The series opens with an aerial shot of Las Vegas at night, then cuts to a hand loading bullets in a chamber of a gun. Another aerial shot -- this one of the MGM Grand - and another bullet sliding into the chamber. A third shot of the Strip, the last bullet slips into the gun's chamber, and the camera pans out to the Las Vegas suburbs as a taped message begins to play: "My name is Royce Harman. I reside at 7642 Carpenter Street, Las Vegas, Nevada. I am 41 years of age. And I'm going to kill myself. I'd like to say 'I love you' to my mother Paige and my sister Gina. I'm so sorry. I never wanted to put you through this. I just can't do it anymore. I've lost hope."
As we hear this suicide note, we see a generic-looking house -- presumably on Carpenter Street -- and the camera switches to the inside of the darkened house. Light from the street lamp below pours in as a black-clad man with a gun in his hand walks down the hall.
"I love you, Mom." And the bullet rings out.
Cut to the outside of 7642 Carpenter Street, this time with a lot of police cars and yellow tape. As an SUV pulls up, a plainclothes detective mutters, "Here comes the nerd squad."
Two not-especially-nerdy men stride by: one is squat, balding, and bitching about a promotion. The other bears a slight resemblance to a Kennedy -- perhaps the West Coast branch, where all the members spend their time surfing and grilling vegetarian kebabs out back, as opposed to the womanizing and touch-football-on-skis shenanigans the folks back east favor. Or perhaps I'm just trying to work in the trivia that William Peterson has played assorted Kennedy siblings not once, but twice. Either way -- the two men, whom we do not yet know by name, are walking by the name-callers on their way into the house.
In the shot, they're entering the bathroom. West-Coast Kennedy -- who, for the sake of brevity, I'm just going to introduce as Gil Grissom -- is carrying a metal suitcase, the contents of which look like a pool chemistry kit on steroids. Squat-Bald-and-Bitching opines that the corpse in the bathtub became a corpse via suicide, noting that the sleeping bag and bathtub location are perfect for easy cleanup, and the bathroom's window is ajar so that the smell of putrefaction might alert the neighbors that their neighbor may be dead. What a thoughtful suicide victim.
Grissom puts on some glasses and notices...maggots! Yum. Based on the age of the pupa, he estimates the body's been deceased for a week. His boss is not impressed. "That's a maggot, and he stinks," grouses Squat-Bald-and-Bitching. Then, in the breath, he fulfills every cop stereotype known to man by complaining about paperwork and expressing a fervent desire to grab fresh doughnuts at the Krispy Kreme. Is he going to go to the Excalibur and get his donuts at the Krispy Kreme there? Huzzah!
But wait -- sharp-eyed Grissom has stopped playing with the maggots and noticed that beneath the suicide's gun, there's a tape recorder. "I think we may have our suicide note," he says.
Cut to the scene, where the message is playing for two women -- presumably mom Paige and sister Gina. Immediately after Harman says, "I love you, Mom," we hear the gunshot. Gina jumps and cries out, while Paige stares at the tape player in horror. "Go upstairs," she commands. No kidding -- for such a considerate suicide, wouldn't Harman think to turn off the tape recorder before firing the gun? "This can't be happening," Paige says, clearly in a daze. The camera pulls back on Squat-Bald-and-Bitching and Grissom. Not that laying eyes on Grissom is an undue burden, but what's he doing delivering the suicide note to the of kin? Shouldn't the homicide detectives do that? Have all those television-detective shows been wrong all these years? In any event, Grissom leans forward and offers his condolences. She's having none of it. "You don't understand," she says numbly. "This is his picture. But that's not my son's voice." Grissom blinks, nonplussed.
Cut to credits: an opening shot of the Las Vegas strip at night, intercut with typical crime-scene props like fingerprints and corpses and typical television show props like actors, flash by while "Who Are You?" plays. It's all very meta. Incidentally, Squat-Bald-and-Bitching is played by Paul Guilfoyle; according to my copy of Barnhardt's Unauthorized Television Guide 2000-2001, he's playing Captain Jim Brass. Oh, the jokes about brass balls to be made for an entire season. Thank you, writers!
scene: a young woman parks her car in front of the police station and strides down the hall and into the lab. As she enters the lab, she recoils at a fetal pig suspended in formaldehyde. She's going to go work on crime scenes, yet she can't handle a fetal pig -- now would be the time to start rethinking vocational choices. But because giving herself the heebie-jeebies over one pig wasn't enough, the woman moves on, getting more grossed out as she notices a squid in preserving fluid, several frogs floating about, and a shark's egg. Did this woman never take a biology class? After she runs out of things in jars to gape at, the woman -- who resembles a very tall Kimberly Williams -- decides to spook herself further by staring in horror at a human skeleton on display. Oh, my, God -- nobody who's made it to adulthood can be this green, especially if they're wandering about a laboratory. Unless this woman's managed to miss reading National Geographic, watching the Learning Channel, and taking a basic sixth-grade biology class, she's seen nothing that would shock a thirteen-year-old.
Naturally, as she's engrossed in creeping herself out, Grissom sneaks up behind her and says hi. The woman peels herself off the ceiling and introduces herself as Holly Gribbs. Grissom introduces himself as her supervisor on the graveyard shift in forensics, then asks her to roll up her sleeve and donate a pint of blood. It's something all the new hires do. What is the modern workplace coming to? First they want a photocopy of every form of ID you have, and now they're storing your bodily fluids? Holly has the same reaction: "Why?" she demands. "So many reasons," chortles Gil, doing his best to leave Holly with the impression that she's working for a ghoul.
The scene switches to a whiteboard drawn in a grid, with columns of crimes under assorted names. "One more, baby, one more," gloats a Charlie Sheen look-alike. A second man enters the scene and greets the first: "Ninety-nine. You and me -- dead heat. crime solved gets promoted to CSI III, man." "Yeah, yeah," says the first guy. "Choice of shifts, $8000 raise and extra week vacation. O ho, it's all about the Cabo, bro." Thank you, Captains Exposition. How else would we know you two are hotshot competitors, if not through you stating backstory and incentive for us? Bro -- who, as his column indicates, is named Warrick Brown, proposes betting $20 on the possibility that the promotion will happen during this shift. The other guy, Nick Stokes, asks if there's anything Warrick won't bet on. The answer is no. And the viewer is left wondering: haven't we already seen the gambling addiction on ? And wouldn't living in Las Vegas be a bad idea if you're a compulsive gambler? It's like asking a functioning alcoholic to live in Napa Valley. Nick, who's apparently an enabler, asks Warrick for a line on a professional game, then warmly wishes him good luck on the shift. Warrick reciprocates, and tells Nick he hopes Nick's not handling a trick roll tonight. A what? Given this show's track record with exposition so far, it's only a matter of time before we find out.
Cut to Gil telling Holly that CSI's job is to use the evidence to recreate the crime scene without having been there. Holly's looking around the lab, finally rethinking that vocational choice. She's looking in the wrong places; the odds on her going to a crime scene strewn with preserved pig fetuses and human skeletons are pretty low. "It's pretty cool, actually," Gil says. "I just got out of the academy. I already know this," Holly replies, leaving the viewer to wonder -- exactly what was Holly's academy experience like if she's surprised by a forensics lab that has a human skeleton? Didn't they cover that sort of evidence in any of her classes, or was all her time spent fending off the advances of Steve Gutenberg and telling Michael Winslow to stop making funny noises?
Gil just smiles smugly and has Holly sign waivers in case of injury or death on the job. She does so, complaining that she's lightheaded from giving blood. "You're probably low on sugar. I've got just the thing," he says, and pulls out a jar of indistinguishable dark objects from its home to the urine samples in the lab fridge. "Try one of these," Gil offers. Holly looks even more squeamish than before -- she's really reaching into levels of human discomfort that normally accompany being asked to breaststroke through a vat of rancid lard -- and says she doesn't want to eat anything that's been in the lab. Gil looks nonplussed, then smiles persuasively. Holly takes a look at the thing Gil's handed her and asks, "Is there a grasshopper in here?" Gil responds by popping one in his mouth and rolling his eyes orgasmically, while the soundtrack crunches along. Crunches? I asked my dad, who had eaten a variety of chocolate-covered insects during his wild days in the Navy, what chocolate-covered grasshoppers were like, and he told me they squished -- not crunched, squished, much like lard would if you had to swim through it. But I digress.
Holly's now in a meeting being run with ruthless bloviation by Cap'n Brass. He fulfills yet more police clichés by carrying on about paperwork, then brusquely assigns cases to detectives who couldn't be less thrilled to get them. Nick gets a trick roll, which is exactly what he didn't want; Warrick gets a homeowner shooting a would-be intruder. Brass then asks, "Anyone seen Catherine Willows?"
No, but we're about to: a minivan pulls up, a woman leaps out of the passenger seat, leans into the back to kiss a child who's a dead ringer for the Bad Seed, then scoots into the police station.
Brass gets to revel in yet another cliché: he's chewing out Gribbs for being related to her mother -- who is, as it turns out, a lieutenant in the traffic division. Brass carries on about being forced to hire Gribbs due to nepotism, then segues into his secondary role as Lieutenant Exposition, informing Gribbs -- and us, the viewers at home -- that the CSI lab is number two in the country and solves crimes nearly everyone else would call unsolvable. He does not, unfortunately, tell us who's the number-one crime lab or why we're not watching them instead. Perhaps that information will be revealed in an upcoming episode, when the CSI folks go play them in the Forensics Softball Championship Games or something. Gribbs absorbs his diatribe and exposition, then replies that she thought the key to being an investigator was to collect evidence, then come to a conclusion, as opposed to prejudging her. Gribbs then gives us backstory: she graduated with honors in criminal justice at UNLV. Brass is less than impressed, as am I, since UNLV's requirements apparently don't include spending any time around a lab, if Holly's reactions are anything to go by. Gribbs tells Brass he's not being fair; Brass hauls out the big book of clichés, bitching first about hiring, then about his breadth and depth of experience on the squad, and finishes by telling Gribbs she'll amount to nothing more than headaches and bad press. He then dismisses her. Way to get the last word in there, Brass.
Gil looks over at Brass, less than impressed by the alpha-male display that just went on. His chiding is cut short by a reminder to appear at an autopsy at 12:30 a.m., and to bring Gribbs with him. "I think every new hire should experience an autopsy on their first night," he says. What an ass. I bet he goes out of his way to harass waitresses their first night on the job too.
A brief shot of the Rio -- which has a decent buffet, incidentally -- and we're at the home intrusion scene. Catherine and Warrick come in with their crime-solver suitcases and stand over a dead body. They turn and look at the home's occupants, a young yuppie couple and their crying baby, then ask them what happened. The husband, who's doing all the talking, takes us into flashback.
The scene shifts and the composition changes to signal that we're in flashback; everything's washed out in a klieg-light intense white, and the sounds are all echoey. The baby's crying, the body -- who is the wife's drunken friend, alive, well, and none-too-sober in this scene -- is menacing the nice young couple, and an eviction goes awry. When the drunk kicks in the door, the husband shoots to protect.
Back in the present day, the husband sanctimoniously says he's protecting his family, then ushers his weeping, shocked wife off to put the weeping baby to bed. Catherine asks Warrick what he thinks. Warrick opines that perhaps the man may have lied: "I can always tell when Whitey's talking out his ass. It's a gift." Indeed, it must be. And poor Haley Joel Osment had to settle for seeing dead people when he could have been blessed with the ability to divine the truth from Whitey.
Catherine tells Warrick to back up his sixth sense with some hard evidence; he notices a tread print on the door and matches it up with the body's shoe. The husband looks nervous and asks, testily, why Warrick's matching up the shoe prints. As Warrick's giving a neutral answer about crime-scene procedure, Catherine notices that the body's sneakers are tied two separate ways. She quizzes the yuppie on whether or not he might have worn the shoes -- which he vigorously denies -- then asks what happened to his pinky toe; the nail looks torn and the toe's wrapped in a Band-aid. He claims he tripped on a rattle, and Catherine smiles that Universal Parent Understanding Smile. Warrick makes the Whitey Is Lying face.
And now we're at an autopsy: Gil and the coroner are on one side of the gurney. Holly is on the other, looking a little green around the gills, and comments on the smell. Isn't that what the goop that's supposed to go under your nose is for -- to hide the smell? Come one, we've all seen The Silence of the Lambs. You wear the stuff under your nose to mask the odor of the corpse. Perhaps the anti-"eau de Carcass" goop is only whipped out in federal autopsies, not mere civil cases.
The coroner tells Gil that Harman wasn't a suicide after all. Gil explains to Holly that the victim's arms would affect the angle and size of the wound -- and here we're treated to the bullet-cam as we zoom in through the bullet hole, around the chest cavity and back out -- and the hole they're looking at had to be made by someone else.
"It's like someone stood over him, and BAM," says the coroner -- as we are again treated to the bullet-cam, only faster and louder, presumably to symbolize the brutality of the act. The coroner then begins to peel open the chest cavity, which we really don't need to see now that we've had two tours in the last three minutes. Holly watches him make incisions; Gil watches Holly's reaction. He asks how she's doing, and Holly makes a hasty exit looking for the bathroom.
After Holly leaves, the coroner peers owlishly at Gil and says, "She is cute," while Gil feigns surprise. Holly stumbles by the bathroom door and ends up in the morgue, but she's so nauseous, she doesn't notice. She vomits quickly, then gets a gander at her surroundings. One look at the neat rows of plastic-covered corpses, and she's headed for the door. Her foot catches on a body cover, and she feels along the doorframe for a knob -- having forgotten how to work a door in her panic to get out, I guess.
Meanwhile, Gil and the coroner are discussing Brass's autopsy turn-around edicts while a monitor, facing the same angle they are, displays Holly freaking out in the morgue. We rejoin Holly's freak-out in progress, as she turns around and notices that the corpse she's uncovered is looking somewhat green and desiccated. Holly turns around and begins screaming for help. The scene comes off like a cheesy horror film, kind of like that Nike commercial that got pulled from the Olympics. Instead of Holly sprinting off, however, Gil happens to come by and opens the door. Holly hyperventilates her way out of the room, gasping about the presence of bodies in the morgue. Gil pulls her close for a paternal hug -- very quick, with a desultory pat or two on the back while she tries to burrow through his scrubs -- then turns to the morgue window and yells, "You assholes!" I recoil in shock -- that's not a word you hear a lot on a network during prime time! Since when is it okay to say one of the seven dirty words on CBS? ["Since ten o'clock, I guess." -- Sars]
Fortunately, profanity has just the opposite effect on Holly; she begins breathing easier and Gil talks her down to normal. He's a little touchy-feely here -- time will tell whether it's because he's all warm and caring like that, or whether he's going to put the make on young Holly.
scene: another night aerial of Las Vegas, this time by the Mandalay Bay, a hotel I cannot recommend enough due to its fantastic multilingual cable package and gigantic bathroom with both a shower and a tub. It's pure heaven being able to loll in the tub and listen to the Chinese cartoons. But I digress.
Nick's walking down a hotel hall and enters the room where the trick roll -- also known as Mr. Laferty -- is sitting on the bed, looking greatly dejected in wife-beater, boxers, and cowboy boots. Wow, that's classy. Apparently, the hooker took everything, including Laferty's wedding ring. Oh, that's not going to go over well with Mrs. Laferty back home. Perhaps the third-best CSI unit's going to get called in after that little revelation. Nick asks if Laferty got slipped a mickey, and we find out that Laferty's bad heart, which has undoubtedly gotten a hell of a workout in the last three hours, prevents him from drinking. Laferty sees Nick's sympathetic face and launches into full confession mode: he loves his wife of thirty-one years, he's never cheated on her before, he's in town for a convention...
We're back in flashback mode. A considerably more put-together Laferty is stumbling out of a lounge, his balance hindered by the poor man's Elizabeth Hurley who's attached herself, remora-like, to his side. Flash to their hotel room: she's stripping while he ogles -- apparently watching strange women undress in front of him will do less damage to his heart than, say, having a drink -- and then he peels off her bra and dives for her breast. We see his head moving around her chest while she rolls her eyes impatiently...
And we're back in the present time. Nick checks Laferty for discoloration and notices it around the inside of his lips. After ascertaining that yes, the hooker in question was hot, Nick proposes to swab the discolored area in hopes of getting a clue. About the case, anyway.
The scene switches to the XO liquor store; Gil is clucking about taking evidence on his first liquor-store robbery, and how the owner was so grateful, he gave him farm-fresh eggs. I wonder immediately if Gil went back to the lab and suspended them in formaldehyde; Holly takes a more self-centered tack, asking if this small talk is supposed to make her feel better. Gil confesses it is, and asks if it's working; Holly says yes. Oh, man, I'm sensing major separation of work and personal-life issues looming on the horizon here, if melting looks are any indication. Gil snaps out of seduction mode and back into business, telling Holly the scene's from a routine robbery, and he's leaving her for an hour to dust the scene. That doesn't seem right; you're going to throw a rookie on a crime scene alone their first night on the job? Wouldn't you want to check on her technique first? And given that this rookie is Holly, who hasn't shown the best coping skills when it comes to handling a bad case of the creeps, wouldn't you be damn sure that someone comes along to make sure she doesn't inadvertently lock herself in the Häagen Dazs freezer?
Logic apparently takes a back seat to plot advancement. We switch back to Warrick, who's in the lab looking at hair fibers with an unnamed tech. In this scene, we discover that he's checking the hair to see if it was pulled -- in which case, it's going to have little bulbs from the force -- or not. The hair in question, which came from the house where the yuppie shot the drunk, has the bulbs. Warrick deduces it was ripped from the drunk's head, and orders the unnamed lab tech to tell Gil that he wants to open a homicide case on the yuppie.
Back to the XO liquor store, where Holly's carefully dusting for fingerprints as some harridan harangues her about the time she's taking. Holly tries to reason with the woman, explaining that she doesn't want to contaminate the crime scene, but Madame Bitchify could care less about contamination, and lets Holly know this in terms that rival Brass's for spite. Holly continues to brush for prints.
In the meantime, Warrick is now sitting in an interrogation room and talking to the yuppie, explaining that he'd like to clear the yupster of any homicidal aspersions, but needs to square the evidence against his statement. Recognizing the awesome power of the Whitey Lie Detector, the yuppie amends his story, making it look like he staged part of the attack, but still sticking to the basic story that he shot only when provoked.
Holly's night just keeps getting better; she's having no luck handling Madame Bitchify, and her calls for backup are going unanswered.
Switch over to Nick, who's taken Laferty's swabs to a lab. He hands them off to a chemist that bears a startling resemblance to Liam Gallagher, except this guy actually carries on a civil conversation, if waxing rhapsodic about the abundance of evidence anal swabs contain can be considered civil. Stokes just stares at the swab as it's analyzed, then sighs the sigh of the put-upon as it comes up empty. That's what you get for taking the oral swab instead, I guess.
Back at the XO corral, Madame Bitchify is waving a gun in Holly's general direction. Catherine comes in and barks while pointing her gun at the old bat, "All right, put the gun down." "Am I getting robbed again?" Madame demands as she slides the gun over to Catherine. Catherine doesn't bother to reply, and turns her attention to Holly as she confiscates one gun, holsters another, and radios in a report to dispatch. Madame asks, "Who's going to clean my counter here?" Catherine tells her to clean her own damn counter, among other choice sentiments. She then gathers Holly for what passes as lunch at 4 a.m., and tells Madame to pick up her gun tomorrow. As the two women leave, Holly asks sotto voce, "You can do that?" "No," snorts Catherine, obviously amused at pulling off that stunt.
The moment of levity doesn't last; the shot shows Gil beating a mannequin head with a golf club as real blood flies out. There's probably a market for that sort of thing, voodoo for the kinesthetically inclined, but Gil tells Warrick he's merely simulating a case where a pregnant wife caught her husband in bed with someone else, and he's now trying to determine from the simulated injury whether the husband's death was from malicious intent. Odds are, if someone's getting clubbed with a nine iron over a marital indiscretion, there's probably some sort of intent involved, and it's not going to be philanthropic. There's no need to whang on a mannequin to verify that. But then we wouldn't have the cool visual -- or the information that it's Holly's blood that got splattered on the canvas there. Warrick declines to replenish Gil's supply, then chats with him about the shooting case. We learn that the lab tech's name is Bo, and that Gil is something of a Zen master, exhorting Warrick to "forget about your assumptions. Forget about your promotions. These things will only confuse you. Concentrate on what cannot lie -- the evidence. Follow the reason we're having this conversation." Warrick, deep in the moment, replies, "Follow the shoe." You can almost hear the brass gong boom in the background.
The scene follows the shoe from about sixty camera angles as Warrick examines it for what appears to be an interminable period of time. He finally gets a flash of inspiration -- look inside the shoe -- and notices a chunk of toenail. "Tripped over a rattle, my ass," Warrick says, filing this incident away as more validation of his lie-detecting gift.
Another action-packed lab scene: Gil's working with a fingerprint technician on prints pulled from the Harman case. The prints have latex flakes in them. The technician says that on a hunch, she tested the flakes and they came back positive for lecithin, a chemical found in cooking spray. Gil muses, "If latex rubber and cooking spray went on a blind date, how would the night end?" Come to San Francisco, Gil. There are a number of clubs that can show you the answer. The tech has another answer for him, though: "Better than ours did." Oooh! Feel the burn! Gil blinks -- an action that we are now trained to associate with him being taken aback -- and admits that taking her to see Wizard of Oz synched to Dark Side of the Moon may not have been the best date idea. I agree -- I watched it back in July and I still can't listen to Pink Floyd without shuddering. I can only imagine what it must be like to see it on a date, getting a contact high from the pot fumes that invariably accompany any Floyd-related cinema experience, and thinking, "We live in Las Vegas, and this is the best date he can come up with?" In any case, Gil defends himself, prompting the technician to make another pass at him. That Gil, he's a charmer. The tech then resumes matching fingerprints.
Holly and Catherine are in a diner together. Holly confesses that she's doing this job because she was pushed into it by her mom, who is fulfilling a few thwarted career dreams via her daughter. Catherine listens for a moment, then tells Gribbs, "I really love my job. We're just a bunch of kids being paid to work on puzzles. Sometimes there's a piece missing. Sometimes we solve it in one night." Holly waffles some more; Catherine continues to sell CSI as the pivotal role in crime-solving. "If you stay with it, my hand to God, you will never regret it." You know, given how much time folks are spending telling Holly how much she's going to love her job, and given how awful her first day has been for her, I'm thinking we're heading toward some sort of ironic ending. But I could be wrong.
Meanwhile, Brass is practicing his unique brand of motivational leadership by telling Warrick that there is no way he's going to rouse a judge from bed at 4 a.m. to get a warrant. Warrick explains how the evidence stacks up; Brass is unimpressed, then spends a few moments yanking Warrick's chain just because he can. Say it with me: Brass is an ass.
In a local hospital, Nick is walking down a corridor talking to Dr. Leever about the Elizabeth Hurley knock-off about trick rolls. Leever says no, but helpfully notes that six "professionals" have come through the ER in the last few nights, all of whom have been knocked unconscious, and all of whom display skin discoloration. "Where, their lips?" inquires Nick. "No. Their nipples." A light bulb goes off over Nick's head as he deduces what Laferty must have done. Nick goes to visit the hooker and asks to see her discoloration. She cracks that it'll cost him $20, but pulls up her hospital gown. Nick looks for a moment, then tells the hooker that he just came from a trick downtown with similar blotching; whatever he absorbed orally, she's taken dermally, knocking her out. She can give back Laferty's belongings, tell him what happened and turn over whatever she's using, or face an attempted murder charge. After a moment of severe eye-rolling, she hands over a Visine bottle. "Eye drops?" Nick says...
And we're in the lab with Liam Gallagher the lab tech again, saying, "No. Scopalamine." Normally used for motion sickness, a small amount of the chemical can knock you out cold. Nick inexplicably flashes back to the bathroom, where we see the hooker adjusting her bra, rubbing the drug on her nipples and rejoining Laferty at the bed. He nuzzles and passes out, she tosses his room, then goes downstairs to make her getaway. Cut to her getting woozy and passing out. At this point, I have to ask: six of her coworkers pass out from the same thing and she still goes ahead and puts the stuff on her nipples? Where is she working, an escort service specializing in women who haven't grasped the relationship between cause and effect? It doesn't matter: Nick's closed his hundredth case.
Gil is back with Paige and Gina, telling them they're reclassifying the suicide as a murder. Paige is surprisingly okay with this, saying that a murder makes more sense than a suicide. Given that they're both pretty senseless, I suppose it's only a matter of degree, but this whole scene really was about showcasing CSI's inexplicable interaction with the of kin. What the hell do the detectives do, then -- stand around browbeating potential suspects while waiting for CSI to show up and handle all the sticky parts of the crime?
Meanwhile, Catherine is in the hospital, about to perform the unenviable task of examining an excruciatingly cute little girl for evidence of sexual molestation. She handles it reasonably well until the little girl asks if Catherine can keep her dolly for her: "I don't want the same thing that happened to me to happen to Dolly." Catherine is taken aback for a moment, then checks the doll's body. There's a blue Band-Aid on the crotch. Catherine immediately deduces that this has been going on for some time and goes to comfort the girl, her voice breaking as the girl flinches away from her touch.
Before I can get all misty over that, we're back in Brass's office, observing the special relationship between him and Warrick. Warrick is taken off the case for going over Brass's head, and busted down to babysitting Holly. "You can't do that -- me and Nick are tied!" Warrick protests, so upset that he's forgotten correct pronoun objects. Brass is unsympathetic, and tells Gil, "Have Warrick shadow Gribbs for the three weeks or until Nickie makes his hundredth, whichever comes first." Again, Brass is an ass. Warrick explodes, and Gil pulls him out of the office. In the hall, Warrick protests that he had the perp and Gil busts a Zen smackdown: "Yes, you had him, but the minute you started thinking about yourself, you lost him." After Gil's finished with him, Holly, who has been standing there looking as though she'd rather be anywhere else, smiles sympathetically. Warrick brusquely tells her to follow him.
In the CSI-SUV together, Warrick tells Holly that it's a robbery scene, she should take plenty of photos, and he's going to leave her in the care of the police cruiser while he runs an errand.
Cut back to Yuppie Estates. Gil knocks on the door and tells the testy yuppie-cum-shooter that he's taking over the case from Warrick, and he has a warrant for the yuppie's toenails. The yuppie dissembles for a while, then tells Gil, "I'd love to help you, but I've already cut them." "May I see them?" Gil asks. "I've flushed them down the toilet." Yup -- those are the actions of an innocent man who's already fielded a toe question from police investigators. "May I see your toilet?" Gil inquires snidely, then proceeds to enter the bathroom, flip on a UV light, and Hoover everything for the clippings. The yuppie goes from looking supercilious to looking dismayed.
It's daylight now. Catherine pulls up at her house and runs inside for a moment, going in to check on her kids. Her daughter -- looking a lot less like the Bad Seed after a good night's sleep -- wakes up, and Catherine says, "Mommy had a rough night. I couldn't drive here fast enough to tell you how much I love you." Her daughter hugs her back. I check the horizon for a looming plotline about the conflicts between work and parenthood.
Gil is back in the lab, explaining to Bo how he's planning on matching the toenail clippings to the fragment Warrick found in the shoe. After he finds a match, Bo shouts, "The brother was right! Yeah!" and executes a complex break-dancing move; Gil chides him about the possibility of back injury. The brother in question, meanwhile, is driving up to the window at the Parlay Hut and placing a bet -- not on the Packers, as he's supposed to, but on the Niners. If I didn't know better, I'd say that Warrick's trying to pull a fast one here. Either that or he's so overjoyed at Gil's nailing the yuppie, he's taken leave of his senses. Still -- it's beginning to look like Warrick's got a gambling problem, what with the wager he had with Nick, the deal he pulled with the judge, and his apparent familiarity with drive-by gambling establishments.
The scene has the yuppie walking out in cuffs while Warrick and Gil pose in a manly fashion on the edge of his driveway. As he walks by, he flashes back to what actually happened: the drunk pounded the door, he had the wife let in said drunk, and calmly plugged him three times. He then tried to set up a crime scene. It failed.
While CSI's alpha males are preening in the suburbs, Holly's on a non-staged crime scene, patiently dusting for prints. A muscular young man comes in, telling Holly he's a neighbor. "I just saw the cop car leave. Is everything okay?" Holly tells him yes -- not terribly alarmed that cops have left her alone on the scene -- and she's just collecting evidence. The man decides to add to the evidence collection, and reaches for a gun after she turns her back.
In another part of Vegas, Nick is walking down the hotel hall with Laferty's belongings. A greatly relieved Laferty listens to Nick's little lecture on the danger of Liz Hurley look-alikes, and all is well in this subplot. Nick returns to the squad room, where Gil gives him a brand-new badge indicating that he's now a CSI level III. Warrick claps, although not nearly so vigorously as he would were he getting the promotion, and congratulates Nick. Nick accepts graciously, and the two men do a complicated male-bonding handshake thing. Catherine rounds them all up for breakfast, but before they leave the office, Brass comes in to ruin the fun. Everyone's faces collapse into expressions of dismay as Brass tells everyone, "Holly Gribbs has been shot. She's in surgery now. Apparently the suspect returned to the scene. They don't think she's going to make it." He orders everyone to pull a double shift solving this, then puts Brown -- whose body language is screaming, "Oh, shit!" in eight different dialects -- on administrative leave pending investigation. The episode closes with Gil blinking, apparently nonplussed.