The Lady of the Lake had a busy week last week and didn't get a chance to watch any of her favorite shows live :( and she wasn't able to watch this episode tonight. In addition,
The Lady doesn't do bugs, so she watched the episode with major trepidation.
The show begins with a man driving to meet his girlfriend. He is gets a text from her and he tries to dictate a response, but his dictation app keeps messing up (
something The Lady knows only too well) so he decides to text while driving (
and kiddos, that is a big No No!) After taking his eyes off the road for a few seconds, the driver looks up to see a man standing in the middle of the road. He swerves to miss him, and runs off the road. When the driver gets out to confront the man, he is still standing in the road just scratching at his body. The driver tries to tell him to move, but he is crazed, acting strangely and scratching himself. Then, another car comes and hits the man in the road.
Cut to the team discussing the case at the round table. They tell us that the man who was killed was a journalist,
Albert Stillman, who had been investigating vaccinations. Because
Stillman had been investigating drugs prior to the vaccination case, and had received a phone call from a burner phone, the team suspects foul play in his death. The team flies to Atlanta to investigate whether the death was an accident, murder or suicide-to decide if it was an equivocal death.
We next see the
Unsub listening/watching a video of the
Unsub and
Stillman arguing about seeing something. While watching the video, the Unsub sees things crawling under his skin and he sticks himself with a needle seemingly trying to get whatever was crawling under his skin and put it in a vial.
The
Unsub next abducts an entomologist,
Dr. Suri. When the doctor comes to, he knows the
Unsub, he says "it's you!" The
Unsub tries to make him look at the vial of blood to see what is there.
Dr. Suri tells him he is sick, so the
Unsub puts him in a chamber and covers him in cockroaches. Ick, ick, and double ick! (
The Lady covered her eyes during that scene!)
While doing the postmortem on
Stillman, they see a welt under the back of his ear and deduce that it is a bite. Since they made a point of mentioning it, you know that it is a clue!
Dr. Siri was dumped in an ally and found with a gunshot to the head and bite marks and
Garcia found that he too had received a phone call from the same burner phone!
The team presented the profile: the
Unsub is inflicted with
Delusory Parasitosis, a mental disorder that makes one feel like bugs are crawling under their skin. He desperately tried to get his story heard, first by
Stillman, the journalist, and then
Dr. Suri, the entomologist. They said that they should search for the
Unsub by checking out entomology and infectious disease fields and hospital intake records.
The
Unsub goes to a support group and is drawn to one of the members,
Jane, who shared about her problem. He introduced himself to her by saying, "
Hi, I'm Leo."
Back at the police station, the team discusses support groups and Garcia finds a support group for Morgellons Disease, which is a disease that causes the affected to see thread-like fibers under their skin.
Meanwhile,
Leo is having drinks with Jane, and they commiserate with each other over their problems. They leave to show each other their bumps and bruises and the scene fades with them making out. The next scene shows them the next morning in bed, when someone knocks on the door. It was the
Morgellons group leader knocking on
Jane's door. While she is knocking on the door, her phone rings and they overhear her talking to "
Agent"
Jareau.
Jane freaks out, wondering why the
Feds are after them and
Leo says he will take care of it.
Lisa talks to
Hotch and gives up
Leo and they storm
Jane's apartment.
Leo is gone and they bring
Jane back to the station.
Jane tells
JJ and the other agent that the government tried to kill
Leo once with vaccinations. The ladies talk to
Jane and deduce that
Leo was injected by someone at the
CDC.
Leo, meanwhile, finds the group leader and takes her to his place.
At the
CDC, they find that
Leo Jenkins was a former lab assistant at the
CDC in Atlanta. He had been diagnosed with shingles in his left arm. The doctors at the
CDC vaccinated him, which caused him to lose feeling in his left arm. He developed ghost pains in his arm after this, and he attributed this pain to the doctors putting cockroach larvae in his arm rather than the actual vaccination (
which reminds me of the season 1 episode with Elle on the train, Derailed).
We next see
Leo and the group leader,
Lisa, in a basement and he creeps her out by repeating what she said in group, and deduced that she was afraid of spiders and opens a box of big hairy spiders and puts them on her (
again, The Lady didn't watch!). Fortunately, the team arrives and saves
Lisa from the yucky spiders.
The team talks to try to get
Leo to surrender.
Rossi says he can make the cockroaches go away. He takes
Leo's phone, turns the camera on and makes
Leo look to see that there are no bugs under his skin.
Rossi says he can make them go away forever, but he had to let
Lisa go. In that weak moment
Leo relents and the team wrestles
Leo into handcuffs.
JJ takes
Jane home and we find out that
Jane is a little bit crazy, she believes that the government is behind all her ailments and calls
JJ a liar. We may have to keep an eye on her.
The episode ends with
Lisa getting rid of all the baby ointment she used for her own problems, smiling and smiling while looking at a picture of her baby who passed away as an infant.
All in all, despite the iciness of the bugs, it wasn't a bad episode. Not stellar, but not bad.
The Lady is still trying to wrap her head around
Jennifer Love Hewitt's character. It suspends belief that an agent who had been working undercover for many years could join the team and jump into profiling without a hitch, including being able to use all the jargon and expound on the various behavioral theories. I remember several seasons ago, season 1 or 2 when
Hotch and
JJ were talking in the plane on the way back from a case and
Hotch asked
JJ if she had ever thought about taking the classes and becoming a profiler.
JJ coming back as a profiler is a stretch, but at least she had been with the team for several years and had "on the job" training.
~~~~The Lady of the Lake
