Bloodline
Directed by Tim Matheson
Written by Mark Linehan Bruner
A Romani couple kidnap a girl for their ten-year-old son to marry, in the process killing her parents. Finding she has epilepsy, they discard her and kidnap another girl. Garcia discovers that their MO goes back at least a hundred years, concerning at least thirty abductions of young girls.Written by Mark Linehan Bruner
Prentiss: Winston Churchill said, "There is no doubt that it is around the family and the home that all the greatest virtues of human society are created, strengthened, and maintained."
"Bloodline" provides examples of:
- Downer Ending: The BAU stop the family, but are left with the knowledge that this wasn’t the only branch of the family who enact the ritual. Not only do the BAU have no idea how large the family truly is, the final scene of the episode is of another family about to go through with the ritual.
- Even Evil Has Standards: The mother refuses to kill the first victim when she turns out to have epilepsy, and while the father initially tries to insist, he isn't able to bring himself to do it either.
- The Family That Slays Together: A Romani couple who abduct the daughter of a local family as a bride for the son and kill the parents. And as Garcia discovers, this family have been doing it for generations.
- Generation Xerox: A dark example. The boy's mother was the last kidnapping victim.
- Good Cop/Bad Cop: Prentiss and Hotch respectively pull off an excellent one.
- I Need a Freaking Drink: The father of the first victim, trying to cope with his daughter's abduction (though it's implied he's been struggling with the bottle since his divorce): the local sheriff even quips to Hotch that he's smelled bar fights that stank less of booze. That said, he seems determined to sober up when Hotch explains his daughter will need a great deal of support to process the trauma of her ordeal.
- Roguish Romani: The Romani family are murderous thieves, pickpockets, and abductors of children. Rossi calls this a "perversion" of Romani culture, but then Garcia starts searching for similar crimes coinciding with "waves" of Romany moving through an area, and Rossi says "A lot of Romany make their living as petty thieves."
- Slashed Throat: How the Unsubs kill their victims.
- Stockholm Syndrome: The Romani family kill parents and abduct girls with the intention of making the daughters future wives for the sons. Kathy/Sylvia has become conditioned to the point where she is fiercely loyal to her husband that she allows herself to get caught and claims to have committed all the murders to protect him. She also gives her son an order not to tell the FBI about his brothers.
- We Need a Distraction: When the son finds the local cops distributing Wanted posters with his mother's face on them, the father essentially makes her get arrested for shoplifting so he and their son can escape.
- Would Not Hurt A Child: Discussed. When they discover that the girl they took has epilepsy, the couple naturally deem her unfit for their son and the father wants his wife to kill her, but the mother refuses. They end up dumping her in a ditch, but alive and relatively unharmed.
- You Just Told Me: When interrogating the mother, Hotch reads her a list of names of local Roma her family could be with at the moment. When he gets to one name, she screams that she will never tell him. He tells her she just did.
- Hotchner: Mario Puzo wrote, "The strength of a family, like the strength of an army, is in its loyalty to each other."
