Criminal Minds Season 18 Episode 4 Recap: Is Voit Trying To Awaken His True Self?

Following a heart-breaking send-off to actor Josh Stewart’s character, Will LaMontagne Jr., things are slowly going back to normal in the eighteenth season of Criminal Minds. And by normal I mean the BAU getting busy nabbing vicious serial killers who prey on easy targets. Previously, Voit was able to remember his family ties after Rossi and Dr. Lewis decided to make him interact with Ramona Havener, the only victim of the psychopath the BAU was able to rescue in the past. While Voit’s amnesiac afflictions might be genuine, he surely has a secret ploy to get back in the game, as the fourth episode strongly hints at.

Spoilers Ahead

Why Did Dr. Ramsey Begin His Killing Spree?

The episode opens with a night scene in Tucson, near a not-so-busy freeway. An ambulance stops by, and a paramedic, Brad Falco, attends to a homeless woman lying on the pavement. Feigning care and assuring her that city-approved healthcare will be provided in the hospital, Falco takes her into the ambulance, only to inject her with anesthetic to render her unconscious. The poor woman realizes too late that a terrible fate awaits her, but by then there is no way for her to escape her predicament. 

Later, her headless, de-organed, flayed remains are discovered in the middle of the Sonoran Desert—making it the second case for the BAU with a similar MO. Initially it becomes difficult to identify the corpses due to the condition they are found in. A suspicion regarding the victims being targeted by the cartel arises as the team spots scorpion tattoos inked on both the victims’ feet, but it becomes clear that the perp is trying to pin the crime on the cartel by mimicking their MO. Judging from the use of anesthetics and the surgical precision with which organs and skin have been removed from the victims, BAU team members deduce that a skilled surgeon, accompanied by an emergency responder, might be the supposed culprits. Indeed, Falco, the disgraced paramedic with a shady career record, is only the enforcer; the mastermind behind these serial killings turns out to be Dr. Malcolm Ramsey, a surgeon who lost his wife in a vicious car accident, which also resulted in their daughter, Ariel, getting herself severely burned. Now Dr. Ramsey, a bit of an egomaniac and eccentric in nature, fully blames himself for their predicament, as he was the one behind the wheel, and has taken it upon himself to help his daughter. Ariel suffers from autoimmune disease, which means her body can’t readily accept skin grafting—making the recovery process a lot more difficult than it otherwise would have been. 

The good doctor has gone to extreme lengths to ensure his daughter gets the proper treatment she deserves, setting up his base in an abandoned hospital where he keeps Ariel inside an enclosed quarantine area and dismembers the POC homeless victims brought by Falco in a different section. Exploiting the social neglect homeless people get subjected to, Dr. Ramsey proved himself to be a menacing, psychopathic figure. I mean, there might be a slight sense of sympathy viewers can feel knowing his motive and all, but the way he went about saving his daughter is straight out of old-school horror stories. Despite all this, Ariel’s condition is preventing her body from accepting skin grafts—prompting Ramsey to continue his vicious hunting routine. 

Was BAU Able To Stop Dr. Ramsey?

The major breakthrough in BAU’s investigation comes with the capture of Dr. Ivan, a black market surgeon who was disposing of the bodies by harvesting the organs and attaching cartel tattoos to avoid suspicion. In the meantime, Ramsey ends up murdering Falco when he refuses to comply any longer in fear of getting caught and calls out the doctor about the futility of his desperate attempt to cure Ariel. Using clues provided by Ivan, it doesn’t take Penelope long to pinpoint Falco as one of the collaborators, which eventually directs the investigation to Dr. Ramsey. As the doctor’s past comes to light, BAU members figure out the whole scenario with relative ease, and locating the abandoned hospital, they rush in. 

Despite Dr. Ramsey’s repeated warnings to not leave the quarantined zone, Ariel decides to come outside as she desperately wanted to return to her old life. To her utter shock and disbelief, Ariel discovers what her father has been up to as she finds him trying to silence his latest homeless victim. The realization that her father has been murdering people to provide means for her treatment sickens her to the core, and right at the moment Tyler leads the BAU FBI team inside the hospital to apprehend Dr. Ramsey. Desperate to continue his work, Ramsey tries to threaten the BAU team with the life of the homeless woman screaming at the operating table. Ariel, in a disillusioned state, kills her father by jamming a scalpel in his throat—the guilt of being the reason for the loss of others’ lives did a number on her mind. 

Moments later, Ariel nearly faints as her autoimmune condition worsens. Trusting Tyler, she asks him to take her outside to let her gaze upon the starry night for one last time. As Tyler complies, Ariel questions him about whether her act of killing her father made her a deplorable person. Probably to provide a sense of comfort to the girl, who is counting her moments, Tyler assures her that she did the right thing. Ariel passes away, and this marks three times in a row since he became an active member of the unit that Tyler had to bear with people dying on his watch. As pain engulfs his mind, Emily tries to comfort him, mentioning the nature of the job as a BAU member is to cope with loss. 

Is Voit Trying to Awaken His True Self?

On the other hand, Voit’s amnesiac affliction takes an altogether new direction as JJ decides to rejoin in order to keep the pain of Will’s loss at bay. The social network Voit had created to influence serial killers has received a new video link, as spotted by JJ. The video shows a masked stalker secretly filming a little girl in the middle of the night before turning towards the camera and making cryptic gestures. Convinced that it has to do with something, Voit, Rossi, and Lewis show the video to him, which triggers nightmares in Voit’s subconscious about the masked person trying to kill him using an electric drill. Taking this as a positive sign regarding Voit starting to recognize his true self, Rossi and Lewis decide to opt for a Rorschach test to dig up some more latent memories from Voit’s psyche. Penelope uses visual match to identify the mask as a Yase Otoko mask used in Japanese Noh theaters. 

 However, this time Voit imagines Rossi to be the masked killer and tries to distance himself from him in fear. Dr. Ochoa, the chief neurologist who is tending to Voit, is given the responsibility of taking another Rorschach test when Rossi intervenes and shows the mask to Voit. This time, Voit vividly remembers a harrowing memory from his past, when he killed a certain Oliver Young by drilling through his skull. At present, a reformed Voit is disgusted by the fact that he took pleasure in killing Oliver. Already going through a personal crisis after realizing his family has abandoned him, Voit realizes what kind of a monster he was and secretly tries to overdose himself to take his own life out of guilt. In the meantime, JJ figures out that the masked stalker in the video is Voit himself by identifying his finger gesture. This indicates the possibility that Voit had recorded the video himself in the past and set it to be posted on his network, anticipating that he would lose his memory in the future and this video would be shown to him by the BAU team. In my assumption, Voit was playing the long game, making himself forget his true self to earn the trust of BAU members, only to reconnect with his psychopathic alter ego through visual suggestions and triggers. JJ rushes to the hospital to meet Voit and discover the situation regarding him trying to overdose himself. Dr. Ochoa’s quick response results in Voit’s life getting saved, and JJ promises him that she will ensure that he lives to suffer as much as he has tormented his victims. As the episode ends, Dr. Lewis is able to sense JJ’s anger is clouding her mind—which indicates that Will’s loss has affected her much more than she is acknowledging at the moment. Throughout the episode, JJ has assured his friends and colleagues that everything is fine, but as the final moments of the episode convey, her pain has simply transformed into anger, which might pose problems for the team in the future. 

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