Blood Hungry
An UnSub has a psychotic break and, believing a boy with a good singing voice to be a literal angel, he kills the boy's relatives and drinks their blood in the hopes it will make him divine. He kidnaps the boy, and his mother cleans up the blood and hides the boy in a shed.
This episode provides examples of:
- Abusive Parents: Everything wrong about the UnSub, Eddie Mays, is ultimately a result of his treatment by his narcissistic mother.
- Ax-Crazy: Eddie becomes a murderer during a psychotic break that includes religious mania.
- Creepy Souvenir: Eddie collects organs from his victims (liver, heart, stomach), puts them in sealed buckets and takes them home - intentions unknown. During a slightly more lucid phase, he feels guilty and returns some of the organs to the victims homes or leaves them in a church.
- Driven to Suicide: Eddie tries to hang himself while in custody, but is rescued.
- Hookers and Blow: Eddie went through this in college in an attempt to evade from his mother's controlling behavior. The drug use ended driving him insane.
- I Am a Humanitarian: The cannibalism of Eddie's real-life inspiration, Richard Chase (who would collect and drink the blood of his victims) is alluded to and shown, but Eddie doesn't actually go as far.
- It's All About Me: Eddie's mother is obsessed with the good name of her family (the oldest in the town) and would rather hide Eddie's crimes and allow more innocents to die rather than be exposed as the mother of a murderous junkie.
- Mistaken for Gods: In his mania, Eddie becomes convinced that a neighbor child is an angel because of his beautiful singing voice.
- Deep South: The episode is set in a fictional locality in the Bible Belt. Religious allusions abound and the local sheriff has a very thick southern accent.
- My Beloved Smother: Mary Mays subjected Eddie to strict control in his childhood and way after, to the point of calling him three times a day while he was in college. It was then inverted when Eddie had a psychotic break and was briefly interned in a mental insitution. His mother didn't even contact him once while he was there, nor did she watch him after to make sure he took his medication.
- Ripped from the Headlines: Except from the Setting Update, Eddie is just Richard Chase with a different name.
- Sanity Slippage: Happens to Eddie in his backstory and through the episode. He starts hallucinating images by the time of his arrest.
- Serendipity Writes the Plot: Mandy Patinkin injured his leg while skydiving in reality. His injury (and cause) was written in as having happened to Gideon, and the episode was changed to leave him in HQ with Garcia instead of going to Tennessee with the rest of the team.
- Sick Episode: Gideon has a casted leg as a result of an accident and can't join the team at the site. Nevertheless, he helps them from Quantico.
- Stalker with a Crush: Downplayed. Eddie develops a crush on his neighbor's voice, which he takes as evidence of his divine nature, and it drives him to abduct the child and murder his family.
- Sympathy for the Devil: The BAU team is clear that despite the horrific nature of his crimes, Eddie is sufficiently mentally ill that he is literally not responsible for his actions, and more deserving of pity than hatred.
- Through the Eyes of Madness: At one point, Eddie hallucinates the image of his last, bloodied victim in the place of a statue in a church.
- Gideon: Harriet Beecher Stowe once said, "The bitterest tears shed over graves are for words left unsaid and deeds left undone."
