Just a Dream: The UnSub seemingly shoots Rossi and escapes the BAU, returning to the cabin where his last victim is held, where she kisses him passionately and agrees to go with him. Her hands come away covered in blood...and it turns out it's his last thoughts as he's dying, Rossi having shot him in the head.
- Diagnosed by the Audience: In-Universe example, as for once, even the BAU can't guess at what the UnSub's disorder is.
- Cannot Keep a Secret: Garcia reassures herself that JJ knew she couldn't keep a secret when she told her about the job offer from New Orleans.
- Freudian Excuse: The UnSub's mother was a prostitute who brought her work home.
- Imagine Spot: The UnSub imagines things going his way. They don't, often because he's too busy imagining to focus on what he is doing.
- Irony: The UnSub worries that he'll turn evil. Gradually, slowly, so that one day he will just be pure evil without noticing. He thinks about it a lot while burying prostitutes he just murdered and mutilated.
- Luke, You Are My Father: Defied. The UnSub tries to inform a car salesman that he's his son, but chickens out and murders him instead. We never learn whether they really were related.
- No Name Given: Along with no specific disorder given, this UnSub's name is never revealed.
- Not Good with Rejection: If you don't cater to this UnSub's savior complex, he will murder you and mutilate the corpse.
- The Pollyanna: The UnSub is deeply committed to believing things will improve, at least half the time.
- Riddle for the Ages: We never find out what was wrong with this UnSub.
- Split Personality:
- While the team don't discuss this theory, the UnSub could be seen as having DID. He spends time in his inner world and talks about an "alter" on his tapes. He contradicts himself on different occasions, as Tara points out, going from one extreme to the other, so likely both personalities identified as the same guy.
- Maladaptive daydreaming, while not considered a psychiatric disorder, fits even better.
- The team mentions that he seems very optimistic in his journals, and very pessimistic in the rest of his life.
- Too Dumb to Live: Subverted with the UnSub's last victim. She seems to be too stupid to play along with her clearly insane kidnapper, but then it seems like she wises up, but then that turns out to be a hallucination on the part of the UnSub, but at that point she is in any case saved.
- Too Much Information: When JJ tells her friends she feel a bit sick because she ate lots of oysters at a recent party, Reid helpfully informs her that she probably contracted a common bacterial infection from all the seafood.
