Ah, suburbia. We're in a housing development that goes beyond "prefabricated" and into "cloned." As a thin, balding plumber navigates a dry and roomy crawl space, a strident female voice screams, "What's taking so long? I just wanted you to fix the leak!" I briefly entertain the hope that perhaps the plumber will thrust his hand through the floor Carrie-style and kill this harridan, but I suspect this is just so much backstory leading up to the inevitable moment where some civilian discovers a body. Still, if that woman is so adamant about how she wants the plumber to use his time, then maybe she should have been more specific about what was leaking and where. Few plumbers are psychic; they're not going to crawl under a house, commune with an i-beam, and instantly know where the leak is. Granted, for $90/hour, they should be, but you just can't have it all.
Good Lord, I've digressed and we haven't even hit the credits yet. Back to the show!
The plumber continues his crawling, as he shines his flashlight on a concrete berm, he mutters, "I've found something." The camera glides along the path of the beam to rest on his discovery -- four spidery, mummified human fingers sticking out of the concrete.
Cut to night. The entire house has been taped off, a process I sincerely regret missing since I would have liked to have seen how the harridan in Scene I reacted to the news of a body in her basement. Nicky's wearing a dorky blue jumpsuit and pulling a toolbox out of the CSI van. He crouches by a crawl space and radios, "Okay, I'm ready up here." "Hang on a minute," replies Gil, and the scene switches to him belly-crawling in what looks to be a considerably darker and cobwebbier crawl space. Fortunately for Gil, he doesn't share my claustrophobia; in fact, he looks downright ecstatic. Oh, that Gil -- overjoyed by the idea of bodies moldering undetected in cramped and dingy places. Gil shines the flashlight from his hardhat onto the hand and identifies the hand as definitely human based on the metacarpals and phalanges. He then joins Nick outside; Nick has been passing the time by staring at the house's foundation and muttering, "There's got to be a better way." Not according to Gil: "When a body decomposes in concrete, it leaves an air pocket, vacuum sealed. We do this right, it will open like a jar of pickles." I can appreciate the use of metaphor as a teaching device as much as the person, but Gil's colorful lectures have a way of putting one off one's food. Nicky, made of less imaginative stuff than I, buckles down to work, joining Gil in chiseling a hole in the house's foundation. The bricks fall in, and a cavity is revealed, with a set of human bones resting inside. Nicky says, "Ten bucks says they sell the house." Gil replies, "By law, you've got to disclose everything: three bedrooms, two baths, and a skeleton in the basement."
Who Are You?
Cut to the credits, which pass as I blink in shock at Gil's failure to make jokes about skeletons in the closet.
Cut to the office. Gil's handing out work assignments, telling the assembled morgueteers that he and Nicky will be handling the skeleton. "I hear it's just bones. What a rush," Sara says dully. For someone who spent her last extraneous subplot singing the praises of cremation, she's pretty up on this human remains stuff. Gil ignores her and addresses Warrick, telling the two junior CSI folk to investigate the scene at an officer-reported shooting. He warns them of the potential pitfalls in investigating a cop, which go unnoticed by both Sara and Warrick since they're too busy bickering over who will drive to the scene. The only people left in the squad room are Gil and Catherine. She asks Gil what she's to be working on since she "could use a rush," and Gil, like an idiot, tells her he's got something that fits the bill, but he can't give her the case due to conflict of interest. "The alleged rape victim is an exotic dancer," he says. "Because I used to be one, I'll be biased?" Catherine replies. Knowing you, Catherine, yes -- everything sways the direction of your investigation. But Gil doesn't think Catherine's affinity with the g-string divas will be the problem; it's fact that the rape suspect is her ex-husband. "He's asking for you, but you can't take it," Gil warns her, little realizing that telling Catherine to separate her personal biases from her work is an exercise in futility. This is a woman who got someone killed because she was in a snit about a dead woman's marital infidelity. God only knows what egregious professional violations Catherine will commit when dealing with her ex-husband expressly against Gil's wishes, but I am fully confident we'll spend the rest of the episode finding out.
Catherine and Gil dicker a little; then Gil hands her the file, telling her to talk to Eddie, then pass off the case after she's finished with the preliminary round of questioning. He stares at her, clearly wondering if he's done the right thing, and the camera pans on to Catherine's face. A nice transition shot takes us to a picture of a graying man in the tank, rubbing his face in worry as Catherine's reflection stares at him intently. She shakes her hair, rolls her eyes, then steels herself for a conversation with the ex. As Catherine walks into the tank, Eddie immediately starts protesting his innocence. Catherine is dishing out forensic jargon in reply, then Eddie says, "We had sex, okay? But she was with me one hundred percent!" Catherine looks up and says, "In a parking lot behind the club." Eddie gives her a look clearly meant to push a few buttons, and says, "Well. Some women like the outdoors." Catherine assumes a look I normally associate with my cat when she's trying to communicate high dudgeon with minimal effort, and asks if Eddie's presumed girlfriend knows about his habit of boffing strippers in the wild. Eddie responds that he's a single man, and Catherine acidly informs Eddie that perhaps he should call the ex and plead for money to pay a lawyer. Naturally, Eddie takes this moment to scream at his wronged ex-wife, "Cath! I'm in a jam here!" which leads me to suspect that even if the infidelity didn't kill this marriage, his incredible denseness would have. Catherine continues playing hard-ass until Eddie plays the child card, reminding Catherine that perhaps the child might not benefit from visiting her dad in the clink. Whatever objectivity Catherine has gathers its skirts, curtseys to the audience, and disappears for the remainder of the show.
Down in the morgue, Gil and Nicky are standing over the bones, trying to determine telling clues. Gil muses, "Based on the auricular surface, I'd say she died when she was about twenty." "'She'?" Our Boy for Exposition asks. Gil explains, for the sake of all of us at home, that one can usually assign a gender to a skeleton based on the width between pelvic bones, then deftly addresses my sniping about Nicky the Exposition Wonder Boy by noting, "For a ladies' man, you don't know much about bone structure." Nicky grins and replies, "I know all I need to know," then rips into a deconstruction of the presumed cause of death, noting that the gouges on the skeleton's ribs indicate this person knew her attacker. Gil notes that the nature of the gouges indicates a curved, serrated edge and finishes, "Whatever killed this girl, was not a traditional weapon." He then crouches down to see eye-to-skull-socket with the bones, cups the skull gently in one hand, and peers intently, whispering, "Who are you?"
Cut to a parking lot that looks like it's behind the new Aladdin casino. Sara and Warrick walk over to a crime scene in progress, only to be greeted by Brass. He introduces them to a cocky-looking cop named Joe Tyner, and the four make small talk about what led to this scene. Tyner takes us all on flashback -- he was pursuing a Jeep driving like many large vehicle drivers in the Bay Area typically do, i.e. all over the road with no consideration for other cars, double yellow lines, or any of the other regulations or conventions the rest of the vehicular community follows as a matter of course. It's dismaying to learn that poor driving is a regional constant. Anyway, the officer's chasing down the Jeep, the Jeep pulls into the empty parking lot behind the casino, and Tyner drives up and leaps out of his car, drawing his gun and yelling, "Get back in the car!" as he does so. Tyner, who looks all sorts of wigged out in the flashback, is yelling for the guy in the Jeep to toss his keys on the ground and put his hands on the wheel. The guy, who's clearly falling apart as the seconds elapse, begins babbling, "Whatever you think I did, I didn't do. I didn't do it. I'm on three strikes, man. Let me just show you my registration." As his hands move off the wheel, Tyner's eyes widen and he shouts for the driver to put his hands back on the wheel. We see the driver reach for a gun kept by his knee and shoot himself in the forehead.
Back in the present day, Sara listens to this harrowing tale of suicide-by-cop and asks abruptly, "Where's his gun?" Tyner replies that he left it in the Jeep, and Sara goes off to bag the firearm for further examination. Warrick asks for Tyner's gun, and the two men give him a small measure of grief; Warrick keeps his cool and informs them it's standard procedure, and Tyner hands the gun -- which he claims he didn't fire -- over to Warrick. Over at the Jeep, Sara peers in and verifies that the driver really does have a bullet hole in the middle of his forehead. As she's collecting the gun, we hear Warrick say, "We're going to need to seal this lot." Brass replies, "Tyner told you what happened. Whose side are you on here?" Brass, now is not the time to be pulling that thin-blue-line business, especially with your neighbors in California undergoing not one, but two, trials in which rings of police officers set up citizens, filed false charges, and committed other atrocities in the name of police work. Warrick smacks Brass around a little -- only verbally -- and asks him to step aside so the CSI folks can do their job. "At least test his hands for gun residue!" Brass says, and Sara replies, "At this close proximity, they'll both be covered, no matter who fired." Brass and Sara stare at each other a while, and eventually Brass averts his eyes as the scene fades out.
Gil is standing over a chunk of masonry and staring at it when Nicky walks in. "You brought the foundation of the house back here," he notes, and Gil defends the decision by pointing out that since the Jane Doe was dumped in the concrete when it was still wet, the chunk holds a partial impression of her features. It's like those casts archaeologists can make of Pompeiians who were trapped when Mt. Vesuvius erupted -- and it's proof that Gil takes all the cool work, because we find out that Nicky's been sent out to check the house's permits. Since the house was sold after it was completed, the homeowners aren't suspects. The scene closes with the two men musing that, but for a leaky pipe, the body would have remained undetected, thus depriving them of an opportunity to do a lot of cool forensics work and bother a murderer grown complacent with time.
Back in the part of the lab that doesn't give the impression of being 500 feet below the Earth's surface, Warrick is hunched over a microscope. Sara comes in, and Warrick muses, "Why would a guy speed all the way down the Strip, just to pull over and cap himself?" It's nice to see all that unpleasantness with the judge hasn't put him off thinking about deep philosophical issues. Sara, who has no time for tautological discourse, walks Warrick back around to the evidence they're supposed to be discussing, and it comes out that both the officer's gun and the dead guy's were nine-millimeter weapons, and both are missing a bullet. "Brass isn't going to like this," warns Sara, and Warrick snaps back, "I don't give a damn what Brass likes." "Like I do? If Tyner's dirty, he goes down. I just know what happens when you piss off a PD." In Warrick's case, that means you have two public agencies gunning for you. All he needs to do is run afoul of the Las Vegas firefighters to maintain his streak of stumbling into civic messes. He knows this too -- the camera pans out on Warrick looking grim.
Gil is sitting at his desk, letting his little spider run across his palms, when there's a knock on the door. A pallid blonde stands in the doorway asking, "Gil Grissom? Or...should I call you Spiderman?" "It's harmless," Gil assures her. "Of course it is," she purrs in a voice that evokes cold winds in November. "It's an orange-kneed tarantula. Nice specimen." Gil looks up through half-closed eyes and lifts the hand with the spider to her, cooing, "The tarantula's touch is very gentle." "It leaves no prints," she whispers, soft as frost forming on a winter window. "They move without a trace. May I?" She slides her hand under his, and Gil opens his mouth as he shifts the spider to her palm. I've seen less explicit allusions to sex in a Paul Verhoeven movie. The woman sighs gently and pulls her palm back, Gil rises with a love-struck look on her face. "Maybe I should introduce myself," she says. "Teri Miller does not need an introduction," Gil moons. "I need you to make me a face."
In another part of the building, one where the walls aren't in danger of melting from the volcanic sexual tension bubbling below the surface of spider talk, Sara and Warrick are having a discussion with Tyner. He's vehemently denying any involvement in the driver's death, and Sara's pressing him about this missing bullet. Tyner reveals that he doesn't top off the clip -- the fourteenth bullet puts pressure on the clip, and the gun can jam just when one needs it most -- and Warrick asks Tyner if there's anyone who can confirm his habit. Tyner leaps to his feet: "It's not a story! And no, I don't tell people how I carry. Do you? Check the other magazines!" I like this guy -- he's playing the accused-cop-on-the-edge thing just right. Of course, Brass has to come crashing in, thus ruining the effect with his usual bombastic style: "What's going on in here!?" Warrick, ever cool in the face of irritability, replies that they're all having a little talk. Brass informs them all he's the union rep on this case -- a move clearly intended to cow the investigators -- but Sara counteracts by telling Brass Tyner's clip was missing a round, and the bullet's missing. Tyner protests again, and Sara says, "With a record like yours, we're supposed to take your word?" Warrick picks up the beat with, "Five civilian complaints, three for excessive force, two IA investigations --" "I was cleared!" Tyner interjects. Warrick pauses for a moment, calculating the maximum effect, and says, "I'm sure you were." Tyner, as expected, explodes. Brass calms him down, then displaces the anger by charging Sara and Warrick to go out there and find the one missing bullet. Warrick makes a crack about how fortunate it was that he sealed off the crime scene, and departs while Brass and Tyner fume impotently.
Back in the looooooooooove lab, Teri's bent over the foundation, filling it with putty and demonstrating the same flair for gruesome food metaphors that Gil has: "It's like a human Jell-O mold!" She explains that it won't be easy to get a face together, and Gil replies, "They told me you were the top forensic artist in the country --" "And Canada," Teri continues. "I didn't say I couldn't do it. Give me your hand." Gil does, and Teri murmurs, "You'll enjoy this. It's a science as much as an art." Gil plunges his hand into a bowl full of goo -- no Freudian meaning there, no sirree -- and Teri guides it into the cavity, molding the gel to the contours of the face. Jesus, they keep this up and I'll need a cigarette at the commercial break. Gil looks pole-axed as Teri pours a bucket of latex into the molded cavity. A moment later, Teri pulls out a blob of latex; Gil peers over her shoulder and says, "It doesn't really look like anything." "Of course not. No shadows. No shadows, no perspective," Terri replies as she deftly smoothes and molds the latex with her fingers. "Now look," she finishes, and holds up a slice of feminine-looking face, mouth fixed in a tight line and eyes closed. The camera fades out on the face, and back on Teri, seated at a bench and working on adding more slices of face to the mannequin head in front of her. Gil sits to her and says, "So teach me." It's foreplay and expository dialogue! Teri walks us through both the production process and the ethnotyping she does based on bone structure and dominant phenotypes in the country. We learn that the skeleton likely belonged to someone of Nordic descent; as Gil queries why Teri's popping brown eyes in the empty sockets, Teri replies that the majority of people in the U.S. are brown-eyed and "it photographs better. You want to get her picture out there, don't you?" Gil replies that he does, brooding, "There's someone out there who needs closure. And someone out there who needs to go to jail." Teri regards Gil for a moment, then presents him with the finished face. Creepy dead glass eyes aside, it's pretty human-looking. Gil grabs a camera to take a picture of the model, and the camera pulls in tight on the face...