‘Criminal Minds’ Episode 808: ‘The Wheels On The Bus’ Recap

In tonight’s episode of Criminal Minds, “The Wheels on the Bus,” the BAU races to save a group of teens taken hostage and forced to play a deadly game of survival.

Tonight’s episode opens with a high school bus ride home. As some teens talk about the upcoming Winter Formal their bus driver pulls over to help what looks like a motorist in distress.

But the man waving for assistance is actually a ruse. He boards the bus and immediately shoots the driver in the leg. Carrying heavy duffel bags, another man boards the bus behind the first and they start tying up the kids.

With several kids’ lives at stake the BAU is all-hands-on-deck, and Garcia’s ex-boyfriend Kevin (Nicholas Brendan) arrives to assist the team in the search. They trace one of the teen’s cellphones to an abandoned barn and find the bus and 14 of the children, which means that ten are still missing.

Those unlucky ten are taken to an abandoned building. Equipped with shock collars and Bluetooth headsets, the UnSubs are using the kids as teams in a “real-life” version of a fictional video game called “Gods of Combat.”

Rossi somehow figures that out, which is odd as he has never been portrayed as a gamer. In the game, you take over a means of public transportation (bus, train, etc.), and you split your hostages into two teams of five players.

You outfit your team members with gas masks, collars, and a means of communicating with you. Each “commander” (our UnSubs) sets their team against the other player’s team and the commander with the most people left alive at the end is the winner. Follow that so far?

The BAU realizes they have two seriously crazy gamers on their hands. Can they find out where this “real-life” game is being played and rescue the kids before they are forced to start murdering each other?

What did you think of tonight’s episode of Criminal Minds, “The Wheels on the Bus”? Was it too outlandish?