‘Criminal Minds’ season 11, episode 14 review: To catch a long-term kidnapper

“Criminal Minds” is a show with a rare gift: Even if sometimes they tell a story that is fairly straightforward and similar to some others that have aired over the years, they still find a way to deliver using a few key twists, strong performances, and a crisis that had a surprising turn at the end.

The biggest amount of praise we’ll hand out in this episode is to AJ Cook, who did a sensational job in this hour of being both protector and investigator to the case of a young woman who was kidnapped at a very young age, and then subjected to countless amounts of psychological torture, sexual assault, and so much more. It’s a harrowing story, but one that at least had a happy-enough ending in that she was reunited with her old family and started to remember the circumstances surrounding her kidnapping in the first place.

Did we see the shooting in the closing minutes of the episode coming? Not at all, and we suppose that this was more or less the point: The episode wanted to find at least some way to surprise us, and they certainly did by ending the installment in the way in which they did. The captor now seems to be dead, and of course we imagine there will be many questions out there regarding whether or not you would have wanted to do the same given the circumstances. We’re not going to put ourselves into the mindset of the average viewer of the show.

Do we wish still that there was more that happened here that satisfied the long-term narrative of season 11? Absolutely that would have been great, but we’re also not going to quibble too much with the best case-of-the-week that we’ve seen in 2016 so far. Grade: B+.

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