'Criminal Minds' Season 9 200th Episode Recap: JJ’s Secret is Out, a Battle of Wits and Guns and a Happy Reunion
"Criminal Minds" season 9 200th episode does live up to its name and hype, as the BAU team come together for the promise of an episode to remember.
*Criminal Minds Season 9 Episode 15 recap: A bloody Valentine and a ritualistic habit for two take the team for a ride for this week's case: Read here for more.
At first, "Criminal Minds" fans are greeted with JJ's (AJ Cook) abduction, where she seems to be taken into the hideout of a man who is set on torturing her. Afterwards, the show goes through a series of flashbacks that takes the audience through a rollercoaster of what JJ's life has been while she was away from the team.
At the onset, viewers can see the hostile environment that JJ has gotten herself into, which isn't helped by the fact that the people she'll be working with are not very accepting of her nature as the then-innocent JJ.
Meanwhile, over at the BAU team, they are trying to see just what happened to JJ. Her husbrand, Will LaMontagne Jr. (Josh Stewart), meets up with the team to track down JJ, while the secrets that JJ has with new section chief Mateo Cruz (Esai Morales) starts to unravel.
Familiar Faces Follow Breadcrumbs
Any Paget Brewster/Emily Prentiss fan will immediately recognise her voice, as she delivers the usual quote at the start of "Criminal Minds" season 9 200th episode opening sequence. This is the signal not only of Brewster's quick return but also of the events to come.
The team are now becoming desperate to find JJ, but with so little clues and the fact that they are still in the dark as to what happened to her back in 2010; they are now on a mission to find JJ's foxhole in the BAU.
Reid (Matthew Gray Gubler) and Garcia (Kristin Vangsness) are on a spy-like mission to retrieve data, while Rossi (Joe Mantagna) and Blake (Jeann Tripplehorn) try to find more clues as to what JJ was working on during the time that she was gone from the BAU.
But as the BAU team get deeper into JJ's story---they've found out that she has been working in the Middle East and has been linked to a ghost database tagged as Integrity---the State locks them out of their search and tells them to go back to chasing serial killers. This prompts Hotch (Thomas Gibson) to call in reinforcements. Yes, Emily Prentiss all the way from London.
Torture, Guns and a Hearty Reunion
All of this is happening while JJ is tortured in the hands of Tivon Askari (Farah Tahir). In between flashbacks of JJ's time in the Middle East, the BAU team start to piece together what had been happening, even going so far as to suspect that Cruz had a hand in the whole thing.
It turns out that JJ and Cruz's former teammate in the ops, Michael Hastings (Tahmoh Penikett), was another traitor. As he confronts JJ and Cruz in the torture room, Prentiss and the BAU team draw closer to the hideout where a number of scenes with gunfights ensue.
*After the milestone, what comes next for "Criminal Minds"? Read here for more related news.
This is exactly what the producers have promised---thriller, suspense and a mini movie for "Criminal Minds'" 200th episode. In the end, despite the very daunting quote from Nietzsche, viewers are treated to the happy reunion after the unsub was apprehended and JJ and Cruz rescued.
It's pretty obvious that JJ has changed a lot from the time that she went on that covert mission, but even after she was tortured, it seems that JJ will remain a stronghold in the BAU team.