We open in LA, CA. We got some funky music playing with some dark exterior shots of LA. We pull back and realize that we are following a yellow taxi cab through downtown LA. We hear a voiceover of a man monologing about how disgusting people are, “you are all just animals pretending to be something you aren’t.” We realize that the monologuer is the taxi driver.

He pulls up on a dark street, and a young woman knocks on the window of his cab and asks if he’s on duty. He tells her that he’s not on duty, but she begs him and tells him that it’s cold out, and she forgot that the LA public transit stops running at a certain time. Then, the taxi driver experiences a flashback. We see flowers, a clothesline, it is all very aesthetic. The unsub then tells her to get in and she’s al “this must be my luck night,” and he’s all “sure is.”

We cut and we see Prentis walking arriving home, at her apartment building. She goes upstairs and she looks SO GOOD. Her apartment has a security alarm and she turns it off. She immediately walks into her bedroom and opens a safe. Inside the safe is an envelope with what looks like classified information. We see passport and files with pictures of Prentis, but most of the information has been redacted so we can’t really tell what they contain. We also see a photo of her friend Sean, who alerted her that Ian Doyle had escaped from prison. There are other photos of other people we don’t know, and we must assume that they must have worked with Prentis during her Interpol days. Her cat, Sergio, startles her by jumping into her lap. As she’s petting Sergio, she realizes that he’s wet, and she panics and thinks that someone (maybe Ian Doyle) has broken into her apartment.

She creeps around her apartment with her gun, still talking to Sergio, looking for evidence of a break-in. In one of the rooms she finds an open window, and she calls the cat sitter, who confirms that they were the one that left the window open. Just as she is starting to relax, she gets a call from an unknown number. They don’t leave a message after she sends them to voicemail. These voicemail machines are such a good feature in tv/movies, and our modern phones just don’t have that theatricality in them anymore.

So Prentis puts weights on her windows so that no one can open them from the outside, and places a booby trap in front of her front door as well. My girl is paranoid, and I don’t blame her. She also sits ready with her gun in front of her front door – she is ready for someone to try to break in.

Presumably, the next morning, the team assembles in the round table room, sans Prentis. Morgan asks where Prentis is, and Reid says that her car was not there this morning. Garcia gets up to call Prentis and ask for an ETA, but Prentis finally arrives. Morgan cracks a joke about Prentis having a “long night,” and Prentis tells him coldly to mind his own business.

Garcia starts the presentation by telling the BAU about their latest case in LA. Three women were abducted and murdered in the last couple of weeks. All three women were white, from different parts of the city, and socio-economic statuses. All of them were abducted and held for 24 hours before being dumped in public spaces. All three were drowned but then transported and dumped somewhere else. They were also drowned in methanol… which is… strange. Finally, if that wasn’t weird enough for you, each woman also had a square of flesh removed from the bottom of one foot.

Cut to the unsub- a man in STEM. We see him with test tubes in a laboratory doing some sort of science project.

On the BAU jet, we learn more about methanol. Methanol is highly toxic to humans. Even in small quantities, it can cause blindness and is fatal. However, it has many uses; antifreeze, rocket fuel, and is used in the making of a lot of different chemicals. It is also interesting because none of these victims were sexually assaulted, but given the damage done to the foot, it seems very focused and as if he has a plan. The BAU wonders if the skin patch is a trophy of sorts. But that doesn’t seem right because, once removed, the skin would just wither and dry out

Now we get another monologue from the unsub, accompanied by a montage of the unsub driving around in his taxi. He complains about the smells of the “guinea pigs” as he drives around.

In LA, we meet DETECTIVE BAILEY, who is working on this project. He explains they have nothing and essentially just having a really hard time.

Back with the unsub- he is parked, and another passenger gets into his taxi cab while talking on the phone. The unsub immediately has an averse reaction to her and tells her to get out. She refuses, and he starts screaming at her. When she still won’t get out, he gets out of the car and she finally gets out but threatens to “report him.” He does not seem to care at all.

At the morgue, the mortician talks to the team about how each victim was “drowned” in the methanol. Each victim must have soaked in the methanol for a substantial amount of time. He also says that the edges of the foot wounds were jagged on the first two victims, but the third one was much cleaner – meaning the unsub got more confident. The mortician also says that the removal of skin happened post-mortem (thank god). All three women had chloroform in their systems. However, none of them showed signs of chloroform on their bodies – it must have been inhaled or aerosolized.

Now we get an intense cleaning montage of his car by the unsub. Love a man who cleans!

Back at LA headquarters. Reid finds out that you can buy large quantities of methanol fairly easily in CA, so that does not bode well for narrowing down the profile. The most recent victim (the girl we saw at the beginning of the episode) clocked out over past 1am, and normally took the train to and from work. However, due to the timing, the public transit was closed, so she would have needed an alternate room home. The BAU deduce that it would have taken too long to walk, so they quickly zero in on the unsub being a taxi cab driver.

We now see a young blonde lady get into The taxi. She’s being friendly and chatty, and the unsub is being a huge buzz kill. The “sense memory” stuff starts again once he gets a whiff of her. He locks her in the car, closes the partition, and begins blasting her with aerosolized chloroform. She passes out. He drives her to his lair/lab in a secluded location.

We cut to Garcia answering a call from Morgan. He asks her to focus on the taxi driver angle and look at the taxi cab drivers who picked up fairs in the area where the 1 am victim was abducted. Garcia finds seven car companies, but they run out of a cab stand and are heavily tracked. None of these official cabs picked up anyone in that vicinity within the past 72 hours. So now the BAU thinks the unsub is using an unregistered taxi cab. Garcia tells Morgan that there are 2300 registered cabs in the city, so this angle is not going to be workable.

Cut to the Unsub playing Chemistry. He has a pre-recorded track of instructions that he is listening to as he prepares the latest victim. It’s a little ASMR situation. He’s a podcaster. The latest victim wakes up and sees the unsub in his element. There is a massive vat of methanol at the other end of the lab, and the unsub had another victim’s lifeless body soaking in it to absorb the smell of their essence or whatever. The unsub raises that body out of the vat of methanol as the latest victim watches on in horror. The unsub comes up to the latest victim and tells her that she is going to “live forever.”

The BAU gathers to try to narrow down the unsub sans cab. Reid points out that methanol can be used to preserve test samples for scientific experiments. So now the BAU knows that the unsub is a man in STEM. So now they just have to figure out what specifically he is experimenting on.

And now it is profile time:

Unsub is a male Caucasian
Driving a “gypsy cab” (unregistered/unlicensed taxi)
He uses the vehicle to abduct women
His victims have been between the ages of 20-40, and the unsub is probably in the same age bracket
Due to his use of methanol and chloroform, he is probably very intelligent
He will not have injected himself into the investigation or be following it at all. He may not be concerned with leaving behind evidence at all
Because he is anti-social, people who know him will not be surprised when he is apprehended
The police will want to go public with this information because someone has likely had a confrontation with him and will come forward.

The team gets called in because another body has been found. Meanwhile, Reid tells Garcia to look into anyone who has made large purchases of methanol.

Then the BAU gets a call from the lady who was forced out of the car by the unsub earlier in the episode. She tells Prentis and Morgan – very indigently – about how he made her, a paying customer, get out of the car. She tells them about how the unsub was listening to his own little podcast, and she was flustered by the experience but managed to get the last two digits of his license plate. Prentis and Morgan think that if he is listening to his own recordings, he is probably delusional on top of being anti-social. They ask the woman to sit with a sketch artist, and she is annoyed, but Prentis is like “you could save someone’s life,” so she relents.

Back at LA headquarters, the BAU gets another call about a girl who has gone missing (the current victim). She was on her way to a job interview, but her roommate claims that she never got home.

Morgan and Prentis decide to a roleplay in a cab. They ask a taxi driver if they can sit in his cab, and at first he's like ???, but then he’s like whatever. Morgan gets in the front, and Prentis gets in the back, and they try to focus on the victimology that causes the unsub to chose specific victims. They realize that it must not be something visual or physical, given the setup of the cab with the partition, etc. Morgan also asks Pretnis what is going on with her – because he’s noticed she’s off. She dismisses him and tells him to leave her alone. Then she makes a comment about how bad the back of the taxi cab smells, and they realize that the unsub is attracted to the way people smell or don’t smell. When they share this information with the rest of the team, Reid points out that methanol can be used to create smells.

Now we’re back with the unsub, and it looks like he is making candles. So he soaks his victims in methanol and then distills their “essence” into candles??? Wow. What an artist. We see the skin he’s taken from the women on display in a cabinet which is horrific. He has been using the skin samples as labels for his different scented candles. Watch out White Barn! The victim begs him to let her go, but he’s all, “I’ve perfected the process!”

So now the team is talking about sense memory. Something about the natural scents of each of the abducted women triggered the unsub. They think that he may be choosing women who choose not to wear perfume because he may have a particularly strong sense of smell. Garcia then calls and claims that she found exactly one address for someone who has ordered all the scientific items Reid asked her to look into. What a lucky break. Only one address. Wow.

While the unsub is in the midst of submerging the gal in the tank, the BAU rolls up and starts chasing him as he takes off in his cab. It is a full on long-ass car chase. It lasts for AT LEAST five minutes. Meanwhile, Prentis and Reid get the latest victim out of the tub. She is going to be alright! Finally, the unsub is cornered and crashes into a big truck. His car actually goes under the truck, and it’s implied that he is decapitated or otherwise maimed horribly. When the BAU finally gets to his car, the only thing that has survived is the recording of his stupid podcast, which is playing.

We cut and see Prentis arriving back home with a Nabakov quote, and there is a wrapped present left outside her apartment. She walks into her apartment, turns off the alarm, and arms herself. She gets a phone call from Reid, and he is asking if she’d want to go see a movie with her, specifically Solaris. She thinks Morgan put him up to this, but he denies that and tells her that the reason he wants to go with her is that the movie is in Russian, and none of the rest of the team speaks Russian. She turns him down while she cases her apartment and checks the safe again. Everything seems okay.

She gets off the phone with Reid and opens the present. On the inside is a singular purple flower. She smells it, and it brings her back to a memory. We see a flashback of her picking this same purple flower in France. The CIA shows up and arrests her, and she acts confused and upset, but whispers to one of the agents that she wants to talk to Sean. We pan up and see none other than Ian Doyle standing on a balcony, watching them take her away. He makes a call and tells whoever is on the other line that the CIA has taken “her”, it seems like he does not know who Prentis really is and believes she is instead this Lauren Reynolds person. He is then taken into custody by the CIA.

Rating Criteria:

Criminal/Serial Killer: 13/20

Character development/ character arcs: 18/20
Forensics/Context: 10/20
Script writing: 18/20
Background characters: 18/20

Overall: 77/100

S6E14 - “Sense Memory”

S6E15 - “Today I Do”

S16E10 - “Dead End”