Criminal Minds season 13 episode 12 review: Is a Penelope, Luke romance forming?

When it comes to getting some stories on our main character’s personal lives on this season of Criminal Minds it’s been like pulling teeth. Not everyone was crazy about the Spencer Reid prison storyline last season being such a huge arc on the show (personally we loved it since it gave Matthew Gray Gubler some meaty material to show us just how amazing he is!), so this season the show has returned to it’s roots. They tied up the Mr. Scratch story in the premiere and since then it’s been very little about our main characters and instead it’s all about the case of the week. Unfortunately outside of a select few unsubs like Jamie Kennedy’s Floyd Feylinn Ferell, there hasn’t been a really good unsub that stuck with us. We’ve had a guy who thinks he’s a pirate and tonight a guy who thinks he’s a werewolf.

The one thing Criminal Minds has excelled at this season is bringing in some really great guest stars, like Lou Diamond Phillips (who we loved on Longmire) and last week we had Max Adler from Glee. If they can keep up this kind of guest star momentum then we will be okay with some less than stellar unsubs.

Related – Check out what’s coming up on episode 13!

We want to talk for a moment about Garcia flirting with Luke over the phone in last week’s episode since we’ve been thinking about it all week. Criminal Minds has never really been a show to bring together characters in a shipping kind of capacity and while some people wanted to see Morgan and Garcia end up together, we were personally happy with the way it played out since there aren’t a lot of really strong male/female friendship on TV that don’t turn romantic. That being said we are starting to slowly board the Luke and Garcia ship after seeing how easily she was able to slip into flirting with him, but with Luke it felt different than with Morgan. There is some chemistry here and we don’t want to see Luke become the new Morgan that she ends up just having a flirty relationship with – we would actually like to see something a bit more over time.

Speaking of Luke dating, tonight he’s on a blind date with a woman named Lisa that his ex-partner fixed him up with. The date seems to be going quite well as they get to know each other until Garcia shows up to tell him that he has a case. As Luke goes to pay the bill, Garcia takes this as an opportunity to meet Luke’s date. When she has a chance to talk to Lisa alone she has her usual foot in mouth disease as she basically tells Lisa that she thinks Luke is attractive and smart.

So is Luke interested in Lisa? After a conversation with Matt about the date he admits that likes her quite a bit. He’s called her a few times and she won’t return his calls and the more she won’t talk to him, the more he falls for her (isn’t that always the way?). He tells Matt that he wasn’t open to dating before because of the job, but that he’s now starting to open up to the idea. Eventually she calls him and tells him that she doesn’t want to see him again. He tells her that he’s disappointed and she admits that she likes him, but that she knows he wasn’t honest with her at dinner and no good relationships start off with lies. So what exactly does she think he lied about? He told Lisa at dinner that he didn’t have children, but when Lisa hears Garcia tell Luke that he needed a sitter for his sweet little girl she thought that he had a daughter and lied. After clearing up that Roxy is his dog, they decide to give it a second date which goes much better than the first one.

CarterMatt’s Overall Thoughts

While not everyone may be on board with a Penelope and Luke romance, we are really starting to sail on this ship. To be honest, we have been ever since we first saw them together on the elevator. Garcia may want to push him away in fear of him becoming a replacement for Morgan, she’s also pushing him away from becoming something even more. We were never a fan of the Garcia hates Luke for no reason storyline, but this is a storyline we can get behind. It still may be a while for us to get there since this relationship with Lisa may be forming right now, but we are the patient type and don’t mind a slow burn.

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