What a guy, makes you cry
Show: Criminal Minds
Season/Ep: 9, 5
Title: Route 66
Role: Eddie Lee Wilcox
Route 66 is an episode about fatherhood, generation trauma, and the shittiness of "correctional" facilities. Okay, the last isn't precisely on-screen, but when you have an ex-con committing further crimes, you have to question why it takes a woman to realise that Eddie was acting out of PTSD.
It comes close to suicide-by-cop. Eddie has taken his daughter Sam, not exactly with permission, but it's one last trip to the sea, just like his daddy - who then committed suicide. And he plans to repeat history.
Is Eddie a bastard? Yeeeah, but I like that the writers made me more than 2D, which happens a lot when there's a Bad Guy of the Week. You know he's made mistakes (okay, he's killed people) but he knows he's fucked up. Hence the whole drive-to-the-beach-and-kill-himself plot.
Todd is an expert at layering his characters and Eddie is no exception. One could argue that killing the gas station guy and the truck guy were both self-defence. We see the gas guy's hand on the shotgun. The truck guy would have beaten him to death. And framed against Hotch remembering beating the man who'd killed his wife (I assume - I don't know the show at all) it presents a greyer area than first appearances assume.
Overall, I liked this episode. It had nuance and depth, and Todd's character doesn't end up end, which is always nice. And again, he is not a sociopath - he's a man drowning in grief and trauma, and blind to any way out because the system hasn't given him one.