‘Criminal Minds’ to Mark 300th Episode With Trip Down Memory Lane

Even though it is hitting its milestone 300th episode, Criminal Minds is not forgetting where it came from.

When the milestone episode airs on Wednesday, Oct. 3 on CBS, also marking the season 14 premiere, fans of the BAU’s Criminal Profiling Unit will be taken down memory lane as Criminal Minds looks “back at where we started,” according to showrunner Erica Messer.

“I wanted to be able to honor the length of the series by showing how we started,” Messer told TV Guide. “There’s clips in the very, very beginning that are from the pilot. That was important to me, to remind everyone of how long we’ve been doing this, fighting crime, if you will.”

Along with clips that echo back to the series’ beginning, as the team races to save Reid and Garcia, Messer teased that a past case will affect the current one.

“Within the body of the story I really wanted a past case to affect our current case because, once again, not many shows get to go back a decade in their storytelling and say, ‘Yeah, remember this case? What if these two things are connected? Something from 10 years ago is connected to today,’” Messer said, adding that the episode “honors just how long we’ve all been a part of this.”

The 300th episode has been a longtime coming for the long-running series, which first premiered in 2005 and has proved to be a major success for the network, with its most recent season averaging a 1.0 rating in the key demo. After scoring a season renewal in May, the “eight-day shoot and a 54-page script” for the season opener will produce a nail-biting, edge-of-your-seat episode.

“When Reid and Garcia are abducted by Benjamin Merva (Michael Hogan), it’s up to the rest of the team to find them,” the official CBS synopsis for the episode reads. “The BAU finds surprising clues in their own history to solve why the two heroes have been targeted by a mass murderer. It’s a race to save them before a ‘Believers’ prophecy is fulfilled…”

Although season 13 concluded with a cliff hanger that left the fates of Reid and Garcia hanging in the balance, season 14 will pick up several minutes later, as Messer claimed that “there was more fun in the mystery of exactly what happened after that standoff that we left the season on.”

Criminal Minds‘ 14th season will kick off with its 300th episode on Wednesday, Oct. 3 at 10 p.m. ET.