‘Criminal Minds’ season 12 spoilers: How many major threats are still out there?

The 11th season of “Criminal Minds” left us with quite a big cliffhanger, and one that we’ve compared to “The 13 Ghosts of Scooby-Doo” in the past. After all, some of the most dangerous people to date were let loose back in to the world, and the team had to find a way to get them back behind bars. It was a cool method for the show to explore its own past, and take on threats that are a little more known to the viewers (and the team) than the standard UnSub of the week.

With that, we’re a little surprised to hear that when the show returns this fall, several of these threats will have already been re-arrested. Here’s what executive producer Erica Messer explained to Entertainment Weekly:

“There are still five out there when we come into the premiere … One of them is a guy Peter Lewis plays named Mr. Scratch. He is our baddie for the year. We will stretch him out and tell his creepy tales.”

There could be a couple of reasons why the show chose to take things in this particular direction. For one, the site reports that many of the other UnSubs were brought in by Luke Alvez, the new character played by Adam Rodriguez, and that may be the show’s way of introducing him to this world and the fans. Maybe there were also only so many actors who the show would get back to play a past Unsub. There’s a part of us that wanted a full season of re-capturing bad guys, but it feels more now like we could just have some sporadic ones over the course of the season mixed in with some standards.

For now, we are excited to see Mr. Scratch coming back, since this will give Hotch a lot of material this season. Hotch has a lot of unresolved issues with Mr. Scratch and he was an UnSub that bumped up the creep factor for sure.

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