YMMV / Criminal Minds: Beyond Borders

• Aluminium Christmas Trees:
  • While the IRT is fictional, the FBI has international field offices and does occasionally investigate crimes abroad, either because Americans are involved or because foreign law enforcement requests their help.
  • A serial killer with delusions of Mayincatec godhood? It has happened. Check Adolfo Constanzo and Magdalena Solís. They were arguably worse than the guy in the show.
  • Anyone who thinks that a female Indian mob boss is unrealistic has not heard of Phoolan Devi.
• Growing the Beard: Season 2 is superior in every aspect to Season 1. It's a shame the show got cancelled just as it was finding its footing.
• Jerkass Woobie: Most UnSubs here are Tragic Monsters to varying degrees.
• Narm:
  • The voiceover at the beginning of each episode, saying how "68 million Americans leave the safety of our borders every year" as the map moves to this week's episode's location. The "safety of our borders" part is ironic and darkly hilarious, given that it's a spin-off of Criminal Minds. Sure, America's totally safe with all those Serial Killers running around. The Spaniard dub changes it to just "leave our borders" (and also "if danger strikes" to the less sensational "if an incident happens").
    • When applied to real life the line is damn near laughably ignorant, as you are far more likely to come to harm from others inside your country's borders than outside.
  • The episode "Il Mostro" for Italian viewers. So, so much.
• Narrowed It Down to the Guy I Recognize:
  • While mostly averted, this turns up in "Iqiniso" when Arnold Vosloo, probably the most famous white South African actor alive, appears as the concerned father of the victims of the week. Of course he's playing a larger part in solving the crime than any other victim relative.
  • Jim Beaver, known for "Supernatural" and a previous apparition in Criminal Minds, plays the unsub in "Blowback."
• Paranoia Fuel: Word of God is that the show isn't about scaring Americans out of travelling abroad, but the promos sure love the words "Americans go missing/get in trouble abroad every year."
• Special Effects Failure:
  • In the premiere, except for a couple scenes, the use of green screen is very obvious and the stock footage of streets clashes terribly with the sets the characters walk in. There is even a brief shot where a sandy, desert-like hill can be seen in the background of what's supposed to be humid, lush Thailand. It gets better in later episodes, but the car scenes are often a problem.
  • A Season 2 episode features a clearly CGI lion.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • Technically, there is nothing in the premise that forces every episode to be about middle class American tourists being victimized by foreign serial killers, as even the mother series has non-serial killer episodes once in a while. The IRT could just as well assist in stand-alone crimes (such as the FBI did in the Amy Bradley and Natalee Holloway cases), cases where the serial killer is suspected to be American (as it happened in the Lisbon Ripper case) or in which no Americans are involved at all (as it was proposed in the Monster of Florence, Rostov Ripper and Mataviejitas cases, even though the FBI ultimately only intervened in the first and only to elaborate a profile). In fact, showing that the IRT's intervention is requested by the local police force rather than the local American embassy (and then worming itself into the local LE's investigation unwarranted) would eliminate a lot of the show's criticism.
    • However, the show finally started to level things out since the UnSub of "Iqiniso" was a white South African seeking revenge for the murder of his sister by attacking her murderer's children twenty years later, while the UnSub of "The Ballad of Nick and Nat" is suspected to be American.
  • "El Toro Bravo": The killers "see bulls as superior" and target foreign runners that "disrespect" the bulls by touching them during the Running, taking selfies or waving a newspaper. The reason these are banned in reality is not because of some abstract sense of "respect" for the bulls, but pure security concerns: A runner that has one hand occupied while actively attracting the attention of an already panicked bull just makes himself likelier to get injured, and also increases the risk of the bull getting separated from the herd, losing sight of the guide oxen at the front and becoming both unpredictable and dangerous to other people. Making the killers out to avenge someone who was hurt because of a foreigner's imprudence during the Running would be both more believable and also get rid of the (lampshaded) Plot Hole caused by the police not knocking on the door of the one local celebrity with a very obvious reason to hate Australians and Americans, one minute after Australians and Americans began to be murdered in town.
    • The guy that loosely inspired this episode robbed foreign women in El Camino de Santiago and disguised himself as a pilgrim when he (correctly) thought that the police was after him. Put that in the context of northern Spain's mountainous, forested geography and the ongoing exodus of Spaniards from rural to urban areas, leaving more and more abandoned villages behind, and you could easily upgrade him to a nomadic Serial Killer without resorting to Toros y Flamenco cliches.
    • Said case involved an American woman on a spiritual journey/reawakening being victimized by a Spanish irreligious killer (he had been the Anarchistic flavor of squatter in his youth, for example). The episode goes the cliched route instead and has the Spaniard as a Catholic zealot stereotype and his American victims as the ones not concerned with religion. This is a lost chance to subvert expectations by having the killer be someone who targets religious people because of having a vendetta against them, maybe exploiting the victims' expectations that he must be religious because he is Spanish to gain their trust, even.
    • The secondary plot of a Catholic priest with some link to the killer stonewalling the investigation. The episode just happened to come out between the uncovery of two scandals involving the Catholic Church in Spain: one was the kidnapping of babies in Catholic hospitals between The '30s and The '80s, who were then sold to rich families who could not have children, and whose real mothers were told they were stillborn; the other your typical Pedophile Priest cases from the 80s. Neither is the Start of Darkness of the unsub. The priest is a Good Shepherd and his reluctance to talk is because he was told about the murders under secret of confession.
    • 2016 was precisely the year when the sanfermines had its most notorious crime in years, a gang rape. Had they waited a bit, they could have used this location for an Aileen Wuornos knock-off episode in a future season (and have six victims in a single killing spree standing for the six bulls that die in a bullfight, instead of two sprees of three victims standing for the three acts of bullfighting, in two consecutive years). However, this plot was used in the Cuba episode instead.
  • "The Harmful One" has a fleeting mention to the murder of two British backpackers in a Thailand beach resort, Hanah Witheridge and David Miller. There is strong evidence that the post-2014 coup Thai government railroaded two innocent foreigners into prison (and eventually the death penalty) in order to close the case ASAP and keep Thailand's appeal as a tourism destination intact. The dropped plotline involving Lambert's brother may have been a loose dramatization of this case, for all we know.
  • Suicide is an extreme taboo in Muslim culture, to the point Muslim majority countries have the lowest suicide (or reported suicide) rates in the world - but you would never guess that from "Denial," whose premise is a seemingly Muslim Egyptian woman spree-killing men she blames for her husband's suicide, then killing herself when cornered. Compare the infamous 1999 EgyptAir crash, where the American investigators found conclusive evidence that pilot Gameel al-Batouti had committed suicide by crashing the plane on purpose, but were forced to leave it as "undetermined" because their Egyptian colleagues and authorities (nevermind al-Batouti's family) would simply not admit that. It is also well documented that many Muslim suicide bombers are young, suicidal men who are convinced to "martyrize" themselves as an acceptable alternative to "pointless" suicide. The episode could have incorporated this by making the unsub be in denial about her husband's suicide and convincing herself that he had been murdered by the other guys, with her delusion being fueled by the police listing his death as an unsolved murder despite evidence of suicide. This way, the "Denial" title could have applied to the unsub as well as the victim's mother who doesn't want to admit her son's homosexuality.
    • This could also be a good contrast to the episode "Whispering Death" that aired back to back with it, whose starting premise is the fact that suicide is considered honorable in Japanese culture and the police will close a case as suicide without a second thought.
• The Woobie: The unsub in "Paper Orphans" suffered a psychotic break after she had a miscarriage, her husband died in the earthquake, her two younger children died in the following cholera outbreak, and her eldest daughter was abducted and possibly raped/murdered. As Clara puts it, this offender doesn't have as much a stressor as a lifetime of them.

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