Our Darkest Hour (Season 5, Episode 23)
Premise: During a Los Angeles heat wave, the BAU hunts a killer who invades homes during rolling blackouts and always leaves one witness alive, and whose past crimes reach into the lead detective’s childhood.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 5, Episode 23
- Unsub
- Billy Flynn, “The Prince of Darkness” (Tim Curry)
- Location
- Los Angeles, California
- 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
- “And out of the darkness came the hands that reached through nature, molding men.” (Alfred Lord Tennyson, read by Morgan)
- Guest stars
- Eric Close as Detective Matt Spicer, Robert Davi as Detective Adam Kurzbard (credited as Eric Kurzbard), Linda Purl as Colleen Everson, Maxim Knight as Carter, Isabella Murad as Ellie Spicer
- Director
- Edward Allen Bernero
- Writers
- Erica Messer
Summary
The Case
“Our Darkest Hour” opens in a Los Angeles heat wave, as the city cuts power to neighborhoods in rolling blackouts; during one, a couple checks on a noise outside and comes back to find an intruder in the bedroom. At Strauss’s request, the BAU flies west: Gregory Everson, 56, was beaten and shot at home, and his wife, Colleen, was raped and left alive. The gun matches the rape and murder of two women downtown three days earlier, and officials fear a new Night Stalker. Detectives Matt Spicer and Adam Kurzbard of Newton division robbery-homicide lead the case, and Spicer, a media favorite, handles the press. Colleen, restrained after two suicide attempts, says she shut her eyes when the gun went off, the last thing her husband saw.
Stopped clocks show the unsub cut the power at the first scene; since then he has used the scheduled blackouts. Annie Danzi is killed next, and her young son, Carter, is made to stay in a closet through it, though his mother told him to close his eyes. The unsub leaves a misspelled message, and the profile describes an uneducated, sadistic loner, self-conscious about some flaw, who needs darkness to kill. The press dubs him the Prince of Darkness. Garcia traces him through blackout home invasions in every continental state over 26 years, more than 200 houses, starting in San Diego in the summer of 1984 and escalating from burglary to assault to murder. After he kills a couple and leaves their baby alive, the city calls off the blackouts.
Following his early path, the team finds a Santa Monica double murder: Joe and Sylvia Spicer, Matt’s parents, who he was told by his grandparents had died in a drunk-driving crash. A guided memory session brings back cigarette smoke, a stranger saying “Hello there,” his father being killed and his mother pleading. The team concludes that Spicer was the unsub’s first child survivor and that the killer now wants credit for shaping him.
The ending
Spoiler: Spicer’s daughter, Ellie, and his sister, Kristin, vanish from his house as the power fails across the city. Spicer and Morgan go in without backup and find the unsub holding Ellie. He forces Spicer to drop his gun and kneel, taunts him about his mother and sister, and makes Morgan promise that Ellie will be all right; Spicer tells Ellie he loves her and is shot. The unsub leaves with Ellie as Kristin begs to be taken instead, and Morgan vows to find him. The story is to be continued.
Why it stands out
- The season finale ends on a cliffhanger resolved in the next episode, “The Longest Night”; both episodes use only Leonard Cohen songs on the soundtrack.
- Tim Curry, known for playing villains, has rated Billy Flynn as the scariest of his roles because he is a believable human murderer rather than a supernatural one.
- Robert Davi and Eric Close both played FBI agents in earlier series: Davi led the profilers on Profiler, and Close starred on Without a Trace.