Compulsion (Season 1, Episode 2)
Premise: The BAU must throw out the usual arsonist profile to stop a fire-setter who has turned deadly on an Arizona college campus.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 1, Episode 2
- Unsub
- Clara Hayes (Jennifer Hall)
- Location
- Tempe, Arizona
- Starring
- Jason Gideon (Mandy Patinkin), Aaron “Hotch” Hotchner (Thomas Gibson), Elle Greenaway (Lola Glaudini), Derek Morgan (Shemar Moore), Spencer Reid (Matthew Gray Gubler), Jennifer “JJ” Jareau (A.J. Cook), Penelope Garcia (Kirsten Vangsness)
- Opening quote
- “Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.” (Albert Einstein, read by Gideon)
- Closing quote
- “Don’t bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.” (William Faulkner, read by Gideon)
- Guest stars
- Lukas Haas as Clerk (The Footpath Killer), J. Karen Thomas as Dean Ellen Turner, Evan Lee Dahl as Jeremy, Bob Jesser as Professor Wallace, J.J. Dashnaw as Matthew Rowland
- Director
- Charles Haid
- Writers
- Jeff Davis
Summary
The Case
“Compulsion” sends the team to Bradshaw College in Tempe, Arizona, where six fires in seven months have ended in the death of student Matthew Rowland. His roommate’s video shows someone working the locked door before fuel pours under it. Chemicals are missing from the chemistry lab, and an earlier fire came a day after a similar theft, so another is expected soon. During an evacuation briefing with Dean Ellen Turner, a new fire kills Professor Wallace. The standard arsonist profile, a young man who sets fires for sexual thrill and a sense of power, does not fit, because this unsub never stays to watch.
A message left on the tip line sounds like “I do this for Karen,” but Garcia’s filters and later clues show the word is “Charon,” the mythical ferryman of the dead and the name of Pluto’s moon. Replaying the video, the team sees the doorknob turned exactly three times and recognizes scrupulosity, a religious form of obsessive-compulsive disorder: fires follow clusters of threes, beginning with the first on March 3. Reid remembers chemistry student Clara Hayes turning her ring in threes and repeating the word “sugar.” Her apartment holds Bible verses, lines from Paradise Lost, some thirty homemade bombs and a clipping in which her mother calls Clara’s survival a miracle and a test from God.
Agents pull alarms across campus, but Clara has stranded fellow students in a disabled elevator in the science building, whose third floor is under construction, and douses them with gasoline while reciting the Trinity. Cornered, she agrees that her urge makes no sense yet says she cannot resist it. The scene ends with the trapped students asking to be let out; no fire is shown and her arrest is not.
The Team
Elle begins work with the BAU, and Jennifer “JJ” Jareau introduces herself as the unit’s liaison. Gideon has just captured Virginia’s Footpath Killer by chance at a gas station while staring down a shotgun, and he challenges Elle to explain why the man stutters.
The ending
Spoiler: After the case Elle decides that Gideon only claimed to know the cause to buy time, and that no one really knows. Gideon answers that he knows how to bring a stutter on, and a flashback shows him mocking the killer until the man can barely speak.
Why it stands out
- A.J. Cook joins the main cast here; this is JJ’s first appearance.
- The Footpath Killer’s real name is never revealed.
- The episode calls Charon Pluto’s only moon, though two more were found in the summer of 2005, before the premiere, and others have been discovered since.