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Nov. 13th, 2008 07:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
go_gentlehallelujah i am done with everything that i had to do today and i can go to bed now. I've slept 8 or 9 hours over the last two days. Total, not average. Weirdly enough, I think I fenced better today than I have for awhile. (It's because I can't overthink things, I just have to do, I think.) I fell asleep in 2 of my 3 classes today - the only class I made it through totally awake was the one where we watched HBO's Rome.
I really liked this episode or Criminal Minds. Reid! Reid backstory! Team taking care of each other! Babies! Reid with a baby! Reid-centric episodes are always my favorite.
That said, there were a couple of things that didn't sit quite right for me. First, I thought the tone at the end during the happy family reunion moment was off - it felt sort of 'yay we have revealed the secret that destroyed this family and we can move on now and perhaps begin speaking regularly again!' but I think Reid has perfectly good reason to be angry at the father who abandoned him with a mother who couldn't even take care of herself, much less him. Rewatching though, I'm not sure if that tone thing comes accidentally from the writers or if it's deliberatively given to Reid Sr and did I mention how I haven't really been sleeping? Either way, I really feel that Reid deserves his anger towards his father.
A couple of nitpicky weird things:
-Reid, with his eidetic memory, choses poker as the game to beat the house on? Granted, I'm not totally familiar with the odds, especially of whatever machine he was playing, but I'm pretty sure there's a reason that card counters choose blackjack.
-The engineering degree thing is now canon? Ew. I hate that piece of backstory because it makes no sense. (My personal pick for the 3 PhDs would be math, linguistics, and a social science, probably psych or sociology or something.) All the engineers I have known are much more in touch with the real world than Reid. The mathematicians, on the other hand...
-Caltech? Really? (The articles in the episode say all three PhDs came from Caltech, but is unclear about the undergrad. One of them explicitly puts the Yale vs Caltech thing as a decision for grad school, as a choice between Classics and Math. That does explain something I was wondering about, because I don't think the overlap between undergrad applicants to Yale and Caltech is very high.) (I cannot see Reid as an undergraduate at Caltech at all. The student culture there tends towards the brash. I think he would have been eaten alive.) (Also, at Caltech, "Engineering" is a program at the same org level as "Physics, Math, and Astronomy", and is composed of several specialized departments, and I imagine that you would be awarded a degree from the specific department, not the engineering division as a whole, but whatever.)
-What the hell is Reid's timeline, anyways? Wikipedia tells me he finished high school at 12, and one of the articles from the episode says he graduated from college at 15 and joined the BAU at 22. Even allowing for his Reid-ness, 7 years for PhDs? Especially if number 2 is physics (which I don't remember if that's canon or not), because physics means labs means delays no matter how brilliant you are. And throw in there that I think he lived at home til 18 - didn't he? If he was caring for his mother until he had her institutionalized when he turned 18? Then how the hell did he go to grad school in LA at 15? And where did he go to undergrad, anyways?
yes, i know i'm overthinking this.
I really liked this episode or Criminal Minds. Reid! Reid backstory! Team taking care of each other! Babies! Reid with a baby! Reid-centric episodes are always my favorite.
That said, there were a couple of things that didn't sit quite right for me. First, I thought the tone at the end during the happy family reunion moment was off - it felt sort of 'yay we have revealed the secret that destroyed this family and we can move on now and perhaps begin speaking regularly again!' but I think Reid has perfectly good reason to be angry at the father who abandoned him with a mother who couldn't even take care of herself, much less him. Rewatching though, I'm not sure if that tone thing comes accidentally from the writers or if it's deliberatively given to Reid Sr and did I mention how I haven't really been sleeping? Either way, I really feel that Reid deserves his anger towards his father.
A couple of nitpicky weird things:
-Reid, with his eidetic memory, choses poker as the game to beat the house on? Granted, I'm not totally familiar with the odds, especially of whatever machine he was playing, but I'm pretty sure there's a reason that card counters choose blackjack.
-The engineering degree thing is now canon? Ew. I hate that piece of backstory because it makes no sense. (My personal pick for the 3 PhDs would be math, linguistics, and a social science, probably psych or sociology or something.) All the engineers I have known are much more in touch with the real world than Reid. The mathematicians, on the other hand...
-Caltech? Really? (The articles in the episode say all three PhDs came from Caltech, but is unclear about the undergrad. One of them explicitly puts the Yale vs Caltech thing as a decision for grad school, as a choice between Classics and Math. That does explain something I was wondering about, because I don't think the overlap between undergrad applicants to Yale and Caltech is very high.) (I cannot see Reid as an undergraduate at Caltech at all. The student culture there tends towards the brash. I think he would have been eaten alive.) (Also, at Caltech, "Engineering" is a program at the same org level as "Physics, Math, and Astronomy", and is composed of several specialized departments, and I imagine that you would be awarded a degree from the specific department, not the engineering division as a whole, but whatever.)
-What the hell is Reid's timeline, anyways? Wikipedia tells me he finished high school at 12, and one of the articles from the episode says he graduated from college at 15 and joined the BAU at 22. Even allowing for his Reid-ness, 7 years for PhDs? Especially if number 2 is physics (which I don't remember if that's canon or not), because physics means labs means delays no matter how brilliant you are. And throw in there that I think he lived at home til 18 - didn't he? If he was caring for his mother until he had her institutionalized when he turned 18? Then how the hell did he go to grad school in LA at 15? And where did he go to undergrad, anyways?
yes, i know i'm overthinking this.