‘Criminal Minds’ season 10, episode 5 review: Was Thomas Gibson-directed ‘Boxed In’ a winner?

It is Halloween season, and when you have a show that is as scary as “Criminal Minds” is sometimes even when it is not October 31, then you can probably assume very well that they are going to go all out making sure that their themed installment of the show is a winner.

When it comes to “Boxed In,” we did definitely get a sense from start to finish that the show wanted to really cultivate something special. Thomas Gibson directed the episode, and even featured many of his family members in roles both on and off-camera. The story was chilling, and it went from disappearances to death and so much worse all under the lens of Halloween.

Was it entertaining? It was certainly well-paced, chilling, and action-packed to go along with it. The only fault that we would give it is that so much of the episode was a standard hour of “Criminal Minds,” and maybe we were hoping for something a little bit more and a little bit different. We got a little of it in the closing minutes, but we wanted it a little sooner.

Then again, this is a frequent frustration that we have with this show. We feel like the majority of the time, we feel like we’d appreciate more focus on the families and the character sin the BAU, and not the UnSub that they are targeting on a week. With that being said, that’s probably a personal thing, since the show knows what it is doing right now given the ratings and all of the success.

So with its whole “always love your children” message and the unearthing scene at the end, we’d say that Gibson helped to make this an above-average episode of the show. We would say that it is probably not a top 10 of all-time, but there’s nothing wrong with that. Grade: B.

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