52 Pickup (Season 4, Episode 9)
Premise: A former motel killer reinvents himself as a nightclub charmer, and the BAU must work out what a pickup-artist guru taught him.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 4, Episode 9
- Unsub
- Robert Parker (Gabriel Olds)
- Location
- Atlanta, Georgia
- Starring
- David Rossi (Joe Mantegna), Aaron “Hotch” Hotchner (Thomas Gibson), Derek Morgan (Shemar Moore), Spencer Reid (Matthew Gray Gubler), Emily Prentiss (Paget Brewster), Penelope Garcia (Kirsten Vangsness), Jordan Todd (Meta Golding)
- Opening quote
- “The minute people fall in love, they become liars.” (Harlan Ellison, read by Prentiss)
- Closing quote
- “Cleanliness becomes more important when godliness is unlikely.” (P.J. O’Rourke, read by Rossi)
- Guest stars
- Currie Graham as Viper, Courtney Ford as Austin, Joanna Cassidy as Mrs. Holden, Keri Lynn Pratt as Ashley Holden, Kimberlee Peterson as Melissa Foster
- Director
- Bobby Roth
- Writers
- Breen Frazier
Summary
The Case
“52 Pickup” brings the BAU to Atlanta, Georgia, where socialite Vanessa Holden, 25, went home from a club with a stranger who cut open her abdomen, left her to suffer for hours and then slit her throat. A year earlier two prostitutes died the same way in cheap motels, with bleach, ammonia and trash bags set out in a triangle and traces of the cleaners under their nails: the killer makes victims clean up their own deaths. The team profiles the two sets of murders separately. Witnesses at the club describe a flashy dresser in a fedora whose costume draws the eye while hiding his face, and the jump from motel prostitutes to a wealthy woman suggests he has remade himself, perhaps through a pickup-artist course.
That leads to Paul Thomas, a seminar teacher called Viper, who refuses to hand over his student list, taunts Morgan and flirts with Prentiss. Another woman, Becky Williams, falls from an eighth-floor window after meeting a man in sunglasses, and the agents conclude his disguises screen a mark near his left eye. Melissa Foster, a former prostitute, comes forward: a year ago she gave him that scar, he called her “the help,” and the mess, not the pain, drove him off. While Morgan coaches Reid on talking to women and Reid charms bartender Austin with a magic trick, Prentiss and Todd confront Viper at a club. He boasts that his first exercise is to punish the confident girl who once rejected you, so the unsub must have known Vanessa.
Mrs. Holden remembers a cleaning woman’s son, Bobby, caught spying on Vanessa as a child, whom she struck before firing his mother. That night a mishap leaves a palm-reading customer needing to clean up, Austin leads him to the back, and she vanishes. Garcia matches Viper’s students named Robert against mothers in Fulton County and finds Robert C. Parker. SWAT bursts in while Parker is forcing Austin to scrub the floor, and she is saved. Inside the agents find Parker’s bedridden mother, hooked to a dialysis pump issued ten months earlier: the second trigger behind his change.
The Team
To win over the grieving, uncooperative Holdens, Jordan Todd invents an older sister lost in a car crash; her file says she is an only child. Hotch reprimands her for lying on the bureau’s behalf and orders everything through him. After the case he tells her Prentiss praised her work, notes she guessed early that Vanessa knew her killer, and says he trusts her judgment again.
The ending
Spoiler: Austin, recovered, tells Reid she has quit bartending and plans to take up magic, and the visit closes with a card trick hidden in a package.
Why it stands out
- Gabriel Olds guest-stars as killer Robert Parker, with Currie Graham as rival pickup artist Paul “Viper” Thomas and Joanna Cassidy as Mrs. Holden.
- Courtney Ford, who plays Austin, later played the sorceress Nora Darhk on DC’s Legends of Tomorrow, which gives Austin’s plan to take up magic an extra wink.
- Thomas Gibson and Cari Shayne (Det. Harding) had earlier starred opposite each other as lovers in the 1997 TV movie The Inheritance, based on a Louisa May Alcott novel.