Criminal Minds: Beyond Borders: Made In... (2017)
Season 2, Episode 5
3/10
Defective and Poorly Executed Plot
7 April 2017
Warning: Spoilers
This episode happened to be the very first time I watched this TV show and most probably the last time as well. The reason for watching just a single episode of the show that I have no interest in was pretty much obvious as the plot of the episode revolved around Bangladesh. As a fellow Bangladeshi, I felt a bit of an obligation to write a few word on this.

To start with, the entire episode was captured in America while they just affixed some snippets of some busy roads, Mosques and some important installations in Bangladesh throughout the episode. Consequently, the true and recent image of Bangladesh has been adulterated in many ways.

The episode starts with a verse from the great Rabindranath Tagore's poem narrated with the snippets of the busy Dhaka and the verse itself in Bengali on screen. The fact that was very much sore for the eyes to see was the fact that they probably used Google Translator to translate the line from English to Bengali. As many apart from the Bangladeshi themselves, wouldn't know that Google Translate morbidly functions when it comes to translating from English to Bengali or the other way around. So, the alphabets looked more like Sanskrit than Bengali and it wasn't readable, even more so as it did not make any sense at all even to a native Bangladeshi like me.

The fluctuations continue as the show tried its best to portray Dhaka so antiquated as it takes a toll to get ahold of a full cellular network in the capital city, which does not have much of a truth to it. Maybe the statement would've been partially true if we were speaking for a decade-long ago but the advancement of IT sector in Bangladesh has improved drastically, so much as opposed to its neighbour India where there are still many places where Cell Network is pretty much hard to find by. There was another significant bygone point in the episode which has been pretty boldly dealt with in Bangladesh by its law enforcement agencies in the recent past; which is the uptick of the terrorist attack against the foreigners in the country. As secularism remains to be one of the four main pillars of Bangladesh's constitution, there's no place for any militancy in the name of Islam in Bangladesh. Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists and Christians; no matter what their belief, the citizens of this very country bonds over kinship.

Despite some erroneous insinuation throughout the episode, there were some bold and true fact about Bangladesh mentioned briefly like Bangladesh has one of the fastest growing economies in the world, the sub-par environment for the working class in many of the factories and the poor police per civilian ratio throughout the country because of the densely populated areas.

All in all, it was quite clear for the viewers to see that the plot was written in a great haste thus resulting in a poor execution. Since I came to understand that the theme of the show is to run across borders while solving crimes, they could go into more depth regarding certain country's facts where the show is concerned.
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