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Oh FFS.
Home from work and watching the two-part finale of Criminal Minds from last season. I've only made it 7 and a half minutes in and it is time for a little Geography lesson.
It's a lesson about Michigan Geography, so you don't even need a map! You just need to look down at your left hand (palm down).
Lower Michigan looks kind of like that. We call it the mitten. All around the outside of your hand are borders defined by rivers and lakes. Draw a line across the base of your hand and everything south of that is Indiana (toward the pinky finger) or Ohio (toward the thumb).
Detroit (a place you may have heard of!) is located halfway along the first bone of your thumb: halfway between your wrist and the knuckle, right on the edge of the mitten.
Port Huron, a place you probably have not heard of, is located at the middle joint, below your thumbnail, also right at the edge of the mitten.
Depending on what part of Detroit and what part of Port Huron we're talking about, this is a distance of about sixty miles. It's a pretty straight shot on I-94 and there's not much traffic at night, but still: SIXTY MILES. Trust me, I know, I grew up near Port Huron and went to high school near Detroit and the commute between them is burned permanently into my brain.
Now! Detroit and Port Huron have some things in common. Each is a city on the edge of the mitten, beside a river. Detroit is on the Detroit River. Port Huron is on the St. Clair River. Neither of these rivers is very wide, and on the opposite sides of these rivers, in both cases, is a mystical land called Canada, represented in the mitten diagram by the empty space next to your left hand.
In Detroit, you cross the Ambassador Bridge or take the [does it have a name?] Tunnel to cross the Detroit River into a city called Windsor in the province of Ontario, in the mystical land of Canada.
In Port Huron, you cross the Blue Water Bridge (there are now two of it and they don't match, it's kind of stupid, but it's all the Blue Water Bridge) into a city called Sarnia in the province of Ontario, in the mystical land of Canada.
Even if, for some very good or perhaps totally crazy reason, you decided to drive the sixty miles from the Cass Corridor in downtown Detroit to the Blue Water Bridge in Port Huron in order to cross into Canada and dispose of a body, when you get across the border from Port Huron you will not be in Windsor. And if you decide to drive sixty miles with a body in your trunk instead of 0.6 miles, that had better be a plot point.
Ahem.
I'm going to go see how much more of the episode I can watch before I come back and rant at the internet some more about people being wrong on the television. I have a feeling Prentiss and Morgan's visit to Detroit might make a vein pop out of my forehead.
This entry is crossposted at http://dsudis.livejournal.com/524504.html.
It's a lesson about Michigan Geography, so you don't even need a map! You just need to look down at your left hand (palm down).
Lower Michigan looks kind of like that. We call it the mitten. All around the outside of your hand are borders defined by rivers and lakes. Draw a line across the base of your hand and everything south of that is Indiana (toward the pinky finger) or Ohio (toward the thumb).
Detroit (a place you may have heard of!) is located halfway along the first bone of your thumb: halfway between your wrist and the knuckle, right on the edge of the mitten.
Port Huron, a place you probably have not heard of, is located at the middle joint, below your thumbnail, also right at the edge of the mitten.
Depending on what part of Detroit and what part of Port Huron we're talking about, this is a distance of about sixty miles. It's a pretty straight shot on I-94 and there's not much traffic at night, but still: SIXTY MILES. Trust me, I know, I grew up near Port Huron and went to high school near Detroit and the commute between them is burned permanently into my brain.
Now! Detroit and Port Huron have some things in common. Each is a city on the edge of the mitten, beside a river. Detroit is on the Detroit River. Port Huron is on the St. Clair River. Neither of these rivers is very wide, and on the opposite sides of these rivers, in both cases, is a mystical land called Canada, represented in the mitten diagram by the empty space next to your left hand.
In Detroit, you cross the Ambassador Bridge or take the [does it have a name?] Tunnel to cross the Detroit River into a city called Windsor in the province of Ontario, in the mystical land of Canada.
In Port Huron, you cross the Blue Water Bridge (there are now two of it and they don't match, it's kind of stupid, but it's all the Blue Water Bridge) into a city called Sarnia in the province of Ontario, in the mystical land of Canada.
Even if, for some very good or perhaps totally crazy reason, you decided to drive the sixty miles from the Cass Corridor in downtown Detroit to the Blue Water Bridge in Port Huron in order to cross into Canada and dispose of a body, when you get across the border from Port Huron you will not be in Windsor. And if you decide to drive sixty miles with a body in your trunk instead of 0.6 miles, that had better be a plot point.
Ahem.
I'm going to go see how much more of the episode I can watch before I come back and rant at the internet some more about people being wrong on the television. I have a feeling Prentiss and Morgan's visit to Detroit might make a vein pop out of my forehead.
This entry is crossposted at http://dsudis.livejournal.com/524504.html.
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SPN regularly has no idea where South Dakota is, how far it takes to get places from there, or what it looks like, but I choose to believe it's just magical. :)
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My primary question is (I have so many, just to do with the case. It would be ranty), if you're going to do a story that mimics this particular case and you must have a US connection (which to be fair, you must or the jurisdiction question goes out the window) what about SEATTLE?
Also, I *really really* want a CM/Flashpoint crossover. In the interests of international cooperation or something. Just sayin'
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Um, all of that to say, I haven't yet recognized what real case this was based on (and probably won't until I Google it up after watching Part 2) so... yay.
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I mean, I can see them wanting to move the story to somewhere else in Canada; they changed a lot of the rest of the story. I'm actually not sure why it was necessary to make it Canadian at all, given how much they changed--there's nothing essentially Canadian about living on a pig farm and being crazy, the motives were totally different, and frankly the case isn't hugely well-known in the states (it got a special warning for being close to real events in Canada, but not in the US) so US viewers would not have known the goddamn difference.
I can see them wanting to have their Detroit episode and make their remarks about Detroit and whatnot, but if they wanted to do this they could as easily have set it somewhere outside Detroit--twenty-four miles out of Detroit there's still farmland, and a lot of the land in Detroit is deserted urban prairie.
In short, DOES NOT COMPUTE.
AND FURTHERMORE, HOTCH.
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It's sort of amazing that a case that probably most people who watch any news in Canada and certainly most Canadian women who do would know in a second is so completely unknown just across the border.
Of course it took casting Americans to get any sort of movie made on the Teal/Homolka case which affected my life and many girls and women in Ontario starting with pre-teen (I was the same age as some of their victims and vividly remember the search. One of the girls is even buried a stone's throw from here, I found her grave once.) through to university while the case was being tried.
And the Elizabeth Bain case probably means nothing to anyone south of the border or even outside of Ontario, except as an interesting point of law. (They convicted her boyfriend of murder even though her body has never been discovered. He was recently cleared and freed.)
You're not that far away! It's weird! I mean I'm aware I haven't heard of all US cases ever but it's not like I don't know about at least some of the major serial killers/rapists from down there, and in my head these are on pretty much the same scale. And yet..
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And, yeah, the one thing that gives me hope is--I mean, why not just show us Hotch bleeding out or whatever if they were just going to kill him? Hurting him bad, or kidnapping him, give the unsub a lot more to play with, so... maybe! Maybe it will eventually be okay.