This week’s episode of Criminal Minds deals with a crazy guy who gets off seeing kids strangle themselves. It is all about a twisted contest he creates between three high schools about which school can get the most people high by choking themselves. It seems that you get a similar effect when you’re body is deprived of air as you do when you use drugs.
This guy went around to three high schools introducing the kids there to the game and then made a rule that they had to do it via webcam to get points. The school with the most choking victims would win the contest. Unfortunately several kids died while playing this game by choking themselves to death when the brain shut down other parts of the body, such as arms and hands, to try to preserve its own supply of oxygen and thus these kids couldn’t loose themselves from the ropes before they passed out.
This was a pretty bizarre episode, even by the Criminal Minds standard, which we know can be pretty extreme. My first thought was that it would be pretty far out that kids would actually choke themselves just to win a stupid contest, then I thought about all the drugs teens (in particular) do just to feel a part of a group and kind of backed off my stance with this episode.
The Criminal Minds team goes to this small town and start to question people about the rash of suicides they have been having and discover someone is putting these kids up to strangling themselves. The investigation leads them to a teenager who is deep into the Goth look and they discover that his mother passed away a couple of years ago and he had withdrawn from the world and became tied to the Internet. This, of course, fit the profile they were looking for.
In the end they discover the kid was merely the victim of a sick father who abused both the boy and his mother and that the father was behind the entire strangulation game from the beginning. This was a twisted little episode on many levels and it represents well the Criminal Minds series.
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