I think Reid wears grandpa sweaters because they remind him of his mum.
Thank you for my new head canon.
While Hotch/Reid is my OTP, Hotch/Beth is just so damn cute.
So going by all the notes, I’m starting to think confessing this was a bad idea. It seems I’ve run into the H/R fanatics LC was talking about.
I”m a fervent Hotch/Reid shipper but I do like Hotch/Beth on the show, just like you I think they’re cute.
If the writers decided to give Reid a boyfriend, and no, NOT Morgan but someone outside of the team, I think I could appreciate it too.
Walking into the office, JJ was pleased to find Hotch unoccupied. She’d just finished talking to the last couple to see their latest victims alive and was eager to update the unit chief. This case was looking to be a nasty one and she didn’t want to waste any time.
“Hey Hotch, I just talked to the Gentries. They were … “
“I don’t get it JJ.” Hotch interrupted, remarkably outside of his usual attentive professionalism.
“Sir?” She asked, confused. Hotch’s voice seemed laced with something she couldn’t identify. Some strange, out-of-place tension that she could swear was bitterness.
Without turning to her, the agent elaborated, “I’ve tried over and over again to see what he see’s, but I just don’t understand the appeal.”
Noticing for the first time that he was staring at a map of Georgia, JJ suddenly had a sinking feeling she knew what this was about.
‘Oh no. Not again.’“I mean, what more can I do?” Hotch continued, unaware of JJ’s heavy sigh or eye roll, “I talk to him, I read to him, I love him. And yet I, a living and breathing human being, am just expected to accept that I’ll never measure up to a sheet of paper?” He finished, waving a disdainful hand towards the offending article.
Walking up to the distressed man, JJ placed a hand on his arm, “Hotch, don’t do this to yourself. You knew about Reid’s … thing with the maps long before you two got together. It’s just a part of who he is.” Thinking for a second, she added, “It’s not even the weirdest part of who he is.” When he finally tore his eyes away from his perceived romantic competition to look at her, she smiled sympathetically, “I think you just need to let it go.”
Staring at her in that unnerving ‘I don’t need to blink because I’m the Unit Chief’ way that he was so fond of, Hotch argued, “How can I just let it go. How can I just accept that I’ll never be enough?”
Before JJ could answer, he turned his attention back to the lone occupant of the wall; eyes narrowed into daggers.Knowing that there would be no reasoning with him for a while, JJ set out to find Gideon or someone to pass on the information too.
She also had to make a note to have a frank discussion with Spencer because, after hearing her boss rather disturbingly mutter, “He’s mine you son of a bitch.” to a map, she realized that someone really needed to put a stop to this.
And soon.
Criminal Minds A family affair (7x16)
They are so cute >///<
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I loved this scene (it and the conversation between Aaron and Dave on the plane were the two things I unequivocally loved about the episode).* It actually points up why the rest of the episode was so damned frustrating, because this scene was exceptionally well-written. It conveyed a lot of information in a really short period: Beth knows what Aaron does for a living, she knows that it can wreak havoc with pre-established plans but that doesn’t seem to bother her personally so much as upset her on his behalf (“But you trained so hard”), they really do seem to live to tease/troll each other at every given opportunity (“To see me collapse at the finish line?” “Yeah, I need that”) and, most significantly, that they’d already talked about Jack and that up until this point, Aaron hadn’t been ready to introduce the two of them. I loved the flash of vulnerability - the tiny hint of hurt/disappointment - Bellamy Young brought to her reading of the line “I know Jack will be there”; you could tell that it bothered Beth, even though she was trying to hide it. The way she opened back up and brightened up when he said he’d love for her to meet Jack was wonderful. It was maybe a minute-and-a-half or so, but it told you a lot. And I just don’t understand how the person who was responsible for this scene (and that great exchange between Aaron and Dave on the plane, where they’re not talking at all about Aaron being ready for the triathlon) was responsible for the remainder of the episode, which was overwritten and overwrought, but also thoroughly underwhelming.
*I was less in love with the triathlon scene mostly because I don’t think the team should have been there. That plot point was never about the team or the team being a Family or anything like that. The triathlon was thematically significant for Hotch as an individual, as Aaron; it was about him having something for himself that opened the door for him moving on and getting another chance at happiness. Thematically and narratively, that scene should have just been Aaron, Beth, Jack and Dave (since Dave was the only member of the team who always actively knew about both Beth and the triathlon). On some level, I think Kimberly Harrison’s writer’s instincts told her that, which is why there’s no explicit introduction of Beth to the team as a whole. Harrison’s gut knew that the final image of that scene - that the emotional import of the scene - was just about Aaron, Beth and Jack, that is wasn’t about Hotch’s personal and professional lives coalescing. But the Team As Family is one of the overriding points the show’s trying to hit pretty hard this season, so the team got shoe-horned in anyway. But I think that’s why we don’t get the formal introductions of everyone to Beth - because the scene really wasn’t about the team at all, and Harrison knew that.
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You know how you don’t water your plants for a while and they fall over and get droopy? And then after a few days you water them again and almost immediately they perk right back up? (Yeah, whatever, I suck at maintaining living things.) When he said he wanted her to meet Jack, she perked up just like my plants do when I finally get around to watering them. Lame analogy, but she was wearing green, and her cup was green, and she’s sitting in front of all those plants, so it was the first thing that popped into my head.
I agree about the triathlon. I enjoyed it immensely as fanservice, but tonally and from a character perspective, the execution was even more awkward and unnatural and out-of-place than I thought it would be. The team didn’t even have anything to do since Hotch ran off to meet Beth right after he finished the race.
On the other hand, Harrison generally set up the team interactions so well that I’m willing to give her the benefit of the doubt there, so idk, maybe Hotch running off was the point. The only reason I can think of for their presence that would be relevant to character development would be to set up that shot of Aaron literally walking away from his team to spend time with his family. You know, in case there was anyone remaining who needed to be hit in the head with obvious!stick. But even if that was the point, there was probably a better way to do it. The whole team at the triathlon was so jarring, especially when half of them didn’t even want to be there.
Oh, but while I’m babbling, I think it would be kind of cool if Hotch didn’t really want anyone besides Rossi there, but the team insisted on coming because they thought Hotch was lonely and needed support/someone to cheer for him. And then they show up, some of them severely hungover, and Hotch blows them off to go spend time with his girlfriend. Hee! I really hope that’s how it went down.
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As I said to Kirsten earlier today, the triathlon scene isn’t as effective as it could have been because Beth meeting Jack and Beth meeting the team are both important milestones in Aaron’s story. The former is about him welcoming her fully into his personal life. The latter is about him welcoming her to the other side of him. Both of those moments should have been their own story beats. The team being at the triathlon fucked that up because for reasons I’ve already articulated, everything about the triathlon is about Aaron and Beth; her meeting Jack at the triathlon rightly had to take story precedence. But now, because the writers’ room decided the triathlon also needed to be a Team Moment, they’ve screwed up Beth meeting the team; they’ve lost that story beat forever because it’s only been alluded to based on the fact that she went to lunch with them – offscreen.* If they’d just kept the end of the episode confined to Aaron, Beth, Jack and Dave, not only would that scene have been stronger, more streamlined and more thematically consistent, but the show wouldn’t have lost the moment of Beth meeting the team; they could’ve saved that for a later episode and actually treated it with the importance it deserved.
Also, I just thought the team being there was sloppily handled because there was literally no set up for it. When the promo pictures first dropped, I just assumed that at some point in the intervening episodes between the release of the pictures and the airing of the actual episode, there’d be some mention made that the other members of the team besides Rossi even knew Hotch was training for a triathlon. I mean, sure, just because something doesn’t happen onscreen doesn’t mean it didn’t happen at all (i.e., we know that if the characters were real people, they have to sleep even if we don’t always see them doing so). So just because it was never mentioned onscreen that Garcia, JJ, Morgan, Prentiss and Reid knew about the triathlon doesn’t mean they were unaware of it. Still. If you’re going to make a big deal out of all of them being there to cheer Hotch on, it would have made sense to drop even a little hint that they all knew about it. Based on what we were shown, Rossi was the only person who ever knew but then suddenly, everyone’s there on the day of the race. And then that weirdness gets compounded by, as you said, Garcia, JJ and Prentiss all coming off like they didn’t even want to be there because they were all so hungover, in which case - then why are they? They didn’t have to be, especially since it was never established that they - or Morgan and Reid - even knew about it in the first place. I haven’t really had a problem with any of the Team As Family moments this season except for the one at the end of Proof, but this one didn’t work for me. Because like I said - the triathlon was never about the team or Hotch’s connection to it.
*FWIW, I don’t think Hotch ditched the team to go hang out with Beth and Jack. When he tells her that “we’re going to lunch” and asks if she wants to come with them, he gestures in the direction of where the team is standing. And it’s literally seconds after Reid asked and everyone agreed that they wanted to get something to eat. We’re not shown Hotch, Beth and Jack walking over to the team because the last shot of the episode needed to be just of the three of them, because the important emotional and narrative beat of the whole sequence is Hotch introducing Beth and Jack to each other
(which is why the team didn’t need to be there).
I disagree here, that triathlon was an FBI triathlon, as stated in 7x10, so I can’t see how the team could ignore Hotch participating in that event.
And given the number of FBI agents who were present (and not just the ones participating, but also the ones cheering and supporting the participants and the ones helping them, like the FBI woman at the finish line handling water to the contestants) it would have been weird if Hotch’s team hadn’t been there. It would have been unnatural to say the least.
I never thought for a single second that they didn’t know about Hotch participating in that triathlon, the possibility of them being unaware never crossed my mind to be honest.
The fact that the team was there was important, because it showed us that Hotch wasn’t bothered about being affectionate with Beth in front of his team,even if it wasn’t planed. He knew his team was here but that didn’t stop him from hugging Beth in front of the others. I think that was the point : Hotch being open about his relationship with Beth without making a huge deal about it.
What would have bothered me would have been the team not being present, or Hotch not desiring their presence here.
He was pretty happy to see them cheering him on when he arrived at the finish line and that’s what matters.
