So this recap is incredibly delayed because I had to move all the furniture and vacuum all the cat hair my cats are storing down there in case they wake up bald one day. And then I had to scrub the kitchen floor and do the dishes, run a few loads of laundry and get those put away, tend to the mildew on the bathroom ceiling (such a shame I had to do that -- they had just evolved to the point where they were electing representatives to a sort of mycological Parliament) and shine all the faucets, and then, once I had finished this frenetic bout of housekeeping and could therefore suffer some horrible death without having total strangers rampaging through the house and tut-tutting over my housekeeping skills as a reflection of my fitness as a human being...wait a minute. You mean not everyone has the paranoid fear that once they're brutally murdered, others will jump to conclusions about their mental health based on the cleanliness of their apartment? I don't know where that came from. Let's just get on with the episode, shall we?
We begin with a shot of grassy swampland, then a well-manicured suburb abutting it. It's no doubt named for the very ecosystem it just displaced. We see people going about their business -- two kids carrying surfboards, hired help tending to the lawns, and then a toddler in a bloodstained footy pajama set wandering down the street. Cut to a few different law enforcement vehicles, one of which is disgorging the Child Protector of the Greater Miami-Dade area himself, Horatio. He asks Sevilla what's going on, and she tells him, "Gardener saw a bloody kid out here on her own." We cut to the child in question now on a gurney and being divested of her bloody romper. Caine and Sevilla brainstorm where the child might have come from -- some uniforms are doing door-to-door, but there's nothing to indicate that the wandering waif is local. The two are over by the gurney now, asking the EMT what they've got; the EMT replies, "There's not a scratch on her." The child, however, is understandably irritated and begins crying. Horatio looks at the girl for a minute, then says, "Well, the blood had to come from somewhere, didn't it? My guess is that someone close to this child is either dead or dying."
And then Roger Daltrey screams off-camera, leading me to wonder if someone's covered his footy romper in blood too.
Once we're back, the little girl is looking up at Horatio and crying fiercely; not even Speedle's presence calms her down. I can empathize. Horatio is swabbing her and directing Speedle to take the swabs to Hematrace. He then turns back to the little girl and croons, "Good job. You are a good girl." That shuts her right up. Speedle performs an impromptu field test and discovers -- unsurprisingly -- that the little girl was covered in human blood, and it's not her own. Horatio directs Speedle to take the sleeper to Megan and get DNA and Trace working on it, then goes back to reassuring the toddler, "You are a good girl." He then wanders over to Sevilla and says, "Too much blood for a casual injury." Sevilla wonders how far the toddler could have walked. Horatio muses, "Your average adult has been clocked at two-and-a-half to three miles per hour, but to my knowledge, no toddler has ever been road-tested." For some reason, the idea of road-testing toddlers cracks me up. Horatio then says, "I'm interested in that sunburn on the one side of her face. You have a sunburn on one side of your face, it means you've been walking in a straight line, doesn't it?" The two figure out that the child was traveling due north, so they hop in a car and begin heading south.
Back in the lab, Speedle's standing at a lab bench where Megan's seated. Calleigh comes in and says, "Everybody's talking about the bloody child. Does anyone know where she came from?" Speedle replies, "That's the question." Megan, who's cutting up the sleeper, says, "This [beat] is the answer. You want a leg or a foot?" Megan begins cutting up the sleeper, paring the edges as neatly as the story editor must have begun paring her role following the big news.
While Horatio drives south, Megan and Calleigh examine the feet of the sleeper. Megan points out the presence of soil; Calleigh wonders if it came from a lawn the little girl crossed. Megan replies, "Well, her feet [beat] were soaked with blood." Speedle checks out the muddy mixture of blood in the scope and says, "Well, that narrows it down." He then holds up a sample container and announces that he has business elsewhere.
Horatio keeps driving through beautifully manicured neighborhoods, squinting hard through the Sergio Leone filter to see if he can discern any details that would give hints to the child's route. Too bad that nice Bil Keane can't come by and do one of those maps that shows where the kid's been wandering; it'd be a lot easier to follow the dotted lines and captions. Horatio drives on by, and as he passes one house, he hears screaming. He perks up, but it only turns out to be two giggling teenagers chasing each other out of the house. He speeds off, disappointed.
In the meantime, Calleigh and Megan work silently on the sleeper. There's a science montage here, but nobody on the show's going to go to the effort to explain what they're doing or why. Who cares about these pesky "clues" and "tests," anyway? Calleigh's cell phone rings, and she answers it; it's Horatio, and he wants to know what Profiler Plus has turned up. A slightly less cross-eyed version of a psychic babe than the original? That would be my first guess. Calleigh tells him "amelogenin's up -- we've got two different bleeders, one male, one female." Megan calls out, "Make that three." Calleigh verifies that it's another male, and "we're three for three and counting." And...what are they testing for, what is it telling them, and how will it contribute to the plot? Why do I even ask?
Once Horatio's off the phone with Calleigh, he's on with Speedle, who tells him, "Somebody was trading the old for the new. The soil on the toddler's feet was laced with glyphosphate." Horatio says, "That's a heavy-duty grass killer. They may be resodding, so let's look for a location where they're resodding." And by "let us look," he really means, "Let's have Delko tool around in a helicopter and look." Meanwhile, Calleigh clicks back into the conversation to tell Horatio that the number of bleeders has gone up to four, and they're all related to the girl. Just then, Delko breaks in to tell Horatio that they've spotted the house with the lawn that's being resodded. Within seconds, Horatio has pulled up. Two vehicles park behind his. He notices the open door, and Sevilla whips out her gun and gets into position as Horatio intones, "This is the place." He gives a thumbs-up to the helicopter -- good thing Delko's got binoculars -- then heads toward the house.
Well. When they titled this episode "Slaughterhouse," they weren't kidding around. There are two adult-sized bodies lying prostrate in the foyer, one of which is huddled over an infant, and a woman lying on the couch with no face below the nose. I have to admit, I wasn't particularly curious to see what someone looked like when they stuck a gun in their mouth and pulled the trigger, so this really isn't doing a lot for me. Horatio notices one of the bodies in the foyer breathing raspily, does the usual "we have survivors" drill, then crouches down beside the man, asking, "Who did this to you?" "My son," the man answers, then goes into the fragmentary speech patterns one might reasonably expect from someone who's been witness to and/or a participant in a mass murder. Horatio looks over at the boy lying in a pool of blood a few feet away, rolls him over -- ignoring the splashing noise from the pool of blood the boy's lying in -- and notices the baby the boy is holding. Sevilla comes out of the bedroom, voice choked, as she says, "Horatio, we've got another one." Horatio heads into the bedroom to see a small boy slumped over a computer keyboard, his headphones still blasting music. He's been shot once at the base of the skull, and his computer monitor is blood-spattered. Horatio sighs, as if he's aware that the show's been killing minors at an alarming rate. Come to think of it, they're not the only at-risk demographic: it's very dangerous to be a woman on this show ("Golden Parachute," "Wet Foot, Dry Foot," "Ashes to Ashes"), or a Latino ("Saving Face," "Wet Foot, Dry Foot"), or a child ("Broken," and now this). Only the white males are safe, and that's assuming they don't comport themselves like brazen man-hussies and get killed for their wanton behavior ("Breathless").
Anyway, Horatio takes a moment to brood over how he wasn't here to protect the children; then he's distracted by a beeping sound. He wanders through the house, alert and tense, and into a rather crowded kitchen -- dishes in the rack and in the sink, food along the counters -- toward the microwave. He warily presses the door button and notices a bottle of formula inside. It's easy to see how creeped out anyone would be about that; after spending ten minutes with a houseful of bloody bodies, one would almost expect to find a microwaved housecat and "Helter Skelter" written in blood on the door.
After that scare, Horatio's giving Speedle the Cliff's Notes version of what's inside: four people dead, three of them children. Speedle looks about as you'd expect him to. Speedle asks, "Any sign of an intruder?" then looks over his shoulder as if expected someone in a t-shirt with a big "I" on the front to be frantically waving and shouting, "Me! Me! Me!" We establish that the sole survivor is being wheeled to the hospital; the little girl is currently with Social Services until, as Horatio says, "she can be placed with her family...if she has any left." Look around, Big Red, and draw your own conclusions.
Then Horatio moves on to giving everyone instructions: he's sending Delko over to the back -- poor Delko gets sent as far away from the action as possible in every case he works -- and tells Calleigh, "It may take a minute to acclimate yourself. There's a whole lot of red in there." Calleigh, who's recognized the grimness of the occasion by taking off a few layers of make-up, takes all of ten seconds before heading inside. As she looks around, Sevilla gives the expository spiel: "The occupants are Jason and Stephanie Caplin. Dad's an optician at Stonybrook Mall, Mom's a stay-at-home. Four kids: the oldest is Luke, he's sixteen; Timothy's nine, and the only other victim found in a separate room. Our toddler, Erin, the only surviving child, is seventeen months. And Max...six weeks." As Sevilla talks, we see Speedle taking pictures of Stephanie and her new chinless face, Alexx examining Luke and Max, Calleigh snapping a shot of Timothy. Alexx touches the baby's forehead and says, "Not a very long time down with us, angel, and back up you go." I do like the idea of talking to the dead people, but I wish she'd come up with snappier dialogue. Sevilla gives the usual "the neighbors had no idea a massacre was about to take place" speech. For once, I'd love to have a case where the neighbors say, "They were always so quiet...except for the abusive, profanity-laden screaming," or "It's about freakin' time. This gonna affect our property values any?"
Sevilla mentions, "Mom was tired because of the new baby." Hell, I'd think having a toddler, a pre-adolescent, and a teenager would do it too. Delko reports that the sliding glass doors were open, but no signs of forced entry, nor any other suspicious signs. Horatio says, "Okay, so everything we have is right here, and we have a happy, all-American family shotgunned to death in their own home." Speedle points out, "Except for the dad and toddler." Horatio, who's off and running for the theory train, says, "Right. But if the toddler belonged home, what was the dad doing here?" Delko wonders why two school-aged children are home too. Perhaps they're home-schooled? Needless to say, that possibility never gets raised. Horatio asks, "Alexx, do we have a time of death?" She tells him it all went down between 11 AM and 1 PM. Horatio asks, "Was everyone home for lunch when they were surprised by someone?" "Someone they knew," Delko says, hunkering down to Sevilla. Horatio begins pacing around, saying, "What we do know is that Mom's not the only one shot in the back, right?" Yup. Alexx notes, "Mom's wound is consistent with a self-inflicted gunshot." Horatio asks Calleigh if they've got spatter on the muzzle. Affirmative. We see the blood flying back toward the muzzle in TMICam, and Calleigh notes that the rifle's got "a hell of a recoil." Since the rifle's some three feet away from Stephanie, it's entirely possible that the force of the shot flung it backward. Calleigh points out that Jason could have pulled the trigger too. Horatio doesn't dismiss this, and orders GSRs for everyone. Speedle notes that in order for this whole scene to come off as a murder-suicide, Stephanie would have had to have shot herself last. This sort of deductive thinking explains how he ended up on the forensic fast track. Horatio replies, "Right. Let's work on a timeline." What is this "let us" business? Why not just be honest about it? "Speedle, come up with a timeline." "Eric, walk around a lot and look stunned." "Calleigh, run to me with reports every hour on the hour." "Megan, you -- wait. Why don't you just clean off your bench? Maybe unsub from some listservs so our sysadmin doesn't get any angry emails from listmasters. Keep on...doing whatever it is you're doing off-camera." Sure enough, Speedle is doing the timeline. He warns, "It's going to take a while." Horatio tells Speedle to take all the time he needs. Well, it's not like the Caplins are going anywhere. Sevilla is dispatched to warn the neighbors that they're in for a lot of law enforcement personnel in the 'hood.
Alexx has moved on from chatting up the infant to inspecting young Timothy, noting that the wound area is wide; this means that there was sufficient distance between Timothy and his shooter so that the pellets had the chance to spread before impact. We see this in black-and-white and slow motion, until the pellets hit, and then Timothy's wound runs red. Personally, I think it's overkill -- we already have three dead children, and showing their deaths over and over again isn't going to make the episode any more tragic or poignant. It's only going to make it more exploitative and obvious that the writers went for the cheap sympathy card by wiping out The Littlest Victims. Alexx notes, "No defensive posture." "That's because he was taken by surprise," Horatio says. Alexx blames the headphones. She also explains how Timothy was home from school; his liver temperature was 99 degrees, and if he died around the same time as the rest of his family, that means he had a 103-degree fever and was home sick. Alexx says, "When you're ready to snap, one more tug on your sleeve is all it takes." Horatio has no good reply for this.
He then wanders off to do God knows what. It isn't helping Speedle with the timeline; nor is it going over the master bedroom for evidence with Calleigh and Delko. Calleigh notes that this is the only bed that's not made, and Delko snorts, "Kids are cleaning their rooms -- Mom and Dad are the only ones living like this." Calleigh observes as she checks the drawers, "Mom is, anyway. Dad's getting his needs met somehow -- everything in here is washed and pressed." The "everything" in question is underwear, and this is where I reveal my shocking slovenliness by asking why on earth anyone would bother to press his or her underwear. Calleigh notes the crib at the foot of the bed, and Delko comments sympathetically, "Yeah, nobody's getting any sleep." We see a shot of Stephanie and her three older children in a frame on the dresser, and the camera pans up to show a plethora of family photos on the dresser. Calleigh comments, "That's no excuse." I hope she's talking about sleeplessness as a poor excuse for killing your family, as opposed to sleeplessness as a poor excuse for failing to make the bed. Delko's looking at the mobile, and he notices a long pendant. He lifts it up and says, "Baby's first jewelry was an amulet?" Calleigh blithely replies, "Oh, you can get them at any corner botanica." You'd think that Delko, living in Little Havana, would not have needed to be clued in to that. We find out that the amulet in question is supposed to ward off evil spirits, and then we move on to Delko's discovery of a full bottle of antidepressants, the prescription indicating that it was filled three weeks ago.
Speaking of depressing, it's Megan, evidently chained to a lab bench for the duration of the episode. A deputy drops off a bag of evidence, and Megan sighs, "Tell Horatio [beat] I'll call if I see anything." The guy leaves, and Megan mutters, "I'm sure I'll be seeing you again." Only if he's around during the two episodes, Megan.
Delko's in the kitchen now, telling Horatio, "I don't see any sign of blood or struggle here." "Not physical, anyway," Horatio opines. He looks around the kitchen, dirty plates in the sink and crowding the counter, and continues, "This place isn't a mess -- it's downright filthy. Kids will pick up after themselves, but they will not clean." Has Horatio ever actually been in a house with more than one person in it? Dishes pile up at an alarming rate. Heck, you should see our kitchen after the husband cooks dinner on an average night; it looks as though a grocery store mated with a Crate and Barrel, and all parties involved promptly blew themselves up afterward. And there are just two of us. I can only imagine what it's like in a household with six people. Delko opens a fridge with an "I love Daddy" picture on it -- rather advanced for a two-year-old, or shockingly backward for a nine-year-old, you make the call -- and we see that the fridge is practically empty. These people apparently didn't even believe in condiments. Horatio continues his litany: "Empty fridge, overflowing garbage. They obviously live on fast food." Well, Horatio, you spend all day tending to a few kids and see how many home-cooked meals you manage to whip up.
Horatio stalks over to the counter where a Cheeburger Cheeburger bag is sitting and says, "Looks like somebody didn't eat their lunch today." Horatio inventories a few burgers and a half-eaten fry. Delko comments that the bag wouldn't have lasted ten minutes in his house. Horatio then decrees, "Well, Mom did give up the fight. Who's been taking care of the family?" That statement rubs me so wrong in so many ways, I don't know where to begin. How about with the expectation that any woman who brought home her fourth kid from the hospital is apparently supposed to have seamlessly integrated a new baby into her household routine as though it's just another fifteen-minute task to key into the Franklin-Covey time management system? Or the idea that, somehow, the domestic decay is all Mom's fault, and God forbid her husband should be expected to shoulder some of the burden on the home front? Or maybe the whole expectation that stay-at-home moms apparently have nothing better to do all day then clean the house and cook meals, what with infants and toddlers not being at all needy? Or just the idea that Mom had somehow "given up," as opposed to being defeated by a mountain of dishes, a baby who won't stop crying, a toddler who's learned the word "no," two older children, and a husband who's apparently more concerned about ironing his own underwear than he is with helping out around the rest of the house? This whole scene seems to have been written by people who apparently have house elves doing all their housework for them, as they've demonstrated no grasp of what goes into keeping a house sanitary, much less juggling child-rearing on top of that. Delko begins brainstorming -- with him, it's more like a light drizzle -- and Speedle saves us all from the ruminations by announcing, "I have a point in the timeline. Or at least a place to start."
Cut to Calleigh explaining, "We isolated bleeders on specific parts of the sleeper, but on the feet, it was an extreme amount of everyone's blood." We flash back to Erin crying as she wanders around. Speedle continues, "So the toddler was here, veered away from the mother, around the father, sharp right to the brother and the infant. But here, the blood from [Luke] pooled around the toddler's foot." Horatio picks it up: "So that means the toddler was over Luke when he bled out." Alexx tells us that at least it was quick. Horatio says, "So she was inside within minutes of the killing, but she's the only family member not shot. Why? Why was she spared?" Delko says, "She's the only girl." Speedle counters, "Maybe she was hiding." Horatio, who's really a glass-half-full kind of guy, says, "Maybe she was lucky."
Horatio and Calleigh are out in the garage now. Calleigh tells him that Stephanie normally drives a wagon, but it's been "a while." We establish that the garage door has been closed. "So Dad goes to work, like normal. Eleven forty-five, he gets a call from Mom, and then he leaves, upset. Right? So Dad leaves his keys in the ignition, but remembers to close the garage door." The two then turn their attention to the gun safe; there's ammonia around the door.
Whatever that means, it's enough to have Horatio and Sevilla checking out chinless Stephanie again. Horatio invites Sevilla to take a look at the position of the body again, noting, "She's the only victim we found at rest." Delko notes, "Females usually don't suicide by shotgun. Too messy." "Well, did you see the rest of the house?" Calleigh snipes. She then adds, "I think there was a bigger concern than this." Horatio asks, "Speed, how long do you think you're going to be here?" "All night," Speedle replies. "Keep me posted," Horatio says. Speedle promises to, while mentally resolving to charge $200 worth of takeout to Horatio's American Express. After Alexx carries out Max's body bag, Speedle stands there, only gradually noticing that bits of brain matter and blood are dripping down on him from the ceiling.
Back at HQ, Alexx's morgue is full up with Caplins. Horatio is standing there too, brooding in Alexx's general direction before bidding her to begin. She rattles off the particulars for everyone: "Luke, sixteen years old. Shot twice -- once in the shoulder, once at the base of the skull." Horatio muses, "Two wounds. Maybe he was on the move." Alexx replies, "Running only gave the buckshot pattern room to expand...newborn, a few pellets is all it took." It's quiet for a moment, and then Alexx continues, "People really don't chew, especially hungry teens." She fishes out a half-eaten fry from the jar containing Luke's stomach contents, and Horatio says, "The infamous half-eaten bag of fries. So -- Luke brings home lunch, but doesn't get to eat because the killing has started." We also find out that Luke's interrupted lunch is but the latest in a series of aggravations that have given the kid the nervous habits of nail-biting and teeth-grinding, as well as an ulcer. From this, we're to infer that he's a stress case, and was very probably responsible for much of the day-to-day care in the house. Horatio takes this in, then asks about Stephanie's reach, presumably to see if it was possible for her to have positioned the rifle in such a way as to blow off her jaw. She's got a twenty-seven-inch reach and the rifle has a 24.5 inch barrel, so it's entirely possible that she shot herself. She's got no GSR, but Alexx says that's not unusual with a long rifle barrel. Horatio asks about GSR on Jason and Luke, but Alexx says they both have too much blood on them to tell. As the camera swoops in on the bloody pulp where Stephanie's lower lip and chin used to be, Horatio asks Alexx to tell him about Stephanie's fatal wound. Alexx does: "One shot, close contact, pellets were a compact mass. Pushed by pressurized gas cloud into the brain, turning the medulla into pulp." Maybe I'm just being touchy, but it seems like the gore factor on this show increases from week to week. Both Stephanie and Timothy died instantly. The autopsy session ends when Horatio gets a call telling us that Jason Caplin just got out of surgery.
We see Sevilla watching a woozy Jason being rolled on his side. A doctor comes up to her and says, "Buckshot penetrated his kidney; we removed it. Packed and ligated the renal artery. Sutured his multiple splenic lacerations. He's got some will to live." Sevilla asks if Jason said anything about his family. Nope. Sevilla wants to know if she can talk to Jason. After warning her that Jason may be a little loopy from the anesthesia, the doctor gives the go-ahead. Sevilla goes in, and has a conversation with Caplin that can best be described thusly:
Sevilla: Can you tell us anything useful? Like, who did this to you?
Caplin: Of course not. But have I mentioned yet that the kids were making my wife really crazy?
Sevilla: So did your wife threaten to do anything?
Caplin: Wait a minute. I need to put on my shocked face so we'll all think that I didn't really just try to set up my wife as a psycho killer. I may be whacked out on the pain meds, but I'm still evil enough to be slandering my dead spouse. Oh, wait, was that in my out-loud voice, or just in body language loud enough to be heard in San Francisco?
Once this conversation is over, Sevilla leaves with his clothes (she hands them over to Horatio with, "The blood's starting to smell") and tells Horatio, "He says his wife called him at the office and he came home." Horatio wants to know why. Sevilla tells him, "She was upset. Baby wouldn't stop crying. U-turns from office to home were not unusual." The two of them having established that Stephanie had her hands full and was prevailing upon the person who had contributed a little something to this situation, they begin pondering Jason's wounding in the course of events. After dismissing the possibility that he shot himself in the back with a rifle, Horatio decrees, "Hormonal depression and long arms could get us there."
It's Megan! She's still holding the swab and writing as Delko comes in. She asks, "What you got?" "A year-long gig!" he replies. Actually, he has some long, dark hairs collected from the master bedroom where blonde Stephanie slept. Well, we know what Megan's doing when she's off-camera -- testing the hair.
And now, it's Calleigh's turn to get her very own Science Montage, where she's doing assorted things to the rifle that will be neither explained nor rendered particularly relevant later, so let's move on to Speedle, who's got the gory version of those mail-order home decorator kits where you can draw up the floor plan and stencil in furniture. Speedle's version has different corpse positions and rifle stencils, and even after painstakingly tracing everything in, he's taken the time to go back and fill in little red-ink pools of blood. Horatio pops by eventually to ask how Speedle's little masterpiece is going, and he replies, "Marking evidence as it rolls in." Delko pops in just then, saying, "Megan ran the hairs from the master bed!" We learn that the mystery shedder isn't Stephanie, but a female relative of hers. Speedle says, "The sister was so broken up." What sister? Whose sister? Why is this the first we've heard of her existence, much less her reaction to the news? Has the sister been talking to Megan? Would that explain it? In any event, Horatio immediately infers the worst and says, "Maybe Mom had more than hormones and kids to worry about, huh?"
Calleigh, in the meanwhile, has to worry about the baby bottle. She's fumed it for prints and is now matching the results against the family's prints. Cue Science Sequence Number Two. I've finally figured out why I'm bored stiff by them on this show -- because they don't show us anything. A good mystery allows us to unravel the puzzle along with the investigators, to identify and process new pieces of information with them. Here, the investigation sequences are basically music videos that don't explain what anyone's doing, much less how it affects the direction of the case as a whole. The segments are stunningly devoid of context. I'm not saying that CSI is necessarily the pedagogical tool I'd haul out in a forensics class, but the original does manage to set up its scenes so that the investigators carry us along on their trains of thought; this one does not, and I think that's dull, D-U-L-L, dull.
Enough of that. We're getting a gander at the aforementioned sister who's now being introduced forty minutes into the episode. Sevilla asks the woman if she was aware that Stephanie was seeing a psychiatrist. The sister replies, "She was having a rough time. Not sleeping. And the baby -- the baby cried a lot. Colic. And she, uh..." The sister is visibly struggling for her composure, and Horatio hones in on the grieving woman with unerring instinct. He hands her a glass of water; she thanks him, and continues, "She, uh, she was having a hard time." Sevilla asks, "Can you be more specific. Because, you know, baby blues are one thing, but postpartum psychosis, that's quite another." The woman leans forward and protests, "My sister was depressed! She wasn't crazy." Nor is she being set up as the television parallel to Paula Yates, who did kill her children in a fit of postpartum psychosis after a long and established history of depression and other indications that her brain chemistry wasn't optimal. Horatio notes, "She had medication she wasn't taking." The sister counters, "She was worried about what it would do to the baby. She was nursing." Of course, you have the question of the bottle found in the microwave -- which neither Horatio nor Sevilla bring up -- but we can assume that Stephanie may have been pumping a few extra bottles and freezing them so she could hand off a feeding or two to someone else and get some sleep, instead of having Max latch on and nurse every two to three hours. ["I just assumed that bottle was for the toddler, but again, it wouldn't have killed them to spend eight seconds of screen time addressing that." -- Sars] Horatio pulls out a picture of the amulet and asks the sister if she's seen that before. "Yeah, I gave that to her. It's a charm, to make her feel better," she replies. Wow, if only we had been introduced to this character, so I could refer to this woman as something other than "this woman," "the sister," or "she." If only someone would use her name in addressing her. Is that too much to ask?
Anyway, Sevilla says, "How about your brother-in-law? Did you help him feel better?" The sister is too stunned to speak. Horatio, to his credit, seems awkward as he says, "We, um, we have evidence that you were in their bed recently." The woman gapes, as if to wonder that anyone would think that a) Jason Caplin is stupid enough to cuckold his wife in a house she's likely going to be in most of the time, and b) she herself is stupid enough to sleep with someone that stupid. She recovers to say indignantly, "All I wanted was my sister's happiness." Sevilla's all, "Well, that goal can get you into trouble -- where were you yesterday morning?" The sister shoots back, "In Buffalo, on business. If you don't believe me, call the airline." Sevilla hisses, "That doesn't explain your little trick between the sheets." Sevilla then gets the chance to feel like a tool when the sister says, outraged, "I held my sister when she couldn't stop crying. When she couldn't get out of bed, much less the house. And that's a hell of a lot more than [Jason] did...he hid at work, day and night, leaving her alone with four kids." Horatio's all, "Well, sounds like it was too much for her." I sincerely hope we have an episode where we get to see how well he handles being the primary caretaker for an infant, a toddler, and two older children, since he apparently thinks it's easy enough for anyone to handle. The sister points out, "It was too much for anyone. My sister loved those kids. Yeah, they drove her nuts, okay, yeah, she was a wreck. But there is no way in hell that she killed them." Sevilla and Horatio sit there, looking openly skeptical.
Calleigh calls Horatio outside, tells him that she couldn't get any usable prints off the shotgun, but she did get Timmy's prints off the baby bottle. Horatio says, "So the nine-year-old is parenting the baby while the mother is doing what?" Going to the bathroom? Trying to take a shower? Has anyone associated with this show ever been around very small children? Or is this comment supposed to drive home the point that only psychotically depressed mothers fail to assiduously tend to their every child's need? I swear to God, Horatio is one of the most insidiously chauvinistic characters to come along in a while; he doesn't get too het up about the poor burned woman until it turns out she's pregnant, he treats the women fumbling for sexual equity -- however moronic their efforts -- as morally bankrupt slatterns, and now he's convinced that Stephanie's somehow engendered a massacre by passing off feeding duties to someone else? When it comes to women, the guy's got more issues than the periodicals section of a library. Calleigh suggests that maybe Stephanie was opening the gun safe, as her prints were the only prints found. Horatio wonders why Stephanie didn't kill the toddler. Calleigh suggests, "Couldn't find her? I mean, she's a woman who can't function. If you can't function, you can't keep track of your children." Horatio thinks Calleigh's onto something. I just love how these seasoned investigators look at the house and decide that the woman's incapable of functioning, and that depression is a sign of character weakness as opposed to a biological condition like asthma, hypoglycemia, or dyslexia.
Cut to Speedle and Delko awkwardly bonding over family life as they prepare to head back in the house. To nobody's great surprise, Speedle was apparently something of a pain growing up. He then turns the conversation around, asking, "What does Delko stand for, anyway?" Deftly Engineered for Lite Komic Effect? Nope -- Delektorsky: "My mom's Cuban, my dad's Russian." For some reason, this delights Speedle. He continues the small talk, and we find out that Delko has three older sisters. So his family had to coordinate five separate escapes, three of which involved children (remember, Delko's parents came over from Cuba when Delko was but a fetus)? Delko says, "So you think the little girl was the favorite, and that's why she made it?" Speedle shrugs, "Who knows? That's what we're here to find out." Speedle inspects a hallway table covered with photos of the boys -- not doing a whole lot to support the Erin-as-favorite theory, if you ask me -- and then wanders around the house. Speedle goes outside, joined soon by Delko, and they head over to a doghouse. Delko says, "They don't have a dog." Speedle says, "If they did, it didn't last." They hunker down to look inside at a bloody blanket, and Delko says, "I guess we know how the toddler did."
Back at the lab, Calleigh and Horatio are reconstructing Stephanie's death, putting up a wooden frame and plastic sheeting to catch the detritus and packing a rifle with plenty of powder to simulate its kick upon firing. Calleigh positions a dummy, saying, "Usually suicides lean forward to get a better shot." Horatio muses, "That would create spatter directly above, but in this case, the blood is back here, so she needs to be back." Calleigh positions the dummy so that she's reclining on the couch. Mmmm, napping on the couch. I could get behind that. Horatio then leans down between the dummy's knees, positions the rifle, and fires it. Sure enough, it spatters to the back. After a loving close-up of the plastic carnage -- which really isn't an improvement over Stephanie's face -- and the confirmation that Calleigh used boiled noodles to simulate brains, the two conclude, "She's either the most relaxed suicide on record, or she was taking a nap." Well, there goes your Mom-goes-on-a-killing-spree theory, because how's she going to pull the trigger while napping? Someone else shot her.
Minutes later, Delko is pulling out Speedle's stenciled carnage diagram and saying, "The blood on the blanket in the doghouse proves the toddler was there after someone was injured." Horatio says, "Right, but her feet were drenched with the blood of all five victims, though." Speedle corrects him: "Not until after she was hiding in the backyard. The transfer from the blanket came from one bleeder -- her mom." And the Mom-on-a-spree theory has one more nail driven into it. I hope Horatio's prepared to grovel when he breaks this news to Stephanie's sister; I hope he breaks it to her, period. I also hope that maybe some of the other CSIs stop and think about how they have broken Olympic records in the Long Jump To Conclusion. Clearly, I'm hoping in vain. Anyway, Delko and Speedle conclude that there's no chance Erin got to the doghouse under her own power; someone carried her out there. Horatio orders the boys to find out who had glyphosphate and soil on their shoes. Both Luke and Jason do, so the step is to see which one of them is capable of carrying the toddler out, and which one is likely to have snapped and begun murdering his family members.
Speedle's doing his part by checking the clothes for bloodstains while Calleigh watches; I get the feeling from their interaction that she's looking to pump him for as much lab savvy as he's got, as she's usually asking him questions and not vice versa. She asks why Speedle's focusing on pants and not shirts, and Speedle replies that "any spatter from a vic is going to be lost among the primary." Calleigh counters that it's hard to get spatter from a long-barreled shotgun. Speedle sits bolt upright and says, "Unless we're not looking for spatter." Calleigh checks the lens and notices several neat round dots of blood. She says, "That's transfer." Speedle recognizes the pattern: "That's tread, from the toddler's footies. The question is, whose blood is it?" Cue Horatio coming downstairs to get results from Speedle; Speedle tells him the transfer stains on Luke's pants come from Stephanie. We go into Horatio's voice-over as we flash back to the scene: "Instinctively, he picked up the toddler, thinking the killer might still be in the house. He did it after Mom was mortally wounded." That Luke had some serious presence of mind; it's not every kid who'd walk in on his mom with half her face blown off and immediately think of protecting his kid sister. Horatio wheels off, presumably to launch a group meeting. Speedle tacks up Exhibit A: The Dirty Dishes, and says, "Mom and Dad aren't doing their jobs, so the son steps up to the plate." Horatio adds, "Luke tries to bring his siblings lunch and walks into a massacre." Delko asks, "Once Luke's in the room, why not save the infant? The swing and the bassinet were in the room." Calleigh says, "Judgment call -- who can imagine shooting something so small?" Megan adds -- NOTHING! She's not here! It's as if the minute the news about Kim Delaney's departure broke, a team of editors was called in to begin excising Megan from episodes. It's pleasant -- no more typing [beat] all the time -- but somewhat unsettling. I imagine old Soviet ministers looking at group pictures from which coworkers had been erased might know the feeling. Horatio speaks : "While Luke is saving the toddler, the killer goes after his threat: Timmy." Delko comments, "Nine-year-old boy -- some threat." Speedle says, "Luke comes back in, tries to save the infant." Horatio continues, "But he dies trying to get the infant out the front door, and why does that happen?" Delko says, "Dad's blocking his path." Horatio counters, "Dad's been shot in the back, and his wound is not self-inflicted." Calleigh and Speedle suggest that Jason and Luke struggled over Max, and in the contretemps, Luke managed to shoot his father in the back. This is more or less confirmed when they look at Max's little romper and notice three small gravitational droplets of Jason's blood, which means that Jason was hovering over the baby.
Before you can say, "He's evil!" Horatio and Sevilla are out at the Caplin place, where a remarkably resilient Jason Caplin is holding one of his children without attempting to kill her -- something of an aberration, given recent events. He then takes Horatio for an insurance adjustor ("they're pulling up the flooring in my house because it's rotted with blood"), and after he gives a spiel of woes that does not once mention any deep or profound sense of bereavement for the three children or wife who were slain, Horatio cuts him off with, "Blood is why we came today. We want to talk about your blood on your baby." Erin squeals, and after calming her down, Jason's all, "I bled on my baby? I got shot. I guess my blood must have been everywhere." Horatio explains that actually, it's the gravitational droplets of blood that were the problem, as "that proves that you were standing over him while you were bleeding." Long story short: Luke died protecting Max from Jason; after a standoff in which Jason correctly surmised that Luke wouldn't shoot him while he was holding Max, Luke managed to get Max and head toward the door, where Jason, unencumbered by anything so pesky as concern over Max's life, shot Luke in the back a few times.
After that rather dull denouement, Jason's bundled into the back of a squad car, where he begins making excuses. "I never slept!" I believe it was Calleigh who wasn't buying it as an excuse back when everyone instantly suspected Stephanie of postpartum psychosis; let's hope she's as harsh here. Jason carries on some more about how the burden of his family drove him mad. At this point, I'm so disgusted with the heavy-handed manipulation throughout this episode (when in doubt, arouse the audience's pity and fear by showing a cute child in trouble) and asinine judgments flung toward Stephanie, I end up snarling at the screen, "It's called birth control, or it's called put up and shut up." I mean, really. What was he expecting from four kids -- the Von Trapp Family Singers? After the car bearing the shifty and evil Jason drives off, Sevilla asks, "Did he just confess?" Horatio bursts her bubble with, "He was laying the groundwork for his defense." "Insanity," Sevilla guesses. Horatio nods, "Two-pronged: I didn't know what I was doing, and I certainly didn't know it was wrong." Sevilla thinks Jason might be onto something. Determined to make sure it doesn't, Horatio sets out to prove her wrong. After a few moments alone with Jason's shirt and a micropipette, we find out how: there's ammonia on Jason's shirt, and a log of him calling home shortly before driving back. Those two things establish that he had removed all his prints from the gun cabinet by means of the ammonia, then called Stephanie to check on the cabinet -- thus getting her to plant her prints. That sort of premeditation undercuts the I-suddenly-snapped defense.
We learn in the last scene that an undeterred Jason Caplin is claiming postpartum psychosis by proxy. I almost wish we did have the legal counterpart to this show, because I'd love to see a lawyer try to make the argument that postpartum psychosis -- typically occurring in the context of an underlying psychiatric disorder like bipolar affective disorder, schizophrenia, or major depression, and quite possibly triggered by fluctuating estrogen and progesterone levels -- is somehow contagious. In any event, Speedle's showing Horatio the headline with his usual flair. Horatio comments, "First he frames his wife for murder, and then he co-opts her illness." Note here: Stephanie Caplin may have had postpartum depression, but barring any symptoms like severe hallucinations or delusions taking place within the immediate weeks after giving birth -- symptoms that were never mentioned once during the duration of this episode -- she was not psychotic. It pisses me off -- like, really, irritation on a galactic scale -- that the entire episode has gone by without one CSI actively attempting to define postpartum psychosis for the audience, much less trying to contest or discredit the idea that Stephanie was, in fact, suffering from postpartum psychosis. Way to spread misinformation about something that seriously affects one in one thousand women, guys. I hope you're proud.
Horatio speaks for us all, however, when he says, "What a stellar human being [Jason Caplin is]." Poor Speedle actually retains some vestigial faith in a jury being composed of enough individuals to be able to see Jason Caplin's defense as the complete bullshit it is. Horatio replies, "The important thing now is that she really knows what happened." That Horatio, always thinking of the kids. The camera swoops in on a shot of Erin in The Sister's arms, and then the screen goes black.