This week's C.S.I. comes to you courtesy of several fantastic MBTVers, specifically: Stacy, who generously gave me her tape; Daveyboy, who sent a very funny recap of the first twenty minutes; and mulberry, who also gave me a fantastic summary of the episode. Thank you, all.
On with the show. And what a way to begin! A young man is barreling, naked as a baby, across the screen. Insofar as sprinting nudists go, he's not that bad. Unfortunately, his is not the frisky gambol of students blowing off steam during finals week -- which is how I saw most of my sub-four miler nekkid people -- but a panicked sprint through a dark field at night. He's looking over his shoulder, clearly terrified. We hear his raspy, fearful panting and a dull roaring sound behind him. The camera closes in on his terrified face as the roaring increases in volume...
And then we pull back to Warrick taking pictures of something in broad daylight. Gil is, as usual, crouching over a body and alerting us all to the presence of maggots. "This kid's been here a while," he says, and turns over a vaguely grayish body to reveal the naked sprinter from the paragraph above. In the cold light of day, he looks considerably less pleasant, covered as he is in maggots and other props of decay. His face is frozen into a grimace -- whether that's from rigor mortis or something that happened before, I can't tell. Gil muses, "No gunshot wounds, no stab marks, no signs of strangulation." Warrick replies, "That's a long way out in the sticks, just to drop dead." No kidding -- based on the abundant long grasses and the copse of green trees immediately behind our two desert-based coroners, I'd guess they traveled all the way out to the San Bernadino foothills one state over to check this out. Since, you know, Las Vegas is surrounded by sand and rock for miles around.
Gil tells Warrick that perhaps the naked dead ran all the way out in the sticks to his eventual death, stooping to demonstrate how he came to this conclusion by examining footprints: the left foot is normal, but the right foot is turned, which indicates he was turning as he ran. Warrick notes Gil's tracking acumen -- one of those old Wild West skills that remains relevant in the twenty-first century in a way that whalebone corset manufacture or wholesale buffalo slaughter don't -- and asks him to call it. "Fear," Gil replies, looking around the abundance of herbaceous growth not normally found anywhere within a fifty-mile radius of Vegas. "This kid was chased to death."
Switch to the credits. I wonder if they only include scenes from the first three episodes in case of cancellation?
Friends & Lovers
Back in the lab, Gil is wearing a pair of phat goggles and having a snippy conversation with someone on the phone. From the dialogue -- "No! I did it yesterday!" -- and the peeved look on his face, I'd guess he was spending a little quality time with Brass. Catherine barges into the lab immediately after and teases Gil about dishing out assignments before the CSI squad takes the night off. Gil mutters, "Paperwork, paper clips, paper punchers. All these people want me to do is push papers. Nobody wants me to solve crimes." Ah, so Gil was on the phone with Brass or his moral equivalent, the Middle Manager. Gil, I feel your pain. Catherine, however, does not, reminding Gil that he could have turned down the job. Gil shoots back, "Yeah, the grass is always greener, Catherine." What? Greener where? Bakersfield, where you found Monsieur Maggot? On the middle-manager side of the fence? I am so lost, and it's only eight minutes into the episode.
Unlike me, Catherine's learned to ignore Gil when he's not making sense, and reaches across the lab bench to pick up a clipboard that presumably lists their night's work. Just as she reaches forward, Gil plunges the slender rod of whatever machine he's working on, and a piece of paper goes up in a bright flash of flames. Catherine looks at Gil impatiently and says, "You really want to see flash paper flash? Walk in on a bookie." Gil, who seems pushed beyond the limits of his patience, snaps back, "That's what this was about, bookies!" The phone rings, and Catherine admonishes Gil not to answer it as she fetches a stack of papers from his desk and hands them to him. Gil grabs the papers, plays a little hot-potato with the cell phone, and eventually ends up tossing it and sprinting out the door.
In the scene, Warrick, Sara, Catherine, and Gil are walking through the bright and sterile corridors of the lab complex, Gil dispensing assignments along the way. He and Warrick will work on the naked and the dead -- conveniently rolled up into one kid -- and Sara will investigate another dead body in a dumpster outside Henderson. "I'll dress down," she cracks. Yes, Sara, please do. Actually, anything would look better than whatever it is she's wearing now -- a cable-knit muscle tee in an ivory-and-brick weave, and charcoal cargo pants. My eyes! Catherine also gets a dead body, namely that of the dean of a private school. "What, did the suspect kill him with a silver spoon?" she cracks, and Gil shoots down that foray into classist stereotypes by replying that the school's founder is the suspect. Nicky runs in to the scene just in time to get his assignment -- go with Catherine -- and to give Sara a meaningful look of some sort. God, I hope those two don't get together. The writers are all dropping all the hints with the repartee and all, but I really don't want to read the evidence here. Anyway -- Nick and Sara are separated tonight, the better to, um, let the chemistry begin its slow reaction or something, and everyone goes on their separate ways.