Revelations (Season 2, Episode 15)
Premise: 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.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 2, Episode 15
- Unsub
- Tobias Hankel, “Raphael” (James Van Der Beek)
- Location
- 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), Diana Reid (Jane Lynch)
- Opening quote
- “There is not a righteous man on earth who does what is right and never sins.” (Ecclesiastes 7:20, read by Hotch)
- Guest stars
- Taylor Nichols as William Reid, Muse Watson as Mickey Bates, Bill Smitrovich as Detective Farraday, Remy Thorne as Young Reid, Cecelia Specht as Pam
- Director
- Guy Norman Bee
- Writers
- Chris Mundy
Summary
The Case
“Revelations” picks up at Tobias Hankel’s Georgia farm, where Morgan and Prentiss find JJ shaken after having to shoot the dogs, and Reid gone, apparently dragged into a cornfield. A sighting of Hankel asking for a motel two towns away proves a decoy. The team moves into Hankel’s house, where Garcia finds he spied on strangers through their webcams and logged each one’s sin. JJ and Prentiss learn from his old Narcotics Anonymous sponsor that Tobias abused Dilaudid, that his mother left when he was 7, and that his father, Charles, turned to doomsday preaching and beat him, once burning a cross into his forehead. Charles’s body turns up on the property, about six months dead, yet journals in his handwriting continue after his death. The team concludes that Tobias, asked by his father to kill him, split into three personalities: himself, his father and the archangel Raphael.
Hankel streams Reid’s beatings to the team and makes him pick, from people on webcams, one to spare; Reid picks Marilyn David, and Gideon phones to warn her, but defense attorney Mike Hayes and his wife, Pam, are slaughtered. When Garcia undercuts the spread of the murder video, Charles beats Reid until his heart stops, and Reid is revived with CPR. The timing of the posting narrows the search to a 17-mile radius. Raphael then orders Reid to choose a team member to die. He names Hotch, calling him a classic narcissist and citing Genesis 23:4. Hotch, who once argued with Reid over that very term, sees a coded message: the real verse is about burying the dead. A farmer’s report of slaughtered sheep, echoing Reid’s word “poacher,” points to an old plantation in Marshall Parish with a cemetery, a place Tobias’s journals warn him away from.
The Team
In captivity, Tobias drugs Reid, saying it helps, and Reid relives his childhood: his father, William, walking out on him and his mother, Diana; Diana reading him Proust; and, at 18, Reid having her taken to a hospital against her will. At the house, JJ blames herself for splitting up with Reid at the barn and insists on watching the newest murder video, saying she has no business in the field otherwise.
The ending
Spoiler: At the cemetery, where Tobias says he used to go to get high, Reid confesses to Charles that he sent his mother away. Charles answers with a verse from Exodus on cursing one’s parents and forces him to dig his own grave. As the team closes in, Reid ends the standoff with the single bullet in Hankel’s gun. Dying, Tobias asks whether he will see his mother again and apologizes. Reid, safe, asks for a moment alone.
Why it stands out
- This is the first of three episodes with Taylor Nichols as Reid’s father.
- Reid’s socks are mismatched when his shoes come off, a habit of Matthew Gray Gubler’s, who considers matching socks bad luck.
- Mandy Patinkin wore warm clothes for the final scenes, shot at 22°F, because he had a concert in New York soon after and did not want to get sick.