Lucky (Season 3, Episode 8)
Premise: 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.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 3, Episode 8
- Unsub
- Floyd Feylinn Ferell (Jamie Kennedy)
- Location
- Bridgewater, Florida
- 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
- “Fantasy, abandoned by reason, produces impossible monsters.” (Francisco Goya, read by Morgan)
- Closing quote
- “God sends meat and the Devil sends cooks.” (Thomas Deloney, read by Morgan)
- Guest stars
- Michael Beach as Father Marks, Nick Searcy as Detective Jordan, Bailey Chase as James Colby Baylor, Kate Connor as Sheryl Timmons, Daniel Quinn as Bob Kelton
- Director
- Steve Boyum
- Writers
- Andrew Wilder
Summary
The Case
“Lucky” opens at a psychiatric hospital, where a doctor fails to stop the board from releasing a dangerous patient who has just turned 18. Years later, in Bridgewater, Florida, 19-year-old Abbey Kelton is found in a park, partly eaten by alligators, her throat cut and an inverted pentagram carved into her chest. Locals suspect a satanic cult, a notion Rossi once debunked, but the team sees a lone killer who uses Satan to excuse his urges. The ten fingers fed to Abbey before she died belonged to ten other women, prostitutes from nearby truck stops and rest areas, and the map of their disappearances centers on Bridgewater.
When choir member Tracey Lambert vanishes on a hike, Father Marks organizes a search, and the team uses the sign-in sheet as a suspect list. During the search Sheryl Timmons disappears. The body of Maria Lopez, missing for nine months, proves to have been frozen after death, and the team concludes the killer is eating his victims. Records at Hazelwood, the mental institution for Florida’s most dangerous patients, burned in a 1998 fire, but Dr. Nash produces notes that Dr. Jim Lorenz threw from his window before dying in the blaze. They describe a boy who bit flesh from his infant sister and believed a demon possessed him: Floyd Feylinn Ferell, now living under his middle name. A raid frees Sheryl, but Tracey is not there.
In custody, Feylinn talks of his recipes and a smart friend who speaks to him, and says he will tell only Father Marks where Tracey is. With the priest present, he reveals that Tracey is in everyone, since he fed her to the search volunteers, and Marks lunges at him.
The Team
Garcia fixes a coffee-shop stranger’s laptop, and James Colby Baylor asks her out. Morgan advises her to walk away if he seems too smooth; she turns down dinner, then lashes out at Morgan. Morgan asks Rossi to take the priest, but Rossi steers that interview back to him, and Morgan, hostile to Marks, tells him that as a boy of 13 he prayed for something bad to stop and God did nothing. After the case, Rossi calls the source of evil irrelevant to the job, and one of them allows that Reid was right: believing in God means believing in the devil.
The ending
Spoiler: Garcia does go to dinner with Baylor, and they talk about luck and coincidence on her doorstep. As she turns to go in, he tells her he has been thinking about this moment all night, and the episode ends with Garcia’s life in danger, a cliffhanger picked up in the next episode.
Why it stands out
- The killer’s initials, FFF, can be read as 666, since F is the sixth letter of the alphabet.
- A print of Francisco Goya’s “Saturn Devouring One of His Children” hangs among the posters in the young killer’s hospital room.
- Michael Beach, who plays Father Marks, later worked with Shemar Moore again in the film “The Bounce Back” and on “S.W.A.T.”