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?
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.
Someone is cleaning a body tray in the tight camera shot, the better to set the mood in the morgue. Warrick, Gil, and Jenna the coroner are standing over Naked Maggot Guy, who is covered with a sheet and presumably free of detritovores and other opportunistic diners. Warrick puts forth the theory that this kid was suffocated, based on his facial bruises; Jenna replies that those bruises could well have come from him hitting the ground face-first. I thought when people died and stayed in one position for a while, the blood pooled at the lowest point and made those parts livid. Wouldn't this kid have a purple face if he fell on his face and stayed there long enough for a thriving maggot colony to appear? I digress. Warrick tells Jenna he wants to take some mouth swabs; she tosses him some "whatever, schmuck" reply and pulls Gil aside, telling him, "There's something I want you to see." She immediately launches into a spiel about the likely relationship between naked, moderately unblemished young bodies in the desert and overindulgence in a controlled substance, rattling off a list of common drugs and ending with freon. Freon? Las Vegas is heavily air-conditioned, but you wouldn't think freon is one of those substances you can huff without going to a great deal of effort. Maybe I'm just not up on my cheap inhalant highs. Anyway, Jenna tells Gil, "I gotta be honest. I've had a lot of dead bodies from the desert, and when they've been out there too long, the elements tend to eat away the evidence." Fortunately for Jenna, they found this kid off the 99 in Tehachapi, in the middle of a grassy field, so they're not really going to have that desert-eating-away-the-elements issue here.
But they are going to have bad-skin issues. After informing Gil that the kid's the picture of health internally -- thus eliminating the "he liquefied his brains huffing a Chevy's A/C" hypothesis -- but a wreck externally, Jenna directs him to look at a skin sample in the microscope. We see what looks like a big, pink cross section of the Grand Canyon. It's a sign of dehydration, but not from exposure. Jenna then goes on to try and buss the Grissom chops before last call. "Warrick told me what you said about this kid dying from fear. I never read about that in any medical book." Gil fixes her with the same look he gave the mannequin head in episode one before beaning it with a golf club, and says, "Try the Forensic Medial Journal. Read the four canons on cause of death: homicide, suicide, natural, and unexplained. It talks about fear in the last part of unexplained." "I had to ask," Jenna sulks. Grissom turns to Warrick, who had, when given a choice between mixing it up with Jenna and Gil or swabbing out a dead guy's mouth, opted to do a little dental hygiene on the dead. "You want to know what killed this guy?" Gil demands of Warrick. "Benihana the maggots."
"What the maggots?" asks Warrick since, like me, he's thus missed all opportunities to visit the Benihana. "Tox the maggots. Whatever he" -- and here Gil gestures expansively to the corpse below -- "ingested has probably evaporated from the sun. But maggots are like little refrigerators. They preserve what we digest for longer periods of time." "Entomology is our friend," Warrick observes glumly. And here I thought he'd be comfortable with vermin since he spent so much time at mangy casinos. "Yes," Gil says, with an impish little smile.
The shot starts with a maggot pinched between tweezer ends, blindly squirming about, then pulls back to Warrick's narrowed eyes as he watches the larva writhe about. "Sorry, little buddy" he says, displaying infinitely more compassion that I would -- my first reflex would be to put those maggots in a blender and hit puree, shrieking, "Die, maggots, die!" -- and says, "Scalpel." Liam the Lab Guy, watching with the same intensity as the guys in my labs who loved watching bacterial cultures get vaporized in the autoclave, hands over the scalpel. "Talk about your Pulp Fiction," Warrick cracks, and it's all I can do to refrain from thinking about him and Liam the Lab Guy bending to the maggot with tiny syringes filled with adrenaline. Warrick eviscerates the maggot -- which isn't the hardest job in the world, since a maggot is basically a sack of guts and therefore easy to disembowel -- and hands over the slimy dab of entrails to Liam, who promptly jams the mess into a mass spectrometer costing tens of thousands of dollars. Since it's going to be a few seconds until the guts can be analyzed, Liam switches into his secondary role: acting as an enabler for a recovering gambler. "You play any pigskin lately?" he asks. "No," Warrick curtly replies. "I'm off that." Liam looks shocked. "But it's primetime for you!" he says. Warrick looks rueful. "I can't say I don't have that urge." Liam's eyes get big as saucers as he realizes that perhaps he's just done the equivalent of giving a recovering alcoholic a six-pack of Sam Adams and starting a conversation about hops. Fortunately, he's saved by the clinical whirr of paper as the spectrometer spits out its results. "Hunh, haven't seen this stuff for a while," Liam says, relieved to be off gambling and back on safe conversational ground. "What's that?" Warrick asks, craning his head to see the analysis. Liam replies, "Jimsonweed."
Cut to a fabulous aerial shot of Vegas at night, just to remind us that these guys tend to work at night. Sara's standing outside a dumpster, about to go diving for bodies. Okay, you know what? It's analogy time. Sara's plotline is to this episode's analogue what the appendix is to the body. Useless. Vestigial. Not missed when removed. Therefore, I'm going to do us all the favor of summing it up shortly and sweetly: sent out to investigate an anonymous body wrapped in plastic, Sara discovers that coffin salesmen are shady and, um, "recycle" the products in the name of profit margins. Justice is served, and there's one less crooked coroner in Vegas. If you really want an eye-opening snapshot of the shams perpetuated by certain parts of the mortuary industry, I recommend Jessica Mitford's book The American Way of Dying. ["Seconded. It's well-written, too." -- Sars] And now that my conscience is clean, we can resume recapping the episode.
Cut to a shot of an institutional-looking building during what is either sunrise or sunset. Given that these folks work the night shift, the episode moves in semi-linear form but maintains the conceits that these people are working separately and simultaneously, and the recent switch back to standard time...I have no idea when this is. The sky is pretty colors, all right? On the inside of the school, Catherine is entering a posh-looking teacher's lounge and staring at a man spread-eagled on the floor, blood stains clashing with his pink shirt. We learn that the body belonged to one Vernon Woods, the 39-year-old unmarried dean of the school, and he was killed with multiple blunt-force wounds to the head. Nicky enters the room and exclaims, "Look at all the blood splatters!" Indeed -- the room looks like a Jackson Pollock painting, had he decided that a pottery wheel and a beaker of blood was a more appropriate set of tools than paint and a canvas. Catherine notes that there are a lot of blows that were dispensed up-close and personal, and muses, "A lot of passion in this one." Catherine straightens up and asks the detective about the suspect. We find out that she's named Kate Armstrong, she founded the school where all this has taken place, and she's claiming that Woods attacked her first. Catherine learns that Armstrong is out in the hall, and heads out to talk to her while Nicky continues to take pictures.
Out in the hall, Catherine is talking to a woman with a curly blonde bob -- this is Armstrong, who recounts that Woods wouldn't let go of her, and she hit him with the first thing that she could reach. She then breaks eye contact with Catherine, sniffles daintily into her sleeve, and looks up at Catherine again to say, "It's all a blur." Catherine is buying none of it, and raises an eyebrow skeptically as she asks Armstrong whether she realizes that Woods took a rock to the head. "I didn't know," Armstrong said. "I just wanted him to let go of me." We flash back to her version of events, where Woods has her by both wrists and is pitching woo along the lines of, "What's your problem? Nobody's going to hear us." Armstrong, scrabbling to get away, wrests one hand free, gropes blindly at the table behind her, and seizes the first object that comes to hand -- a big rock. She hits him once, and it's enough to kill him. Back in the present day, Catherine's eyebrow still hasn't come out of its skeptical orbit. She sidles over to Armstrong and asks, "Were you and the dean having a personal relationship?" Armstrong reacts strongly. "No! He's a pig." Catherine moves in for the kill: "Then why did you hire him as dean? I mean, you founded the school. It's your integrity on the line." Armstrong reveals that the dean was effective at raising money -- leaving us all to wonder if he just manhandled donors until they paid to be left alone -- and that was key to the school. "I didn't mean to kill him," she concludes, sniffling some more. Catherine is unmoved, telling Armstrong that she clearly hit Woods more than once. She then excuses herself, moving off to confer with Nick. He asks her what she got -- "heavy on B.S., low on truth." "You don't seem too bummed about it," he observes. "Hell, no, I'm stoked," she drawls. "We drew the best case, Nicky. I can feel it." Nicky nods and says, "then there's only one thing left to do." The two of them agree -- "string it."
Meanwhile, Brass and Gil are hanging out in his office, interviewing some poor actor who answered the casting call for "slacker." The kid guilelessly prattles on about getting concerned about his friend Eric, whom he hasn't seen since the two of them went out after work one night. We learn that this kid works at Voosh's Fireworks, and Eric works a few doors down at the local music emporium. Throw in a comic book store and a burrito stand and you've got every eighth-grade-boy's fantasy mall. Anyway, the kid carries on about the two of them going out to a party out in the desert near Red Rock. Aw, too bad -- I had such high hopes this kid's friend was the mystery nude, but since they found that body on a grassy knoll and this guy went missing in the desert...okay, I'll stop now. The concerned friend, whose name I really wish the writers had worked into the first ten seconds of the conversation so I wouldn't have to keep coming up with labels for him, tells Brass and Gil that the two of them went to the party, drank a few brews, then lost each other around midnight. Gil asks, in a voice straight out of Reefer Madness, "Did you guys drop anything that night -- Ecstasy, crystal, G?" "Nah. No way," says our young friend. "Look, do you know what happened to Eric?" Gil levels a gaze that I've come to recognize as the bearing-bad-news look and says, "Bobby, we've found a body that matches your description of Eric. Would you be willing to identify him?"
Cut to a shot of Bobby standing in the morgue, limbs drawn tightly to his body as though he's willing himself not to accidentally brush up against death. Gil strips back Naked Dried-Up Guy's plastic shroud and asks, "Is this your friend?" Bobby's face crumples into tears; his body grows even more taut as he sobs, "Oh, God." The camera cuts to Gil, whose face has tightened too, and is tearing up as well. What is this? He was pretty sanguine in the face of the grieving family from episode one, and that's when he was force-feeding them a suicide tape where one could clearly hear the fatal shot. It looks Gil's got a soft spot for the kids. Bobby struggles to compose himself and sniffles, "What happened here?" Gil's face is red, and he shakes his head silently. Warrick displays a second instance of impeccable timing in this episode and saves Gil from human interaction by poking his head in the morgue and calling, "Hey, boss, I got something here." Grateful for the excuse, Gil leaves Bobby standing by the drawer where his friend Eric is currently stored, then strides toward Warrick. Warrick shares the news on jimsonweed, to which Gil responds, "Dry as a bone/ red as a beet/ blind as a bat/ mad as a hatter." Warrick pauses for a moment -- no doubt mentally checking to make sure Gil didn't just recite some sort of spell that gives him batwings, or the crown of Scotland and a restive reign, or something -- then says, "Cite your sources." "Internet insomnia," Gil replies. Oh, Gil. I live for the day you get insomnia and quote me as a result. Anyway, Warrick apparently accepts "the Internet" as an acceptable forensics source and says, "I thought Brass said they weren't taking any drugs?" Gil gives him a yeah, right look.
Back from commercial, we're treated to an interminable scene wherein Nicky is stringing twine about the room in the cool light of day. Ah -- he's modeling the path the blood took when it left Woods's head and made its way toward the wall. Catherine enters the room, and the two of them track the likely events that led to the death, noting that the void around certain blood splatters -- represented on the screen as big empty spaces surrounded by a fine spatter of red -- indicates an interruption between severe blows to head, since the act of continually beating Woods silly all over the office would leave a solid trail of blood around the splatters. Based on the evidence, the two investigators deduce someone else was in the room with Armstrong. "Kate Armstrong's lying," Catherine says. You think?
Back at the lab, Warrick sets a glass down in front of Bobby, telling him it's half fruit juice and half ice. That kid should thank his lucky stars he pulled Warrick as CSI caterer -- there's no telling what delicacies Gil would have dug up from the specimen freezer. Gil fixes Bobby with a look the DEA would do well to drill into their agents, and instructs him to dish on the jimsonweed. Bobby defends himself by saying that jimsonweed's not a drug because it's a plant. I instantly flash back to Dazed and Confused, where the stoners' ringleader is delivering a ringing monologue on the virtues of pot. Gil apparently doesn't buy the organic exemption argument either, noting caustically that most drugs are plant-based, "and that doesn't make them safe." "Or legal," pipes up Warrick, he of the illegal card-counting habit. "Yeah, but he said it was safe, that's why we both bought it." "Did you take the drug too?" Warrick asks, rather than follow up with my question, which was "who the hell is this 'he' Bobby's referring to?" Bobby reveals that both boys took it, drinking it as a tea. "Who sold you this tea?" Gil asks, and Bobby reveals that he and Eric didn't get a name from their local weedsman. "He told us it would be mind-expanding. I mean, that's the whole point of a rave is to experiment." Really? And here I thought it was about Sanrio backpacks and DJs as celebrities. Shows what I know. Warrick asks if Bobby got a stamp when he attended this rave, and Bobby replies that he did, but it was four days ago. Warrick reveals that the stamps are usually waterproof so as not to wash off when dancers sweat, and waves a UV light over Bobby's wrist. A Rorschach-like blot appears on Bobby's arm and Warrick says, "Yeah, that's DJ Masterband's stamp. He is the spinner in Vegas right now" -- thus lending credence to my whole raves-are-about-DJs theory, provided you regard CBS as a network that has its finger on the pulse of electronica. Gil asks Warrick how to go about tracking down "this DJ person," and Warrick replies that alternative weeklies usually have ads for raves. Gil then enlists Bobby as his man at the rave, with the purpose of identifying the jimson dealer.
Back in the lab, Warrick and Gil are dishing about the contents of Warrick's swabs, taken several scenes back. Warrick found patchouli -- big surprise at a music store -- and mentholated cold spray, as well as mystery guest aluminum. While he's talking, Gil is carefully preparing an infusion of tea. "Something tells me that's not lemonade," Warrick says. Gil confirms that the murky brew is jimson tea, and he's preparing it as a way of knowing thine enemy. Gil then abruptly changes the subject: "Do you know what the Japanese tea ceremony symbolizes?" he asks Warrick. Warrick sighs in a he-had-to-ask fashion and replies, "What's that?" "That every human encounter is a singular occasion which can never be repeated ever again in exactly the same way," Gil replies. Warrick sighs again and asks, "Does that apply to our case?" "Everything applies," Gil responds. "That's the beauty part." He goes to take a drink of the tea, and the camera zooms out to a fishbowl filled with tiny mottled goldfish. Well, if you don't have room for a koi pond in the lab, I suppose a fishbowl will do.
Back at the school, Armstrong is walking with the CSI investigators through a pleasantly landscaped sidewalk -- confirming my suspicion that this is an alternate Las Vegas where the water runs abundant and free -- and admitting that there was a second person in the room, a friend on the faculty. Nick strong-arms her out of her discretion by putting the hayseed accent on again and noting, "Homicide will tell us her name if you won't. Your school isn't that big." Armstrong folds and says, "Julia Eastman. But she was doing me a favor. She was just in the wrong place at the wrong time." Armstrong then takes her leave, as Catherine stares thoughtfully in the middle distance. Forget what's going through Catherine's head; I want to know why Nick rolls out the Hazzard drawl when he's questioning suspects. Does he think a hint of corrupt Southern cop is enough to scare the rest of America straight?
In the interrogation room, a soignée brunette is talking to Nick and Catherine about why she happened to be in the room when Armstrong was giving Woods a new cranial orifice. According to the brunette, she was there to be a witness, should any more incidents of harassment occur. We flash back to a scene where Woods whips out his particular brand of charm -- otherwise known as none -- and the brunette darts in to help her frantic friend. Blood, limbs, and heavy objects fly, and the brunette ends up against the same wall that had the void around the blood splatters, watching the blood fly about her while her sweater stays pearly white. She takes us out of flashback and returns us to Nick and Catherine, who clearly haven't been swept into the same flashback as the rest of us. Nick gets up and says, "We're forensic scientists, Julia. Blood talks to us. People exaggerate or forget. Blood's like my grandfather -- never lies." Hey, writers? You want Southern aphorisms guaranteed to make a Yankee's blood run cold, you write me. This blood and grandpa business don't do it. I didn't get raised up in the South for nothing, you hear?
After Nick has stunned Julia with his keen grasp on objective examination of evidence, Catherine drops some more science on Julia, showing her a computer model of the crime scene based on the string model. That's some seriously nice rendering, and marvelously detailed, given that they only got to the crime scene a few hours before. Nick takes us on a tour of the evidence, then poses a key question to Julia: how did a smallish woman like Armstrong wrestle Woods to the ground and bash his head in without help? Julia stonewalls, a tactic Nick recognizes for obvious reasons.
Flash to a party in the desert. This is your typical young-people-on-television party, meaning there's professional-quality lights, sound and crowd-control barriers, and about forty percent fewer people milling about than would be in the same space in a party in real life. Come on -- nobody at a rave is going to be dancing in a personal space bubble measuring eight feet in diameter, and nobody at a rave is going to ignore Gil, Brass, and Warrick paying $20 to get in at the door, especially since Gil's wearing a tweed blazer and eyeballing the guy who stamped him as though he'd rather have this person pinned to a slide beneath his microscope. Brass wanders off, leaving Gil and Warrick to wend their way through the crowd after Bobby. As though to illustrate the contrast between Gil and the rest of the sparse gathering, the camera flashes to a girl dressed like a butterfly undulating on stage, and a waifish teen stage-diving into the crowd below. Gil, walking behind Warrick, shouts, "Teenage wasteland!" Warrick shouts back, "Who?" and Gil replies, "Yeah!" That was pretty funny, I have to admit. More shots of kids presumably decked out in rave wear, assuming that by rave wear, you mean "tiki kitsch by way of Target," then a young blonde woman approaches Gil. "Hi!" she beams. "Hi," he answers heartily, hoping to bluff his way out of actually talking to someone. No dice -- she flings herself into his arms and coos, "I love you." The camera cuts to Warrick wearing a bemused look; he's all about seeing how Gil reacts. Gil doesn't disappoint; he chuckles nervously and says, "You're a total stranger to me." This doesn't daunt the young woman as she runs her fingers playfully down Gil's nose. Warrick saves the day for the third time in a row, shouting to Gil that the girl's on E, and telling her, "Don't take it personally, miss. He's in love with his job." The girl recognizes a lost cause when she sees it and disengages from Gil's arms with a flirtatious finger-wave, then falls into a brunette's embrace and professes her love all over again. Gil turns to see how this is going to turn out, and Warrick steers him toward Bobby, commanding, "Come on, let's go!" A minute later, there's a fracas between the dozen or so besuited men who suddenly appeared without attracting any attention whatsoever, and a scruffy guy who looks like the hipster version of Ted Kaczynski. "What do you got on me?" he asks derisively, and Gil replies, "Selling jimsonweed to kids," in the kind of voice that makes him seem very stodgy all of a sudden. The dealer laughs and challenges Gil to find some "j-weed" on him, which is Gil's cue to rip apart the guy's car, discover a few seeds, and book the smirky young tough. The kid recites chapter and verse of Nevada's drug laws to Gil, leading Gil to reply that those with criminal intent frequently develop a great intimacy for the laws they plan on breaking, and prompting the greatest display of temper we've seen yet: "You're twice the age of these kids, and most of them couldn't find their ass with a map. You prey on innocent kids, selling God-knows-what concocted from God-knows-where, dealing Russian roulette in a bottle, and you think we came all the way out here to bust you on possession, you dumb punk?!" What a great dose of vitriol! It's too bad we're on CBS instead of HBO, because as good as William Petersen was there, the whole speech would have been so much better if he had free reign of the Seven Dirty Words.
Back in the morgue, Gil is telling Jenna that he wants to autopsy Eric again, as he believes Eric drank the toxic dregs of the jimsonweed tea and he needs the evidence to prove that. Jenna -- helpfully aided by the esophago-cam -- guides us through the digestive system and into the world's cleanest lower intestine, where she notes that the persistent little jimsonweed seeds are likely to be lodged. We see a pair of tweezers extracting the round black seed from a spongy wall -- eww -- and Jenna produces a seed, noting, "Jimson reduced his gastric motility and kept this in his system." Warrick gazes at the seed with booking intent in his eyes, declaring that all they need to do is tie one partially-digested seed to the turd currently cooling his heels in the interrogation room. Gil cautions that it may not work. "That's not what you were saying at the rave up in that guy's face." Gil, whose last nerve has apparently been worked pretty hard over the course of the episode snaps, "There's three things I have a problem with: guys that hit their wives, sexual assault on children, and the scum that deals drugs to kids."
Meanwhile, Liam the Lab Tech delivers bad news: the seeds have been tested, and their toxicity is way too low to have killed Eric. Warrick sighs, realizing that the dealer is about to be released -- something he would no doubt be insufferable about -- and the two of them are back to square one. He joins Grissom outside the dealer's holding area and commiserates over the irony of evidence freeing the drug dealer. Warrick asks Gil how he feels, and Gil replies, "It doesn't matter how I feel. The evidence only knows one thing: the truth. It is what it is." Warrick asks Gil if he really believes that, and Gil relates a depressing Zen tale about a Harvard professor that used to pee on a brown spider in his toilet daily, until he took it upon himself to remove the spider to a nicer neighborhood. The day he found the spider dead, having apparently lost the will to live after realizing it would never again have to fight its way back up the side of the bowl after a flush. People, I don't make this sort of stuff up; it just comes from Gil's mouth. "One life imposed itself on another. Right there, I realized where we stand." What, on the edge of the cosmic toilet bowl? "I understood our role. We don't impose our lives on a spider. We don't impose our will on the evidence." Just then, the dealer comes out, and the three men take turns talking smack to each other.
Now working at night when they normally do, Nicky and Catherine discuss how to nail Armstrong and Julia. After asking Armstrong for her bloodstained clothes -- which, she coolly informs them, she burned -- the dynamic duo turns to Woods's clothes, tracing the outline of a hand through the bloodstains and noting a very long finger. They muse over what they might be missing in Armstrong's account, or Julia's lack thereof, and Nick closes the scene by musing, "I can tell you one thing. Someone's playing through the pain." Whatever, dork.
Back to Gil, who is having the mother of all bad days, while he tells Bobby that Eric didn't die from the tea, but from something else. As he's talking, he notices that Bobby's scratching his arm over a bite. Gil asks about the bite and Bobby says, "Yeah, I think I got it from a spider. It's infected or something." Gil asks to see it and Bobby rolls up his sleeve. Gil looks at the puffy, inflamed area and says, "Bobby...this isn't from an insect." I wonder what tipped him off -- the giant size of the bite, or the infection that can only be caused by a mammal that hosts a diverse bacterial population in its mouth?
In the scene, Gil approaches Jenna and asks her to make molds of both the bite and of Eric's teeth. Jenna prods him for details and Gil snaps that he doesn't feel like sharing. Jenna gently pushes again, and Gil spills: "This whole case is going from bad to worse. Usually, it's a body and a case, but when it involves kids, I just can't..." "Gruesome Grissom," Jenna interjects. "The tin man with a heart." Gil stares miserably until Warrick comes in and puts together all the pieces: the aluminum in Eric's mouth comes from the fireworks that Bobby's working around. Aw, man. There's no way this can end well. Oh, wait. This is C.S.I. The show never ends well.
While I'm fighting the sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach, Catherine is drilling Julia by ordering her to open and close her fingers in a fist. Now Nick's asinine comment makes sense to me -- it's not about someone putting on a brave front, but pretending that their finger isn't broken and foregoing a splint. Ow -- them splints are there for a reason. Take it from someone who knows. Anyway, Julia reveals that her pinky was recently sprained -- thus explaining the very long finger in the hand outline on Woods' shirt -- and Catherine gets the a-ha look. Armstrong looks ill. Catherine takes that reaction as a cue to explain how she and Nick deduced what happened, and we're all taken into yet another flashback, this one where Julia held down Woods while Armstrong killed him. Catherine notes that bashing in a guy's head for groping seems a little severe; Catherine, have you ever been in a workplace with a groper? I mean, I read in Entertainment Weekly that she was a stripper before turning to a life of crime-solving, but still...that kind of comment shows a complete ignorance of the rage and humiliation that goes with having to spend every work day steeling yourself against the kind of behavior that has no place in the workplace anyway. Excuse me -- I seem to have drifted off track. Back on the show, a detective mildly informs the women that he'll be placing the two of them under arrest for murder, and asks them if they'd like to say anything. The two women stare back, stonily mute, and as the uniforms come in to take them away, Julia and Armstrong give each other long, tearful looks. Ohhhhhhhhhhhh. I get it again. This is CBS's take on, uh, contemporary relationships. Keen evidence connoisseurs Nicky and Catherine miss it completely, what with this sort of clue being broadcast by the living and not the dead. As the woman are led out of the room, Catherine muses that the case isn't over yet; Nicky replies that from a forensic perspective it is, and "they're going to eat bread and bang a metal cup against some bars." Life must be so simple when your idea of prison reform consists of a Tupperware sippy cup over the tin prison-issue mug. Catherine isn't satisfied with that answer and muses that they still don't know why. Nick replies they're the How people, not the Why people. Catherine takes the opportunity to tell Nick to stop reading the gospel of Gil and think for himself. Oh, that maverick Catherine!
, Catherine and Nick are watching the mild-mannered detective -- who I hope will become a regular, if only because he provides a nice balance to the scenery-chewing antics of some regulars (Catherine) whom (Sara) I won't name (Nick) -- drill Armstrong on the real reason she committed the murder. Armstrong stares, mute and teary, as Catherine muses sotto voce that forensics should reach beyond evidence and toward understanding the inconsistencies of human behavior. Just then, Armstrong decides to tell the real story: it turns out she and Julia were being blackmailed by Woods, and they met to tell him the jig was up, what with it being the twenty-first century and people being marginally more tolerant than they were back when Lillian Hellman wrote The Children's Hour. The dean, recognizing the loss of a significant revenue opportunity, tells them he'll brook no such thing, and tells them that he's going to retaliate by calling parents and telling them the two women were engaging in deviant acts on school grounds, clearly counting on a campaign of lies, aided by bigotry, to shut down the school if the women fail to come around. Just as he heads for a phone, Armstrong desperately lunges toward him. "Julia and I would have never survived a rumor like that. We panicked. The school is our whole life."
Cut to Nicky -- who has, once again, learned a lesson about the complexities of crimes and motive -- and Catherine, both ruing a world where Woods's threats are valid and Armstrong felt desperate enough to kill. Yeah, that compassion's real handy now that the two women's lives are already ruined.
Back in the other storyline, Bobby's wild-eyed, insisting, "I didn't kill my best friend!" His lawyer advises him to keep quiet, but Bobby, who's really working the good-hearted-kid angle here, says he wants to help out the cops but he can't remember anything after drinking the tea. Gil says, "It's not about memory now. It's about the evidence. And the evidence...sucks."
Flash back to the rave: Gil is explaining that the two boys couldn't handle their jimsonweed the first time out and were experiencing some of the usual side effects -- photophobia, which drove them to run away from the rave and its lights; hallucinations that frightened Eric; heightened body temperature (hence the stripped-naked body). Brass jumps in with his feel-bad line of the week: "We just don't know if it was an act of aggression or self-defense." Bobby turns his horrified Bambi eyes on Gil and Warrick and blurts, "I loved that guy!" "That's why I tend to believe it was an act of self-protection." Gil takes us back into flashback where Bobby, suffering from auditory hallucinations, tried to hush Eric by clamping a hand over his mouth. Eric, who was not exactly in touch with his senses at the moment, freaked, and suffocated in the ensuing struggle. Bobby stammers, "I...don't...think...I'd...do...that." Gil pulls out the molds of bitemark and bite, and they match. One more flashback, where we see the suffocation up-close and personal. The lawyer immediately says, "I can tell you, we're going to plead diminished capacity." "Good," replies Gil. "I hope you win." "It doesn't matter," Bobby says brokenly. "Yes, it does," says the lawyer. "It's the difference between prison and a hospital." "You don't understand," Bobby says heartbrokenly. "I don't care what happens to me. I killed my best friend." Gil looks up, tearing. As am I, I might add. Damn you, writers, for pulling out another storyline about the wretched mistakes kids make. These stories are more manipulative than those old railroad films about teens who would go hot-rodding on the tracks and end up flattened.
Gil and Warrick sit in the sun, drinking coffee and watching a grieving Bobby get pushed into a prison transport van. Gil gets up to leave, and Warrick calls out, "Where are you going?" "Away," Gil curtly replies.
Cut to a dark night. Gil straps himself in to the front seat of a roller coaster -- I think it's the one that runs around New York, New York, but it could also be the one behind the MGM Grand -- and rides around, staring impassively. On a lesser man, we might interpret that expression as a manful struggle not to boot during a loop-de-loop; on Gil, it's supposed to symbolize how incredibly out of touch he is with his psyche (as represented by the roller coaster). It's all very symbolic, and quite the bummer -- or it would be if the idea of any Las Vegas roller coaster being empty at night -- or the time changing that dramatically on the way from the station house to the roller coaster -- was plausible enough to hold any dramatic meaning.
week: Gil unearths a skeleton and works with a dishy blonde forensic artist -- is there any other kind? -- to figure out who the bones used to be.