The Fisher King: Part 2 (Season 2, Episode 1)
Premise: 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.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 2, Episode 1
- Unsub
- Randall Garner, “The Fisher King” (Charley Rossman)
- Location
- South Boston, Virginia; Shiloh, 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), Diana Reid (Jane Lynch)
- Opening quote
- “The defects and faults of the mind are like wounds in the body; after all imaginable care has been taken to heal them up, still there will be a scar left behind.” (François de La Rochefoucauld, read by Gideon)
- Closing quote
- “It has been said that time heals all wounds. I do not agree. The wounds remain. In time, the mind, protecting its sanity, covers them with scar tissue, and the pain lessens, but it is never gone.” (Rose Kennedy, read by Reid)
- Guest stars
- Amanda Bernero as Rebecca Bryant, Anne Marie Howard as Celia Bryant, Josh Clark as Detective Casey, Jeff Marchelletta as Robert Greenaway, Brian Appel as Agent Anderson
- Director
- Gloria Muzio
- Writers
- Edward Allen Bernero
Summary
The Case
“The Fisher King: Part 2” picks up with the BAU following a quest set by an unsub who knows the team’s private lives and has forbidden outsiders. After the team goes to the press anyway, Elle, whom Agent Anderson only dropped at her door, is shot in her living room and manages to dial 911; her ID and gun are taken. A man calling himself the Fisher King tells Gideon the agents brought it on by breaking his rule. The girl in his video is Rebecca Bryant, missing for two years from South Boston, Virginia.
A verse from the music box reminds Reid of Chaucer’s “Parliament of Fowls,” which his mother read to him; the old spelling leads to John Fowles’s 1963 novel The Collector, which unlocks the book code. The decoded riddle points to a city where it is never night, and Reid has Diana Reid brought from her Las Vegas sanitarium into protective custody. A courier describes the man who paid him as badly scarred by burns. In South Boston, Morgan and JJ learn that Rebecca was adopted after a 1992 house fire killed most of her birth family, the Garners; Garcia finds that her burned father later spent years at Diana’s sanitarium.
Diana recognizes the voice on the tape as Randall Garner, a fellow patient, and Garcia’s trace ends with the same name. Garner sees himself as the Fisher King, the agents as knights and Rebecca as his grail. A photo Diana was sent leads the team to a house in Shiloh, Virginia, where Garner begs Reid, whom he calls Sir Percival, to ask the healing question. Reid asks whether he can forgive himself. Garner says he cannot, a bomb goes off and the house catches fire, but Rebecca is found chained in the basement and freed with a key.
The Team
In surgery, Elle imagines talking with her late father, Robert Greenaway, who tells her that fighting to live is her choice. She confesses that her last words to him, at 8, were that she hated him, and finally tells him she loves him. Hotch blames himself for not giving Anderson clearer orders.
Reid realizes the unsub’s knowledge of the team matches what he tells his mother in daily letters, which he admits he writes partly out of guilt for not visiting her.
The ending
Spoiler: Elle comes through surgery and is expected to recover, and Rebecca should be all right physically. Reid tells his mother she helped save Rebecca’s life; Diana, more interested in lunch, says she will lecture fellow patients on Tristan and Iseult. Garner’s fate is not mentioned.
Why it stands out
- The season 2 premiere is the first episode produced under CBS Paramount Television.
- Kirsten Vangsness, a guest star credited as “Also Starring” in season 1, is promoted to the main cast as Garcia.
- The book behind the code, John Fowles’s The Collector, is about a man who kidnaps a girl hoping she will fall in love with him, mirroring the case.