The Fox Is A Really Good Episode That I Had Less To Say About Than I Thought I Would. Karl Arnold Is

the fox is a really good episode that i had less to say about than i thought i would. karl arnold is scary, his actor is excellent, and it's a in general a very tight episode. the ending is especially good and haunting, with the reveal that arnold has killed six other families of four (and therefore twenty-four more people) than we're initially led to believe.

i understand that karl arnold is returned to in a later episode? i've never actually gotten to that one before, but hopefully i will now.

it's getting really hard to watch just one episode a day, especially since i've already seen every episode up to 5x02. but im trying.

i do have one other thing to say about the fox, i just need to go back and grab a couple screenshots for it.

I'm surprised by the amount of people who think Reid is being serious here:

given the expressions immediately after:

where reid very clearly smiles and looks to see hotch's reaction (because he has daddy issues). and hotch almost looks like he's trying not to smile. or that he thinks the joke is bad. hard to tell

also, dowd says it himself:

you could maybe argue that reid didn't hear him say that because at the time he was laying in the hallway after getting hit in the head with the gun, but that doesn't really matter. it's not like this is a revelation.

also:

I doubt Hotch would have Reid hang on to his gun if he genuinely thought Reid had shot a man in the head while aiming for his leg, especially because aiming for his leg would have been a terrible idea in the first place.

penelope garcia was that a jaws reference. come here so i can kiss you on the mouth.

okay. confession. part of the reason i haven't updated anything in so long is because:

a. i had no energy for a while

b. i regained energy, but by that point it had been long enough that i got the itchy feeling of needing to edit/revise all my wips before continuing them. i know that's silly. i don't know if anyone else does that. if i spend too long between updates, i have to go back and edit all the older stuff before i can even think of writing new stuff. in the past, this has been bad as "the gap was too long between chapter 5 and chapter 6, so i have to edit chapters 1-4. oops, the gap was too long between chapters 2 and 3 and now i have to edit 1 and 2 again before i edit 3-6 before i write 7. something is wrong with me!

c. this i think is actual writing advice that i got from Somewhere. or maybe there's another thing wrong with me. either way: the way i edit is by retyping the whole thing and figuring out things i want to change/spotting mistakes as i go, rather than reading it over, where i skim and skip over things.

d. i have generally had less time to write than i did before.

if you've ever gone back and reread a fic i wrote, you might have noticed stuff changing (it's never anything major. usually it's a paragraph or two being cut, added, or replaced. what i'm about to share is probably the biggest edit i've done in a bit.

anyway, rn im rewriting the opening scene of "like the strength of an army", and my weird process wound up with a change that i really do like.

Emily cleared her throat. "Hey, Reid?" "Hm?" He didn't look up from his new file. "Lunch is in twenty." This did get his attention. He raised his head and glanced at his watch, eyebrows shooting up. Hm. Reid usually had a clock running in his head. For him to have lost track of the time... "Oh. Uh, okay." He blinked and went back to the file, apparently not catching the invitation in the statement. Of course. Silly her. Reid would never believe that anyone would like him enough to voluntarily spend time with him. He needed to be smacked in the face with a social cue if he was to notice it. "You. Me. Indian food. Twenty minutes." That should do it.

I realised as I was rewriting that I didn't like the original exchange that was in place of the last two paragraphs. it read as being too long because it had five lines of dialogue, interrupted the flow, and served mostly as a reference to a line from canon i think is funny. that's not a good enough reason to exist at the expense of the pacing! so. that'll change...within the next few days. i'm sorry, i flipflop what i'm revising/working on from day to day. because there's something wrong with me.

maybe feel slightly comforted to know that i'm restraining myself from starting another wip until SOMETHING is marked as complete.

lmao nobody is reading this. i'm yelling into the void about my incredibly strange writing/revising process that makes me take eons to update. thank you for listening, void.

what are u thinking elle. if your thoughts were broadcast in this moment would this show still be TV-14?

My brain isn't working fantastically right now so this may not be super coherent, but I'm having Thoughts on the way Morgan profiles, especially in season one, where he has these moments of "okay, I'm the unsub. Why do I..." while the rest of the team says "okay, why would the unsub..." even when he's not talking about the psychology of the unsub (which he isn't really in this scene: this scene is him realising that the victim didn't hear the unsub break the silverware because he did it after killing her) even the language he uses differs from the rest of the team.

I don't know. I might come back to this more coherently later, but I think Morgan's empathy is one of his strongest traits, and I think the fandom, and sometimes the writers, forgets that in lieu of portraying him as Macho Man #503 (can't imagine why... /s)

I think the rest of the team, as skilled as they are, tends to stand on the outside and guess what being on the inside may have felt like, while Morgan tries (and often succeeds) at getting inside.