‘Criminal Minds’ season 10 premiere review: Did Jennifer Love Hewitt live up to hype?

In the season finale of “Criminal Minds” season 9 we lost Alex Blake and we will be gaining a new character named Kate Callahan played by Jennifer Love Hewitt. We are hoping that this character will be something new and fresh and not someone here to replace Alex. Let’s take a look at Hewitt’s first appearance on the premiere and see what transpires.

The show threw the Kate character right into the middle of it all and we couldn’t be happier about her set up: She’s smart, sexy and strong as she takes out the bad guys with style. We also learn that she has a young girl living with her and wears a wedding ring (probably more on this  back story later).

Hotchner has been going through a stack of candidates to replace Alex’s position and finally lands on Kate based on her years of under cover experience. When brought in to meet the team, she fit in pretty much right away as some of the team was already familiar with her and her work and other’s she made instant connections with. We were hoping that there might be one team member she was going to have to work at to win over, but that was not the case.

What we really liked about this case of the week was that the “killer”, who was revealed very early on in the episode, turned out to not be the killer and was actually buying dismembered limbs (online) for his own excitement – very bizarre fetish case and not like anything we’ve seen on a crime show before.

What we didn’t like was the comment about people working as morgues or funeral homes making an “easy jump” into being a deranged killer. As a former funeral director, we recognize that there is a stigma about the profession that is difficult for the funeral industry to shake, and comments like these don’t help (don’t worry, we are getting off our soap box now).

The Tom Green look-alike who played the villain was on point creepy and we loved how he was so brutal, but actual had a moment where we felt sorry for him: We love layered villains like this! Normally these kinds of procedural shows tied up the case of the week, but it seems that they only caught one man in a much larger operation and we may see more on this case in the season.

We were a little worried that Kate was going to be a carbon copy of Alex, but this character is new and refreshing, so it makes it easy to accept her as a new member of the team. Great premiere and we are looking forward to seeing more from Jennifer Love Hewitt this season. Episode grade: B-

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Photo: CBS