On this week’s episode of Criminal Minds the team is called in to investigate the murder of a GI’s family. The killer goes after military families whose husbands have been deployed to duty overseas. This case follows a similar pattern of one of the worst serial killers who has already been captured and imprisoned. Initially the killer appears to be a copycat which leads Hotchner and Emily to visit the serial killer in prison, in hopes of him helping them figure out the physiological mind frame of the serial killer who’s still on the loose.

Emily is visibly uncomfortable and appalled by being so near a man who brutally murdered 14 women. Worse, she has to become fairly intimate and even flirts with him in order to get his cooperation with the case.

After sitting through him reliving how he committed all of his murders, in graphic detail, Emily turns the tables on him in the end. She figures out that the reason he killed the little girls and forced the father’s to watch was that his own father had sexually molested him. By forcing the fathers to watch as he raped and murdered their daughters then kill the fathers last this was the serial killer’s way of simulating the killing of his own father over and over again.

As it turned out their profiling of the latest serial killer was off and their normal tracking mechanisms kept coming up dry because they were tuned in on finding a male killer, when in fact their target was female. Once this revelation came to light, they refocused their profiling and quickly discovered who the psychotic woman was. They were able to find and stop the women just before she was about to kill another family.

Back at the prison with the original serial killer, Hotchner is surprised to find that the fan of the of the imprisoned mass murderer turns out to be the psychopath that almost killed him and forced Hotchner’s family out of his life. It seems Hotchner’s arch nemesis is still toying with him by anticipating he would visit the serial killer.

This episode really set the scene for what promises to be an explosive episode next week, when Hotchner and his nemesis finally appear to go head-to-head.