S16.E10: Dead End - Criminal Minds

So S16...or Season One of "Evolution", take your pick...concludes like that.

With Elias Voit...or Lee Duval...at this stage, I just don't care.

Anyway, with Lee being led to a super-secret interrogation room where he is being interviewed by...someone. Someone we don't know. Someone we might speculate who it is.

Someone I just don't care about.

For all the questions and unknowns and speculations that I have about Criminal Minds, there is just one thing I do know about this show.

This show is just not built for long-term storytelling.

See, long-term storytelling requires a few things. Discipline. Patience. Planning. Foresight. A vision.

...and...

Focus.

None of which this show ever displays.

I could go into all the faults this episode had, but it would all ultimately lead up to the fact CM is just not good at this long-term stuff because they've never learned to focus.

On a better-written show, the conflicted life of Elias, the trials and tribulations of Prentiss, JJ, Luke, Tara, Rossi and Garcia, the ridiculous politics of the upper brass of the FBI...

...and the too-soon sacrifice of Deputy Director Douglas Bailey...

...would be interesting to watch.

On this show, they're all just lost in the morass of hubris these writers exhibit, coming up with all kinds of twists and turns and feints and directions and mis-directions, only to follow through haphazardly on all of them, if they follow through on them at all.

It's a shame, really.

This show has wasted excellent performances by Zach Gilford and his real life wife Kiele Sanchez, as well as by the actresses who played their children, Mia Coleman (the younger Harlow) and Alison Nordahl-Nunez (the older Holly), who happens to be a second-degree Black Belt.

Heck, I would say the most interesting part of Evolution was Voit and his family.

We could have had a wonderful story about Elias and his urges. How he stopped killing to raise his family. How he decided to handle his urges by hiring other people to do the killing for him.

...and how the whole thing would have (or could have) fallen apart because the larger your network of people grows, the harder it is to control everyone within it.

We got elements of that in this series. Heck, in this final episode, the family played their beats of finally demanding answers out of their dad very well, which was an indicator of what this series could have been.

I'll expand on that in the general thread about this season, since I have to stick to the episode.

...but to see the family's last stand and wonder what this season could have been is grating.

I'll give the episode this much. At least Elias didn't die in a hail of bullets like this show likes to do with its white male UnSubs.

...but, to know he's only surviving because the show wants to do...I don't know or care about what...with this "Gold Star" is pretty irritating.

"Gold Star" would be, what, the tenth attempt at serialized storytelling for CM under Erica Messer?

After the Maeve storyline, "victim catalogue" of S10, The Dirty Dozen of S11, Mr. Scratch and his Scratchies in S11-13, Reid in prison in S12, Linda Barnes, the serial killer cult of S13/S14, the Chamaeleon, Voit and now this?

She's failed nine times before, what makes me think the tenth will be the lucky charm?

I guess I should wait until I actually see the episodes...but I'm not holding my breath.

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