The Criminal Minds Member That Fans Agree Is The Least Valuable
"Criminal Minds" may have wrapped for good in 2020, but that hasn't stopped fierce fan debates raging on in the ever-discursive realm of Reddit. Devotees of the show are still hashing out everything from the "Criminal Minds" characters they loved best to the storylines they most hated, and with a hefty 15-year back catalogue to work through since the show's 2005 debut, we'd guess those threads will be running for a long time. Today we're concerned with one corner of the debate in particular: which character is the least valuable — or to put it less politely — the most useless?
We all know that co-worker who has perfected the art of looking busy, whilst adding zero value to the team. Things are no different in the FBI's Behavioral Analysis Unit on "Criminal Minds," home of the show's expert squad of criminal cranium-crackers. So which member of the gang do redditors think is the least valuable?
Fans think JJ is the least valuable
A recent Reddit poll awarded the unenviable title of least valuable member of the "Criminal Minds" team to JJ. Fans' dissatisfaction seems to stem in part from an eyebrow-raising promotion to profiler upon her return to the show, after a brief departure in Season 6. One redditor qualified their vote for JJ by commenting "only after they made her a profiler." In a separate thread dedicated to discussion of JJ's mediocrity, another described how her transition to the new role "turned (them) off slightly", saying "they made her too good too fast."
JJ's return to the BAU saw her promoted from press liaison officer, the perceived haste of which led some to dismiss her as a Mary Sue. Originally coined in the fanfiction community, the term denotes a too-perfect character, often female, who is deemed unrealistically bad-ass. However, as The Mary Sue — a site named after the trope — point out, accusations of such often have a misogynistic undertone. As they pithily put it, characters "only seem to get called out for it when they're women". Indeed, another reddit criticism was that JJ "talked about being a mom too much". Hmm. At the end of the day, all value — and TV criticism — is subjective. Geeks dubbed JJ the indispensable "mom of the group", leaving "a definite gap in the team" upon her departure.