Connections Between Burn and Inferno

“Abandon All Hope Ye Who Enter Here.” There isn’t a single person in the world who isn’t familiar with that iconic line. Dante Alighieri’s Inferno, and by extension The Divine Comedy^[1], has managed to worm its way deep into humanity’s psyche, and nowadays references and adaptations of the Italian poet's work can be found everywhere. One recent use of Dante’s Inferno is found in Jeff Davis’ procedural crime drama Criminal Minds. The second episode of season 10, Burn, shares elements with Dante’s Inferno, and uses the book as an excellent plot device to explore the theme of obsession. The use of Inferno inside Burn was a captivating tribute from the Connecticut born producer to the Italian author. However, thanks to Criminal Minds and The Divine Comedy’s respective messages, expectations, and time constraints, the book and the TV episode could never combine together in a satisfactory way.

In Inferno, Dante Alighieri spins a tale of how he lost his way and found himself barred from proceeding further down a path. Beatrice, a lost love in Heaven, sends someone to guide him to salvation. Dante descends through Hell with the Roman poet Virgil and meets many figures from mythology and history, often holding conversations with them that expand on why they are being punished. As he sees the punishments that await sinners on various levels, Dante slowly loses sympathy for the sinners, and grows to trust divine judgment. In Criminal Minds episode Burn, a series of strange murders brings most of the protagonists to Seattle, WA. After one of the characters makes a connection between the murders and the punishments in Dante’s Inferno, the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit (BAU) manages to track down the antagonist, Justin Leu, before he murders anyone else. There is also a side plot where one of the characters, Penelope Garcia, is obsessing over death row inmate Greg Baylor, who nearly killed her and Dr. Spencer Reid in a previous episode. That obsession eventually culminates in her accepting that she cannot change the man’s fate, and after witnessing his execution, returns home to her relieved boyfriend.

Both Inferno and Criminal Minds as a whole ruminate on the concept and downfalls of obsession, but they present different viewpoints on what should be done about it. Inferno focuses on the potential spiritual consequences, determining that failing to restrain yourself in life would result in impartial, harsh judgment in the afterlife with no hope of forgiveness or respite. In fact, when Dante^[2] shows pity for some of the souls in Canto XX, Virgil scolds him for doubting divine judgment. He says, "Art thou, too, of the other fools?/Here pity lives when it is wholly dead;/Who is a greater reprobate than he/Who feels compassion at the doom divine?” (Alighieri, Canto XX) Dante’s goal with the Divine Comedy was to preach to readers on how humanity currently lives, and preach to them his ideas of what a moral, righteous life looks like. “In the literal sense, the subject of the entire poem, according to Dante, is “the state of souls after death,” whereas in allegorical terms, the poem is about humankind, who by exercising free will bring “rewarding or punishing justice” upon themselves.” (“Dante”) Criminal Minds can’t support moral doctrine like this. The procedural drama revolves on analyzing behaviors of its many characters and how they affect others, not theological discourse. When asked, writer and producer Jeff Davis said “The inspiration for Criminal Minds came out of reading about real-life cases and from my own interest in the subject of psychology. I knew they had tried to do FBI profiler shows before mine, but none of them seemed to have quite captured all of the fascinating psychological tools and tricks that people like Robert Ressler and John Douglas spoke of [in their books].” (Lusinski) Therefore, Burn had to take a different approach. It focuses instead on the immediate consequences of others’ obsessions. The obvious consequences of Justin’s obsession are the numerous murders of father figures in the Seattle area. The consequences of Garcia’s obsession are seen in her deteriorating mental state, and the emotional stress she causes in her boyfriend and the death row inmate. The protagonists in Burn also take a different stance on punishment. They offer both Justin and Garcia a chance to step away from their fixations, giving them a chance to walk away from their obsession. “Put that gun down. Don’t let your father destroy you more than he already has.”^[3] (Davis, 35:27). In short, the difference between the two mediums is that Inferno displays obsession as consuming and unforgivable, and Burn displays it as being somewhat forgivable if you choose to let it go.

The Divine Comedy and Criminal Minds have some rather fantastical elements to it. Both of them are rather unrealistic in modern-day standards in their own way. No person in Dante’s era would claim to see an angel from Heaven or a demon from Hell without someone questioning their sanity. In Criminal Minds, it’s a similar story. “So many of the crimes make absolutely no sense [and] much of it would never happen in real life.” (Stewart) Every time a story is told, the audience must suspend their beliefs on what is real, and what isn’t. This is where we find the difference between the tall tales. The suspension of disbelief, also known as “poetic faith”, is best defined as when the reader and/or audience must “choose to be deceived” by the author or writer and engage with the work in front of them as if it were an account of true events. (Ferri 10). It’s seen as both a conscious and unconscious decision, and it’s very easy to be shaken out of making that choice. In order to keep the audience’s attention, a writer needs to keep the audience’s expectations of the promised premise and of the typical experiences they might have that would influence their ability to engage with the media before them. Anthony J. Ferri says that some filmmakers rely on “schemas”, or a stereotypical style, to keep this up. By playing on the audience’s perceptions on certain appearances and social cues, they can make the story more believable. To play off an example made by Ferri, if a writer wanted to easily and realistically portray a homeless man in today’s era, he would likely be wearing ill-fitting clothes, holding out their hands or walking with a shopping cart. (Ferri, 23) Following that schema makes it easier for the audience to suspend their disbelief. This is what makes merging Inferno and Burn difficult. Dante Aligheri and Jeff Davis ask their audiences for different amounts of disbelief. The Divine Comedy is a trio of books set in imagined, fantastical realms, explores religious themes, and is filled to the brim with supernatural creatures from myths and legends. In short, it’s a work of fiction with a lot of fantasy elements to it, and the audience needs to put more effort into letting go of their view of reality in order to enjoy Inferno. The premise of Criminal Minds, even though it is a little unbelievable by realistic standards, is more modern; there are no supernatural elements in it. In order for parts of Inferno to integrate believably into the real-world setting of Burn, some of the supernatural qualities needed to be changed. For example, it would be jarring for the audience to see a never-ending windstorm, so the punishment from Canto V was adapted to dying by electrocution. (Davis, 26:22) By going through with those changes, the audience loses out on seeing key points of Inferno in Burn, but it helps audiences from working too hard to maintain their suspension of disbelief.

Some major elements of Dante’s Inferno didn’t even make it into Davis’ Burn. Admittedly, it is possible that Davis cut a major part of the material based on how graphic Dante tends to get when describing Hell’s punishments.^[4] However, the more likely answer to why Davis edited out certain pieces of the Inferno is due to time constraints. A Criminal Minds episode tends to run anywhere between forty to forty-five minutes. Burn itself is forty-one minutes and forty-three seconds long. Audiobooks and podcasts of Dante’s Inferno are at least five times longer than that. The shortest audiobook I could find is available on the Internet Archive, and even that one is four hours and one minute long. If Davis had wanted to appropriately address all of the content in the book and connect it to the plot of his TV show, he would have needed to create at least five to six episodes running concurrently with each other. For a TV series as old as Criminal Minds, that’s half a season’s worth of episodes.^[5] Most TV series will limit a concurrently running plot line for two episodes before breaking it up with other plot lines and stories. With so many other plots to explore, dedicating that much of the tenth season was not feasible. With that constraint in mind, it is understandable that Davis refused to put in major characteristics and plot points of the Inferno into Burn. Most of what was cut included discussions about major institutions of power and their corruption, the sublevels within the circles of hell (one of the most prominent being the Maleboge), and Virgil’s relationship with Dante as a guide and protector.^[6] And once again, The Divine Comedy and Criminal Minds lose the opportunity to integrate together.

Overall, Dante Alighieri’s work of art and Jeff Davis’ beloved television series share similarities in their content, but their intentions and abilities lead the stories onto completely different paths. The vastly different beliefs on how to respond to obsessions, the amount of poetic faith expected from the audience, and the limitations of their craft keep the two mediums from truly merging together. Still, if there is one thing that Burn and Inferno can do together, it is teach this lesson: if you let your obsessions rule you, the consequences are dire.

Works Cited

Alighieri, Dante. The Divine Comedy (Translated by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow with an Introduction by Henry Francis Cary). Translated by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Dartmouth College, 2013. Dante Lab at Dartmouth College, http://dantelab.dartmouth.edu/reader. Accessed 6 November 2023.

“Burn.” Criminal Minds, created by Jeff Davis, season 10, episode 2, CBS, 8 October 2014, disc 1.

“Dante.” Gale Literature Resource Center, 9 March 2019, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/H1410000017/LitRC?u=wash_main&sid=bookmark-LitRC&xid=302cf81b. Accessed 6 November 2023.

“Dante's Inferno (Modern English Translation) : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming.” Internet Archive, 9 August 2020, https://archive.org/details/20200809_20200809_0643. Accessed 4 December 2023.

Ferri, Anthony J. Willing suspension of disbelief : poetic faith in film. Lexington Books, 2007.

Heldenfels, Rich. “How many episodes in a TV season? Here's the long and short of it | HeraldNet.com.” Everett Herald, 6 October 2019, https://www.heraldnet.com/life/how-many-episodes-in-a-tv-season-heres-the-long-and-short-of-it/. Accessed 4 December 2023.

Lusinski, Natalia. “Interview: Jeff Davis.” The Script Lab, 1 November 2011, https://thescriptlab.com/features/indie-film/tales-from-the-trade/1519-jeff-davis-interview/. Accessed 6 November 2023.

Stewart, Emily. “Criminal Minds makes no sense and is the perfect crime TV show.” Vox, 21 January 2022, https://www.vox.com/22890101/criminal-minds-review-cbs-fbi-bau-revival. Accessed 6 November 2023.