The Good Earth
Directed by John Terlesky
Written by Bruce Zimmerman
The widow of a farmer believes healthy living comes from healthy people, so she kidnaps joggers and fertilizes her crops with them.Written by Bruce Zimmerman
Reid: "I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity." Edgar Allan Poe.
Tropes in this episode
- Breeding Slave: What the BAU initially assume the UnSub's keeping the men for. It isn't the case.
- Buried Alive: The UnSub tries to do this to her ten-year-old. Subverted since she's not trying to kill her, but to heal her from an imagined skin condition.
- The Cutie: JJ's son Henry dresses up as Reid for Halloween.
- Hypochondria: The UnSub has a severe case of this, hallucinating rashes on herself and her daughter.
- I'm a Humanitarian:
- The UnSub ingests placenta for medicinal purposes. If you wonder where she got the placenta, she scraped it out of a pregnant woman's uterus.
- She also grows her own food using human corpses (in excellent health) as fertilizer.
- Motive Misidentification: The UnSub is a young woman who abducted four athletic men. Throughout the episode, the profilers theorize about her sexual motives, her seeking out sex slaves for procreation, her need to built a family, etc. None of these turned out to be true. The UnSub was using the victims as fertilizer for her plants, and as ingredients for bizarre medical remedies.
- Placebo Effect: As you might expect, the UnSub's imaginary health conditions are cured from whatever she takes expecting it to cure her. If she had imagined thyme to be the cure, the FBI would never have gotten involved.
- Too Much Information: When asked why he doesn't like to go to the beach, Reid cites reasons such as too much visible skin and that it's a boring landscape – but also that it's full of antibiotic-resistant bacteria spread by seagull feces.JJ: Sorry I asked.
- Blake: Alfred Austin said, "Show me your garden and I shall tell you who you are."
