Distress (Season 2, Episode 17)
Premise: 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.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 2, Episode 17
- Unsub
- Roy Woodridge (Holt McCallany)
- Location
- Houston, Texas
- 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)
- Opening quote
- “Our life is made by the death of others.” (Leonardo da Vinci, read by Gideon)
- Closing quote
- “If there must be trouble, let it be in my day, that my child may have peace.” (Thomas Paine, read by Hotch)
- Guest stars
- Nick Chinlund as Max Weston, Joanna Going as Dana Woodridge, Kent Faulcon as Det. Fuller, Sandi McCree as Jolene, Juan Ramírez as Edward
- Director
- John F. Showalter
- Writers
- Oanh Ly
Summary
The Case
“Distress” takes the BAU to Houston’s Fifth Ward, a neighborhood with heavy gang and drug violence, where a homeless man, a construction worker and a security guard have been killed within 48 hours, each by a broken neck, with no other wounds and no witnesses. With Detective Fuller, Gideon and Morgan clear a teenage vandal, Kelvin, whom the guard chased off that night, and the team finds that someone had been sleeping in the empty building next door. With demolition crews working day and night as the area is redeveloped, the team suspects a displaced homeless man guarding his patch. A worker killed in a sewer, where the unsub had set up a new sleeping spot, suggests he attacks anyone who intrudes.
The unsub then attacks a man taking out his garbage but stops when the man’s young daughter screams, and asks her why she is crying; she describes a tall, dirty white man wearing a wedding ring. Satellite images Garcia compares show an SOS laid out in debris on the roof of the guard’s building, and the team concludes the killer is a combat veteran caught in a dissociative state from post-traumatic stress. A missing-persons report leads to Roy Woodridge, a former Army Ranger and security consultant. His wife, Dana, and his best friend, fellow veteran Max Weston, describe years of nightmares and panic at noise and burning smells. Max reveals that in Mogadishu in 1993, as the two hid after an ambush, a boy of about 11 or 12 aimed a rifle at him, and the team concludes that Roy is reliving killing that child. Reid works out that a building implosion near Roy’s broken-down truck set off the episode.
The Team
Reid is short-tempered throughout. He bristles when told Prentiss will help him with the geographic profile, alarms a shelter administrator by suggesting the killer could be in the room, and, when Prentiss asks what is wrong with him, says she hardly knows him.
The ending
Spoiler: Garcia learns that a two-way radio was stolen from a construction truck, and the team persuades Fuller to hold off on a grid search. When Roy radios in with a code phrase the two men devised, Max answers; Roy asks for extraction and marks his position with three flags, which Garcia finds by satellite. The agents arrive posing as security executives, but when Roy sees a boy and takes him for a threat, the rescue turns chaotic, and afterward Roy asks only whether the boy is all right. The team regrets how it ended. Gideon slips away, and he is found back in the now quiet ward, where talk turns to how long people have waged war.
Why it stands out
- Holt McCallany guest-stars as Roy Woodridge, an ex-Army Ranger whose delusions turn the people around him into Somali soldiers, with Nick Chinlund as his friend Max Weston.
- The Mogadishu backstory draws on Operation Gothic Serpent, the 1993 mission recounted in Mark Bowden’s book Black Hawk Down and the 2001 film.
- In a close-up of the Houston map, the name of series creator Jeff Davis appears.