Despite being a big fan of 'Criminal Minds', Season 11 was largely underwhelming for reasons too numerous to list, including too much unsub and not enough team, lack of profiling and psychology, too much emphasis on the personal lives and not enough tension and suspense.
As far as Season 11 goes, "A Badge and a Gun" is towards the top end (seeing as it doesn't commit as many glaring mistakes as most of the episodes from the season) without being one of the very best ones. It is not as good as "The Job", "Hostage", "The Witness" and especially "Entropy" (also found "A Beautiful Disaster" better than given credit for, though generally Morgan's exit arc should have been better handled).
But at the same time it is much better than the likes of "Till Death Do Us Part", "The Bond", "Future Perfect", "Awake", "Inner Beauty", "Internal Affairs", "Outlaw" and "Drive".
Starting with the good points, "A Badge and a Gun" looks slick and stylish. The music is appropriately moody, in both the haunting and melancholic sense. The direction is quick-paced yet sympathetic, and there are some interesting touches such as the ambitious ruse that could have gone so badly wrong and the whole location stuff with the unsub. The acting is very good, all the leads are reliably strong and Carmine Giovinazzo nails his creepy unsub role.
There is more detective work and profiling than most episodes of the season and it makes sense, the unsub with his very bleak past is better developed than most of the unsubs from Season 11 (and while he is shown early on other episodes have done far worse in how much they use their unsubs, here his murder of Patricia was pretty horrifying). Garcia is more adult and more professional than she tended to be in the later seasons too. The cliff-hanger ending is suitably ominous.
However, wasn't really all that invested in the whole subplot with Morgan and Savannah, it didn't dominate the episode thankfully but before this point the relationship was too sketchy and too lacking in chemistry and Savannah too dull a character to really feel anything. The case generally is competent but pretty routine with potentially interesting areas not explored enough (like the significance of Andrew's looks) and apart from the ruse, the murder of Patricia and the ending suspense was lacking.
Occasionally the writing gets a tad confused, with a couple of parts such as the aftermath of the realisation of the occupation of the unsub somewhat extraneous as well.
In summary, in the better half of Season 11 but middling 'Criminal Minds' in general. 6/10 Bethany Cox