My wife and I have enjoyed watching the various seasons of Criminal Minds over the years. Criminal Minds, for those who don't know, is a crime drama that centers on agents in the FBI's Behavioral Analysis Unit (BAU). The series ended a few years ago with a sappy finale that drew heavily on the modern trope that many modern crime dramas seem to tap into, that a group of work colleagues are (mostly) the only "family" to each other.
Well, recently they (whoever "they" are) decided to resurrect the series with some new seasons. This time it's called "Criminal Minds: Evolution." It doesn't have the same enjoyability as the earlier seasons, but the episodic case stories are interesting enough to keep us watching it.
But it's now set within this long arc that spans the several seasons (maybe the idea is to just make it an ongoing backdrop that never resolves), and boy do they pour it on with the psy-ops.
For one thing, one of the team is a lesbo, whose "lover" also works for the government, so there's all of that drama. When that comes up, I get up to get a drink or whatever. But that's not the real meat of the psy-op game in this series.
The long arc involves this mastermind serial killer that's been known about and is being hunted by the government, but his existence is classified. He even has a classified designation within the government: Gold Star. The BAU team learns about it through one of their own investigations, but the higher echelons are reluctant to let them in on the hunt. Various political games and shifting alliances ensue.
Eventually, the team catches a serial killer mastermind (not Gold Star, but a different one named "Voit") and the FBI director is so eager/frantic to find out who Gold Star is that he's conned into letting Voit "help" him. The director orders the BAU team to work/cooperate with Voit, bringing him case information so that he can look at it from his cell and provide insights, etc.
Part of the psy-op is that they keep bouncing around this concept of a "social contagion." The concept is that a dangerous thought, belief, or idea can be like a regular pathogen, spreading from person to person and infecting a society to the point where either the whole society is sick, or to the point where the "wrong person" becomes infected and it causes them to become dangerous to society. It's clear that the concept is just in the background of an idea that maybe the First Amendment should be re-thought a little bit. After all, if the government has the just power to enact laws and constrain people's freedom to prevent the spread of physical pathogens, then they should have the same power when it comes to psychological "pathogens," right?
But then there's the big (rather laughable) psy-op they rolled out two episodes ago: While trying to figure out who Gold Star is, they also are trying to figure out what Gold Star is. Is he just a serial killer? Is he an ex-secret government agent of some kind? Is he a freelance assassin?
No, he's worse than all of that: He's a CONSPIRACY THEORIST (gasp!)