3rd Life (Season 3, Episode 12)
Premise: 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.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 3, Episode 12
- Unsub
- Ryan Phillips (Riley Smith), Taylor Coleman (Curtiss Frisle)
- Location
- Chula Vista, 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
- “No man or woman who tries to pursue an ideal in his or her own way is without enemies.” (Daisy Bates, read by Hotch)
- Closing quote
- “It is a wise father who knows his own child.” (William Shakespeare, read by Hotch)
- Guest stars
- Fredric Lehne as Jack Vaughan, Gia Mantegna as Lindsey, Michael Harney as Pat Mannan, Brian McNamara as Bruce Owen, Cheryl White as Lori Owen
- Director
- Anthony Hemingway
- Writers
- Simon Mirren
Summary
The Case
“3rd Life” opens in Chula Vista, California, where a girl’s body is found strangled with a belt, her face and hands destroyed. Two teenage best friends, Katie Owen and Lindsey Vaughan, had slipped out of a movie halfway through on a holiday weekend and never came back. A voicemail from Katie’s phone, cleaned up by Garcia, captures one girl begging her father for help while another calmly tells her not to fight or show fear. Played for the parents, it identifies the dead girl as Katie; her father, Bruce, refuses at first to believe it.
Lindsey’s bare bedroom, her father Jack’s wiped computer and a life story borrowed from a novel point to secrets at the Vaughan home. When agents suggest that Lindsey’s calm words mean she was coached or abused before, a scuffle with Jack ends with family friend Pat Mannan, gun drawn, revealing that he is a U.S. marshal: Jack and Lindsey are in witness protection, and Jack, a former killer for a Boston crime family, is to testify against its leaders. The team checks for hit men from Boston, but the kill site, an abandoned house strewn with beer bottles and cigarette butts, tells a different story. Nearby lies 18-year-old Doug Silverman, stabbed three times and covered in defensive wounds. The team profiles a drunken teenage gang ruled by an older dominant male who killed Doug when he wanted out, then dumped Katie and took Lindsey. Doug’s father recalls an older friend named Ryan, and Garcia finds Ryan Phillips, 28, expelled from the girls’ school years earlier.
Bruce recognizes Doug’s photo and asks Jack whether he can still do what he once did. Jack drives off in a stolen car and shoots another of the boys, Taylor Coleman, in the leg to learn where Lindsey is. Ryan, waiting for a gun that never arrives, keeps Lindsey captive and tells her she was the one he wanted all along.
The ending
Spoiler: Reid’s map of the gang’s activity points to Mayford High School, where he finds Jack holding Ryan at gunpoint while Lindsey urges her father to kill him. Reid reminds Jack of his promise to his late wife and asks whether he wants Lindsey’s life to be as violent as his own. As other agents arrive, a shot rings out, and Reid says afterward that he tried but failed. What happens to Jack now depends on how much his testimony is worth.
Why it stands out
- Lindsey is played by Gia Mantegna, the real-life daughter of Joe Mantegna.
- The closing line comes from Act 2, Scene 2 of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice.
- After Haley’s divorce filing in the previous episode, Hotch no longer wears his wedding ring from this episode on.