Apparently after years of following mostly heavily serialized dramas and tokusatsu, I’m now all about crime procedural dramas… and House sort of counts, since House is Sherlock Holmes and all that. Anyway. I had not really watched Criminal Minds, started to, in part because a friend loves it, in part because it’s after Survivor, now that Survivor is back on Wednesdays. And as I tend to do when I like a show that’s already been running several seasons, I’ve gone back to watch older episodes, and I just finished season 1.
Spencer Reid is adorable, possibly my favorite character? It’s him or Garcia. Since I’m also watching current episodes, it’s really interesting to compare Reid in season 1 and Reid now. It’s a very subtle difference, but he’s definitely matured and gained… a sort of social confidence. He’s still very much an introvert, but he seems a little less in his own little world. And in season 1, one of the things I found interesting was how the interaction between him and Morgan evolved from Morgan, the cool guy (not that cool guy, obviously… sorry, tokusatsu joke), giving the “weird kid” a hard time, to Morgan seeming to take more of an older brother role… meaning he still gives him a hard time, but also watches out for him and listens to him and gives him advice.
Speaking of Morgan, I ship him and Garcia like it’s on fire. And Garcia is awesome. I loved when she summarily threw Elle’s coffee in the trash for daring to put it carelessly down in HER space.
Elle herself I’m kind of eh on. I think the actress sometimes lacked emotion, basically, and she didn’t seem to have much going on beyond generic badass brunette. And yes, I much prefer Prentiss.
Hotchner… seems really really serious and really needs to smile more, poor thing.
As for Gideon, well, I love the character. The Princess Bride is my favorite movie ever, so of course initially I was just very amused at Inigo Montoya being an FBI profiler, but it certainly speaks to how good an actor Mandy Patinkin is that I stopped thinking of him as “Agent Montoya” very quickly… made me appreciate the character of Jason Gideon himself, outside of the amusing reference, very quickly.