Paradise (Season 4, Episode 4)
Premise: When three highway crashes in Nevada prove to be staged murders, the BAU hunts a killer who traps traveling couples before he can claim another pair.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 4, Episode 4
- Unsub
- Floyd Hansen (Wil Wheaton)
- Location
- Sherwood, Nevada
- 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
- “A fool’s paradise is a wise man’s hell.” (Thomas Fuller, read by Hotch)
- Closing quote
- “Things are not always what they seem. The first appearance deceives many. The intelligence of a few perceives what has been carefully hidden.” (Phaedrus, read by Hotch)
- Guest stars
- William Mapother as Ian Corbin, Robyn Lively as Abby Corbin, David Andrews as Sheriff Bruner, Jack Laufer as Harold Sanders, Joe Unger as Bobby Jones
- Director
- John Gallagher
- Writers
- Debra J. Fisher & Erica Messer
Summary
The Case
“Paradise” follows the Corbins, Ian and Abby, on their drive home from a weekend in Reno, who pull into an empty roadside motel for the night. Meanwhile JJ stops the team as they head home: a Nevada sheriff suspects a crash outside Reno was no accident. Jonathan and Rebecca Gallen were dead before a tractor-trailer hit their car, and Rebecca had been raped and tortured. Garcia finds two earlier couples, one from Germany and one from Oregon, killed the same way on blind curves near Lake Tahoe and Carson City. Each couple had gone missing for two days, traveled without reservations and left no paper trail. To keep the killer confident, the team has the town go on believing the deaths were accidents, which means asking the shaken truck driver, Bobby Jones, to stay silent.
Rebecca’s father, Harold Sanders, learns his daughter was murdered and recalls her husband’s favorite donut shop, which leads to a diner in Sherwood, Nevada, where a waitress remembers the Gallens. At the motel Abby finds her underwear missing, a breakfast they never ordered and a door that will not open; they are locked in, and the strain sets them against each other. When the couple is reported missing, the team profiles a sexual sadist who works nights at a back-road motel, hates women because of an abusive mother figure and enjoys making one partner watch the other suffer. Hotch canvasses motels, including the Crest Cottages, where a man calling himself the manager, Wayne Dryden, says he has never seen the Corbins.
None of the dead women was wearing underwear, pointing to a fetish. Garcia links the pattern to a rape case in Selbyville, where Clint Barnes was convicted though his final victim, the only one killed, was really the unsub’s. A suspect list from that case leads to Floyd Hansen, a former burglar and sex offender who inherited the Crest Cottages when his father died; the real Dryden was fired months earlier. Hansen taunts Abby about her husband’s failure to protect her.
The Team
JJ, now pregnant, plays Beethoven for her baby on the jet, and Reid warns her to limit it to an hour a day.
The ending
Spoiler: The team searches the ten cabins and storms cabin 6, rescuing the Corbins; Ian is hurt and needs an ambulance but is expected to recover, and what becomes of Hansen is not spelled out. Hotch admits he talked to the killer and never saw through him, and a teammate tells him it happens to the best of them.
Why it stands out
- William Mapother and Robyn Lively guest-star as Ian and Abby Corbin; Lively is the sister of Blake Lively, and Mapother is a cousin of Tom Cruise.
- The jackknife in the first crash was a real stunt, not a digital effect: a stunt driver put the truck into a controlled jackknife on camera.