‘Criminal Minds’ season 11, episode 7 review: A.J. Cook is back, hope for Aisha Tyler return
With Tara taking on a new job leading a research team for the director of the Attorney General, we wondered if we would ever see her return to the BAU unit on “Criminal Minds”. Also, JJ is coming back – is there room for them both? It looks like they have left the door open for Tara to come back part time here and there to work with the team and as happy as we are that JJ is coming back, we really like Tara too and would hate to lose her permanently.
Tonight’s episode brings us back to the season premiere where Morgan had a suspect that gave him a clue to what was happening next, but after giving up the name “the dirty dozen” to him and saying that there are four people involved in this, he starts coughing blood… turns out he’s been poisoned. While Garcia is looking into the information Morgan has, she sees that someone from the dirty dozen are track her and now she is frightened.
JJ is back and the group couldn’t be happier to see her! They printed off all of the baby pictures she sent them while she was on maternity leave and set them up all over her desk and are celebrating with champagne. She looks incredible and it’s hard to believe that she had just had a baby… like Garcia said, we need to know her secret! What we really liked about her return was that not only was everyone excited to see her (and so are we), but she asked about Tara and the team made mention that she’s very excited to meet JJ. We hope this means that there will be more Tara coming up in the future, because we came to really love her too. It seems that the network has left this open for a return for Tara Lewis and it’s making us excited to see JJ and Tara on screen together because we think there’s going to be a lot of great chemistry there and could play off each other well when it comes to the case of the week.
Rossi gets a call from Joy and she asks to meet with him. While she was writing a piece about violence on college campus and she notices a connection with some of the women. She ends up getting a hit on another woman that has gone missing and brings it to her dad to help. It was great to see Joy back and helping her dad on a case, but it was really heart breaking as well because we learned that Joy is personally attached to this case because she was attacked on campus too when she was back in school. She didn’t tell anyone, and a week later someone else got attacked and she feels responsible. They are able to close the case with a happy ending, but Rossi is worried that she is still holding onto the hurt. Rossi also learns that Joy has started using his last name on her articles and he is overjoyed.
We also had an update on Spencer and his mom: While JJ and Spencer are working on the case of the week, she asks about his mom and he reveals that the medication she is on for her schizophrenia isn’t working out and he’s getting really worried about her. JJ encourages him to put the case aside and focus on his mom, but he feels that he can do both, so he calls her after the case and tells her that he wants to come and visit her for a little while.
Normally we don’t get episodes of “Criminal Minds” that give us so many personal stories like this one did. We had a little bit from JJ, Rossi and Spencer and it was great to see everyone celebrating JJ and her baby. With a show that is as dark as this one can be, it’s nice to have something like a celebration happen on here every once in a while. Episode grade: B+
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