Penelope Garcia (played by Kirsten Vangsness) is a fictional character on the TV series Criminal Minds. She is the Computer Technician of the Behavioral Analysis Unit which the show centers on. She is flamboyant, fun-loving, and provides the rest of the team with comic relief.

She is very confident in her abilities of finding answers, and often answers her office phone with a pompous, yet joking, attitude. This self-confidence is fed by Morgan, who often initiates flirtatious banter, which Garcia seems to enjoy. Although they haven't pursued a romantic relationship, Garcia did show mild jealousy at the sight of Morgan dancing with two other women.

She also started to cry twice when she thought Morgan had been killed.E210E401 Her parents died in an auto accident due to a drunk driver when she was eighteen, and she now helps counsel the families of murder victims in her spare time. Garcia has stated that after her parents died, she dropped out of Caltech and went "underground" but continued to teach herself computer coding. She had been placed on one of the FBI's hacker lists (she was one of a small handful of extremely useful or dangerous hackers in the world), and they recruited her from there.E309 It has also been mentioned, when she was not allowed to travel with the team to Langley, that she was on the CIA's "lists" as well.E121 JJ joked that Garcia was on the list for trying to hack the CIA for information on Princess Diana's death and other government conspiracies.

Penelope is into online games, specifically MMOGs, as she was once seen playing a game about Camelot on the BAU network.E122 However, tragically, it was revealed to be a trick by Randall Garner to hack into the BAU's Personnel Files. Garcia is unabashedly an emotional being, which sometimes makes her job with the BAU more difficult. She has broken down crying several times while listening to and watching terrifying things in her office to analyze them for the team.

However, according to Agent Hotchner, she "fills her office with figurines and color to remind herself to smile as the horror fills her screens." Garcia is, on the whole, an optimist. She has managed to remain so, even though the job occasionally requires her to dig into people's secret lives, to "find the godawful thing that happened to them that made them do the godawful thing to someone else."E419 Many team members have commented in various ways, that her optimism is an aid to them, that (as Hotch said) they would never want her to change. Garcia was once shot by a man with whom she had just gone on a date, but she survived the gunshot when the bullet missed her heart and ricocheted into her stomach.E308 She is currently romantically involved with fellow FBI Technical Analyst Kevin Lynch (played by Nicholas Brendon).

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