Broken Mirror (Season 1, Episode 5)
Premise: When a prosecutor’s daughter is kidnapped, the BAU must protect her twin from an abductor who seems to know the team’s every move.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 1, Episode 5
- Unsub
- Vincent Shyer (Matt Letscher)
- Location
- Connecticut
- Starring
- Jason Gideon (Mandy Patinkin), Aaron “Hotch” Hotchner (Thomas Gibson), Elle Greenaway (Lola Glaudini), Derek Morgan (Shemar Moore), Spencer Reid (Matthew Gray Gubler), Haley Hotchner (Meredith Monroe)
- Opening quote
- “When a good man is hurt, all who would be called good must suffer with him.” (Euripides, read by Gideon)
- Closing quote
- “When love is in excess, it brings a man no honor nor worthiness.” (Euripides, read by Gideon)
- Guest stars
- Elisabeth Harnois as Trish Davenport and Cheryl Davenport, Robin Thomas as Evan Davenport, Matt Newton as Jordan
- Director
- Guy Norman Bee
- Writers
- Judith McCreary
Summary
The Case
“Broken Mirror” opens with Trish Davenport and her boyfriend, Jordan, driving home from a party until a car blocks the road; Jordan goes missing and Trish is taken. Jordan has been shot in the face, which the team reads as personal. Trish’s father, Evan Davenport, is an executive assistant U.S. attorney in New York who has had death threats, and a note in Trish’s handwriting, marked by her tears, tells him to await a call at 8 p.m. In Connecticut her identical twin, Cheryl, a physics student, is sure Trish is alive. The caller refuses to speak to Davenport and asks for Cheryl, chats with her, lets her hear a drugged Trish and demands $500,000 that he says he is owed.
The drop instructions send Cheryl out alone with the money at 3 a.m., but the demand leaves out every usual condition, and the team sees it is a ruse to take her too; agents stop the grab in time. The kidnapper calls again, saying he wanted the matching pair and that Cheryl invited him with her glances. The team identifies erotomania, set off when Trish and Jordan were about to get engaged. Gideon hangs up on him to apply pressure, and the furious caller shows off a detailed knowledge of each agent. The team concludes he is one of their own, and that the listening device arrived with the FBI’s own equipment.
At the safe house Vincent Shyer, an agent from the New York field office who knows the family, gets Cheryl alone with a knife after knocking out an agent with a taser.
The Team
Hotch’s pregnant wife, Haley, is on hospital bed rest, and her doctors fear pre-eclampsia. Reid keeps quiet about the Redskins game with JJ, and Morgan tells him that women at work are off-limits. Shyer’s phone call turns into a cruel profile of the team: Hotch would climb over Gideon, Reid has autistic traits, Elle was promoted too early, and Morgan is a token. At the end the tased agent stays late on the case file and splits the work with Elle.
The ending
Spoiler: Shyer is stopped before he can hurt Cheryl, and Elle gets him to reveal where Trish is being held. The team quietly celebrates, and a colleague tells Elle that Shyer’s mistake was never seeing her as a threat.
Why it stands out
- Penelope Garcia does not appear; it is the only episode without her.
- A.J. Cook is credited, but JJ never appears, the first of 29 episodes in which a credited character does not show up.
- The title refers to the Davenport sisters as mirror twins, whose features are reversed; Trish’s organs lie on the opposite side.