There are a thousand stories in this, the sparkling city sprawled out among the desert like an ancient goddess of avarice. Yes, a thousand stories, each with its own set of heroes, its own life lesson unfolding after a unique beginning...
But, if you ask the cinematographers on CSI, there's only one way to start the show -- a shot of the Strip, telescoping over to the prefab suburbs beyond. We're in Vegas. We get it already. For the love of God, find a new opening sequence.
After this week's token panorama, we see a young couple in an SUV driving up to a pottery emporium in a strip mall. Permit me the first of my many digressions for the evening: do we really live in a country where the demand for pottery is so great as to sustain an entire retail industry based on the crap? How is it possible that people make a living trafficking in twee ceramics? More importantly, why haven't we rounded up the people responsible for perpetuating the Hummel figurine racket and installed them in forced aesthetic re-education camps? Revolt against cutesy-wootsy clay statues, I say!
These two walk over to the door of their sinister bazaar and note that they've been broken into. I chortle delightedly and hope that the experience will teach them to go into another, more aesthetically pleasing line of work. No such luck: they trip through the trashed store and go back to the safe, observing that it's been scorched open and the cash fund has been taken. Just as the complaining between these two reaches a critical volume, the guy -- I never bother learning the names of the people who stumble across the episode's crime scene, since we'll never see them after 9:03 anyway -- leans past his appalled female companion and commands her to call 911. Naturally, she has to see why, and both merchants of kitsch gaze at the man lying on the floor in a pool of his own blood.
Cue Nicky steering the CSIMobile into the store parking lot. He's barely parked it when Gil and Catherine leap out and scamper into the store. If you guys are looking for crime, you've found plenty of it -- provided you find fake-flower arrangements and wrought-iron planters as aesthetically wrong as I do. The three CSIs are looking for a less horrific crime scene, and as they step over a pile of off-white pottery shards and pick their way through a picket of wooden flowers, Brass helpfully supplies it for them.
"Introductions?" Gil queries, and Brass fulfills his contractual obligation for the week: "Joseph Felton, 44, not an employee, no reason to be here." Gil asks, "Mind if he and I have a moment together?" Yee-haw, we're back to communing with the dead! What will Gil learn from this stiff? That the blood is due to the brain attempting to exit via the ears when it realized it was looking at a wall full of garden gnomes? Gil leans in for the trademark Grissomian Gaze. Meanwhile, Nicky soaks up the opportunity to breathe the fresh outside air before he's banished to the dank subplot subbasement; he's snapping photographs of a mimosa in back. At least, I think it's a mimosa -- it's got the same sensitive fronds and spores on the back of the leaves. Catherine begins dusting a truly evil-looking little gnome -- no, not Brass, we like him now -- for prints. Nicky comes back inside, and he engages in some expository banter with Brass: the safe's been scorched open, which is unusual, and only $300 or so was taken. Gil interrupts this scintillating dialogue to inform us all that the corpse had multiple contusions on the back of the skull, and postulates that perhaps the poor guy didn't know it was coming. That's quite a leap of speculation there, Gil, given that he was whacked in the back of the head and thus could not see it happening. "Robbery interruptus?" Catherine asks. Gil replies, "I'd say our robbery suspect is a homicide victim." You think? "That's one way to beat the rap," Catherine quips, and we go to the credits.
Commercial time! Is anyone else disturbed by Sexy Martha Stewart rolling around all over her new linens collection in various states of undress? I thought so.
Nicky and Catherine are kitted out in scrubs and getting the 411 on the dead guy from David the coroner. David tells them that death was instantaneous; he doesn't know much about the weapon used, but he's swabbed the wound for any residual material the weapon left. The resultant particles are on slides under the microscope. Nicky, in his role as Explanation Lad, notes that the sharp-edged yellow particles look as though they came off the murder weapon, but he's confounded by the glittery stuff. Well, Nicky, there's your first clue: this guy was killed by a member of Mott the Hoople. Find your washed-up glam rockers sucking down watery margaritas in the lounge of the Orleans, and you've got your killers. David does not share my theory, and grouses that he's sent the stuff down to the lab for analysis. Catherine, who has been staring intently at the corpse's dented skull, asks David if he has a comb. "Your hair looks great, Cath," Nicky quips, and David notes defensively that the body's still dirty because the corpses don't get washed until after all the evidence has been collected. "That's what I'm doing," Catherine says, combing vigorously. A lot of dark little particles fall out of the guy's hair, and she collects them, noting, "He's covered in spores. I think these came from a fern." "Well, the back entrance was overgrown with them," Nicky says, smiling with the memory of freedom, sweet freedom, far from the shackles of subplot irrelevancy. Catherine muses about the profligacy of the fickle fern, quoting Kansas: "Most of the spores end up as dust in the wind. But these are evidence, as good as fingerprints or fibers for placing the suspect at the crime scene."
After that morsel of seventies rock wisdom, Catherine goes upstairs to heckle Gil over missing the fun in morgue, and finds him staring enthralled at AFIS. "Melissa Marlowe," he says to Catherine, and she understandably replies, "Excuse me?" Gil then launches into a lengthy monologue: Melissa Marlowe was kidnapped as a four-year-old child twenty-one years ago and presumed dead. However, her fingerprints -- which, like the fingerprints of homo sapiens everywhere, were fixed in their permanent patterns during the fourth month of fetal development -- match up at several critical points. To quote Gil, "Both prints are ulnar loops. Bifurcation, recurve and ridge ending are identical." He then does a whizzy computer-graphics-aided thing, and the two CSIs marvel at the match Melissa Marlowe's prints make with prints taken from the pottery store. Catherine then asks if Melissa Marlowe is a suspect in the homicide; Gil notes that the prints weren't fresh and ventures that they're looking at two separate cases. He's going to pick up the Marlowe case -- something I don't quite get, since the child was kidnapped in Colorado, and last time I checked, Las Vegas wasn't in the Rocky Mountain state -- and Catherine will take the homicide with Nicky.
Meanwhile, Warrick and Sara have managed to dig their way out of the basement they were locked in and have added a new plot to the mix. They're taking photographs of the smoldering remains of Nadine Winston. Apparently, she was dozing in the chair and somehow burst into flames and died. Sara's burbling about the possibilities of making CSI history by proving spontaneous combustion; Warrick is the cool voice of reason: "Spontaneous combustion is science fiction. There's no such thing as a human torch." Sara leans in and asks Warrick, "What if it is real and we've uncovered it?" Warrick implores her to come back to reality and work the crime scene. She does, poking around the pile of ashes formerly known as Nadine. Warrick notices that there's a thin strip of barely burned cloth hanging from the chair; Sara examines it and says, "It's like the body burned but the clothing was fire retardant." Just then, a helicopter conveniently flies overhead, shaking loose some debris from the ceiling and prompting Sara and Warrick to look up. There's a hole in the ceiling, burned up almost to the roof. "It's like the fire created a chimney for itself," Warrick observes. Sara asks if Nadine lived alone, and finds out from a uniform that the husband's already at the station.
Cut to the Mr. Winston being interrogated by the buzzcut detective (listed in the closed captioning as "Investigator"). There's some desultory back-and-forth where the husband protests his innocence, his great love for Nadine, and his conviction that sleeping in separate beds is in no way an indication of marital woe. Apparently, Nadine snored something fierce, and the only way he could get a little shut-eye was to repair to another bedroom. Warrick and Sara are watching Mr. Winston defend his sleeping arrangements and glaring suspiciously through the one-way glass. When the investigator asks Mr. Winston if he knows how to work a blowtorch -- leading me to wonder: how complicated can it be? You hold the end that's not on fire, you aim at something combustible, you watch the results, right? -- Mr. Winston loses it, shouting that he came down to the station of his own volition, and finishing, "Call me if I can be of any help!" He storms out in a grand snit. Warrick watches Mr. Winston go and turns to Sara, asking, "So you still think it's spontaneous combustion?" He does not finish, "As opposed to spousal combustion?" Sara gives him an opaque look and replies, "Theories give way to conclusions once all the evidence is in. I am merely thinking about the piece of evidence." Oh, this has all the hallmarks of a wacky subplot; I want no part of it. Unfortunately, I must keep watching or else Sars will fire me.
I may regret all my sniping about Nicky being exiled to subplot irrelevancy if this scene is any indication. Nicky's standing over a cluster of photos, telling Brass, "This safe was cracked by a plasma lance." "Okay, I'll bite," says Brass, since he apparently never heard of a plasma lance during his long tenure as CSI head, and since he is apparently under contractual obligation to propel the plot forward via expository devices. Nicky goes into gadget-geek mode, explaining, "It's a high-powered electric blaster that could cut through that hard plate with extreme precision. It's not common, but effective. Crime scene from a robbery in '99, Joseph Felton, our dead guy, was arrested but granted immunity in exchange for testimony against his partner, Darin Hansen, who used a plasma lance to crack that safe. Darin Hansen was released from prison last month. His last known address? Vegas." Brass bats his eyes in appreciation and Nicky smiles, perhaps expecting a pat on the head or a kiss on the cheek for that dazzling, if stilted, delivery of more information than any one human delivers in a typical conversation. Brass propels the story along, and Nicky launches into a narration of the flashback rendition of the crime: Felton and Hansen decide to break into a foul emporium of kitsch for old times' sake, and once the two are inside, Hansen cracks Felton on the head in retaliation for dropping a dime on him. Brass expresses his appreciation for that hypothesis and asks Nicky if he's seen the murder weapon. "No," Nicky twinkles, basking in the approval of an older male authority figure. "But I know who we can ask."
Cut to him questioning the biker from the Village People. That lush moustache, the leather jacket, the complexion that implies one too many nights spent at the Glory Hole...I'm digressing. Nicky, Catherine, and Brass are doing their darnedest to make the murder-as-revenge motive stick, but Hansen reasonably points out that he has no incentive to pay a social call on the man who put him behind bars. "But you and Felton go way back," Brass prods. Hansen answers, "Yeah, all the way to our Navy days. We used to stay at the YMCA when we went to San Francisco on shore leave. Oh, we were macho, macho men!" The CSIs heroically restrain themselves from asking any more leading questions about gay-positive disco and prod for more motive, noting that Hansen and Felton lived across the street from each other and the betrayal must have cut deep. Hansen doesn't bite. Nicky tries to support the lance theory, and Hansen points out that "Joe was the lance guy. He taught me how to break into safes. That's why the MO's the same." Confounded by yet more "reason," the CSIs regroup and let Brass jump back in for questioning. He asks Hansen where he was that morning; Hansen replies that he's been in Barstow all week, playing a gig at a local casino that the Indian guy and the construction worker happen to operate. He digs out a few receipts to make his point. Nicky looks acutely betrayed by the evidence. At least he's having a good hair and shirt episode so far.
Hey! It's Jim Walsh, still having problems with his daughter. He's sitting with his wife -- not Cindy, but some other innocuously pretty matron -- and explaining to Gil that it's kinda mind-blowing to learn that the daughter they'd given up for dead twenty-one years ago is actually in Las Vegas. Well, no more mind-blowing than leaving your expansive Beverly Hills house in the hands of your son while you go zipping off to the Far East without thought one for your daughter the expat in London, but I'm confusing my TV parent conceits here. Anyway, Gil decides to rip the slim shred of hope from Jim's grasp, warning, "We still don't know where she is. The prints are a few weeks old and Vegas is a tourist town." The parents press Gil on whether or not their daughter's still alive and Gil backpedals some more, perhaps only realizing now that telling two people who have been missing a child for twenty-one years that there might be a snowball's chance that someone who passed through a pottery store a few weeks ago is their kid without any further leads is a cruel thing to do. Fortunately, he's spared from further painful interaction with the parents by the arrival of Teri Miller, whom we all remember as the crackerjack forensics artist Gil's been smitten with. The smitten status does not appear to be mutual; judging from Teri's icy demeanor, we're in for a whole new class of awkward human interaction from Gil Grissom. Teri ignores Gil and asks the parents for the pictures they have of Melissa; the mother asks how these can possibly be any help, and Gil and Teri put on another explanatory forensics sketch for us, the viewers at home. The upshot: Terri's got a turbo-charged version of Photoshop that lets her computer-age photographs; the algorithms are based on human facial growth patterns through childhood and adolescence. Before Teri and Gil can depart for a tense session of photo-doctoring, Jim stops them in their tracks, asking, "It's been so long. Tell us the truth -- what are our chances?" Teri looks apprehensive, but Gil actually manages a reply that registers as human and comforting, saying, "Twenty-one years ago, they told you that your daughter was dead. Now we're moving in the right direction."
Cut to Catherine with Felton's daughter; they're in the morgue, and the girl -- Tammy -- wants to say goodbye to her dad. Catherine pulls out the drawer and Tammy looks stunned, then gets teary. We find out she has no other family; Catherine's looking sympathetic, but as she walks by Tammy, her magnifying X-ray vision picks up the many tiny fern spores caught in Tammy's fleece vest. Catherine then asks Tammy if she was at the pottery store with dear ol' dad, and Tammy stammers her misunderstanding. She's a lousy liar. Catherine notes that they've matched the spores found on Felton to the ferns in back of the store, and takes a few from Tammy's vest for evidence as well. "Is there anything you want to tell me?" Catherine prods, and Tammy spins this ridiculous story about how she followed her father to the pottery store for the express purpose of pleading with him not to break in. Dad sent her on her teary way, and she has no idea what happened . God, she's a dismal liar. "Why didn't you just tell me that?" Catherine asks. "I wanted to preserve the good memories," Tammy replies tremulously, working that "I'm a plucky orphan now that my daddy's dead" angle for all she can. Then Tammy does the plucky orphan stomp out of the morgue and Catherine watches her go, distrust written all over her face.
Yum! It's a scorched-looking foot on a gurney. "Okay," Warrick says, struggling to retain some semblance of dignity while enmeshed in the comic-relief portion of the evening. "Tell me everything you can about this foot." The lab tech -- who's new, but has a dry and intolerant demeanor I instantly warm to -- inquires, "Where's the rest of the body?" "Incinerated!" Sara says excitedly, continuing, "Lab results for the ashes came back. Negative for accelerant, nothing flammable but sebaceous glutamate." "Hmmph. Human fat," the tech coos in Sara's general direction. We then move into this week's TMI shot -- the burned-out inside of the foot -- while the tech explains that the anklebone was burned hollow, indicating that "the foot was burned off the body, not severed. That's consistent with your theory of spontaneous combustion." The tech finishes by giving Sara a gooey, lovesick grin. "How do you know about Sara's theory?" Warrick demands irritably. "Word gets around?" the tech rebuts, still smiling shyly. "Nah, you're just siding with Sara 'cause you got a crush on her," Warrick shoots back. "No, that's why I wore a clean lab coat," answers the tech sincerely, and I decide that he and Liam should have their own spin-off show. I have no idea what they'd do on it; I just want to see more of them. The lab tech continues, "I'm just reporting my observations: if the foot had been severed, the marrow would still be intact." Warrick pushes to find out if the tech's verdict is spontaneous combustion. "Not yet," he says. "I want to send a scraping down to toxicology --" and here he has to bump past Sara, who's not making any effort to move until he mumbles "excuse me," then continues talking, oblivious to the dirty look Warrick shot Sara, and the upraised eyebrow Sara gave back. They're going to test the blood -- what little there is -- for anything that might have contributed to the scene. Sara makes to talk to Gil, and Warrick testily reminds her that they're a team and they apparently have to travel in pairs. Well. This is a whole different dynamic from the days when Sara was pushing to have Warrick fired and Warrick was enduring Sara as a hermit might a hair shirt.
Gil and Teri are busy extrapolating Melissa Marlowe's looks based on her baby pictures and photos of her mother at the same age. It's a truly hideous process: at several points in the proceedings, Melissa looks like a Todd McFarlane action figure. Or, as Teri says, "aging is about predictable craniofacial growth. Faces grow down and out." Well, that explains James Van Der Beek and several of the shots we see of poor Melissa. ["Ha! I kept flashing on Conan's 'If They Mated' during this scene myself." -- Sars] While the two are having their Socratic dialogue on computer aging, Gil's all in her personal space, hoping she'll pick up on the vibe he's sending her way. My God, what's gotten into the water at CSI headquarters? Everyone's all twitterpated. Teri, however, is immune to Gil's charm, turning down his dinner invitation without a second thought. Catherine comes in as Gil and Teri finish the picture of Melissa. Gil's flush with the thrill of learning something new and cool about work, and hands Catherine the picture he and Teri made, saying, "Say hello to Melissa Marlowe." "Oh my god," Catherine responds. "That's Tammy Felton. And we've already met."
Okay, so Gil was wrong. There aren't two cases anymore; there's just one extremely convoluted one. "Tammy Felton's our murder suspect?" Nicky asks as he chases along after Catherine and Gil through the CSI Central Halls. "She was kidnapped twenty-one years ago, and possibly killed the man who kidnapped her," Catherine hypothesizes. Nicky stammers about the freshness of the prints, and Gil points out that Tammy could have cased the place earlier, then worn gloves to the actual killing. He then makes a pointed inquiry about the murder weapon and Nicky, recognizing his cue, scampers off.
Gil and Catherine, meanwhile, have headed to a psychiatrist's, presumably to plumb his brain as to what makes Tammy/Melissa tick. It's kind of an informal conference, what with Catherine sitting while Gil and the shrink stand -- the better for Gil to hold an aluminum baseball bat steady so the shrink can tape it. "I've got Little League in an hour. It's for my son; he's afraid of the ball." The guys have a little chuckle over that, and Catherine asks, "Why don't you just talk with him?" The laughter stops and the shrink is all business again. Oh, the irony, delivered with such subtlety. Much like my sarcasm, yes? Anyway, the purpose of this scene is to establish that very young children who are kidnapped, then raised by their abductors basically grow up to be sociopaths. To quote the good doctor, "Children kidnapped at that age tend to exhibit some degree of sociopathy as adult. The most defining characteristic is their instinct for survival. There's nothing they won't do." Catherine absorbs all this and, clearly projecting as a mother and thinking of her own daughter, says, "Tammy Felton may be a suspect, but she's also a victim. She needs help." Gil commands his colleague to go meet with Tammy the sociopath and ask probing, disturbing questions about her past life in the interest of the case. Everyone gets up to leave, and the doctor tells Gil -- who is not going anywhere near Tammy -- "Be careful. Sociopaths are dangerous because they don't function with the same moral code as the rest of us." Gil just smiles and quips, "Welcome to my world." I'm going to take that as a shout-out to me, and then I'm going to ponder whether Gil meant that he was used to dealing with people who were morally bankrupt, or whether he, himself, is some sort of benign sociopath, if such a thing exists.
Sara and Warrick are still on this death-by-fire business. Warrick is offering up all sorts of homicide theories, and Sara's shooting them down. "What about life insurance?" he asks, and this is the point where I jump in with an entirely personal sidebar: owing to recent circumstances, I am now terribly familiar with how life insurance policies work. First, you need a death certificate; in the case of a death that's under criminal investigation, you'll also need a police report, an autopsy report, and a coroner's report to detail the cause of death so it can be proven that the decedent didn't bring their demise upon him- or herself. So if you're after someone's life insurance money, wouldn't it behoove you to find a way to kill them that would guarantee a speedy autopsy, not one that has assorted medical examiners and investigators poking about the evidence for weeks? But I digress again. Back to the show, where Sara and Warrick continue to debate the probability of spontaneous combustion and Warrick, who is insisting on investigating all non-spontaneous combustion angles, is getting stymied at every turn.
Nicky's charging into a lab, and watches Liam the lab tech on the phone. Liam is yet another CSI staffer who's been kicked in the butt by love, as evidenced by this phone conversation: "You know I love you...no, I love you more..." Nicky clears his throat and Liam gives him a pole-axed grin, then turns back to the phone, cooing, "Bye, baby." Nicky's all business, demanding to know where the mineral analysis of the pottery store sample is; Liam looks blank, then punts: "Grissom's been running me around like a lapdog, I haven't had a chance --" "Grissom's on a missing persons case. He hasn't sent you anything," Nicky replies peevishly. Still grasping at straws, Liam says, "Did I say Grissom? I meant Catherine." Nicky laughs contemptuously before replying, "Catherine's working with me." Liam, you're adorable, but you're busted. Liam acknowledges it, fetching the swab and asking Nicky, "Don't you ever goof off, huh? Don't you ever get lost in life?" "No," Nicky answers seriously, conveniently forgetting the entire Kristy debacle. The two get down to business. They're doing some sort of light spectrum test where the mystery sparkly bits are supposed to glow once the mineral gets identified. The sparkly bits sure do get ID'd: they're uranium. Nicky, revealing a childhood spent in duck-and-cover drills, gulps, "You serious?" "Simple quantum mechanics," Liam replies, explaining, "When the molecule is bombarded with energy at a specific level, the electrons excite, causing the mineral to glow. At this level, it's definitely uranium." "Which is radioactive! Do we need to evacuate the building or anything?" Nicky says, freaking out disproportionately. Nicky, chill. This is not The Morning After, nor has anyone introduced you to your new coworker Homer Simpson.
Cut to Nicky vigorously washing the skin from his hands. Gil drops by, and in a conversational tone confirms that there was uranium on the swab from Felton's skull. "Tell me: am I radiating a green glow?" Nicky asks. "You'll be fine, Silkwood," Gil deadpans. Hee! The two resume talking crime: to find the murder weapon, all Nicky needs to do is enter the pottery store with a Geiger counter; apparently, back in the 1950s, oxidized uranium flecks were used as color enhancers in pottery. It figures: this is the same decade that gave us Joe McCarthy and Doris Day movies. Why wouldn't they think uranium in pottery was a good idea? Nicky gets over his fear of radioactivity, goes to the pottery store, and finds the murder weapon: that evil-looking little pottery dwarf. Insert your own joke about lethally bad taste here.
Back at CSI Central, Jim and Not-Cindy are asking Gil if he found Melissa. Gil stumbles explaining that yes, they've found her, but a reunion might be kind of tricky on account of her being a homicide suspect and all. "We want to see our daughter now," Jim says forcefully and Gil looks acutely uncomfortable. Meanwhile, Catherine's asking Tammy about her mother. "What's she got to do with this?" Tammy hedges, and Catherine smiles, reasoning, "Tammy, if you want me to find out who killed your father, why don't you just answer my questions?" Tammy pulls out the plucky-little-orphan routine and begins to talk about Mara, her mother. Meanwhile, Gil has given himself a lobotomy -- which explains why he's walking Jim and Not-Cindy down to the interrogation tank to see their kid and cautioning them, "I can let you see her but you can't talk to her, not under these circumstances." Of course -- because people who haven't seen their kidnapped child in two decades will not want to immediately fling themselves at their baby. The parents watch as Catherine asks a few questions about Tammy's family life; Tammy says coldly, "Look. I don't see how these questions are going to help you. May I go?" Catherine nods. Tammy leaves, and Not-Cindy busts loose to chase her down the hall, crying, "Melissa! Melissa!" Tammy turns around, looking panicked and defensive. "It's Mom," Not-Cindy says, hugging an unresponsive Tammy. Tammy pulls away and says harshly, "Lady, I'm not your daughter," then flees. The Marlowes are devastated. "Who is she? Her name? Who is she now?" Not-Cindy tearfully asks, watching Tammy walk by without a single look back. "Tammy, Tammy Felton," Catherine says, stepping into this mess and trying to clean it up. Jim has a small freak-out: we find out that Melissa's babysitter was one Mara Felton, and although Mara was questioned in the disappearance, nothing came up. Well -- chalk that missing persons case up as solved. Jim informs Gil and Catherine that they're getting a lawyer for their daughter, and the two stomp off. Catherine turns to Gil reproachfully. "What were you thinking?" she demands on behalf of us all. Gil says he has no idea. "That woman hasn't seen her daughter in twenty-one years. You actually thought a glass wall would keep them apart?" Catherine continues. Gil replies, "I never thought about that." "I know. You're not good with people," Catherine says. Gil -- who's having quite the rough day human-interaction wise -- only agrees with her.
And now, back to the wacky comedy stylings of Warrick and Sara. "Interesting voicemail you left me: meet you in back of CSI and bring a cotton nightgown. I'd wear it for you, but I actually prefer pajamas," she jibes as he struggles with something in a CSIMobile. "Really?" Warrick inquires. "It was actually for my girlfriend here, Miss Piggy." Warrick dumps a pig on the ground; clearly, pork is the white meat of choice for forensics investigators. Sara stammers that she hasn't eaten meat since Gil used that pig to measure bug larvae growth way back when. I'm guessing the fish she had a few episodes back doesn't count; Lord knows that's my argument every Friday during Lent. Anyway, Warrick and Sara are simulating the Nadine Winston roast by putting a pig in a nightgown, placing a lit cigarette in its trotter, and seeing how it catches on fire. "We're disproving the existence of spontaneous human combustion," Warrick explains, and Sara replies incredulously, "You do not give up!" I'm going to give the writers the benefit of the doubt and assume that this conversation is meant as a symbolic inversion of the one Sara and Warrick had back when she was investigating him. I'm generous like that. Anyway, they dress the pig and set to slow-roasting it; Warrick reasons that Nadine might have burned to death similarly because she had apparently taken enough Seconal to knock out a horse. Warrick dresses the pig, lights a cigarette (with Sara's help), and sticks it on the nightgown. "What now?" Sara asks. "We wait," Warrick replies, and Sara sighs, settling in for another fun-filled stretch of time spent hanging with a coworker in a parking lot and watching gruesome things happen to a dead pig.
Gil, Catherine, and Nicky have a warrant for the Felton place and they're comin' on in. Tammy's none too pleased about this. She's getting increasingly more cold and suspicious in each scene. Could she be...a sociopath? Anyway, Nicky finds a pair of black gloves, and they turn out to have traces of uranium on them -- enough to cause photographic film to blotch, leading me to wonder why Nicky isn't tearing out of the room and shrieking, "Unclean! Unclean!" Catherine takes prints off the gloves and matches them to Tammy. It's not looking good for our plucky orphan abductee. She frantically spins another tale about what went down at the crime scene -- her personality was hijacked by "that bitch Melissa Marlowe."
Cut to Tammy in the tank, doing her best pensive Edward Norton impression. Gil and Catherine are grilling the child psychiatrist about the likelihood of a hidden second personality coming to the surface and killing someone; he cedes that it's possible. Brass isn't buying it: "Maybe Miss Mirror-Has-Two-Faces is playing us for fools. We corner her with the evidence, she goes nuts, sets the groundwork for an insanity plea." I like Brass more and more as the season wears on. "Forensic psychology is a science," Catherine murmurs. "We have to stay open to all the possibilities," Gil continues. Oh, the parallels to Sara and Warrick; perhaps this crew can try sticking Tammy in a Lanz of Salzburg nightie and setting fire to her to see what happens. Anyway -- Jim and Not-Cindy come into the tank with an attack lawyer and have a sit-down with Tammy. We find out that her bail's been set at half a million dollars. There's some impassioned pleading from Jim, to which Tammy replies, "My father was Joseph, my mother was Mara, they're both dead!" Anguished looks all around; then Tammy fixes on Not-Cindy's necklace. "You're looking at my necklace? Your father bought this for me when you were born; you used to play with it," Not-Cindy says. Tammy works that confused-and-tortured angle. Jim ruminates on how difficult it will be to raise bail, and Not-Cindy weeps, "She's not spending another night away from us, I don't care what it takes!" Tammy continues to act all torn up inside; Gil and Catherine look at each other skeptically while Jim Walsh rushes off to make bail. Perhaps he can give Brandon some seed capital and a push toward the blackjack tables and make the money that way.
Warrick and Sara are gazing at the combustible pig and playing chess. Gil comes out to get the 411; Warrick tells him that the pig was a big candle, only without the aromatherapy benefits. The nightgown was the wick, and the layer of subcutaneous fat acted as the wax the wick used for fuel. Gil listens to the explanation and neatly, absent-mindedly finishes the chess game for them. After pooh-poohing the spontaneous combustion thing, Gil says, "It's called the wick effect. It's like an inside-out candle. The fabric acts as a wick and the body burns inward, explaining the high temperatures which destroy the bone." Gil gives them one to grow on by explaining the need for young forensic scientists to learn through experimentation, then wanders back to the Tammy case. Sara thanks Warrick for not pointing out that she was all hot for the human torch theory, and Warrick extracts payback by having her clean up their piggy mess. Thus endeth the comic subplot.
Catherine strolls into the holding cells and stops by Tammy, saying, "I got a call that Melissa wanted to see me." She's wary, and understandably so. Tammy thanks her for coming, and Catherine says calmly, "Am I speaking to Melissa or Tammy?" "Melissa," Tammy assures her, doing a doe-eyed imitation of a sweet child. She continues, "I know who I am now, after spending time with my real parents." Catherine warns Tammy that she's not a lawyer and there are no attorney-client privileges; Tammy wants to know what her chances are in court. Catherine hedges that the evidence is pretty damaging; Tammy asks, "If I plead insanity?" "What are you asking me?" Catherine says warily. "You wanted to help me. When I ID'd Joe, you were kind. I need you to testify that I was not sane when I killed Joe. My lawyer says that would go a really long way with a jury," Tammy says, really working that naïf-alternate-personality thing. Tammy and Catherine continue to spar, and I can't help but note that whoever shot this scene did it in the least flattering light possible. I can see all sorts of pancake makeup and fine lines on both women's faces, and it's kind of distracting. Anyway, Tammy feeds Catherine some cock-and-bull line about not being able to explain what happened, but now she knows her real parents and who's she supposed to be, and Tammy's life -- and memories -- are completely gone. "The last twenty-one years are blank, like they never happened." Catherine gives her a look and says, "Then you shouldn't have had any memories of me...Tammy. There is no Melissa, is there?" "Get the hell out of here," Tammy snarls. As Catherine walks off, Tammy cries, "Don't go. Don't leave me here with her." Catherine spins around, and Tammy says in a normal voice, "Just practicing for court. Not bad, huh?" Somewhere in the New York/Los Angeles nexus, Edward Norton's attack lawyer begins writing the breach-of-acting-gimmick lawsuit and casting about for an appropriate defendant.
The day, Catherine comes into work, and Gil tells her flatly that Tammy's skipped bail and left town. Catherine gets a credit card report on the Marlowes and goes to see them. The conversation is short and heartbreaking: the Marlowes know that they're out their house and their life savings, and they know they're facing a felony conviction for buying some twenty-two bus tickets to twenty-two different states, but that's okay so long as their daughter is okay. Catherine tried to convince them they've been played, but the Marlowes elect to be arrested instead.
Cut to a bus pulling up to a bus shelter in the middle of the desert. Tammy gets off, a scarf covering her hair. She shakes off the scarf and lets down her hair, then looks over at the car that's just pulled over without surprise. Surprise, surprise -- Darin Hansen gets out of the car and walks on over. "Am I late?" he asks. "Oh, you're worth waiting for," she says coquettishly. Then she adds, "You owe me one, Darin." "Owe you? I'm the one who told you the truth about your father," he replies. Tammy answers, "And you knew exactly what I'd do about it." They get in the car and she pulls down the sun visor, giving herself an extremely satisfied look. "Where to?" Darin asks. "Does it matter?" Tammy replies, and the two felonious lovebirds drive off into the sunset. Well, it's a happy ending if you're rooting for sociopaths.