Tara calls Luke to ask if he can fly down to Yakima to help her out with a case. Things have changed since we last saw the BAU team. Budget cuts and bureaucracy have led to each member of the team taking on different cases on their own. Luke tells Tara that unfortunately, he can’t fly down to help her out. He is currently helping Rossi by holding the fort down when he investigates a case in Virginia.
Rossi is working on a family annihilator case in Virginia and it has been hard for him to get a break in the case. Emily is managing agents and dealing with the endless bureaucracy being shoved down their throats. Agent Reid and Agent Simmons are away on classified assignments.
Rossi is struggling with the Virginia case and his personal life has been difficult since the pandemic. JJ is also struggling to balance work and family and misses seeing her children grow up. Rossi calls her to ask for her help with the Virginia case, and he has a gut feeling that the unsub will strike again. ..
JJ and Luke come to the rescue and Rossi is able to apologize and take some time for himself. JJ and Luke help Rossi process the grief, but they are also there for him when he needs them.
The team secured CCTV footage of the home invasion from the family’s neighbour and got a BOLO for the car the unsub used. They also issued an amber alert for the teenage girl. They get an alert and find the car used in the kidnapping but it proves to be a dead end. The unsub sold the car online and dropped it off at Walmart. The guy who bought the car didn’t meet the unsub but they believe he may have been able to help with finding her if they had just asked him more questions.
The detectives realize that the victim doesn’t know her parents are dead and the unsub is threatening to circle back to them to make her do his bidding. They try to find the connection between the two victims of the family annihilator and find that both girls only used an online platform that was created to give teenagers a safe space.
Luke thinks they should call Garcia to help but JJ argues that they promised not to. Luke insists and pays a visit to Garcia, who is enjoying her life away from the BAU. She is not happy that Luke is asking her to be involved but still helps. She and Rossi get into it when they differ in the possible age of the unsub. Emily worries about Rossi and reminds him that they are there for him and that he can depend on them as he grieves. ..
The team works to find out more about the unsub, who is believed to be responsible for two murders. They learn that one of the victims had spoken to a 19-year-old man who was looking for a family and might be the unsub. The team goes to the address given by the suspect and arrests him for questioning. ..
Elsewhere, the Virginia unsub brings his victim to his trailer home in a secluded area. He tells her that he is saving her from her parents. She realizes that he already killed her parents and she tries to get away from him. They have an altercation and the girl shoots him with a gun. The police arrive and take the girl into custody. ..
Tara is overwhelmed after learning her friend committed suicide. Rossi talks her off the cliff and they investigate the crime scene. They find a kill kit in the unsub’s belongings and think he might have someone older training him to kill. As Tara watches the news, she sees the kill kit and texts Rossi telling him that their cases might be linked. ..
Emily is working hard to get the DEA to take over the Yakima case because they have more experience with serial killers. The Deputy Director, Bailey wants the DEA to focus on the missing girl and ignore the drug cartels. Emily pushes back and insists that the killing in Yakima was not done by a serial killer but by a drug cartel. Emily wants Tara to expedite the evidence and container to BAU headquarters but getting clearance for that is difficult. ..
Tara questions if the killings in Yakima stopped in 2020 because of the pandemic. She asks Emily to pull some strings to transfer the container to Quantico after learning that both unsubs had a kill kit. Rossi argues maybe, Tara’s unsub was the one training the Virginia unsub.
The episode ends with another unsub in Whitefield County, GA burying a kill kit. ..
The Episode Review
Paramount+ has delivered the return of the BAU team to our screens. The team has evolved since we last saw them, which is okay. Change is normal and it can be a good thing in most cases. ..
It is difficult to see Rossi overwhelmed with his grief. The last time we saw him, he was a happily married man. It is unclear how his wife died but we might learn the specifics later on in the show.
Based on this first episode of the new series, “The Killing,” we are in for a dark, psychological thriller that dives into a network of twisted serial killers. Are you ready?
