Criminal Minds Season 3 Episode Guide
Plot summaries for every episode of the third season of Criminal Minds, which aired on CBS from September 2007 to May 2008. Gideon walks away from the BAU and best-selling profiler David Rossi comes out of retirement to take his place, while Hotch’s marriage falls apart and Garcia becomes a target herself.
Season 3 recap
The third season, which aired on CBS between September 2007 and May 2008, begins with the unit coming apart. Jason Gideon narrates “Doubt” through a letter written at his cabin, admitting he has lost his footing since his friend Sarah’s murder; Erin Strauss then suspends Aaron “Hotch” Hotchner. In “In Name and Blood” Gideon disappears, leaving the letter for Spencer Reid, while Hotch asks for a transfer and Emily Prentiss resigns, though both end up on a Milwaukee case anyway. Derek Morgan, Jennifer “JJ” Jareau and Penelope Garcia stay on, and in “About Face” Joe Mantegna joins as David Rossi, a retired profiler and best-selling author who agrees to serve under Hotch.
Rossi hints at unfinished business, and in “Damaged” it turns out to be a 1988 double ax murder in Indianapolis whose three orphaned children he has never forgotten; he traces the killing to a carnival boss’s son and gives the family house back to the siblings. Garcia is shot on her doorstep after a date that closes “Lucky,” and in “Penelope” the team, though barred from the case, unmasks the shooter as a deputy who shoots people so he can play the rescuer. Other cases include a dead killer’s son copying his father in “Birthright,” a graphic novelist driven to violence by a gang attack in “True Night,” with Frankie Muniz, and a Miami killer who takes over his victims’ identities in “In Heat,” possibly inspired in part by the Black Doodler killer.
Hotch’s family life unravels: Haley leaves him in “Scared to Death” and files for divorce as “Birthright” ends, and he later explains the split to his young son, Jack. Ten months clean, Reid goes to his first recovery meeting in “Elephant's Memory,” where Michael Ironside plays the senior lawman who lends him a medallion, then walks unarmed into a standoff with a bullied teenager. Garcia begins dating fellow analyst Kevin Lynch. JJ stops hiding her relationship with Will LaMontagne Jr. in “In Heat,” and at the close of “The Crossing” she reveals by phone that she is pregnant.
“Lo-Fi” leaves the season unresolved. Midday shootings in New York lead the team to a home-grown terror cell that times police responses and has been watching the investigation through hacked cameras. Will proposes to JJ, and Morgan learns he is the leading candidate to run the New York field office if the case goes wrong.
Episodes
- 1
Doubt
When three brunette students are stabbed to death on an Arizona campus, the BAU arrests a security guard who fits its profile, until another student dies while he is locked up.
- 2
In Name and Blood
With Gideon missing and Hotch and Prentiss on their way out, the BAU and Section Chief Strauss hunt a Milwaukee killer who cuts out women’s hearts and uses his young son to lure them.
- 3
Scared to Death
When a mass grave in Portland reveals victims killed in wildly different ways, the BAU tracks a psychiatrist who poses as a phobia specialist and uses each patient’s worst fear against them.
- 4
Children of the Dark
When Denver-area families are wiped out in their homes, the parents beaten and the children given lethal injections, the BAU hunts two foster brothers acting out their own abuse.
- 5
Seven Seconds
When a 6-year-old disappears inside a Virginia mall a week after another girl was abducted and killed, the BAU searches the locked-down building and finds the danger is closer to home.
- 6
About Face
Women in the Dallas area find “missing” fliers with their own faces on them before a killer takes them, and the BAU’s new veteran, David Rossi, clashes with Hotch over how to draw him out.
- 7
Identity
After a militia-minded kidnapper kills himself during a traffic stop, the BAU hunts the submissive partner who helped him imprison women and is now becoming him.
- 8
Lucky
A ritual murder in a small Florida town leads the BAU to a cannibal who blames Satan, while Morgan confronts his lost faith and Garcia is courted by a stranger.
- 9
Penelope
When Garcia is shot after a date, the BAU, barred from the case and with Garcia suspended, works out that her shooter is a lawman who believes she has uncovered his murders.
- 10
True Night
A string of brutal killings of Los Angeles gang members leads the BAU to a graphic novelist whose new pages show the crime scenes and whose mind has broken since a gang attack.
- 11
Birthright
When women start vanishing around Fredericksburg in the pattern of an unsolved 1980 killing spree, the BAU needs the original sheriff and a survivor who has denied her ordeal for decades.
- 12
3rd Life
When two teenage girls disappear from a movie theater and one turns up dead, the BAU must sort out whether a witness’s violent past or a local gang of drunken boys is to blame.
- 13
Limelight
When a storage unit sold at auction turns out to hold a sadistic killer’s journals, the BAU works with a fame-hungry Philadelphia agent to find the man who wrote them.
- 14
Damaged
On the 20th anniversary of an unsolved double ax murder in Indianapolis, Rossi goes back to the case that has haunted him, and the team follows him to find the killer and the person who has been sending the orphaned children toys.
- 15
A Higher Power
When grieving parents in a Pittsburgh neighborhood start dying in apparent suicides, the BAU hunts a killer who believes he is releasing them from their pain.
- 16
Elephant's Memory
When a small Texas town loses a father and two officers to a bombing and ambush, the BAU hunts a bullied teenager while Reid struggles with how closely he relates to him.
- 17
In Heat
When a killer in Miami begins taking the lives and identities of gay men traveling alone, the BAU races to find him, while JJ’s hidden romance with Will comes out.
- 18
The Crossing
While JJ fights to protect a young lawyer from a stalker who has followed her from Atlanta, Hotch and Rossi help a Boston prosecutor judge a wife who shot her husband.
- 19
Tabula Rasa
When a suspected serial killer wakes from a four-year coma claiming to remember nothing, the BAU must rebuild its old case to convict him at trial.
- 20
Lo-Fi
When random shootings spread fear across New York, the BAU joins a strained FBI and police task force and begins to see a terrorist plot behind the killings.