A Thousand Suns
Directed by Rob Bailey
Written by Sharon Lee Watson
Written by Sharon Lee Watson
Hotch: "If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the mighty one." The Bhagavad Gita.
An UnSub with a God complex hijacks planes by remote and crashes them.
This episode provides examples of:
- Boom, Headshot!: How Hotch kills the UnSub.
- Discriminate and Switch: When a suspect refuses to talk to the commander assisting the BAU (a black woman), Hotch asks her to let him interview the guy alone. She asks if it’s because of her race or her gender. Hotch tells her it’s probably both, but during the interview the man reveals that his distrust of her was primarily because of her being military.
- Evil Is Petty: Averted: When the team find out a woman who went on a disastrous blind date with the UnSub was on the first plane he brought down, they assume that was his motive. When cornered, however, the UnSub insists her presence on the flight was irrelevant.
- A God Am I: The B.A.U. classify the UnSub as a "mass annihilator" who gets off on the idea of playing God with the lives of hundreds.
- I Lied: The UnSub agrees to let the second plane he's trying to bring down land safely if the B.A.U. call off fighter jets scrambled to shoot it down as a last resort: once they do, however, he tries to crash it anyway and is promptly gunned down by Hotch and Morgan.
- Ironic Last Words: The UnSub drops the "Now I am become death" quote moments before being shot dead.
- Murder by Remote Control Vehicle: The UnSub crashes a plane by sabotaging it via remote control.
- Nephewism: Callahan is revealed to be raising her niece, after her sister and brother-in-law were killed in 9/11.
- Red Herring: The initial suspects are a local militia group whose leader is a disgraced U.S. Army officer with experience in using surface-to-air missiles to shoot down aircraft. They're arrested, but quickly found out to be uninvolved.
- Serial Killings, Specific Target: Toyed with. With his first strike on an aircraft, the UnSub kiils 151 people (passengers and crew i). The FBI notice that he did not personally know most of the victims, but one one of them was his former love interest who had rejected him nearly a decade before. Suggesting that he had a persoal motive for the mass murder. When confronted with this, the UnSub claims that her presence in the chosen aircraft was meaningless. He dies soon after, leaving it unclear if his statement was true or false.
- Title Drop: The opening quote from the Bhagavad Gita has Hotch drop the episode title.
- Rossi: "We knew the world would not be the same. Some people laughed. A few people cried. Most people were silent." J. Robert Oppenheimer.
