The Uncanny Valley (Season 5, Episode 12)
Premise: Women in Atlantic City are drugged into months of conscious paralysis and dressed like dolls, and the BAU traces the killer to a childhood scarred by abuse.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 5, Episode 12
- Unsub
- Samantha Malcolm (Jennifer Hasty)
- Location
- Atlantic City, New Jersey
- 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
- “Anything you cannot relinquish when it has outlived its usefulness possesses you, and in this materialistic age a great many of us are possessed by our possessions.” (Mildred Lisette Norman, read by Reid)
- Closing quote
- “In life, unlike chess, the game continues after checkmate.” (Isaac Asimov, read by Reid)
- Guest stars
- Jonathan Frakes as Dr. Arthur Malcolm, Rosalie Ward as Bethany Wallace, Jeffrey Johnson as Detective Marty Cotrone, Gregory Marcel as Karl Wallace, Valeri Ross as Linda Jackson
- Director
- Anna Foerster
- Writers
- Breen Frazier
Summary
The Case
“The Uncanny Valley” begins with a guard’s night rounds at an Atlantic City, New Jersey, carousel, where Rita Stuart, 25, is found posed on the merry-go-round. She and the first victim, Stacia Jackson, 29, left at a playground, had nothing in common, yet both vanished two months earlier. Their nails and hair had been done and they wore new chiffon dresses sewn to fit, and drugs that block nerve signals had kept them paralyzed but conscious until a stroke and a brain hemorrhage killed them. With no sign of sexual assault or other violence, the team profiles a woman with medical training who does not intend their deaths.
Two more petite women, Cindy Amundson and Maxine Wynan, were each taken a day before a body turned up: the unsub replaces each captive with a woman of matching build. A woman whose wheelchair ramp is broken lures a stranger who stops to help into her van. Mary Newsome’s body then turns up with a wig stitched to her scalp, a method used on porcelain dolls, and Bethany Wallace, a diabetic last headed to the dry cleaners, is reported missing; her husband, Karl, fears for her without insulin. The profilers decide they are hunting a collector replacing lost dolls with living women. JJ learns the hand-sewn handkerchief hems are the unsub’s signature, and a doll collector names the Valois line of the late 1980s, whose maker held a contest that ended when entries hinting at abuse went to police. One entry, with the same hem, was made by Samantha Malcolm, who was given electroshock treatment from age 10 by her father, Dr. Arthur Malcolm, who runs a youth facility called New Lives.
Rossi and Reid question Malcolm. Spotting toys kept on a high shelf, each tied to a girl he treated, the agents accuse him of sexually abusing Samantha and using electroshock to keep her silent, and with his former patients as possible witnesses he gives up where she lives. Samantha had gone back for the dolls she left in his office and found he had given them to another girl.
The Team
Reid returns to playing chess against a boy after a break. When a co-worker, the best player he ever faced, quit, Reid kept playing through game after game instead, and came to see every one as a variation on one pattern.
The ending
Spoiler: At her house Reid speaks gently to Samantha, who still defends her father, and offers her the dolls. She agrees to go with the officers once he promises that no one will take her dolls away, and medics are called for the captive women. Later Reid is back at the chess table with the boy.
Why it stands out
- Jonathan Frakes, Commander Riker on Star Trek: The Next Generation, guest-stars as Dr. Arthur Malcolm, and Garcia jokes that Samantha was doomed like a red-shirted ensign in Star Trek.
- The co-worker Reid used to play chess with is former series lead Jason Gideon, who played chess with Reid until he left in season 3.
- The title refers to the uncanny valley, a term coined in 1970 by Japanese robotics researcher Masahiro Mori for people’s unease at figures that look almost, but not quite, human.