True Night (Season 3, Episode 10)
Premise: 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.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 3, Episode 10
- Unsub
- Jonny McHale (Frankie Muniz)
- Location
- Los Angeles, California
- Starring
- David Rossi (Joe Mantegna), 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
- “Superman is, after all, an alien life form. He is simply the acceptable face of invading realities.” (Clive Barker, read by Reid)
- Closing quote
- “The noir hero is a knight in blood-caked armor. He’s dirty, and he does his best to deny the fact that he’s a hero the whole time.” (Frank Miller, read by Garcia)
- Guest stars
- Parry Shen as Bobby Kim, Ellen Hollman as Vickie Wright, John Walcutt as Detective Brady, Craig Gellis as Glen Hill, Sara Van Horn as Helen Trestle
- Director
- Edward Allen Bernero
- Writers
- Edward Allen Bernero
Summary
The Case
“True Night” begins with a voice describing something inhuman that watches from the dark, as two more men are cut down in a Los Angeles alley: victims six and seven in two weeks. Detective Brady of the LAPD briefs Morgan and Reid while the rest of the team sits in traffic. The overkill points to one unsub in a psychotic break. Meanwhile graphic novelist Jonny McHale, creator of the series “Blue,” has abandoned it for a violent new strip about a character called Night. He flees his own signing moments after arriving, fires his agent, Bobby Kim, and keeps phoning the voicemail of his girlfriend, Vickie Wright, begging her to call back. Rossi even meets a bruised Jonny near a crime scene without suspecting him.
Every victim belongs to a gang, and the attacks grow bolder until six of the Twenty-Third Street Killers die in the home of their leader, Glen Hill, known as Reaper. Hill himself is gone, and blood trails out the back door. The team compares the early killings to Bernie Goetz waiting for a confrontation on the subway, and warns that the unsub will soon endanger people close to him. After JJ keeps the profile on the air, Bobby brings the police Jonny’s drawings, which match the crime scenes, and Jonny is arrested.
In interrogation, Jonny insists the pages are imagination. The team tells him that months earlier Hill’s gang attacked him and Vickie, leaving him nearly disemboweled, and that he is suffering severe post-traumatic stress with psychosis. One drawing matches no known scene. Pressed about Hill, Jonny relives that night: Vickie had just told him she was pregnant and he had proposed when the gang made her say yes, then forced him to watch as they killed her.
The Team
Garcia returns to work after her shooting, finds her system rearranged by Kevin Lynch, and shoos away a protective colleague who offers to skip the trip to Los Angeles to help her.
The ending
Spoiler: Flying home, an agent calls Jonny the first unsub who was not a bad guy, and wonders if anyone could become what he did. Back at the BAU, a teammate fixes Garcia’s chair, and she offers him a Frank Miller line about reluctant heroes, while Vickie’s recorded greeting plays once more.
Why it stands out
- Frankie Muniz and Ellen Hollman, who play Jonny and Vickie, had worked together before on “Malcolm in the Middle.”
- The episode was nominated for a 2008 Golden Reel Award for sound editing in short-form television music.