In a fierce rebuke to the arts of storytelling and television, CBS decided to renew Criminal Minds: Beyonds Borders, one of the worst shows – both ethically and artistically – in recent memory. CM:BB is a spin-off from the veteran Criminal Minds franchise. Except instead of the F.B.I. doing psychological profiling (and, like most psychologists, getting involved in tons of shootouts) inside the U.S., CM:BB looses the F.B.I. profilers upon the world.
In a previous post I examined the show’s first two episodes and the fundamental problem with the idea that the U.S.’s sovereign violence – its monopoly on legitimate force as embodied in this instance by the F.B.I. – should follow U.S. citizens into other sovereignties. Already evidenced in the first episodes were the baselines of the parent franchise, ableism and pathologizing neuroatypicality. CM:BB adds to this by projecting these onto Othered populations. It takes a colonial anthropological look at exotified populations with a proclaimed Cultural Expert (Alana de la Garza) who mostly stands in for ‘native informants’ (which in this series has two meanings, the anthropological and the turning of snitches, though these are not necessarily distinct positions). The othering is accomplished in part through recurring native incompetence where all things procedural and properly logical must be explained by the F.B.I. to native investigators and where native cultural practice has boundaries of propriety also defined by the F.B.I. All of this is offered through a cast with middling chemistry and scripts so bad as to be unintentionally comedic at times, leading to impressive guffaws-per-minute rates.
Between the first two episodes and now CM:BB has shown the following:
Egyptian terrorist uses a cobra to attack gay Americans.
Justice against an Afrikaner torturer from the juridical apartheid era is achieved through proving he killed a white cop while the ‘truth and reconciliation’ program forgives his actual apartheid crimes.
A stand-in for ISIS seduces a white U.S. teenager into traveling to Turkey where they kidnap and brainwash her into carrying out a suicide bombing.
A French serial killer is murderously romantic while smoking cigarettes and drinking wine.
The latest episode, “The Ballad of Nick and Nat”, is arguably the worst. The episode opens with some stock salsa music playing in a bar where a non-Cuban white American girl meets a non-white Cuban-American guy whom she seduces then kills. The F.B.I. is called in to investigate the guy’s death.
They identify problems before even arriving as Simmons (Daniel Henney) lets the teams know that Cuba’s “technology is at least fifty years behind”. This leads into a brief discussion of the old cars prevalent on Cuban streets, what Jarvis (Annie Funke) calls one of “Cuba’s biggest natural resources”. Team leader Garret (Gary Sinise) chimes in saying, “So, our [suspect] is on the move in a country that can’t keep up”. Cue the white U.S. suspect seeing a U.S. flag on the wall of a shop where she has gone to buy a Che Guevara tank top. She kills the storeowner for having a U.S. flag.
The F.B.I. is frustrated at first by – as with all episodes to date – native incompetence. They eventually figure out that the killers are following a route made famous by El Che and staging symbolic representations of Che quotes. I wrote that sentence coherently. How it is done in the show is totally incoherent and extremely funny. For folks who have even a very basic grasp on the Cuban Revolution it will be funnier still.
The show then moves into a discussion of communism and Che Guevara that has all the nuance of a House of Unamerican Activities Committee hearing. Garret says about views of Che as heroic and revolutionary, “That’s one of the great propaganda campaigns of all time, turning Castro’s thug into a hero. The man responsible for torturing and killing thousands of innocent civilians under the cover of, ‘the revolution.’ Cubans are still terrified to speak out against them.” Cultural Expert responds knowingly, “The Butcher of La Cabaña [pronounced in the show ‘Cabana’], and our [suspect’s] inspiration.”
The suspect keeps quoting Che in ways intended to tie her to a madness that is also Che’s, and to prsent both her and him as irrationally violent. For example, some U.S. dude calls Che a “narcissistic psychopath” and tells his buddy, “Let’s get a mojito.” The killer looks into her partner’s eyes with divine inspiration and quotes Che, “If you tremble with indignation at every injustice, then you are a comrade of mine.” Dude becomes a corpse shortly thereafter.
At this point the comedy is set aside so the show can get on with its primary purpose, which is to define women exclusively through gendered violence. The police find out that the killer was raped as a child and then again shortly before she started killing. The killer alternates between screaming Che quotes and nonsensical utterances intended to illustrate her victimization. The woman’s political critique is presented as a symptom of her rape. Her love for Che and concern about U.S. imperialism are all because her step-father raped her and nobody listened, not because U.S. imperialism is a bad thing—and of course no stable person would be moved to question imperailism. The F.B.I. shows up and tells the killer that they’re “listening to her” which solves everything for her and she’s ready to stop killing but her partner isn’t so they both die anyway.
Everything about this is wrong and vile. It takes the actual fact that raped victims are ignored and establishes them as violent actors rather than people upon whom violence is enacted. The killer embraces Che not because she is working class and so has legitimate grievances with the status quo, but because she was raped twice and is therefore, necessarily, by the show’s logic, insane. The killer has no politics nor identity, she is a purely physical being comprised of reactions to rape trauma. Victims of sexual violence and victims of U.S. imperialism are alike incomprehensible, dangerous and erratic. It’s up to the F.B.I. to impose order, reason, and the justice of death.