"Criminal Minds" - October 22, 2008 episode

I am not a regular viewer of "Criminal Minds", though I sometimes watch the occasional episode or hear it from the other room because the husband likes and watches the show. I was a bit more interested before when Mandy Patinkin was on the show, but after he left and was replaced by Joe Mantegna, I was even less interested than before.

The show is about a team of FBI profilers who are called in to solve various very serious cases, usually serial killers and the like, people who have a pattern of behaviour that, if they can figure it out, they have a chance of stopping and catching.

I happen to follow Wil Wheaton on his Twitter feed, and Wil had mentioned a little while ago that he would be on an episode of "Criminal Minds" this season, so I was interested in seeing it. That's the episode that was shown this week.


The team are investigating a series of accidents that appear to be staged in the Reno area. A car is left in the middle of the night in the middle of a remote highway around a blind curve, and the car is then slammed into by the unsuspecting driver of a random tractor trailer. The passengers in the car are always a couple, male and female, who have been missing for two days, but the couple are already dead before the truck ever hits them, and the woman also shows signs of having been raped. It turns out that the victims have all stayed at a remote cabin motel in the middle of nowhere, where the owner of the motel, Floyd Hansen, is the one committing the crimes. He has serious mommy/women issues, which is what's driving his actions. The team track down his identity and whereabouts before he is able to further hurt his latest captives, and when he tries to run away from the authorities, he is appropriately mowed down by a tractor trailer after he runs into the middle of a remote highway.


So, can you guess which role Wil played? Well, he's not a regular, so he wasn't on the FBI team. He didn't have a bit part. And no, he didn't play the male half of the last captive couple. He played Floyd Hansen. And he did a really good job - not over the top, not campy, not unbelievable, just menacing, and mostly, very calm, which is what made him even creepier.

The last captive couple are played by William Mapother and Robyn Lively. She looked familiar, but I couldn't place her until her name popped up in the credits, and then I knew she was in fact the person I thought she was. Except that in looking through her credits, I can't figure out what show or movie I am actually remembering her from. But William Mapother, on the other hand, I definitely know. Yeah, he's Tom Cruise's cousin, whatever, who cares. I know him for often playing the creepy dude, whether it was creepy dude from "Threshold" or creepy Ethan from "Lost". And in this episode, he actually plays the normal guy, the straight man part, whereas Wil plays the psycho, and Wil totally out-creeps Mapother, who as far as I'm concerned is the creepiest dude around.

It was a pretty good episode all around, though both the husband and wife did really stupid things at various times - he left the car running outside when he came back to get her, he peeked into the peep-hole without being careful, which is how he got poked in/around the eye, she approached the window when the shade was finally lifted without apparently realizing that it was being lifted by the person who had imprisoned them in there. And then the stupid arguing between them was just annoying. But as I said, I thought Wil did a great job, and he definitely shows that he's not little Wesley Crusher anymore.


Wil Wheaton as Wesley Crusher in "Star Trek: The Next Generation".


Wil Wheaton in an episode of "Criminal Minds".


His Creepiness in an episode of "Criminal Minds" with series regular Thomas Gibson.