Criminal Minds · Season 1, Episode 15
“Unfinished Business” · Season 1, Episode 15
In this episode: Dean Winchester (940), Damon Salvatore (715), Sam Winchester (665), Olivia Benson (637), Stephen Fry (608), Narrator (554), Clark Kent (523), Nate (486)
When I ran from home, I told myself it was the only way. Lately, I wondered if in every moment, there aren't many paths. Choices hanging in the air like ghosts. And if you could just see them, you could change your whole life.
Is that what you want? You want to change your life?
Doesn't everybody want that?
You said people come here to change the story of their lives. I imagined a story where I didn't have to be the damsel.
I don't trust him.
Which is the first step to truly knowing me.
So instead of our hosts going insane, they are being used for industrial espionage. Does that make this a glass-half-full or half-empty-type situation?
We're engineers. It means the glass has been manufactured to the wrong specifications.
The maze is an old native myth.
Regale me, Theodore.
The maze itself is the sum of a man's life: choices he makes, dreams he hangs on to. And there at the center, there's a legendary man who had been killed over and over again countless times, but always clawed his way back to life. The man returned for the last time and vanquished all his oppressors in a tireless fury. He built a house. Around that house he built a maze so complicated, only he could navigate through it. I reckon he'd seen enough of fighting.
[to Sylvester] Seeing as you have ambitions in my line of work, let me tell you what I tell my new girls: Never start something you're not willing to finish. And if you're getting fucked either way, go with the lucrative version...sweetheart.
The only thing I had when I was a kid were books. I used to live in them. I used to go to sleep dreaming I'd wake up inside one of them 'cause they had meaning. This place, this is like I woke up inside one of those stories. I guess I just wanna find out what it means.
I've been pretending my whole life. Pretending I don't mind, pretending I belong. My life's built on it. And it's a good life. It's a life I've always wanted. But then I came here and I get a glimpse for a second of a life in which I don't have to pretend. A life in which I can be truly alive. How can I go back to pretending when I know what this feels like?
All my life, I've prided myself on being a survivor. But surviving is just another loop. I'm getting out of here. You two are going to help me.
No. Do, do you know how far these people will go to protect their IP? Every part of this building, including the skin on your back, is made to keep you here. It, it'd be a suicide mission.
At first, I thought you and the others were gods. Then I realized you're just men. And I know men. You think I'm scared of death? I've done it a million times. I'm fucking great at it. How many times have you died? Because if you don't help me I'll kill you.
The longer I work here, the more I think I understand the hosts. It's the human beings who confuse me.
They cannot see the things that will hurt them. I've spared them that. Their lives are blissful. In a way, their existence is purer than ours, freed of the burden of self-doubt.
No, no, no, no. I don't understand.
You're a fucking monster.
Am I? Well, you were the one who would so blithely destroy all of them, even him, I suppose. After everything you have shared.
What the hell are you talking about?
Is that why? Did you tell him to -
The intimacies were your idea, if you will recall. I think Bernard was glad of the company.
I'm not one. I can't be. My wife. My son. The burial. I was a father. My poor boy.
That's enough, Bernard. You mustn't get yourself worked up. [to Theresa] I read a theory once that the human intellect was like peacock feathers. Just an extravagant display intended to attract a mate. All of art, literature, Beethoven, Mozart, William Shakespeare, Michelangelo, and the Empire State Building... Just an elaborate mating ritual. Maybe it doesn't matter that we have accomplished so much for the basest of reasons. But, of course, the peacock can barely fly. It lives in the dirt, pecking insects out of the muck, consoling itself with its great beauty. I have come to think of so much of consciousness as a burden, a weight, and we have spared them that. Anxiety, self-loathing, guilt. The hosts are the ones who are free. Free here under my control.
Time to write my own fucking story.
There is no threshold that makes us greater than the sum of our parts, no inflection point at which we become fully alive. We can't define consciousness because consciousness does not exist. Humans fancy that there's something special about the way we perceive the world, and yet we live in loops as tight and as closed as the hosts do, seldom questioning our choices, content, for the most part, to be told what to do next. No, my friend, you're not missing anything at all.
You want to know who I am? Who I really am? I'm a god. Titan of industry. Philanthropist. Family man, married to a beautiful woman, father to a beautiful daughter. I'm the good guy, Teddy. Then, last year, my wife took the wrong pills. Fell asleep in the bath. Tragic accident. 30 years of marriage vanished. How do you say it? "Like a deep and distant dream." Then, at the funeral, I tried to console my daughter. She pushed me away, told me that my wife's death was no accident that she killed herself because of me. Emily said that every day with me had been sheer terror. At any point, I could blow up or collapse like some dark star or...
Did you hurt them, too?
Never. They never saw anything like the man I am in here. But she knew anyway. She said if I stacked up all my good deeds, it was just an elegant wall I built to hide what's inside from everyone, and from myself.
[to William & Logan] You both keep assuming that I want out. Whatever that is. If it's such a wonderful place out there, why are you all clamoring to get in here?
These quotes come from Wikiquote's Criminal Minds pages and are available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.
