User Reviews

Disclaimer:I am no expert reviewer, I just need a show to binge watch and I'm going to Write a review for every episode I watch.

I mentioned in my previous reviews that I love episodes that let me as a viewer learn more about the agents past And this episode did an amazing job exploring Garcias past

I absolutely love Garcia I think she's just one of the funniest characters who's also so smart and loving making it impossible not to like her.

This episode was intense from beginning to end and did not have a dull moment. I loved the plot and writing as it showed how each of the team members respond differently to crisis. Reid, Emily, hotch, and Rossi are trying to gather information, While jj and Morgan take a more emotional side in this episode. I also loved the scene where Rossi was just like screw it I'm gonna stop this murderer and to do that I need to have the truth from Garcia while everybody else was may be a little too afraid to ask.

Morgan and Garcia's friendship is one of my favorite things about the show and the amount of effort that Morgan put in to protecting her was just so sweet to watch.

Not to mention that JJ was a total badass in this episode Willing to do anything to protect her family.

I loved the introduction of Kevin as a love interest I just loved watching them go back in forth the FBI database showing how intelligent they are.

I guess I just love this episode because I love episodes where the agents protect one another and you get to see them work really well as a team. I also liked learning that Garcia was a hacker that was recruited by the FBI and that she only did "illegal" stuff to help victims families.

Overall just a really great and sweet episode that shows how well written and awesome the characters are.

Penelope is a great episode of CM. Starting from the shock ending of the previous story, it takes us through Garcia's recovery (typically TV fast; pretty sure being shot would make you feel like trash for quite a long time, and then she underwent some fairly aggressive surgery too. Still, it's telly), solves the case and throws in a fairly redundant sub-plot of Garcia having encrypted the file with all the team's personal info in. (She is determined that after the Fisher King debacle, no one should be able to mine that data to use against them again. Frankly, such encryption of agents' personal info should be standard!)

There are lots of good character moments here. Garcia and Morgan finally say openly that they love each other. It's a great shame that the show wasn't brave enough to make this romantic love rather than leaving it as deep friendship.

We get an insight into how Garcia got the job she has, and we see how even relatively new recruit Rossi has come to appreciate Penelope; he gives her a slightly hard time here to get her to try to remember things about her attacker, but he's clearly leveraging his position as new boy to save the others from having to be the baddies.

There are a couple of problems. One is the vague air over the whole thing of victim blaming. Let's be clear: the ONLY person at fault here is the murderous cop. Garcia's flagging of the files, while not strictly allowed, would be nothing more than a slight irritation to the people concerned *if they aren't actual killers* and similarly, there wouldn't be a cop outside Pen's home if said killer hadn't shot her, and that cop wouldn't himself get shot if the killer wasn't a killer! Blame the killer, not the victim(s).

The biggest booboo though is having Garcia spout the stupidest platitude to ever exist, namely "everything happens for a reason".

No. It doesn't. If you want to believe this nonsense then you have to believe that every horrible thing that you ever see happen, from war, fire and flood, through pandemic to babies being born with disabilities or dying is not just horrible, horrible misfortune, but is somehow *meant* to happen. That's awful and it's untrue. Sometimes bad stuff just happens. There's no reason to it. In looking for a "reason" it's all too easy to end up blaming people for their own misfortune - what did YOU do, or eat to end up with that illness, for example?

And in THIS context, it means Garcia believing that all the horrible, painful, disgusting things she sees in her job every day have a reason for them too. Now, very strictly speaking they often do, in that the team can say the Unsub is acting due to triggers installed in childhood, or a particular mental illness. But we all know that's not what this silly platitude means. It's supposed to mean that there's something we can "learn" from it, or that something good will happen later, we just have to wait.

It's ridiculous and in this context especially it's really lazy writing and unworthy of the character.

The plot and acting is great, the episode is a memorable one but what I don't like is how they run morgan down because they can't call him, "where the hell is he" prentice shouts as if Morgan should have known Garcia was shot and ignoring them.. when he gets to the hospital they stop slating him and say "there's nothing you could have been doing here" then there's Garcia, getting away with murder again! She breaks the law and hides what she's up to from the team, she goes on a date because she was mad at Morgan for his comment about something being off with the guy she's seeing, then a cop gets killed protecting her and not a moment is given to the poor guy, after everything they even joke that her job is safe because the guy is dead and the investigating officers are now too shaken to look into her suspension.