Goddddd Motel Scene Time. I Have A Lot Of Thoughts On It And Hopefully I'll Be Able To Put Them Into

goddddd motel scene time. i have a lot of thoughts on it and hopefully i'll be able to put them into some kind of order.

ELLE: After he shot me, he reached into my wound so he could write on the wall in my blood. I was barely conscious, but I...I could feel his hand in there. And sometimes it's like I can still feel it. REID: Elle, he's dead. You're...You're right here. You won.

obviously this is an unhelpful thing to say. i dont think that makes reid evil, or a bad friend, i think it makes him a twenty-four-year-old who's struggling to understand a situation he's never been in.

i dont think elle resents him for it. im sure there's frustration, deservedly so, but i dont think it's targeted at reid, more at the general sense of Nobody Is Getting Me. especially this expression here:

in the moment, this doesnt read to me as anger. it's certainly not a happy smile; she's not comforted by what reid says because it's not a comforting thing to say, and i think it sort of develops into anger later, but in the moment, she doesn't resent him for not being able to say the right thing. again, there's frustration, because he doesn't get it. he can't (not yet, anyway). a part of her wishes he did, a part of her wishes somebody did, and yet a different part of her hopes none of them ever do, because it's an awful, awful thing to understand.

i headcanon that reid and elle stay in contact after elle leaves, but i dont think its immediate. i flipflop between two reasons

reid doesnt reach out because he feels guilty, like if he had just said the right words in the right order in that motel room, she would have stayed. i think this is generally how reid responds to abandonment (and sometimes just conflict in general). if i had just said the right thing, done that differently, been better, i could have fixed it. boy is...a little emotionally stunted. if he was a stage of grief he would be bargaining. do you get me.

reid does reach out, but elle doesn't respond. maybe she's still angry about him not being able to Get It, maybe she wants to distance herself from the bau in general, maybe him not Getting It hurts in particular because they were quite close, etc.

either way, they get back in contact post s02e15, when reid texts her a barely coherent rambling apology for that night, how it was an unsympathetic and unhelpful thing to say, and he does get it now, and he's sorry, there is no winning—

she calls him.

i couldnt get good screencaps of it, largely because there are quite a lot of these moments and theyre often very short and rely on the physicality/movement of the characters but. godddd p911 hurts in hindsight with the way morgan is acting the whole time (particularly with principal rawlings, a man who holds a position of power and trust over the children he wants to hurt).

screaming crying eating my laptop. holds him gentle. i dont care that at this point in the series he is a solid fourteen years older than me. i am holding him gentle he needs it

hey simon mirren? what the fuck was this:

(it's a little hard to tell from the image, but elle's "it's totally you" reads to me as earnest, if slightly teasing)

am i supposed to think elle is being sarcastic? because it's not coming off that way to me—although caveat that i am autistic and bad at reading tone. is it platonic? it doesn't read platonic to me. and not because "oh my god a man and a woman complimented eachother. they must be in love" but. im sorry im legitimately trying to read this scene from any angle other than "there is mutual attraction" and i am not finding it! am i biased because i ship them or is this scene legitimately just Like That.

EDIT: forgot that this happens like a minute later. what the fuck!!! you cant do this to me!!!

JJ: It's something we call the buddy system. That means, you always go everywhere with a friend. MORGAN: That's right, because bad men and women are more likely to talk to us only when we're by ourselves

this is likely unintentional, but i like to read into things, so.

for context, they're speaking to a room full of children in a town with a serial child murderer, and are giving them some precautions to follow to stay safe (on a lighter note: the scene is intercut with a scene of gideon doing the same to a room of adults, which i really like)

jj addresses the children as "you" while morgan addresses them as "we". i dont like the term "freudian slip" because i hate freud, but thats the shortest way to describe what i think/headcanon is happening here. im sure they had a script, and i think morgan's part was "bad men and women are more likely to talk to you only when you're by yourself" and the "us/we" came out accidentally. or i could believe that morgan wrote his part of the script and wrote "we" because he sees himself in the victims.

obviously the way morgan was victimized during his childhood was very different to what's happening here (there is no sexual assault and we later learn that the violence was done by a peer, not an adult) but it's made clear several times that morgan takes any case where children are harmed very personally. they all do, because that's just how people are, but again, morgan specifically sees himself in the child victims they encounter. he was victimized differently, yes, but he knows what its like to face violence as a child, he knows the fear they felt, and, considering in this case they profile that the children know their attacker, he knows the feeling of betrayal

oh.

man criminal minds is just full of these lines that never ever come back. nothing in this scene causes me immense pain in hindsight.

(also: just because it's a little hard to tell from the screencaps and I'm unsure if this is information that's okay to include in Alt Text given that it's context not included in the screencaps—here is the conversation with who says what.

ELLE: You know how many rapists I saw walk during my Sex Crime days? [...] It was enough to make you explode.

JJ: Well, it's a long way from feeling like that and actually committing murder. Don't you think?

HOTCH: Oh, not really.

HOTCH: Hey, what are you doing here? HALEY: Your cellphone kept going straight to voicemail. HOTCH: (stammering) Yeah. No, I was in a meeting. Is everything alright? HALEY: Going out of town? HOTCH: Yeah, we've got to go to LA. I was going to call you from the car. (beat) What is it? HALEY: You really don't know why I'm here? HOTCH: Honey, I'm sorry. We're running late. HALEY: (sighs) I just got back from the hospital. Jack. HOTCH: (putting his hand on his head) Oh, my God. The tests. HALEY: Yeah. HOTCH: What happened? HALEY: He's got a condition. It's treatable and he's going to be okay. HOTCH: Honey, I'm sorry. (beat) How was he? HALEY: Scared. They put those electrodes all over him and he was wondering where his daddy was. (walking forward) Babe, you promised you'd be there. HOTCH: I know. I'm sorry. (beat) Where is he now? HALEY: At home with my mom. I didn't want him here while we were talking. Look, I know this job is important to you. But we're important, too. HOTCH: You don't have to tell me that. HALEY: I don't want you to wake up someday in some random city and realise that you don't know your own son. HOTCH: ...They can go without me. HALEY: No, they can't. It's okay. Go. We'll talk about it when you get home. HOTCH: I'm so sorry. (they kiss as Hotch leaves) Sorry.

haha im so glad this is the only conflict they have and everything is fine in their relationship for the rest of forever. haha. ha. hh.