The I-15 Murders

Tonight starts off with a networking promo, complimenting C.S.I. on its Golden Globe nomination for Best Drama. I'm torn: on the one hand, yay C.S.I.! On the other -- does this mean I've lost MBTV cred since I'm recapping a show that the critics actually like?

Previously on CSI: Nicky dealt with some hooker who was stupidly smearing Scopalamine on her nipples in an effort to knock out her johns; Warrick bailed on a case with Catherine in response to his pager, thus precipitating an alpha-male showdown between Gil and his scabrous counterpart Conrad Ecklie; Gil requests of a straight-haired Sara that she furtively follow Warrick around, the better to confirm or deny Ecklie's accusations of Warrick's gambling (people, just read the last recap); Sara has a tape showing Warrick entering a casino.

Now on with the show! We open with a few scenes showing Las Vegas during the day -- first the Strip, then acres of prefab suburban houses, then a tacky little strip mall with a grocery store anchoring it. We see a nondescript woman in her forties steering a shopping cart through the pallid fluorescent aisles; one of the wheels on the shopping cart skids wildly. The camera goes all you-are-there on us, giving us first the cart's-eye view of the groceries and then the ankle view of the grocery-gathering matron. Then we hear a jar of mustard crash to the ground.

Cut to the grocery store at night, with Gil striding inside. This raises a question I've had for a while: there are an awful lot of these crimes taking place in broad daylight and not getting investigated until night falls. I can see this daylight disjunction thing being a problem in, say, Alaska in, say, February, but we're in Las Vegas a couple of latitudes down. Why? Why is the night shift investigating crimes that took place during the day? Does it really take that long to block off a crime scene and call out the troops for inspecting it? Someone on the forums please tell me.

Once Gil is in the store, Brass calls out, "Well, if it isn't the Boss himself! Where's your E-Street band?" This, faithful readers, is the first sign that someone has taken it upon themselves to mess with the series' continuity: Gil was made the head cheese (to employ a food metaphor, in keeping with the tradition on the show) some nine episodes back, and this is the first Brass has commented on it? I don't think so. My sharp forum posters already confirmed that this episode was in fact the third, which raises a series of troubling questions. Are we to assume that this episode lays to rest the whole troubling Warrick-is-back-in-casinos situation from last episode? Are we to assume that Gil and Sara's strange professional relationship will continue to progress based on whatever interactions they have tonight? Are we to continue to watch the tedious pseudo-flirtation between Sara and Nicky with the same level of disinterest, or with a whole new level of contempt now that we know he's been throwing her coquettish hand signals for far longer than we suspected? Most importantly -- what about the hair? Do I ignore all the dramatic tonsorial changes that have transpired over the course of the series? Thank you, whomever decided to play fast-and-loose with the continuity here. You're making my head hurt, and it's only 9:02.

Anyway: back to the episode. Gil blows Brass off and defangs him nicely, complaining about the increased volume of cursing he's doing now that he's running the CSI department at night. Brass plays Captain Exposition, telling us that the nice missing lady is Margaret Shorey; Margaret lives with her sister and had been at the grocery store picking up assorted victuals and analgesics, what with her sister being laid up with a broken wrist. Gil notes that Margaret's purse is still in her cart, but there's no wallet. After performing a cursory survey of the stuff in Margaret's cart -- which is really so picayune as to not merit mention even in this, the recap of the show, but goes a long way in confirming my theory that everyone at the grocery store is judging you by the contents of your cart, which is why I always overcompensate for buying a pint of Chubby Hubby by putting, like, five pounds of leaf spinach in my cart on top of it, but...well, I've really wandered off topic here and thus do not really have the time to relay the story about the time I was in Costco and all I was buying were a few cases of cat food, a few cases of Diet Coke, and a shrink-wrapped package of Lean Cuisine dinners, and the guys behind me began snickering and laying bets on the probable state of my love life while the cashier was ringing me up, therefore fueling my contention that everyone plays judgmental anthropologist when it comes to other people's groceries and...oh, look. I did tell the story. Sorry. I'm feeling digressive tonight.

Okay -- Gil notes that there's a smear of yellow goop marring the bottom rim of the shopping cart, and swipes his ungloved finger through the stuff. He then surveys his finger with clinical interest -- it's not bubbling and melting, so all must be well -- and then licks the goop. Brass speaks for me when he says, "Oh, that's sanitary."

"Mustard," Gil muses, then asks the conveniently hovering grocery store manager if he had any mop-ups in this particular aisle of the grocery store. The manager answers that as a matter of fact, they did. "Life holds no surprises," sniffs Gil, and settles his steely gaze on the shelves of French's finest. He selects a jar of mustard, hands over two bills to the manager, saying, "$1.98 for the mustard, plus my two cents" -- oh, ah ha ha ha, whatever -- then drops the jar on the freshly-mopped aisle. Well, I guess if you can't collect the evidence that's already there, create more of it yourself. Brass notes the condiment flying all over his shoes and sputters, "What are you doing?" Gil asks rhetorically, "Now where would you go?"

Cut to the bathroom, where Brass is using one of those so-coarse-it-still-has-large-chunks-of-mulch-in-it paper towels and that soupy pink soap found in your more plebian restroom establishments. Gil is peering into the stalls -- I hope they cleared out the bathroom first, or else someone might be startled when Gil gives them the fisheye while they're going about their business -- and looking for clues. Gil calls Brass's attention to a freshly-Brillo'd bathroom door, noting well the circumference and asking how recently the door has been scrubbed. The manager tells Gil the door was scrubbed that afternoon, in response to a user complaint.

Gil gets a persecuted look on his face -- damn these grocery stores and their pesky insistence on keeping a sanitary establishment! -- and asks, "Can I borrow a hammer?" Cut to the lab, where Brass is waving a black light over the door while Gil takes photos of the scrubbed-out writing. Once the photos are assembled, he and Brass assemble them and read the caption: "I've killed five women. Catch me if you can."

Cut to the Who, doing their part to make forensic science seem as cool as rock opera apparently was in the 1970s.

After a series of shots designed to impart how very busy and aseptic and downright scientific a forensics lab is, we pull in on our intrepid crew getting their assignments. I'm pleased to note that this back-in-time episode has one big perk: I can confirm that the last n episodes where I've been laboring under the misimpression that Sara's last name was Sidel (pronounced "Sigh-DELL" and spelled Sidel in the closed-caption) is, in fact, Sidle (as in "she sidles up to Gil and undresses him with her eyes"). Now that we've cleared that issue up, we can gloss over Sara's curly hair (a holdover from the early episodes) and move on. Gil hands Sara a dead-body assignment, causing her to trill in girlish glee and Catherine to snark, "Well! Somebody likes their job." Nicky gets to check out a disturbance at the Bellagio. Gil hands over the slip, saying, "She says she's a friend of yours." "Ex-girlfriend, Nick?" Catherine snits, apparently in some sort of mood this episode, and Nicky blithely replies, "Depends. Is she the assaulter or the assaultee?" I'd say she's the harbinger of yet another mind-numbing tertiary subplot for you, Nicky. Gil merely gives Nicky an indulgent grin; Sara decides to tease Nicky and says, "You tell us -- you like leather or lace?" Oh, Sara. Don't encourage him. Nicky plays coy for a moment, but as he leaves the room he turns and looks at Sara, blurting, "Lace." Sara gives him quite the arch little look and turns back to reading over her assignment. Gil tells Catherine she's working with him on the Margaret Shorey case, and says he'll meet her after he deals with Warrick. Catherine pats him sympathetically and heads out the door; Sara lingers, glaring at Gil. He gives her the patented "what?" look and she says defiantly, "I filed my report." "I read it," Gil replies, not rising to the bait. Sara rolls her eyes and flounces out.

Cut to Warrick, clad in a wife-beater and a beleaguered expression. He's decided to multitask, combining his work preparations with assuming the cares of the world on his shoulders. Gil comes in and starts fishing for the real story on Warrick's doings. He asks, innocently enough, "How was court?" Warrick tries to concoct a cover story and fails magnificently. We've seen him do this before, back when he was trying to cover for Catherine while she was tromping all over due process. The question is: are we supposed to realize now that Warrick's a lousy liar, or were we supposed to realize it in Episode 6?

Anyway, Warrick claims that he passed his whole I-had-to-miss-court story on to Sara, and Gil says, "Right. Personal reasons." I decide that William Peterson deserves some sort of professional plaudit for managing to enunciate "personal reasons" in such a way as to imply the skeptical quotation marks he's putting around it. Warrick continues to get nervous. He also continues to get more dressed. Gil then tells Warrick that he's got footage of Warrick at the Monaco Casino -- which the closed-captioning identifies as the "Crusty Nickel," thus compounding my confusion even further -- and Warrick gets all righteously indignant on Gil. Gil makes with the disappointed-dad act, saying, "I thought we had a deal. What you do on your time is nobody's business. What you do on my time is my business." Warrick looks even more put-upon than he did three minutes ago, and sighs in such a manner as to imply that he's permanently deflated a lung with the effort. He eventually admits that he was at the casino, but adds that he wasn't gambling. Gil sits down, waiting to hear why Warrick was at the Monaco, or the Crusty Nickel, or wherever the hell he happened to be.

Meanwhile, in another plot thread, Sara walks into a relentlessly beige house with her big box o' crime-fighting tools. The writing credit for the episode pops up, and I realize that I've managed to write approximately 2000 words before the credits have finished rolling. Such feckless bloviation! I'll strive for brevity from now on, what with it being the soul of wit and all. I swear, I think that's from Hamlet, but I've been spectacularly wrong on the Shakespeare attributions before, so now I'm all wary. ["Ware not; the quotation is indeed from Hamlet." -- Sars]

Anyway, Sara continues to scope out the House of Beige, where a khaki-clad corpse is sprawled out over a carpet the Pottery Barn would describe as "sand." She stares at the body, then moves over to talk to a gawky young man who, in his pale pink oxford shirt, stands out like a sore thumb in this eggshell-and-taupe spread. We find out the guy's name is Kenny Berlin; he's the brother of the body. Sara says clinically, "Sorry for your loss," then asks Kenny to tell her what happened. Kenny starts doing that I'm-stammering-with-shock-and-grief thing, and begins with, "I came in and saw my brother lying there --" which, frankly, should be a big clue that something's up, because it's damn hard to see any body whose outfit blends in so seamlessly with its stone-and-ecru background. Anyway, Kenny stammers about just finding the alleged break-in and the dead body, and we're taken in flashback to the presumed murderous burglary as committed according to Kenny's story. The one benefit to the flashback is that we find out the body's name was Jeff. Kenny then claims to have stumbled into the house the minute the crime ended; he then called 911, and hordes of police descended upon the house like so many uniformed Mongols. A nameless, faceless detective thanks Kenny for his patently false and useless story, and Sara begins poking holes in the robbery conceit by pointing out a wad of cash sitting on the bar, the flat-panel monitor and PC with CD-R drive sitting on the desk, et cetera. "He was interrupted," the detective offers, and Sara shoots back, "Before or after he used a bedsheet to transport the silver? Pillowcases are the norm; you know that." Sara looks around the room some more, then voices her conviction that something's not right.

Cut to a montage of assorted casinos at night. Since, you know, we're in Vegas. Now, we're presumably at the Bellagio. Nicky makes nice with the cops and asks about this "special request." "Go ask Catherine Zeta-Jones over there," a nameless cop grunts, and Nicky wanders over to where a woman sporting a poufy shag is kind of staring off into space. As she turns to face him, Nick grumbles, "Oh, I don't believe this." "Hey!" the hooker from Episode 1 chirps. "You probably don't recognize me with the shorter hair" -- she's right, she no longer looks like a low-rent Elizabeth Hurley. Now she looks like a low-rent Gina Gershon. And here you thought such a thing wasn't possible. The hooker continues, "My nipples are all better. Wanna see?" Nicky, thank God, demurs, demanding, "Kristy Hopkins, what are you doing here?" The security guard breaks in with his opinion that Kristy was cruising for customers; Kristy indignantly replies that she was "shopping for a dress, spending my hard-earned money -- okay, semi-hard-earned money," as if we're supposed to be impressed with her "I'm a post-feminist empowered sex worker with ironic detachment" attitude. A verbal match ensues; I spend most of it not focusing on the allegations being flung hither and yon, but on the fact that Kristy's voice sounds like it was dubbed in at a much later date. It's kind of disturbing, because now I'm wondering if it's me, or if there was some other plot that went in here and got rewritten later. See what distrust CBS has kindled in me, now that I know I can no longer rely on them to air episodes in a linear fashion?

Anyway, Nicky hauls Kristy off to collect evidence. "I need your shirt," he says, and Kristy sasses back, "Why is it every time we meet you ask me to take my clothes off?" "Because every time we meet you put yourself in a position where you have to take them off," hisses Nicky. Good for him. It almost redeems how tiresome this subplot is already. Kristy does a lot of back-arching and other behaviors meant to indicate that she's a feisty post-feminist kind of sex worker, and hands over the shirt.

Back at House of Beige, Sara is terrifying the of kin. She's looking for blood on him -- something he doesn't take to graciously -- and checking his clothes for clues. She notices some glass caught in the cuffs of Kenny's tweed pants. As she extracts the shards, she says, "Well, that's good news: there's no blood, bud." She does not, to my eternal disappointment, continue, "But I found glass, you ass." Sara then requests both Kenny's clothes and the broken window. Kenny's not looking too pleased, and who can blame him?

Cut to Gil and Catherine listening to a graphologist. "The person who wrote this is left-handed." Gil asks how he knows this; the graphologist replies that the t-bar on the letter T tilts down toward the right. The graphologist continues his analysis, pegging the bathroom-door writer as uneducated based on a misplaced apostrophe, and possessed of criminal tendencies based on large arches in the letter L. And here the graphologist could have just inferred all that from the lefty allegation, what with there being a body of research devoted to the contention that left-handed people have a marked propensity for criminal tendencies and all. Let me pull out my copy of Stanley Coren's The Left-Handed Syndrome and note that page 180 reads, "The evidence linking left-handedness with criminality and delinquency has been accumulating," and "the attitudes of left-handers were more similar to those of known and convicted lawbreakers." And here I thought all of us southpaws just had problems finding scissors to make collages in kindergarten. Anyway, the graphologist helps Gil and Catherine compile a profile: poor impulse control, criminal, female. The gender thing throws Catherine and Gil for a loop.

And if that weren't enough to make one go hmmmm, the emaciated visage of Christine Baranski in a promo for Welcome to New York ought to. But enough about the commercials.

Sara is wielding a power tool -- again, this is a woman with a demonstrated tendency to use Black and Decker in a destructive fashion -- when Warrick appears over her shoulder, asking if she plans on taking the whole window. Warrick, approaching Sara when she's got a big saw and a bigger problem with you is perhaps not the most savvy survival move you could be making. Sara more or less confirms this by flatly stating, "Grissom reinstated you." "And you have a problem with that," Warrick states. Oh, yes she does: Sara goes off and begins yelling about Warrick forsaking court duties to satisfy the empty vice of gambling, and I get annoyed with CBS all over again. Continuity-wise, this makes no sense: Warrick's been toeing the straight-and-narrow for a while, the two now have a civil working relationship, and he hasn't managed to get any rookies killed while he makes bets for corrupt judges for weeks. If Sara's got gambling issues, they're not going to surface now. But if we view this episode while pretending that the other eight don't exist...then okay. Warrick correctly points out to Sara that his problems have nothing to do with her, and she resumes carving out the window.

Cut to the morning; Sara comes charging into the lab where Gil is bent over a microscope. After leaping into tirade mode -- something Gil acknowledges by saying, "And good morning to you too, Miss Sidle" -- Sara reasserts her opinion that Warrick has A Problem and Gil is An Enabler. "I see the whole puzzle, Sara. You're only seeing one piece." This piece of Zen wisdom is lost on Sara, who demands that Gil take Warrick off her case. He declines her request, saying, "I trust him. Do you trust me?" Sara declines to make a crack about emotional syllogisms, and Gil runs off to see something Catherine wants to show him.