Criminal Minds Season 2 Episode Guide
Plot summaries for every episode of the second season of Criminal Minds, which aired on CBS from September 2006 to May 2007. The team finishes the Fisher King case, Elle Greenaway leaves and Emily Prentiss arrives, Reid is held captive by an unsub who leaves lasting scars, and Gideon’s past catches up with him when the serial killer Frank Breitkopf returns.
Season 2 recap
Season 2, broadcast on CBS from September 2006 to May 2007, first settles the Fisher King case: in “The Fisher King: Part 2” Elle Greenaway survives a gunshot at home, and Spencer Reid’s mother, Diana, identifies the kidnapper as a man from her sanitarium. Elle returns from leave, but in “Aftermath” she shoots a rapist the team had to release and calls it self-defense; doubted by Aaron “Hotch” Hotchner, she quits the unit in “The Boogeyman.” Jason Gideon, Derek Morgan, Jennifer “JJ” Jareau and Penelope Garcia gain Emily Prentiss in “The Last Word,” when she arrives with transfer papers Hotch never approved.
Several cases hit close to home. JJ takes on three missing soccer players from a town near where she grew up (“North Mammon”). Morgan is arrested in Chicago for a boy’s murder in “Profiler, Profiled,” and the trail leads to the youth-center director who abused him as a boy. Gideon draws an anthrax plot out of a Guantanamo detainee, and the target proves to be a new mall where Haley Hotchner had planned to take her son (“Lessons Learned”). Josh Stewart arrives as New Orleans detective Will LaMontagne Jr. in “Jones,” flirting with JJ while chasing a woman who imitates Jack the Ripper.
In the two-parter “The Big Game” and “Revelations,” James Van Der Beek plays Tobias Hankel, a Georgia man whose personality has fractured into Tobias, his late father and the archangel Raphael. He holds Reid captive, drugs him and streams his beatings, and is shot by Reid with his own gun once coded clues bring the team close. Reid then struggles with Dilaudid and misses a flight on purpose. Keith Carradine’s Frank Breitkopf, a killer whose victims date back 30 years, trades stranded schoolchildren for Jane, played by Amy Madigan, and leaves town with her in “No Way Out.”
Frank returns in “No Way Out, Part II: The Evilution of Frank,” killing a friend in Gideon’s apartment and leaving Gideon under police suspicion, killing Rebecca Bryant and seizing Tracy Belle, whose life the team saved in “The Boogeyman.” Jane goes to Frank to win Tracy’s release. Erin Strauss, played by Jayne Atkinson, tells Hotch he is no longer effective and warns Prentiss that staying means helping end his career.
Episodes
- 1
The Fisher King: Part 2
With Elle shot and a kidnapped girl still missing, the BAU decodes the Fisher King’s last clues and finds that Reid’s mother knows who he is.
- 2
P911
When a boy the FBI lost track of a year ago appears in a live online auction, the BAU joins the Crimes Against Children Unit to find him before the sale closes.
- 3
The Perfect Storm
When a pair of killers in Jacksonville start mailing videos of their torture to victims’ mothers, the BAU must find out which partner is really in charge before another woman dies.
- 4
Psychodrama
When a Los Angeles bank robber who strips his hostages starts staging violent scenes with them, the BAU must understand his fantasy before he kills again.
- 5
Aftermath
When a Dayton rapist who phones his victims before each attack suddenly changes targets, the BAU works out what he wants, while Elle struggles with the aftermath of her shooting.
- 6
The Boogeyman
As the BAU hunts a killer of children in a small Texas town, Hotch presses Elle over the shooting of the man who attacked her.
- 7
North Mammon
When three teenage soccer players disappear from a small Pennsylvania town, the BAU must profile a whole community before a deadline set for the championship game.
- 8
Empty Planet
A Seattle bomber who takes his name and mission from a science fiction novel targets technology, and the BAU must work out what he really wants.
- 9
The Last Word
A pair of rival St. Louis serial killers compete for attention, while an unexpected new agent arrives at the BAU.
- 10
Lessons Learned
With an anthrax attack days away, Gideon tries to reach a terror recruiter held at Guantanamo Bay while the rest of the BAU hunts his sleeper cell.
- 11
Sex, Birth, Death
When a troubled teenager tells Reid he dreams of killing prostitutes, the BAU must decide whether he is the D.C. killer or a future one, while a congresswoman pressures Hotch to keep the case quiet.
- 12
Profiler, Profiled
When Morgan is arrested in his hometown for a boy’s murder, the BAU has to clear one of its own, and the trail leads to the man who mentored him.
- 13
No Way Out
Called to a Nevada town where bodies missing a single rib have surfaced for years, the BAU closes in on the most prolific serial killer it has ever tracked, who has a hostage plan of his own.
- 14
The Big Game
When a couple is murdered after a Super Bowl party and the killing turns up online, the BAU hunts a killer on a biblical mission who seems to speak in several voices.
- 15
Revelations
With Reid held by a killer who lives as himself, his dead father and an avenging archangel, the BAU combs the man’s house and Reid’s hidden clues to find him before he is killed.
- 16
Fear and Loathing
When black teenage girls who love to sing are murdered in a New York suburb and marked with swastikas, the BAU sees past the hate-crime staging to a serial killer and clashes with a mayor afraid of its profile.
- 17
Distress
When men are found with snapped necks in a Houston neighborhood, the BAU tracks a combat veteran who believes he is back in Mogadishu and tries to bring him in alive.
- 18
Jones
When a New Orleans killer believed lost in Hurricane Katrina resumes a string of Jack the Ripper–style murders, the BAU and Detective Will LaMontagne Jr. decode the one word his father left behind.
- 19
Ashes and Dust
When an arsonist burns San Francisco families to death in their homes, the BAU traces him through a radical environmental group whose secretive, dying leader may be the key.
- 20
Honor Among Thieves
When Prentiss’s mother asks the BAU to help a Russian immigrant family whose father has been kidnapped and mutilated, the team finds that the mob, the ransom and the daughter are not what they seem.
- 21
Open Season
When young travelers vanish on the roads into Spokane and turn up dead in the Idaho wilderness, the BAU hunts two brothers who stalk people like game.
- 22
Legacy
When a Kansas City detective insists that dozens of homeless people have quietly vanished from his beat, the BAU must find a legal way in before a mission-driven killer strikes again.
- 23
No Way Out, Part II: The Evilution of Frank
When Frank Breitkopf kills a woman in Gideon’s apartment and leaves him under suspicion, the BAU hunts Frank as he targets the people Gideon has saved.