The moment I realized that this episode would be hands-down awesome was when Garcia admitted that she had a legitimate fear of clowns.  One squeezed her breast while making honking sounds.

"Apparently, making it funny makes it ok," she dryly informed Prentiss and Morgan.

If last week was a departure from all that is true and good about Criminal Minds, this week was like the perfect high dive back into case file glory.  The Russian judge gives it a 10, the French judge gives it a 9, only because they didn't introduce the killer at all before saying, "AND BY THE WAY, HERE'S THE KILLER."

The American judge claims that only Democrats want to understand other people with psychology, real Americans watch Jerry Springer.  But even he gives this episode an 8 for style.

Overall, it was a solid case – one that played with the psychology that Criminal Minds is built on.  The show reminded is that it wasn't a show about profiling regular people or performing party tricks like naming a flirty cop as loyally married.  It's a show about crawling inside truly depraved minds in order to help prevent more murders.

The grace of this show is that each of the characters is developed subtly, the developments from last season were expanded on in interesting ways.  All J.J. had to do was let Garcia know that babies took 10 months to gestate in order to let audiences know that she was still pregnant and had gone to a doctor about it.

This is a show that values the intelligence not just of its characters, but of its audience.  We didn't need to be reminded that J.J. was pregnant by her hot cop boyfriend, the show trusted that we'd make the connection.

One liners and jokes reveal so much about the characters in this show because it never once falters in its belief that the audience is smart enough not to need clunky exposition.  We'll remember faces, we'll remember details, we'll remember things about our characters.  This definitely helps make the cases more detailed and it also helps make them less... well, less dumb.

As soon as the detail about the killer's DNA being at a fresh crime scene was revealed, my immediate reaction was an identical twin.  Expecting this trope to be dragged out for 48 minutes, I was delighted when Spencer Reid immediately voiced this theory.

The "evil and eviler" twin theory was given to us first, and it reminded us that these people are smarter than your average television detectives.

For all their intelligence, the show also wants us to understand that even intelligent people are deeply flawed and can just as easily be hurt.  Hotch's recovery from his divorce and Kate's death are going to kill me, I know that.  It's not that he's grieving, it's that the enforced normalcy of putting himself back in the field might end up permanently injuring him – physically and emotionally.

This show likes to cycle in on itself and remind us how much characters have changed over time.  For two seasons, Hotch had what looked like a stable marriage, which slowly we saw crumble.  The idea was a familiar one in TV: demanding jobs ruin marriages.

However, what I think Hotch is learning is not just that his job ruined his marriage, it's that his job has the potential to ruin him.  His job had him ignoring his doctor's suggestions, it asked him to put aside his own emotional trauma so that he could help catch a killer.

To have this realization book ended with the budding romance between a town sheriff and the mother of one of the Angel Maker's victims shows that Hotch is either going to have to let himself devolve into simply an instrument of his job, or evolve into someone who can have both job and family.