my complete Criminal Minds rewatch has come to an end
It is *stunning* how bad the plot for the most recent season was. First time I watched I was kinda thinking okay the way Criminal Minds Evolutions focuses on big overarching plots makes it bad, but actually no, season 16 was perfectly fine. It's just 17 that's so boring and for a complete mess of a payoff.
Explanation (aka SPOILERS): Season 16, kicks off with busting a young murderer with expertise he should not have, complete with a kill kit briefcase that the team ends up finding during other murder cases across the country. There are dirt traces that say these were previous buried, dating back to the early 2005s connected to ~60 murders. Turns out there has been a long-standing active serial killer since then the team realizes - Sicarius - who went dormant during COVID, and took that time to develop an online network of serial killers to teach and share their kills to get that itch during lockdown.
Anyways, the team close in on him and towards the end they even get him on the phone, but with the deputy director of the FBI in the room the unsub utters "you're the type of guy who always wants the Gold Star", and the deputy director reacts weirdly and won't talk about it. So when the FBI closes in on the killer, the deputy director wants to go in first and have a private talk with him, the killer shoots him in the head, and he gets arrested.
The BAU tries to ask the higher-ups wth is Gold Star but they're all tight-lipped about it, that's classified. That's the Season 17 case, where the FBI makes a deal with Sicarius to help them take down Gold Star and he will only receive 5 years and they don't charge him as the Sicarius killer. Gold Star turns out not to be one person, but a program that used a published paper from the BAU's David Rossi, and Jason & Jill Gideon about how serial killers could be made. Based on those findings they created abusive juvenile correctional facilities along with 5 test subjects - identified as Gold Star (GS) 1-5. Now active serial killers who have learned to cope through the belief of conspiracy theories and apparently got in-touch through Sicarius's serial killer network.
So through this investigation the FBI needs to work with Sicarius to catch Gold Star for that cushy deal that he serves 5 years for all the murders he committed. He's blatantly selective about what information he gives them (he doesn't even tell them Gold Star isn't a person lol), and on the side Sicarius sneaks messages feeding Gold Star's conspiracy theories to direct them to attacking the BAU.
By the end of the season it's revealed that not only did Sicarius already know the leader of Gold Star, THE FUCKING FBI ALREADY KNEW. The final member of Gold Star is revealed to be the brother of the Deputy Director that Sicarius baited and murdered last season. You might say okay so the deputy director didn't wanna rat out his brother fine BUT NO, HE DID TELL THE WHOLE ASS DIRECTOR OF THE FBI. The guy who went on to keep this information classified and inexplicably made that sweet deal with Sicarius to find out WHAT HE ALREADY KNEW. HUH??? A deal that Sicarius used to blatantly puppetmaster Gold Star with in the first place - ie the big conspiracy at the end that the final member of Gold Star held was that the FBI organized the murder of his brother, the Deputy Director. Sicarius literally committed that murder, but Gold Star believes it's a big conspiracy because of information fed to them by Sicarius??? Bruh aughhh. They take down Gold Star by literally broadcasting footage of Sicarius admitting he did it in the FBI interview when they hammered out the deal. They have software to detect it isn't a deepfake, and they surrender.
There isn't even a single confirmed kill from that final spoilers member of Gold Star so it's so bizarre that this is the big secret the FBI had to cover up and work with an actual massive serial killer for aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa (AGAIN, AS HE ACTUALLY PUPPETMASTERS GOLD STAR ON THE SIDE THANKS TO THIS SO-CALLED "COOPERATION")
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