Criminal Minds -- The Boy In Chains

It takes a lot to get me to cry at a TV show. Well, Cold Case used to get to me, when the dead finally got justice at the end of the show, coupled with a great musical score. This was the first time Criminal Minds made me cry.

A family is driving home when the father starts monkeying around. But it's no joke when they see a dirty looking teen in chains standing in the headlights of their car. At the same time another boy goes missing and the team believes that who ever had the boy in chains went out and found another boy to replace him.

I only started watching Criminal Minds regularly so I don't know about Morgan's past, but from what was said it seems it was child molestation. Anyway, Morgan tries to use his past experience to help him get through to the boy in chains who won't speak and is cowering in a corner. He eventually gets him to tell him his name: Angel Suarez. Morgan gets him to finally speak.

Meanwhile, the team learns a woman named Samantha Allan came forward about seeing a boy in chains 30 years ago, but when she spotted a picture of her father on the wall she quickly says she made a mistake and leaves. Later, Prentiss gets Samantha to reveal what she remembers seeing as a child. Her mother was sick and she went in the basement looking for her father and saw him doing something, then she saw a boy in chains in a truck, but refuses to believe her father is involved.

Rossi is skeptical that Samantha is remembering something that really happened, but Prentiss is positive it really happened. They get Sam to go see her father and make an excuse to look down in the basement, but when she goes down in the basement she finds nothing out of the ordinary there. Samantha ends up feeling horrible she suspected her father of something so horrible.

Meanwhile, when Angel learns his mother is coming to see him, he cuts his wrist. Luckily, Morgan arrives and gets him help. Eventually, Angel is reunited with his mother, who feels guilty for not reporting him missing, but they were illegals and she had her other children to think of.

The team figures out how JB is preying on these children and finding them. They hang out at one of his construction sites and he gives them rides on the machinery. That's how he settled on Billy Henderson as his next victim. That was how he chose Angel.

Eventually, the team finds where JB Allan was keeping the boys. Unfortunately, Billy Henderson isn't there when they find his lair. Sam helps them figure out where her father has taken Billy. They arrive just as JB has thrown Billy in a hole and in trying to bury him alive.

When Sam sees her sick and perverted father at the police station I thought she was going to grab a gun and shoot him. I was kind of wishing that she would. But this isn't Law and Order: Special Victims Unit where someone can easily grab a cop's gun and gun down a criminal.

So, apparently, every time JB killed one of his young captives, he built a new building over where he buried the child. So judging by the amounts of additions he erected on his own personal graveyard.

Of course, there's some unanswered questions. Like why did he keep Angel so long and Billy so little before he was going to kill him? He was kept so long in a small space he developed arthritis in his legs and he's only a teenager.

Sometimes some criminals are so vile that jail isn't enough punishment for them. JB Allan was one of those people. Yet death would be too good for him. Sometimes you think a little an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth sort of justice needs to be employed. Like how about they put JB Allan in some cramp dark place, chain him up and torture him for the rest of his miserable life.

On a bizarre note, the actor who played JB Randall I've seen before and it was driving me crazy where. I think it was on Roswell where he played a nice dad. I finally did an Internet search to see what else he played in.

It was a very sad episode. It made you cry when you think of all the boys who weren't lucky enough to escape from this monster. It makes you wonder how a father could be so depraved and evil. He really was a sick monster.