Dorado Falls
Directed by Felix Enriquez Alcala
Written by Sharon Lee Watson
A war veteran's acquired face-blindness combined with his PTSD-induce paranoia causes him to perceive his family, friends, and co-workers as impostors.Written by Sharon Lee Watson
Reid: "Men are not prisoners of fate, but only prisoners of their own minds." Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Provides examples of:
- Actor Allusion: Luke Dolan is played by Max Martini, a man who has some experience playing black-ops operatives.
- Dramatically Missing the Point: Played for Horror. Because of a case of Prosopagnosia
(read: he cannot recognize faces) caused by brain injury in an accident, Dolan instantly (and quite brutally) jumped on to the conclusion that everybody he's ever known has been replaced by impostors in a grand conspiracy led by his superior officer. A conclusion that leads him to kill all of his co-workers and torture his own elderly parents to death for information that doesn't exists.- Though it is implied he is suffering from Capgras Syndrome, a very real but very rare syndrome where the sufferer believes that their loved ones have been replaced by impostors.
- Hate Sink: General Boyd Millgram, Luke Dolan's superior officer and the man who ordered him to kill a couple of kids who could have sounded an alarm during Operation "Dorado Falls", the event that is directly responsible for all of the episode's tragedy. While he's an asshole General Ripper, in the end Dolan's actions are directed by a delusion manufactured by his hatred of the man. The moment Dolan quit the Navy, Millgram just stopped caring about him.
- Hope Spot: At the climax, the BAU manages to calm down Dolan (who is about to go on a shooting spree inside of FBI Headquarters to try to unravel his "conspiracy") by making his daughter and wife talk him down. They ask Dolan to please keep his eyes closed because otherwise his Prosopagnosia will make him unable to recognize that it's them, and he does... until he's arrested and they try to say farewell, upon which he goes completely berserk and struggles against the cops, thinking he's been fooled by more "impostors". All that the Dolan women can do is weep, knowing that he now hates them in his delusion.
- Meaningful Name: General Boyd Millgram — as in the Millgram Experiment.
- Ominous Mundanity: Operation "Dorado Falls" — both because of the awful thing Dolan did in that assignment (well, awful for Dolan) and what Dolan does to other people because he structured his conspiracy delusion around it-
- Operation: [Blank]: "Operation Dorado Falls", the SEAL assignment that Luke Dolan is structuring his delusion of a Government Conspiracy around, and the operation that gave him PTSD and made him retire from the Navy. While the events that gave him PTSD are awful, in the end it was a counter-terror raid like any other.
- Roaring Rampage of Rescue: Played for Horror — Dolan thinks he's doing this. In reality, he's massacred everybody he knows and some people he doesn't and it's heavily implied that if he actually got to his wife and daughter, he would just murder them too before continuing on his way to "rescue" them.
- Spree Killer: Dolan begins his (alleged) Roaring Rampage of Rescue by shooting up the I.T. office he worked on.
- Suspiciously Similar Substitute: Luke Dolan is one of Roy Woodridge. Both are Shell-Shocked Veteran spree killers with exactly one casualty being a officer of the law. The reason for their PTSD is because they've killed children while serving in the line of duty.
- However, Roy's killings were random, and he'd only kill one person every trigger, while Luke had a single trigger and killed several people he believed are responsible for the incident as well as people he believed were keeping him away from his family.
- Take Me Instead: Rossi offers himself in a hostage exchange.
- Title Drop: The UnSub says he didn't start this. Rossi asks him what he didn't start, and he replies, "Dorado Falls".
- Too Dumb to Live: A guy comes late to work and discovers his colleagues lying strewn on the floor, shot wounds in their foreheads. He just stands there until the killer jumps him.
- War Is Hell: During Operation Dorado Falls, Dolan was ordered to shoot and kill two children who were witnesses and accepted as collateral damage. It's what gave him PTSD.
- Rossi: "We're born alone, we live alone, we die alone. Only through our love and friendship can we create the illusion for the moment that we're not alone." Orson Welles.
