In movies, death threats are a dime a dollar, especially in thrillers and crime dramas. But what happens when you're a victim of one, and the following resolution is to die by poison or stabbing--a reality of the threat that you thought was a joke?

Criminal Minds Season 9 Episode 22 promo trailer (YouTube/TVSeriesPreview)

This is what the victims in Criminal Minds Season 9 Episode 22, titled Fatal, had encountered, as they fall victims to an unsub who seems to enjoy letting them know that they're about to die and are in no way in control of their fate.

The Criminal Minds BAU team first entered the crime scene with two victims having fallen to poisoning. The police weren't taking the threats as seriously until a man who claims to have received a note winds up being dead in his own jail cell where he thought he was safe.

As the team searches for clues in what almost seems like an invisible suspect, the next victim was actually already talking to the unsub. Enter Bill, a retired worker who was apparently leaving behind mementos to those that he kills: a piece of twine.

Fate is not in your hands

While poisoning seems to be his method of choice, the body count starts to escalate as the team seems to keep missing the connections between the seemingly random killings.

Meanwhile, Bill is given his retirement party, which he seems very reluctant to acknowledge or even be in. His pal and partner in the business seems to be the key to unraveling Bill's psyche, as he tells the story of how Bill wouldn't have been in the company for so long if he had not missed leaving for Greece back in the day.

It turns out that Bill seems to hold an obsession for anything related to Greece. As the BAU team resident genius, Spencer Reid (Matthew Gray Gubler) was able to see what the pieces of twine really mean--the pieces of twine were not the same lengths, as each was the length of years that the victims had lived.

This hails back to the three old women known as the Fates, who decided when they would cut the string of life of people. It turns out that Bill's obsession over that one missed trip to Greece years ago had spiraled into two decades' worth of anger that he's now taking out on his victims.

Wrong place at the wrong time

Still, the BAU team cannot see the connections between the victims. While the unsub studied each of them enough after warning them of their inevitable death, they all seemed random people, each one with no real connection with each other.

That is until they find out that the latest victim, a woman who was stabbed to death mere minutes after being given her death threat, had actually been to a coffee shop near where the other three victims were killed.

As Reid and Alex Blake (Jeanne Tripplehorn) head off to the coffee shop to investigate, they were able to get their hands on a hidden camera tape and realise that at one point in time, all of the victims were in line together, and that there was one more victim to go.

It became a rush of trying to find how the unsub was able to see his victims for the BAU team, as they tried to identify the last possible victim before her String of Fate is cut short. David Rossie (Joe Mantegna) was able figure out that the unsub's trigger may have been the bad news given to him while he was at the hospital near the coffee shop on the same day that he chose his victims.

And as it turns out, he was seeing an oncologist, meaning that, despite his retirement and money for Greece--it's all going to be useless because he's dying anyway.

Just as the BAU team were able to find the last possible victim, they realised that the pattern of devolution that the unsub was going through didn't fit the pattern--she should've been killed a day before but somehow, she was spared and there was no sign of poisoning in her delivered pizza.

Here comes the twist. That partner that toasted to Bill's retirement party? He's now the possible victim of Fate. Bill's mysterious past gets unraveled, as the BAU team finds out that what fueled Bill's rage for the past two decades was actually misguided. What he thought was a missed chance of a lifetime trip to Greece was, in fact, the one thing that saved him from being killed 20 years ago when the shuttle that was supposed to take to the airport had crashed, killing all other passengers except him.

Fate is almost a fearful and tricky thing--just when you thought you had it figured out, it turns its head on you. Rossi gives quite the fitting quote from Jean de la Fontaine to end Criminal Minds Season 9 Episode 22: A person often meets his destiny on the road he took to avoid it.

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