The Internet Is Forever (Season 5, Episode 22)
Premise: The BAU hunts a hacker in Boise, Idaho, who studies women through social networks, plants cameras in their homes and streams their murders to an online audience.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 5, Episode 22
- Unsub
- Robert Johnson, “Watcher 89” (Reece Rios), Austin Chapman (Ned Schmidtke)
- Location
- Boise, Idaho
- 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
- “The single biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it has taken place.” (George Bernard Shaw, read by Hotch)
- Closing quote
- “The Internet is the first thing that humanity has built that humanity doesn’t understand, the largest experiment in anarchy that we have ever had.” (Eric Schmidt, read by Rossi)
- Guest stars
- Jonathan Goldstein as Detective John Fordham, Sarah Lieving as Lucy Masters, Matthew Rocheleau as Scott Weldon, Deborah Puette as Louise Hightower, Peggy McClellan as Allison Kittridge
- Director
- Glenn Kershaw
- Writers
- Breen Frazier
Summary
The Case
“The Internet Is Forever” begins with the BAU reviewing three women who have vanished from their homes in Boise, Idaho, roughly two months apart: Paula Renmar, Samantha Rush and Dorris Archer. There is no forced entry or stray DNA, and nobody reports the women missing for days, because each one’s social networking account announced a trip the morning after she disappeared, posts the unsub wrote himself. Dorris’s alarm was disarmed with her own code, and her trained guard dog vanished with her. Her partner spots rearranged photographs, and agents find marks showing that small cameras were mounted throughout the house. Garcia recovers a video of Dorris being strangled, filmed from the killer’s own camera and watched live by a chat room audience, and traces his signal to the victims’ own wireless networks, routed through dozens of proxy servers.
The team concludes the victims share a narrow facial geometry that likely mirrors the killer’s own face, and that he keeps the bodies to gaze at. At JJ’s press conference, a reporter asks about that resemblance, a leak that goes out live, and the angry unsub kills Allison Kittridge, 29, on camera in daylight. Garcia is ordered to tag the chat room’s viewers instead of chasing his signal. At Allison’s house, agents find a fiber-optic line where she had DSL: the killer gets inside by offering free fiber installation. The cable company names a fired worker, Mac Jones, but that identity was stolen; the man is really Robert Johnson, once arrested for possessing torture videos. Viewer Scott Weldon, caught with child pornography, gives up the handle Watcher 89, while appliance dealer Austin Chapman insists he barely uses computers.
The Team
Watching Allison die while racing to trace the stream leaves Garcia shaken. She tells Morgan she wants to see the killer suffer and then frightens herself; he answers that this is a good thing. She also notes that hackers’ loyalty to their handles is how the FBI once caught her.
The ending
Spoiler: Watcher 89 has hacked about 20 networks, and filtering for single women with the right face points to Lucy Masters. Agents find her house empty and a camera recording them, and a stream from her network shows her inside a frosted walk-in freezer. Chapman, whose business restores appliances, is confronted as its source and gives up the address after being warned that his grandchildren will one day find his crimes online. Garcia cuts the unsub’s connection, agents save Lucy, and Johnson is arrested beside the bodies of Dorris and Allison, insisting his followers understand him.
Why it stands out
- Hotch’s early joke asking Reid whether he joined a boy band was ad-libbed by Thomas Gibson.
- Ned Schmidtke guest-stars as Austin Chapman, the accomplice of the unsub Robert Johnson.
- The team’s profile compares the killer’s hunger for permanence to real killings that live on online, such as a journalist’s murder and the stoning of an Iranian dissident.