The Fisher King: Part 1 (Season 1, Episode 22)
Premise: On vacation, each BAU agent receives a clue from a killer who sets the team a medieval quest to save a girl missing for two years.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 1, Episode 22
- Unsub
- Unidentified unsub (Charles Haid)
- Location
- Montego Bay, Jamaica; Arlington, Virginia
- 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), Haley Hotchner (Meredith Monroe), Diana Reid (Jane Lynch)
- Opening quote
- “No man needs a vacation so much as the man who has just had one.” (Elbert Hubbard, read by Gideon)
- Guest stars
- Diane Venora as Doris, Aaron D. Spears as Gerald Dupree, Treva Etienne as Detective St. Pierre, Challen Cates as Dr. Jesson, Amanda Bernero as Rebecca Bryant
- Director
- Edward Allen Bernero
- Writers
- Edward Allen Bernero
Summary
The Case
“The Fisher King: Part 1” opens as the team scatters for two weeks of mandatory leave, and an unknown man draws each of them into a game. In Montego Bay, Jamaica, a trail of blood leads from a headless body in room 19 to Elle’s door, and she is held by Detective St. Pierre. The victim, Marty Harris, a registered child sex offender, checked in with Frank Giles, who has vanished. Gideon’s cabin receives Harris’s head along with a 1963 Nellie Fox baseball card, a player Gideon idolized as a boy. A caller warns Hotch not to waste time on the first victims, bad men who had it coming, and to help “the youngest” save “her.” Reid gets a skeleton key and a note telling him to call Gideon, and a rare butterfly arrives for another team member who collected them as a girl.
Hotch flies down and clears Elle: Harris died before she arrived. Back at Quantico, Garcia finds that the hacker who raided the bureau’s personnel files, which list the agents’ vacation addresses, got in through her personal laptop while she played an online Camelot game; she traces him to Giles in Arlington, Virginia. The team finds Giles dead beside a bag of cash, a medieval message in blood and a riddle etched on a knife blade. Reid reads “none” as the old canonical hour for 3 p.m., and the team uses spotlights to cast the shadow early, revealing a box in the wall. It holds a music box playing Schubert’s Trout Quintet, a lock of hair and a video in which the unsub sets the team on a quest to save a captive girl, allowing one rule: no one outside the team may help.
The hair belongs to Rebecca Bryant, missing from South Boston, Virginia, for two years. A young man delivers a page of numbers to Haley, a book code keyed to an unknown book. The team goes to the press with a sketch from Haley’s description.
The Team
Morgan and Elle head to a Jamaican resort run by his friend Gerald Dupree. Hotch tells Haley he joined their high school theater club only to meet her, and Gideon has a friend, Doris, at his cabin. Reid goes to the Nevada sanitarium where his mother is treated for schizophrenia, learns that she treasures his letters about his cases, and leaves her a favorite book but lets her rest. Later Gideon confides that the cabin was his last refuge and that he has nothing left.
The ending
Spoiler: Elle, awake for 36 hours, is sent home with Agent Anderson. There the unsub confronts her, furious that the press conference broke his one rule. To be continued.
Why it stands out
- Jane Lynch makes her first appearance as Reid’s mother, Diana.
- It is the last episode produced under Paramount Television.
- Morgan’s nickname for Reid, “Pretty Boy,” is heard here; off camera, Shemar Moore calls Matthew Gray Gubler “Pretty Ricky.”