Seven Seconds (Season 3, Episode 5)
Premise: 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.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 3, Episode 5
- Unsub
- Susan Jacobs (Suzanne Cryer)
- Location
- Woodbridge, Virginia
- Starring
- 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), Haley Hotchner (Meredith Monroe), Jack Hotchner (Cade Owens)
- Opening quote
- “Nothing is easier than denouncing the evildoer. Nothing more difficult than understanding him.” (Fyodor Dostoevsky, read by Hotch)
- Closing quote
- “Fairy tales do not tell children that dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children that dragons can be killed.” (G.K. Chesterton, read by Hotch)
- Guest stars
- Ariel Winter as Katie Jacobs, Alexander Gould as Jeremy, Paula Malcomson as Beth Jacobs, Emmanuel Xuereb as Richard Jacobs, Salvator Xuereb as Paul Jacobs
- Director
- John Gallagher
- Writers
- Andi Bushell
Summary
The Case
“Seven Seconds” begins with a frantic 911 call from Susan Jacobs: her 6-year-old niece, Katie, has vanished at the Potomac Mills mall. A week earlier another girl, Jessica Davis, was taken from a mall and murdered. The mall goes into lockdown, and Agent James Franklin, who heads the bureau’s rapid deployment team, calls in the BAU. Cameras show Katie entering but never leaving, so the team treats the mall like a neighborhood and searches it in sections, knowing that abducted children who are killed usually die within hours. Garcia, working in the security office, finds seven seconds of footage of Katie leaving the arcade and heading north before she disappears.
Katie’s mother, Beth, makes a public plea. Katie’s cousin Jeremy, 13, has a panic attack and cannot remember anything until Morgan walks him back through the arcade, where he recalls that Katie wanted ice cream and he told her to leave him alone. Search dogs lead to the food court, where a necklace Katie wore turns up in the trash, its clasp torn. Katie said she found it at school, but it is real gold and stones, and the torn clasp suggests rage, which makes the case look personal. At her home the team learns she has been wetting the bed and acting out on her dolls, and suspects she is being molested by someone close.
Suspicion first falls on Jeremy, then on his father, Richard. Questioned, Richard knows his niece’s tastes but nothing about his own son, and the team concludes he gave Katie the necklace while abusing her. He denies he would ever hurt her.
The Team
In a short closing scene, Hotch is allowed five minutes with his sleeping son.
The ending
Spoiler: Attention turns to Susan, who once worked at the mall and split from the family before Katie vanished. She says she was having a lighter engraved for Richard, but he quit smoking a month ago, and the two have been separated. Confronted with what her husband did to Katie, she cries out for it to stop, and searchers find Katie in a storage closet, with no pulse; she is revived. Jeremy remembers Katie calling his mother’s name. Jessica Davis’s killer remains at large.
Why it stands out
- Emmanuel Xuereb and Salvator Xuereb, who play the brothers Richard and Paul Jacobs, are brothers in real life.
- Several agents wear shirts reading “C.A.R.D. Team,” short for Child Abduction Rapid Deployment.