Fans Call Out Criminal Minds Hypocrisy: It's All About the Drama, Not the Loyalty
Is the BAU really as close as they claim to be?
Criminal Minds: Evolution has revived the beloved profilers team together with their mission to figure out and take down serial killers and captivating group dynamics.
The revival came with a few changes which gave more time to look into the personal lives of the main characters. Probably, one of the most repeated notions in the Evolution apart from "pandemic" and "COVID-19" is "family."
The team is really committed to making viewers believe they are a close-knit group that genuinely cares about one another. However, fans notice that it has not always been the case.
In the previous seasons, the unit was more about talking about their loyalty to each other than actually doing something to help a teammate in need, one of the fans noted on Reddit.
"The team loves to preach family, but as soon as something happens, they back off," the fan started a discussion.
The author of the unpopular opinion gave several examples that proved their point. First of all, the whole storyline of Elle Greenaway who was with the BAU for the first two seasons of Criminal Minds seemed more than an oversight from the team. Elle never psychologically recovered after being shot by an unsub, but the team not only let her return to the team but also put her in a position to re-live her trauma making her bait for a serial rapist.
This triggered Elle's downward spiral and she eventually killed the unsub in cold blood and resigned from the FBI.
Another example is Spencer Reid's infamous drug addiction arc which his teammates seemed to utterly ignore.
"Allowing Reid to spiral into drug addiction and recover on his own [is another example]," the fan wrote. "They helped Strauss later on with her alcoholism, but not him."
Other examples given by the author and commenters included:
- the team ignoring the fact that Emily Prentiss missed therapy sessions while still being shaken up after the whole Ian Doyle thing;
- nobody checking on Gideon when he was missing;
- Hotch getting stabbed and the team dismissing it as "he's probably just asleep."
Taking all these examples into consideration, the BAU no longer feels like the close-knit family they claim to be. However, some commenters noted that the majority of examples were from before they really switched up to being family. Fans think it was Rossi's entrance that changed the team dynamics.