Troubling
In my channel surfing last night I watched a portion of a re-run of CBS's "Criminal Minds," at least in part because the episode was old enough to feature Mandy Patinkin. I find his work consistently interesting from Inigo Montoya in "The Princess Bride" to the lead reaper on "Dead Like Me." So, despite the re-run tag on the episode, I watched some of it. When the episode ended I was struck with a major whiskey tango foxtrot moment.
The story of the show was a sexual predator on a college campus who turned out to be a kampus kop. A murder copycat to his modus operandi got him out from under the charges after he was caught (I may have missed something in that - channel surfing after all). It turns out that the copycat was a sad Goth chickie whose desire was for the killer to kill her since she couldn't bring herself to do the deed. Which is all fine in fiction and the world of the teleplay. So what goes hugely wrong? As the show is reaching its climax, the FBI types are watching the sad Goth chickie and the bad guy on security cam and from a distant, hidden eyeball-vantage point. She admits to killing "for him" but the bad guy won't kill Gothie baby (he knows he's on camera). So she knifes him in the gut. At which point the FBI eyeballers start running toward her. She then finds the nerve to stick the knife in her own gut (as the FBI stands there, pointing guns [?] and telling her to "drop the knife"). Finally, maybe 30 or 45 seconds after the kampus kop gets the shiv, only after Gothie stabs herself, the FBI types watching on the security cam shout "Call an ambulance!"
OK, maybe we don't like the bad guy but doesn't someone call an ambulance the moment the knife goes in his gut? I'm sorry but that's just stupid scriptwriting.