S3E10 - “True Night”
Guest host Jen from Wheels Up 30 Pod did our recap.
We start off with a panel view of Los Angeles, with New Yorky music in the background, then, Frankie Muniz brings the monologue about the secrets of the night. Suddenly, we are pulled into what appears to be his extremely violent drawings. The vigilante hero “Night” appears to kill the wolf villain who is terrorizing the scene. However, what at first seemed like a dream appears to have a hint of reality to it, as an image of a bloodied, tattooed limb lays in an LA alley.
Cut to the BAU, and JJ is presenting this image to the team as part of an ongoing string of violent murders in LA. Given the escalation of these murders, the team heads to LA right away, though Derek has to check on his baby girl first, as she is back on her first case since her shooting.
Throughout the episode, we’re pulled between dreams, flashbacks, and the present, so the timeline feels super chaotic, which is entirely fitting for this episode once everything comes together. So, back to Frankie Muniz, who is dreaming?? No its a flashback to him with what I can assume is his cute blonde girlfriend who is trying to decide what to leave as her voicemail message. Jonny, as we learn is his name, is abruptly woken up by his invading publisher who is coming to pick him up for an event. He comes into Jonny’s studio apartment and makes note of Jonny’s new violent turn in his drawings.
In his interactions with his publisher, Jonny is definitely going throughout, flashing back again to his girlfriend wanting to go out for jerky. As he’s dreaming, the limo he’s taking to his book signing passes the crime scene where the BAU has just arrived and Reid and Morgan are bickering about LA traffic. We find out this last murder has two victims, bringing the body count to 7 in the last two weeks. The team is pretty certain that the violent nature is indicative of an unsub experiencing a psychotic break. Just one guy, they reiterate.
Jonny McHale, a famous graphic novelist shows up to the appearance but he quickly becomes overwhelmed by the flashing cameras. He runs out and tries to call his girlfriend, who’s named Vickie. Jonny then makes a run for it, where he jumps in front of a car and breaks the windshield. The couple comes to check on him and he chokes out the driver. Cut back to the scene and Morgan is telling Hotch that the unsub is getting off the charts brutal. Reid then tells the local police that a housecat loose in a neighborhood is a small-scale ecological disaster because they’ll kill anything. He then says an unsub in a psychotic break is worse.
So it’s pretty clear at this point that Jonny is the unsub suffering from a psychotic break and we can tell that the murders have something to do with Vickie, but we aren’t clear on all the hodgepodge of details yet. As his condition deteriorates, he continues to work on his drawings that bring him into his “night” fantasy where the vigilante kills the beast with a machete at a suburban looking house. Back to reality, and the house exists in real life. Another body has just been discovered by the mail carrier.
Back to Jonny’s flashback, he and Vickie have obtained the jerky she was craving and they are headed home when she says to Jonny “I wonder if the baby will love jerky”. Jonny’s so happy to learn they are having a baby and he immediately proposes. Before she can answer, it appears they have been approached by something dangerous. We hear Vickie’s screams as Jonny wakes up and finds that he is covered in blood. The BAU is arriving at the new crime scene, which is at a “gangbanger” named Glenn Hill’s home.
At the station, JJ is approached by an agent who says they saw her press conference, and the next scene is the FBI entering Jonny’s studio to arrest him. He is super confused and is asking “what did I do?” over and over again. Jonny is taken to the station for questioning and we see his publicist there, along with boards full of extremely gruesome crime scene photos. As he awaits questioning, Jonny affirms his innocence.
However, after looking through his apartment, Rossi says they didn’t find the murder weapon but that they didn’t need to because “Mr. McHale is a very sick young man”. All of the drawings have matched up with the crime scenes, all but the ones he drew last night. Hotch goes to ask Jonny where Glenn Hill is, and we learn that it was Glenn and his gang who had approached Jonny and Vickie that night. They attacked the couple on the street, beat and cut Jonny within an inch of death and then made him watch as they assaulted Vickie. We then see Derek and Emily enter a blood ravaged room, with Glenn Hill’s mutilated body presumably at the center. I say presumably because they never actually show the body. We can assume what the scene might look like based off of Jonny’s drawing, but considering the nasty shit they show on Criminal Minds, this is like too much for them to show?? Yeah, Jonny has to be super sick.
The team is headed home on the jet and Emily is really shook cuz this was the first unsub she caught who wasn’t a bad guy. She reflects on how Jonny was just a regular guy and the tragedy he suffered turned him from a happy, successful writer and talented artist into a killer in just six months. She wonders if we’re all capable of something like that and Rossi in his very Rossi way just says “life is a hell of a thing to happen to a person.”
The final scene cuts to Jonny in the hospital, curled up in the corner of his room, listening to Vickie’s voicemail over and over again. The wall of his room are covered in beautiful drawings of her likeness. “Hey, this is Vickie, I can’t come to the phone right now because I’m out living my life.”
Rating Criteria:
Criminal/Serial Killer: 20/20
Character development/ character arcs: 10/20
Forensics/Context: 12/20
Script writing: 17/20
Background characters: 20/20
Overall: 79/100