Amplification (Season 4, Episode 24)
Premise: When a weaponized anthrax strain kills visitors to a Maryland park, the BAU hunts the maker under a media blackout while Reid is exposed in the maker’s home lab.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 4, Episode 24
- Unsub
- Chad Brown (David Dean Bottrell)
- Location
- Annapolis, Maryland; Frederick, Maryland
- 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
- “It will become fine dust over all the land of Egypt, and will become boils breaking out with sores on man and beast through all the land of Egypt.” (Exodus 9:9, read by Reid)
- Closing quote
- “Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it.” (Helen Keller, read by Reid)
- Guest stars
- Tamlyn Tomita as Dr. Linda Kimura, Dan Lauria as General Lee Whitworth, MD, Miles Anderson as Dr. Nichols, Elizabeth Maxwell as Abby, Donald Sage Mackay as Senator Baylor
- Director
- John Gallagher
- Writers
- Oanh Ly
Summary
The Case
“Amplification” starts with a family and a young cyclist, Abby, at a park in Annapolis, Maryland. By the next morning, 25 people who were there have gone to emergency rooms and 12 are dead from a new, unusually fast anthrax strain. Under a media blackout, Fort Detrick’s General Lee Whitworth and the CDC’s Dr. Linda Kimura join the case. Reid tries a memory exercise with Abby, but the toxin has damaged her speech. Reasoning that the strain must have been tested first, Reid and Kimura turn up three earlier deaths logged as meningitis, all linked to a bookstore, the Book Front, which tests positive.
The team profiles a homegrown extremist from the science or defense world whose targets are personal. An angry 2002 hearing on bioterror readiness points them to Dr. Lawrence Nichols, later forced out of Fort Detrick. At his house Reid walks into a lab with white powder blowing through the air and seals himself in. Nichols lies dead from a blow to the head, dead two or three days, too long to have staged the attack, and Reid stays inside to look for a cure. A thesis marked in red ink tells him Nichols was mentoring someone, and Garcia identifies Chad Brown, a public policy student and former Book Front employee who failed Fort Detrick’s psychological screening four times. Kimura suspects Nichols hid the cure in his inhaler. Reid worsens on the way to the hospital.
At Brown’s house Prentiss and Rossi find a shed lab and light bulbs being tested as spore bombs. Brown proposed to a woman at the park and was refused. Whitworth guards the Washington Metro red line named in a Nichols study, but the team bets on rejection again and goes to Frederick, the train stop nearest Fort Detrick. Hotch and Morgan corner Brown at the station, and Whitworth pretends the Army wants to recruit him.
The Team
The blackout weighs on everyone. JJ longs to warn her family about Henry’s daily walks in Potomac Park but is told she can’t. Garcia struggles to stay hopeful, and Reid has her record a message telling his mother he loves her. Inside the lab he refuses any narcotic pain medicine. At Brown’s house Prentiss lies to a frightened neighbor, blaming toxic mold, and later asks whether it is naive to wish lying were never right. Hotch calls late to talk with his son, Jack.
The ending
Spoiler: Flattered, Brown gives up his bag and is arrested; Whitworth admits the profile was right. Reid wakes in the hospital with Morgan beside him. Abby and three other patients are recovering, the inhaler did hold the cure, and the strain is locked away at Fort Detrick.
Why it stands out
- Tamlyn Tomita guest-stars as Dr. Linda Kimura, the CDC pathogens chief, with Dan Lauria as General Whitworth.
- The case looks back to the 2001 anthrax letter attacks: Whitworth and the BAU argue over Dr. Steven Hatfill, the Fort Detrick scientist once named the prime suspect, whom the Justice Department officially cleared in 2008.
- One name on Garcia’s list of graduate students is “Ly, O.,” a nod to the episode’s writer, Oanh Ly.