Sometimes I question exactly what Criminal Minds is going for. There are clearly more gruesome, heinous crimes committed in the Criminal Minds world than in the real world. It's a lawless place where people can do terrible things to others and the world goes on normally. Half the stuff featured on the show would be instant top of the newspaper headlines.
There's something perverse about the nature of "Devil's Night." The killings are flat out torture and are unimaginable on any scale, and yet, we see several people lit on fire. Quickly, though, the victims and their families are nothing more of afterthoughts, instead the episode shifting focus onto family bonds, more specifically between father and son in order to emphasize Hotch and Jack, and the victims are nothing more than afterthoughts. The emotion in the episode comes not from those burned, but the guy who does the burning, which in turn shows how demented everything is. Was that the desired effect? We'll never know.
Score: 8.7/10
