North Mammon (Season 2, Episode 7)
Premise: When three teenage soccer players disappear from a small Pennsylvania town, the BAU must profile a whole community before a deadline set for the championship game.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 2, Episode 7
- Unsub
- Marcus Younger (Tom Schmid)
- Location
- North Mammon, Pennsylvania
- Starring
- Jason Gideon (Mandy Patinkin), Aaron “Hotch” Hotchner (Thomas Gibson), Derek Morgan (Shemar Moore), Spencer Reid (Matthew Gray Gubler), Jennifer “JJ” Jareau (A.J. Cook), Penelope Garcia (Kirsten Vangsness)
- Opening quote
- “It’s not so important who starts the game, but who finishes it.” (John Wooden, read by JJ)
- Closing quote
- “The ultimate choice for a man, in as much as he is given to transcend himself, is to create or destroy, to love or to hate.” (Erich Fromm, read by JJ)
- Guest stars
- Mimi Michaels as Brooke Chambers, Kayla Mae Maloney as Polly Homefeldt, Kelly Kruger as Kelly Seymour, Lisa Waltz as Judy Homefeldt, Jason Beghe as Sheriff Yates
- Director
- Matt Earl Beesley
- Writers
- Andrew Wilder
Summary
The Case
“North Mammon” begins on the night of a high school pep rally in a football town, as soccer players Brooke Chambers, Kelly Seymour and Polly Homefeldt stay at Brooke’s house while her father is away. A man threatens Polly by name, and the three end up locked in a dark space underground, where their captor tells them two can leave alive if they choose one to die. Five days later Polly’s mother, Judy, reaches JJ through JJ’s aunt and begs for help, and the police chief, Jeff Yates, sends an official request. Kelly and Polly left their parents word-for-word identical messages about a road trip lasting until Friday, the night of the state championship game, so the team believes it has until then.
With no forced entry, the team profiles a patient planner from inside the close-knit town. Cigarette butts at a lookout across the street carry the DNA of the girls’ soccer coach, Don Haas, and Brooke’s father, Peter Chambers, attacks Haas in public, revealing that he got Haas cleared years earlier after a Pittsburgh arrest for soliciting an underage prostitute. Video shows Haas at the pep rally, though. The girls’ jerseys turn up behind a motel where Chambers, supposedly away on business, meets a male lover once a month. Both men, the team decides, were framed by someone who resents them. Underground, the starving girls turn on each other, and while the feverish Brooke sleeps, Kelly persuades Polly that Brooke should be the one to die.
The gathered parents trade accusations until JJ tells them they are doing what the unsub wants. Brooke’s phone then comes back on just outside, where Brooke and a blood-covered Polly are found; Kelly is dead. A parent recalls that the men all played on the town’s last championship team, and when JJ shows Polly a photo of that team, Polly identifies Marcus Younger, the garbage collector who found the jerseys. He was the team’s star until he wrecked his knee in that title game and lost a scholarship to Notre Dame.
The Team
JJ, who grew up nearby in East Allegheny and captained her own varsity soccer team, brings the case to the unit herself and insists the athletes would never run off. Afterward she explains that a college scholarship was her only way out of small-town pressure, and when a colleague praises her work and asks about training as a profiler, she says she prefers being the person families and detectives can turn to.
The ending
Spoiler: Yates and the agents find Marcus at home. He insists he never touched the girls; he only showed them that they would turn on each other, as the town turned on him after his injury.
Why it stands out
- This is the first episode without Elle Greenaway; the credits reflect her absence, and a clip of her and Hotch at a bomb explosion was altered to remove her.
- The girls’ choice echoes the Andes plane crash, which one of the girls cites, and the 1884 case R v Dudley and Stephens, in which shipwrecked sailors killed and ate the youngest of their party and were convicted of murder.
- Jason Beghe, who plays Yates, later starred as Sergeant Hank Voight in “Chicago P.D.”