RoundTable Mondays: Aaron Hotchner

[ficdirectory.livejournal.com]

Aaron Hotchner grew up suffering physical abuse at the hands of his workaholic, lawyer father. (Season 1). It's strongly implied that his mother did little to stop the abuse. Hotch has a younger brother named Sean, who is a chef in NYC. Their father survived cancer, but later died of a heart-attack at 47, while Sean was still a child.


Hotch married his high school sweetheart, Haley Brooks, soon after high school, and he worked as a prosecutor for the District Attorney's office. The first case Hotch ever worked with the FBI involved the Boston Reaper, in 1998.

Hotch's son, Jack, was born in 2005. Haley begins to resent all the time Hotch spends at work as early as Season 1. Haley filed for divorce in Season 3. In early Season 4 Hotch suffered acute acoustic trauma and a shrapnel wound to his leg after being too near an explosion. At the end of Season 4, George Foyet (The Reaper) breaks into Hotch's apartment and stabs him 9 times before delivering him to a local hospital, and stealing Haley and Jack's address. Hotch's family is then put into protective custody.

However, in Season 5, The Reaper got to the US Marshall assigned to Hotch's family and tortured him, trying to get him to tell where Haley and Jack were located. He withstood everything that Foyet had, according to fellow agent, Spencer Reid, but The Reaper used the Marshall's cell phone to contact Haley. He posed as someone with Witness Protection and told her that Hotch had been killed and her location had been compromised. Unaware that Hotch was alive, and she was speaking with a killer, Haley lets Foyet in. She gets in contact with Hotch and they have a final conversation. Hotch is able to issue a code to Jack telling him to "work the case", and Jack was able to hide in the house. Haley was (possibly) shot and also stabbed.

Hotch arrived to find her body and fought Foyet to keep him from locating Jack. Hotch ends up beating Foyet to death to keep this from occurring. He takes custody of Jack, and Haley's sister, Jessica, takes care of Jack when Hotch is away on a case.

In Season 6, he is reluctant to allow Erin Strauss to promote fellow FBI teammate Jennifer Jareau, against JJ's will. Hotch promises he will work on getting her back. In her absence, Hotch takes over part of her job as media liaison, despite his busy schedule. When co-worker, Emily Prentiss is threatened by an international criminal, Hotch makes the decision to bring JJ in to help find Emily. When it's clear that she will not be safe, Hotch and JJ fake Emily's death and get her out of the country through covert exfiltration. Though he is quite serious, Hotch takes moments to talk to his team and make sure they are coping with the demands of the job, or to discuss a potentially dangerous moment on the field. He and Derek Morgan often discuss the importance of trust between the team, and encourages Morgan to trust the others on the team. He tells Penelope Garcia that he knows when she has to step out of her comfort zone, it's very difficult for her, but that he would not want her to change herself for the job. He makes sure Reid gets respect despite his young age, and reassures him that he does not have to give answers others want to hear, while he is grieving Emily's loss. He also helps Rossi cope with the loss of his first wife in Season 7.

Prior to Season 7, Hotch was working in Pakistan, but came back in time to reaveal to the team that Emily Prentiss is alive. He tells the team it was his decision and any "issues" should be directed at him, and not fellow conspiritor, JJ. Hotch has also been promoted to Section Chief, because the former (Erin Strauss) was dealing with alcoholism and needed to go into treatment after drinking on the job. In what little free time Hotch has, he goes to Jack's school conferences, tries to help him through issues of potential bullying. We learned recently that Hotch is also an athlete and has been training for a triathlon, during which he meets a woman named Beth. Hotch is concerned initially because he only lost Haley two years ago, and it may be too fast. But the episode ends with Hotch smiling.


What is your favorite Aaron Hotchner episode?

Is there a part of Aaron's life that you wish got more focus?

What is Hotch's most striking character trait?

What is your favorite Hotch scene?

What do you think makes Hotch an integral part of the BAU?

For writers, how do you portray Hotch? Are there aspects of his life that are not on the show that you incorporate into your fiction? Do you stick pretty close to what the show portrays with regard to his character?

For readers, how do you like your Hotch portrayed? Stoic and serious? A family man? Do you prefer him in danger or saving the day?

What do you think makes Hotch tick?

Feel free to add any other thoughts about Hotch's character in this post, but keep it respectful, please. Disagreement is part of life, but don't put another person down to make your point.

Comments

[chreesko.livejournal.com]

Is that because you don't see the team members as each filling a “family” role? I go back and forth on whether I do, too, so I get that viewpoint. But for some reason Hotch's role within the team just reminds me of that refrigerator commercial with the kids and dad yelling “Mom! Mom! Mom! Mom! Honey!” because they can't find anything without her. I don't know.

I wasn't counting Garcia (or rather, to be perfectly honest, I forgot about her). ;) So I guess I'll amend it to say that other than Garcia, then, i.e., among the active field agents, Hotch has cried or almost-cried the most: Omnivore, Nameless, Faceless, 100, Slave of Duty, and The Bittersweet Science. That's a lot of cries.

[ficdirectory.livejournal.com]

No, I definitely don't see the team as actually filling any kind of family roles. I'm really canon-brained. So unless it's stated overtly that Hotch gave birth to the rest of the team, then I cannot reconcile it, LOL. The Team Dad thing is only something I stand by if forced to choose one or the other...

[chreesko.livejournal.com]

lol. I'm dying at the idea of Hotch giving birth to the team. ahahhaaa! He'd be totally emo about it, too, which makes it even funnier.

But! I do love the team dynamics. It's such a great example of how a team should function, with each person filling their role in a way that complements the others. They provide emotional support for each other when needed and stand back when needed. And I think it lessens the import of what they do have – a perfect team, which is really, really rare, despite what TV likes to tell us – to say that if they are that close, then they are automatically a family. As I said, I go back and forth on whether I see them that way or not, but even though it's a viewpoint I can get behind, I actually resent it a little when the show tries to actively push the idea of the team as family on me. (It's the same reason I don't want them to get too much into Hotch's backstory. The writers can be very ham-fisted on occasion; I'd rather they just didn't touch it.) For some of them at least, they already have a family. And that's not the same as “team.”

I genuinely believe that if Hotch had to choose between Jack and Morgan/Prentiss/Rossi/Reid, or if JJ had to choose between Henry and Morgan/Prentiss/Rossi/Reid, or if Morgan had to choose between one of his sisters or JJ/Prentiss/Rossi/Reid, they would choose their actual family member every time. (Of course, being the people they are, and because this is TV, they'd come up with a way to save everyone, so it's a moot point. But still.) That's the way it should be, and that's the way any of the team would want it to be. Would Morgan really expect Hotch to save his life over his son's? Of course not. Those relationships aren't equal. That doesn't make the team less important, it just makes them not family.

[ficdirectory.livejournal.com]

I like these thoughts, chreesko <3

[nwjarvis.livejournal.com]

I don't know if you'd regard it as canon, but in a 2006 interview, Ed Bernero (Seasons 1-6 Showrunner) said, "All good drama, all good shows, are family shows. So at the core of this show, our BAU profiers are a family."

So, not literally, no. But they fulfill the paradigm of a family, just as they function as the Knights of the Round Table.

Oh, and Hotch already DID choose his BAU family over the home family. Which, hmmm, yeah, I'm pretty sure he regrets. Which isn't to say he wouldn't do the same thing again.

[ficdirectory.livejournal.com]

Families are also people who aren't necessarily best friends, but have each other's backs regardless. I see the team as this, if any, kind of family.

[chreesko.livejournal.com]

I was thinking more of a two people hanging off a cliff, which one do I save? scenario. But it's true that Hotch did choose the job over his family before. That was different to me, though, because (a) it wasn't a life-or-death situation and (b) having had someone he loved actually die because of his job (as opposed to just leave him) changed his priorities IMO. The Hotch of today is very different to me than the one of five years ago.

Plus, even when he chose the job over Haley and Jack, he was giving them up; they were never in any physical danger. When they were in danger, he tried to save them until the very last second, and even ran off on his own to do it when the team couldn't keep up with his mental leaps.

But I do think it's mostly a shift in perspective that he has had in the last couple of seasons, since Haley's death. Jack is a bigger part of his life now than he ever was when Haley was alive. For all that I believe he loved his family before Haley was killed, I don't think he valued family in the way he does now.

[citjara.livejournal.com]

Honestly, I think it's a bit plain to say he just chose the team over his family. The team was virtually breaking apart with him being transferred, Prentiss leaving the FBI and Gideon vanishing. It was seriously insulting when Haley said the dicision itself was a "no-brainer".

[full-metal-ox.livejournal.com]

And, complicating matters further, consider the occasions on which the distinctions between Team and Family blur; I'm thinking specifically of Diana Reid's spot-on analysis of the Fisher King, Jack saving himself (and quite possibly his father's sanity) by his game--turned grimly literal--of Working The Case With Daddy, and Haley's full ceremonial hero's funeral with FBI pallbearers.

[chreesko.livejournal.com]

I actually think his decision to go back didn't have to do with the team as much as it did the job. The team was encouraging him to come back, and they kept blocking his transfer, but if he had been the sole member of the BAU, he still wouldn't have been able to leave. Not that he didn't become that close to the team later, but I don't think he was quite so attached to them at that point.

But from Haley's perspective, it was a no-brainer. That's why that conversation is so difficult to rewatch. They were both wrong, and they were both right. She was saying that he had an obligation to his own family that was greater than his obligation to other families. And he did. When you marry someone and have a child together, you're not just roommates. You can't run off every time you feel like it because your family isn't as important to you as this other thing. His job was changing him and endangering their family (the guy bringing the note to the door in TFK 1, for example), but he didn't care.

Hotch said he was trying his best to balance family and work, but he really wasn't. His best would have been what he did in S5 and S6 when he was forced into it, i.e., passing some of the paperwork (that he shouldn't have been doing anyway) off to Morgan and taking a more active role in his son's life, among other things. Ultimately, Hotch was prioritizing his work because on some level he thought it was more important than his family.

One could make the argument that it was (see below), but I can't fault Haley for not understanding that. Hotch was trying to protect his family from the horrors of his job by not bringing it home or talking about it, but in doing so, he created a situation where Haley didn't really understand what he did and why he did it until Foyet was standing in her living room with a gun to her head.

On the other hand, Hotch was right, too. If you're one of the 0.000000001% of the population that can get into the head of a monster, if you're one of the few who can hunt and catch serial killers, don't you have a responsibility to society to help stop them? And if you've got a hero complex like Hotch does, it's a part of your personal makeup as well. He had a duty to his family, yes, but he also has a duty to the victims, to the ones whose lives will be saved by the BAU. To shirk that duty would have been soul-crushing. If he'd taken that White Collar job, I'm certain they would have gotten a divorce in a few years anyway, because the resentment and anger would have driven them apart anyway.

[citjara.livejournal.com]

>But from Haley's perspective, it was a no-brainer.

It shouldn't have been!
I absolutely agree on this:

> When you marry someone and have a child together, you're not just roommates. You can't run off every time you feel like it because your family isn't as important to you as this other thing. His job was changing him and endangering their family (the guy bringing the note to the door in TFK 1, for example), but he didn't care.

Yet I think her comment completely ignored that he's NOT ONLY her husband. Yes, family should be his priority, but by saying "it's a no-brainer" she was saying that his other side didn't matter, that the ties he has to his co-workers didn't matter. I found that to be disregarding WHO he is...

[chreesko.livejournal.com]

Yet I think her comment completely ignored that he's NOT ONLY her husband. Yes, family should be his priority, but by saying "it's a no-brainer" she was saying that his other side didn't matter, that the ties he has to his co-workers didn't matter. I found that to be disregarding WHO he is...

I agree, kind of, except I think the issue wasn't that she was actively ignoring this other part of him, but that she didn't even know it was there. We didn't see much of their home life, so this is based mostly on my interpretation of the few scenes we did see and the fight in 3x01. To me, the problem is that he went from a guy who had a job to a guy who had found his calling, but for whatever reason, Haley never realized that. Why or how she didn't realize that is an interesting question in itself, and one I'm not sure we have enough information to answer. Part of it may have been that he never told her or let her see that part of him, because she seemed kind of taken aback that he said “This is who I am.” Until that point, she didn't realize that he had another side.

In that context, it wasn't inconsiderate for her to expect him to forget about the team when his marriage was falling apart. As far as she knew, it was just a job and they were just co-workers. If my boyfriend walked out on the conversation that was deciding the future of our relationship because someone from his job needed him when he wasn't even supposed to be at work anyway because of a suspension, that would be not only the end of the conversation, but the end of our relationship as well. If I knew that the job was an integral part of him, that might make a difference. But again, I don't think Haley got that.

I do think that once Hotch left her in the bedroom, she thought about it and realized what he had said: whoever he might have been in the past, the job was an integral part of him now. That's why she was gone when he got back; once she understood what he was saying, she realized she couldn't live like that.

What it came down to ultimately was that she thought he should put his family first, and he thought, because of the nature of his job, work should come first. Neither of them were wrong, but those two viewpoints are never going to be able to co-exist in a marriage. Neither of them could make that fundamental change in outlook – and it wouldn't have been fair for either of them to expect the other to change – so they were doomed from the beginning.

Ugh, this hiatus is killing me. I want the show to come baaaaaack so I can make myself stop ridiculously over-analyzing every little glance, lol.

[citjara.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I get all of that... while it seems Haley was his High-School sweetheart, I'm sometimes tempted to believe, they didn't get married out of high school. With his career within the FBI and a prosecutor first, he certainly never had a 9-5 life... but inspite of what we were led to believe in Fisher King, I'm tempted to believe they did not get married out of high school but sometime lots later, probably after not having seen each other for a couple of years.
(of course, we've just stumbled across one of the canon inconsistencies)

I'm not sure whether there was a change she didn't see coming or whether she married him without realizing who she married. I agree with you, when he left here there in "Doubt", she finally got it.

[citjara.livejournal.com]

PS: I have a blast over-analyzing this show, too :)