In the latest episode of “Criminal Minds”, fans were given an opportunity to check out some of the characters from the upcoming spinoff show that will focus on the international team headed by Jack Garrett, accompanied by Lily Lambert and Matt Simmons. The team was called to help out the BAU on a case involving a four-member family getting kidnapped during their holiday in Barbados.
The family falls into a trap when they arrive to Barbados by airplane and miss their regular connection to the resort that they’re supposed to be staying in, and end up taking a suspicious-looking shuttle van instead. While everything seems normal at first, and the van driver is actually friendly and full of tips about the area and the local state of tourism, things go bad quickly as the water he’s handed out to the family turns out to be spiked with drugs, and they all start falling asleep one by one.
When the two teams meet up in Barbados and start working on the case, they compare the information they’ve all collected on the UnSub so far, and end up identifying certain patterns that could prove useful to them. They suspect that he has a specific type, an “annihilator”, which is typically a father who has either lost his family or personally killed them all.
The UnSub is then seen pushing the family on to a boat and the show goes into some detail about his childhood through several flashbacks. Moving back to the present, we can see the criminal separating Greg from the rest of the family and giving him a hard beating, emulating the kind of treatment he once got from his father himself.
The teams manage to track down the criminal with the help of some security footage, and they even identify a possible name for him – Jerry Tidwell – by looking through cases that involve teenagers killing their own families. Jerry Tidwell had been released from a mental institution at the age of 21, where he had to stay as a result of the incident.
In the end, the teams discover the location of the boat, overpower Jerry and rush to look for Nick who had been thrown overboard by Jerry in a previously ensuing fight. It turns out that Nick is all safe in a lifeboat, and everything ends well. The teams were shown to cooperate quite efficiently, by all accounts, and this could prove interesting for the future development of the show. If we could see more crossover action like that, it looks like no fans would mind right now, as it was a very well-designed episode that did its job quite well.