Open Season (Season 2, Episode 21)
Premise: 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.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 2, Episode 21
- Unsub
- Paul Mulford (Jim Parrack), Johnny Mulford (Jake Richardson)
- Location
- Boise, Idaho; Spokane, Washington
- 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
- “One man’s wilderness is another man’s theme park.” (read by Gideon)
- Closing quote
- “Wild animals never kill for sport. Man is the only one to whom the torture and death of his fellow creatures is amusing in itself.” (James Anthony Froude, read by Prentiss)
- Guest stars
- Laura Allen as Bobbi Baird, Kelly Overton as Ranger Lizzie Evans, Larry Sullivan as Sheriff Raymond Schaeffer, Gareth Williams as Tim Harrison, Kristin Alcala as Heather
- Director
- Félix Enríquez Alcalá
- Writers
- Debra J. Fisher & Erica Messer
Summary
The Case
“Open Season” begins in the woods with two brothers, Paul and Johnny, as Paul coaches Johnny to aim for the heart. Three young people from Washington state have been found dead in the Idaho backcountry: Courtney Jacobs and Shane Everett a year ago, and now Alex Harrison. Each has two wounds clean through the chest but no bullets, plus injuries from running for days. Garcia counts ten people in their early twenties missing around Spokane over five years, always in spring, their cars never found. Hotch, JJ and Reid set up in Spokane with the newly promoted Sheriff Raymond Schaeffer, and JJ coaches him through telling Tim Harrison that his son is dead. Gideon, Morgan and Prentiss head into Boise National Forest with head ranger Lizzie Evans.
Two sizes of the same boot print and lookout points above the death site suggest two killers shooting together, one wound apiece, and the wounds fit arrows from a compound bow. The profile describes two fit men, one strong and one weak, likely relatives, who hunt people for sport. Bobbi Baird, stranded on Highway 2 on her way to a job interview in Spokane, is reported missing by Lynn, who was expecting her. The brothers set her loose in the woods and tell her to run. She stumbles onto two camping couples; Joel and Taylor Brause are killed, and Luke and Heather grudgingly let her stay with them overnight while the brothers watch and wait for dawn.
A woman at a hunting store remembers the Mulford brothers, whose late uncle Joe left them a service station on Highway 2. There the agents find Bobbi’s Mustang and Alex Harrison’s car among many others; the brothers listened to police dispatches for broken-down cars. Hunting licenses back to 1980 suggest the uncle, relieved of military duty for hallucinations and delusions, began the killings and raised the orphaned boys off the grid to continue them. In the woods Luke is shot, Heather stays with him, and Bobbi runs on.
The Team
On a night out, JJ and her colleagues deflate a man named Brad who poses as an FBI agent to impress women, by showing their own badges. Prentiss describes her grandfather, who spent his last years living off the land in the French Alps.
The ending
Spoiler: Following tracks and smoke, Gideon finds Johnny by a fire with stab wounds and a woman nearby, dead from an arrow; Bobbi has stopped running and taunts Paul. Johnny says where his brother is, and agents find Paul dying. Bobbi survives. Afterward an agent admits that her question, how anyone could hunt people, still lingers, since the team must think like the killers; how different the two really are is left open.
Why it stands out
- Kristin Alcala, who plays Heather, is the daughter of the episode’s director, Félix Enríquez Alcalá; it was the first time the two had worked together.
- The idea of hunting people for sport goes back to Richard Connell’s 1924 short story “The Most Dangerous Game.”
- The manhunt plot owes its main idea to Richard Connell’s 1924 short story “The Most Dangerous Game,” in which a man hunts people for sport.