Criminal Minds (TV Series)

False Flag (2017)

Kirsten Vangsness: Penelope Garcia

Quotes 

• Penelope Garcia : [opening quotation]  "Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth." - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

• Luke Alvez : Garcia, have we confirmed that this truther's even legit?

  Penelope Garcia : Of course I've confirmed that, and she is. Melissa Miller has a pretty popular truther podcast, especially around Roswell. She promotes all kinds of conspiracies, but her cause celebre is staged shootings.

  Matt Simmons : So she thinks the reason we have gun violence, it's been faked by the government as a pretext to revoke the Second Amendment. Nice.

  Emily Prentiss : It's another reason not to do this.

  Jennifer Jareau : Or it's the exact reason to do this. What was tonight, other than a staged shooting, and why is she the only one willing to cooperate?

  Luke Alvez : Unsubs like to insert themselves into the investigation. Profile skews male, but she could be a partner.

  Dr. Tara Lewis : Okay, then if she isn't involved, I can get her to talk. I'm a forensic psychologist. I'm trained to outwit and outsmart clinical psychopaths far more dangerous than her.

  Emily Prentiss : But if we're wrong, she's going to post her podcast. Then what? Then we're the next example of fake news.

• Penelope Garcia : It's time to get out our tinfoil hats, my fine furry friends, because we are on our way to Roswell, New Mexico, aka Ground Zero of conspiracy theorists because of a certain alien crash... I mean weather balloon.

  Emily Prentiss : The sheriff there has had two suspicious deaths over the last forty-eight hours. Both victims were members of the truther movement.

  Penelope Garcia : Yes, which is a group of conspiracy theorists who share their out-there beliefs online with each other. No judgment here. Uh, let's look at our fist victim, Bryan Behar. He believed that the flouride they put in our drinking water is a mind control agent meant to keep us docile. He died by drowning. "People drown all the time", you say; I say "not in their own aquariums".

  Matt Simmons : So the M.O. matches his conspiracy. Is that a coincidence or a choice?

  David Rossi : That depends on victim number two.

  Penelope Garcia : Uh-huh. That's Carl Lee. He's a JFK conspiracy nut who was shot once in the throat.

  Jennifer Jareau : As anyone who saw the Zapruder film knows, that's where the first bullet struck Kennedy.

  Luke Alvez : Carl Lee we can definitively classify as a homicide, but the drowning death, that could have another explanation.

  Emily Prentiss : That's why we'll be treating this as an equivocal death investigation. Wheels up in twenty.

• Penelope Garcia : It looks like our two victims were talking via encrypted texts. It took a while to break, and their conversation was short, but its content made my perfectly-shaped eyebrows go "Hmm?". Carl says to Bryan "I think I'm getting close to finding out who it is", to which Bryan says "Maybe we should go the police", and Carl says "What good would that do?".

  Matt Simmons : Well, that could be motive. Whatever Carl was close to finding could have killed him and Bryan.

  Luke Alvez : At first glance, yeah. But we're talking about conspiracy theorists here, and a lot of them suffer from association fallacy. Let's say you thought Lyndon Johnson had JFK killed in order to escalate the war in Vietnam.

  David Rossi : That's ridiculous. Everybody knows that...

  Emily Prentiss : No, no. We're not getting into that again. Go ahead, Luke.

  Luke Alvez : Uh... my point is that if you thought the government could do that, then you were likely to believe that they'd brought down the towers on 9/11. Pretty soon you're down that rabbit hole and you see everything as a plot.

  Jennifer Jareau : So maybe these guys weren't into anything. Maybe they just talked themselves into a group delusion.

  Emily Prentiss : Okay, we should investigate that when we land. And since the police are mentioned so prominently on the text, they might know what the victims were looking into.

  Matt Simmons : Chicago Mob, right? Killed JFK.

  David Rossi : He gets it!

  Emily Prentiss : No, don't get him started, Matt. Next he'll be showing you YouTube clips.

• Penelope Garcia : The devil's in the pitchforky little details, my friends. I-I matched the formatting of the text on poor doomed Carl to a local publisher. He goes by the name of Bob Orci. He writes conspiracy-related commentary for books like "Behold a Pale Horse", "Protocols of the Elders of Zion", "Mein Kampf".

  Jennifer Jareau : Books the truthers love.

  Emily Prentiss : Right now, we need as much evidence as possible to prove that Doug is our unsub. If he bought the book we found on Carl, it strengthens our case. Luke, you and Matt bring in this publisher.

  Luke Alvez : I'm on it. Garcia, can you help me out with an address?

  Penelope Garcia : Yeah, I'm... I'm working on the physical address of Mr. Orci as we speak. The thing is he lives so far out there that it's not a place where there are street numbers on the houses, so the closest thing to a physical address I can get you is...

  Melissa Miller : [the scene dissolves to the interrogation room]  Route 3, Greenwood Way?

  Jennifer Jareau : You know him?

  Melissa Miller : By reputation. He's not a truther. He's an anarchist. He's dangerous.

  Jennifer Jareau : How dangerous?

  Melissa Miller : He has fertilizer lining his place as an explosive.

  Jennifer Jareau : [jumping out of her chair and opening the door]  Prentiss!

  Melissa Miller : Wait. That far out in the desert, there's no cell service. You're not gonna reach them by phone.

• Penelope Garcia : So let's talk about weird science. There are certain types of coral that, when they come into contact with bleach, release something called a palytoxin. So the coral, it, like, emits this aerosol, and then that aerosol causes the throat and the lungs to close and the eyes and the skin to burn.

  Jennifer Jareau : Well, that's the mystery chemical weapon the M.E. couldn't place.

  David Rossi : So let's play this out. He pours in the bleach, coral spits out its toxin, and mother nature does the rest.

  Jennifer Jareau : It's not murder. It's an accident.