beatriceeagle

...and she's right, so just for her, I'm posting my first (awkward) attempt at meta. It's Criminal Minds meta, though, so all you eager Quillers can get your hopes back down again and continue theorizing over what the title Deathly Hallows means for the seventh book.

I suppose I should disclaim that this was written under the influence of an (according to my sister) 101 degree fever.

So, have you noticed that CM loves irony? Actually, irony's not really the right word for it. Irony is when something is the opposite of what you expected, whereas CM does things that are just so damn fitting it's amazing.

Take, for instance, "Jones." Title aside, that episode is like a hotbed of connections and refrains and just general fittingness. It's definitely an episode with a theme. The theme is "moving on." They even talk about it.

First there's the unsub. Hotch says it: "She can't move on." The entire episode only happens because Sarah Danlin couldn't move on after her rape, and when she got stuck back in that time, she snapped.

Then there's the the cop of the week, Billy. He angsts (and I love him for it, because what's a television show without angst?). He's spent all this time solving this case for his father, and now it's over. As JJ says to him, "You have to move on."

And all of this is the set-up for the real focus of the episode, Reid. Nobody ever says it to him in those words, but the idea behind his parts of the episode is that he has to move on...and doesn't know how to. Contrary to a lot of opinion on the 'net, the end of the episode doesn't wrap up the storyline, doesn't really give us any answers, but rather leaves us with a question: can Reid move on?

(On a tangent, for a moment, Reid's comment about Sarah Danlin when they're in her apartment -- "It's almost like, by taking on the Ripper persona, she was trying to kill something in herself?" Total projection.)

All of that is well and good. But what makes it genius, what completely sets the tone and makes it definite that this is the theme the writers are going for, is the setting. They're in New Orleans. They didn't have to be. The plot would have worked almost as well in any other city -- certainly some plot points would have been different, such as LaMontagne, Sr.'s death, which would have had to have played out differently -- but it could have been done. Instead, we get an episode about moving on that is set in a city that is moving on. Brilliant.

Thus ends my slightly lukewarm first attempt at meta. (And all of

fishzilla's snide comments about how I never post.)