The Big Game (Season 2, Episode 14)
Premise: 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.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 2, Episode 14
- Unsub
- Tobias Hankel, “Raphael” (James Van Der Beek)
- Location
- Atlanta, Georgia
- Starring
- Jason Gideon (Mandy Patinkin), Aaron “Hotch” Hotchner (Thomas Gibson), Derek Morgan (Shemar Moore), Spencer Reid (Matthew Gray Gubler), Emily Prentiss (Paget Brewster), Jennifer “JJ” Jareau (A.J. Cook), Penelope Garcia (Kirsten Vangsness), Haley Hotchner (Meredith Monroe)
- Opening quote
- “I didn’t have anything against them, and they never did anything wrong to me, the way other people have all my life. Maybe they’re just the ones who have to pay for it.” (Perry Smith, read by Gideon)
- Guest stars
- Don Swayze as Charles Hankel, Bill Smitrovich as Detective Farraday, Samantha Smith as Helen Douglas, Todd Grinnell as Dennis Kyle, Jaime Ray Newman as Lacy Kyle
- Director
- Gloria Muzio
- Writers
- Edward Allen Bernero
Summary
The Case
“The Big Game” begins on Super Bowl night outside Atlanta, Georgia, where Dennis and Lacy Kyle are killed in their home after their guests leave. Minutes earlier a frightened man whispered to a 911 operator that someone named Raphael meant to kill the homeowners as sinners who owned too much. Police arrive in four and a half minutes, too late, and find a verse from Revelation on the bed. The call reaches the team during a night out at a bar, with Haley Hotchner along; Gideon has skipped it for the Smithsonian, where he is shown an Audubon print of a mockingbird, a bird that can imitate dozens of species.
The BAU profiles a mission-driven killing team: the throat and artery wounds resemble the slaughter of livestock, suggesting a hunter or farmer, yet the killer left no prints, a care that deluded killers rarely show. Garcia then finds a video of Dennis Kyle’s murder spreading across the internet, shot by the Kyles’ own laptop camera, which the killer controls remotely, likely through software planted during a tech-support call. A voice reading from Leviticus adds what seems to be a third member. A second call from Raphael leads to the Douglas home, where a handyman is dead and Helen Douglas, cast as an adulterous Jezebel, has been taken. Recalling the mockingbird’s mimicry, the team considers that every voice may belong to one man who believes he is the archangel Raphael. A second video then shows her killed by dogs.
The dogs are traced to Tobias Hankel, the man JJ and Reid have been sent to see as a witness because he once reported a prowler near the Kyle house. At his isolated farm, Tobias seems nervous, says his father, Charles, lets no one inside, and denies ever making that call. As they leave, the agents work out that the call was a way to time the police response.
The ending
Spoiler: With no cell service to call for backup, JJ and Reid split up to search the barn. Reid ends up alone with Tobias, who insists he tried to warn everyone and could not stop the killer by himself. As Reid tries to calm him, his father orders Tobias to shoot Reid, calling him a devil, and Tobias protests that he does not want to. The episode ends there, to be continued in “Revelations.”
Why it stands out
- The episode aired after CBS’s coverage of Super Bowl XLI and drew 26.2 million viewers by preliminary count, the largest audience in the show’s history.
- Perry Smith, quoted at the start, was one of the two murderers whose crime inspired Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood.
- James Van Der Beek and Meredith Monroe, both from Dawson’s Creek, appear in the episode but share no scenes.