Guess what, everybody! CSI takes place in Las Vegas! Who knew?
Three sweeping shots of the strip later, we get a transitioning pan over to an office park. Like office parks throughout the rest of America, this one manages to combine the worst of architecture and landscaping in a life-denying nexus of boxy office buildings and spindly shrubbery. And then we transition into the lobby: it's heartening to see what whomever selected the sets this week had an eye for consistency. It's all sterile spaces and hard edges; the silence of the foyer is punctuated by the security guard's incessant stream of small talk. We learn that the bluff fellow's name is Dominic; based on his amiable prattle, we learn he's the kind of well-meaning goober you don't mind unless you're having a really bad day. And then, you peer at him through a haze of DayQuil and Robitussin and wonder if, when you're prosecuted for pulling his ceaselessly prattling lower lip over his head, you can make the argument that you were out of your mind on over-the-counter narcotics at the time. Not that I've had that experience with virulent head colds and security guards or anything.
As people move in and out of the lobby, Dominic's partner Jake takes the vase of flowers Dominic just signed for and sends Dom out to get dinner. He then moves over to a bank of packages on the lobby's far wall. Hearing a ticking noise, he looks up and notes that the clock -- which looks like something Howard Roark would have hung on the wall in between defiant acts of Objectivism -- is ticking quietly. I note that the clock reads 12:30 and wonder why Dom went for dinner. Anyway, Jake looks down at a briefcase and notes that it happens to be ticking; as the music plays all hollow-like to indicate that Jake's hyper-perceptive toward ticking mystery briefcases, Jake leans down. The briefcase promptly blows up, sending Jake hurtling toward the far corner of the lobby in a hail of fire and debris.
Cut to Catherine and Gil walking toward the taped-off lobby at night. Catherine mutters about how the fire department really knows how to trash a crime scene. I have no patience for her tonight: life is tough when the crime includes fire. Deal with it, okay? Gil cheerfully responds, "That's what they do: put wet stuff on the red stuff." I have no patience for him tonight either. Brass comes out of the smoking husk of building and plays Captain Exposition: a few people had head wounds, an elderly guy lost his arm in the blast, and Jake died. His body's still inside. Brass declines to state exactly how many pieces of Jake's body are inside and easily identifiable. As the three grown-ups on the show make their way into what's left of the lobby, Brass wonders, "How big do you think this bomb was?" Catherine answers dismissively, "It's not the size of the bomb, it's the overpressure in the air around it." I have no idea what overpressure is -- I imagine we'll find out in a few scenes, but in the meantime, amuse yourself as I do by imagining that whomever is responsible for Saving Silverman is pleading for clemency by saying, "The movie's not a bomb, it's just a victim of vicious critical overpressure!"
Gil and Catherine gravitate to Jake's corpse with unerring instinct and peer at his miraculously intact body. Well, make that "mostly intact." Gil quips, "The Van Gogh effect. In stereo. Both ears gone," and then the camera helpfully pans down to the corpse so we too can see the earless tragedy. Ick. Still, for all that he's missing his ears, the rest of Jake's face is remarkably well-preserved; I would have thought that the force might have blown off his nose. Even his eyebrows look mostly-there. Anyway -- Catherine notes that the perfectly symmetrical amputation indicates poor Jake was looking directly at the bomb when it went off; Gil picks up her point to note, "So it either drew his attention or was contained in something that seemed benign." The two of them promptly sweep their flashlights over an area to see if they can find anything to support Gil's hypothesis. Just then Gil sniffs and inquires, "Smell the sulfur?" Yes, Gil. It's Old Scratch himself, and he's come to bet a fiddle of gold against your soul. Before Satan -- or his CBS equivalent, the team that brought you Yes, Dear (Alan Kirschenbaum and Greg Garcia) -- shows up, Gil's whipping out his Leatherman and scraping some gray powder off Jake's body. He then asks for Brass's lighter and flicks it near the powder, igniting it. The team notes the ready burn and concludes that the bomb's propellant was gunpowder. Gil gives Catherine the Investigatory Eye and commands her to make the call. She does: "Seat of the bomb is here" -- as evidenced by the scorched crater -- "victim was thrown three meters. His clothes are torn but not burnt, indicating a low-velocity propellant, six or seven thousand feet per second. Who? Why? Will he do it again? Time will tell."
The Who comes in to underscore Catherine's point, and the credits roll.
Note to CBS: if you're looking for a graceful way to end That's Life -- which, going by the previews, looks in need of a mercy killing -- feel free to bring the CSI team east to investigate a killing spree that leads to the death of every character on the show. Just a suggestion...
Back to the show: Warrick and Sara are standing near Catherine, probably getting briefed. If she briefs anything like the way she calls a scene, it's got to be a frustrating experience. Gil is poking among the rubble with a flashlight and holding forth on the unique frustrations of a crime scene. As he moves, he steps over the flowers Dom and Jake manhandled minutes before the explosion; it's all very symbolic, I'm sure. Gil is more interested in looking for evidence, telling the assembled troops, "Our murder weapon's in a thousand pieces and we have to put them back together again." You know he lives for moments like this. Warrick and Sara look nonplussed; when they ask Gil for guidance, he tells them to cart anything they can find back to the lab and "stay curious." Sara turns to Catherine and asks for a further explanation. Catherine actually provides one: "Bombs explode. Weird thing is, their components survive the explosion. If we can piece together this bomb, we can find out who did this." How? I reiterate what I said earlier: Catherine's style of briefing is as incomplete as her style of calling a crime scene. Warrick is sent off to take photos of the scene, with instructions to also photograph anyone who is checking out the carnage perhaps a little too eagerly. Back inside, Catherine uses a nifty-looking set of pincer-thingies (note: not the technical term; if you know what these things are actually called, feel free to share on the forums) to pick up assorted pieces of twisted and scorched metal. Sara uses a pair of calipers to do likewise. Warrick continues to take pictures, sweeping the walls for things that need photographing. His eyes alight on the Ayn-Randian clock; the camera lingers on the face, which still reads 12:30.
And then the scene abruptly changes. Nick and some anonymous guy are walking out of what looks like one of your higher-end casinos, and the pal is exhorting Nick to hang out, drink a lot, and pick up some women. Nicky declines with, "I just pulled a double and I still have to file my shift report." He's such a do-gooder. The friend goads with, "You never passed up a wild night back at A&M," and I nearly pass out from the shock of realizing that we finally have a little backstory on Nicky: he went to Texas A&M, which explains the occasional accent. Then I grow faint as I behold the second revelation of the night: George Eads has apparently buried the hatchet with the hair and wardrobe personnel. Oh, happy day! Anyway, the newly shorn Nicky slaps the friend down with a condescending comment about how he's all grown up now. The friend proffers his condolences, then runs off to chase two blonde women who, frankly, look like they'd just as soon slit someone's throat with a nail file. Nicky shakes his head ruefully and continues toward his car. Just as he's waved off the valet and is about to get into his big ol' SUV -- it figures that Nicky would drive one of those -- he notices an altercation. We hear an unfortunately familiar female voice yelling, "Let go of me!" as a man responds, "Kristy, you're not going anywhere." Nicky's head swivels around. Could it be? Unfortunately, yes. Nicky mounts his white horse and goes charging over to the scene in question. Some buff guy is manhandling our favorite feisty post-feminist sex worker; as he warns Nick to stay out of the private argument being conducted in a very public space, Kristy says, "I know him! He's a cop!" "Crime scene investigator," Nicky corrects her, which, although an endearingly geeky move, is not a bright one. He then defuses the situation, and the guy in question moves on. Nicky and Kristy are left to their usual witty banter:
The sexual tension, it -- oh, who am I kidding here? There is no chemistry between these two. Watching them is like watching Tom and Nicole go through the motions at the Golden Globes. Still, Christy and her newly-long hair -- she no longer looks like a low-rent Gina Gershon, but a low-rent Liv Tyler -- follow Nicky back to his car.Him: You okay?
Her: Yeah. I'm fine. That was good timing, thanks.
Him: I suppose you need a ride.
Her: Do you mind?
Him: No.
In the scene, Las Vegas's answer to Hepburn and Tracy are at her bungalow, having a little heart-to-heart in the driveway. Kristy ruefully notes that every time she runs into Nicky, she's in trouble. He tactfully counters that perhaps she should take up a line of work that doesn't require quite so many people skills. Kristy tells Nicky she's doing precisely that. "I'm going back to school. I've always wanted to study communications." Oh, Kristy. Stick to hooking. Really. It's a little more useful than being able to tell people what the hell Marshall McLuhan meant when he asserted that television was a cool medium. Nicky's just relieved she's leaving the business, so he doesn't question her choice in majors. After a few moments of awkward small talk, Kristy invites Nicky in for a drink. "I don't think it would be a good idea," he demurs regretfully. "Just 'cause you're a crime scene analyst, you don't have to analyze everything!" Kristy chirps. Well, with such a profound grasp on the intricacies of logic vis a vis equivocation, it's a wonder Kristy isn't studying philosophy. Anyway, Nicky laughs. Nothing good can come of this.
Meanwhile, Warrick's having no fun at all taking photos of the crime scene. Nobody else is having a good time either, so it's okay. Catherine finds a cog with "FP" scratched into it and drops it in a bag for further study. Meanwhile, Gil's outside studying the walkway for clues when he hears his name. He looks up and it's Dominic, who's gazing upon him with a mixture of awe and nervousness. "I've seen you on TV before," Dominic stammers. "I admire your work." Forgive my lack of a willing suspension of disbelief, but I have a hard time swallowing the idea that Gil would be some sort of cult-like media figure to forensics groupies in the greater Las Vegas metropolitan area. Anyway, Gil rounds on Dominic with a mixture of skepticism and irritation on his face and, realizing he's got a live one here, quickly dials it down to distant amiability. "Have you talked to homicide yet?" he asks cannily. Dominic then stumbles into a conversational melee that has me writhing in secondary embarrassment, telling Gil that the boys in homicide sent Dom back to talk to Gil, "since we're in the same line of work...law enforcement." He's so sincere, and so blissfully oblivious to Gil's skeptical eye assessing him, that I just have to wince. Gil does not share my reaction. After ascertaining that Dom knew Jake and watching Dominic turn around to look at the news crews hovering in the background, he asks, "Would you, uh, like to be on the news?" "Oh, sure!" Dom burbles, "but only if I was, you know, helping people." Gil smiles a little, and Dom nervously barrels on, "I know what you're thinking: my building blows up and I'm ten minutes away at Arby's sucking down extra sauce. You know, how could I want to help people?" Oh, Dominic, that is so not what Gil is thinking. Gil says blandly, "Well, I mean, realistically, what could you have done?" Dominic, who is conducting an entirely different conversation from the one Gil's having, continues to incriminate himself by babbling, "Well, I know a lot about bombs! Pipe, power, powder. The three Ps of mass destruction." He finishes his recitation with a look on his face that clearly conveys how much he hopes Gil is impressed by his knowledge. Gil, on the other hand, can barely notice since he's distracted by his Spidey-sense blaring. He flatters Dominic by asking if the other man would like to help him in the investigation -- Dominic's pleased and incredulous reaction sparks another round of secondary embarrassment for me -- then takes his leave to tell his cohorts, "Well, we got a live one out there. I got a cop babysitting him." Having played fast-and-loose with the fantasy life of one security guard, Gil turns back to the investigation, and Catherine shows the gear with FP scratched into it.
And now, the commercials. Apparently, William Peterson is in that Haven movie. I don't care; just watching Natasha Richardson bray, "Yah're sayfe. Yah're in Amurricah!" in the previews is enough to put me off even thinking about watching it.
It's daylight, and Nicky's in his gargantomobile. He's on the phone with someone, saying, "Hey. It's me. You in the shower? Anyway, if you check your messages, I don't have to work until later, so I thought since you're between careers, you might want to grab a late..." His voice trails off as he reaches Kristy's house and notes the ribbons of crime-scene tape festooning the exterior. "Breakfast," he manages. Ooops. Before plunging into how much grief Nicky's about to get into, let's stop for a moment and give Nicky style points for the morning-after breakfast invitation. If it weren't for the unfortunate plot complications -- as exemplified by the rest of the scene, in which Nicky drives up to Kristy's house, has to bluff his way out of the situation as Ecklie approaches, then drives off looking ill upon learning that Kristy's a 419, i.e. dead -- Nicky would be having a red-letter episode.
Cut to Warrick, who's drawn the short end of the plot stick for two weeks running, watching Dominic give a lesson on explosives back at CSI Central. Warrick is trying mightily not to look terribly contemptuous; Brass isn't even trying. As Dominic continues to explain how the explosive in the lobby would have worked -- actually using the phrase "Bob's your uncle" as a sort of colloquial shorthand for mutatis mutandus -- Warrick mutters, "Gil was right: you do know a lot about bombs." "How'd you learn so much?" Brass demands. "Oh, they don't teach this stuff at universities. This is all trial and error," Dom blithely replies, still operating in the throes of the delusion that he's aiding the investigation as opposed to being investigated. "So you just blow up bombs and study them?" Brass asks incredulously. "Yeah," replies Dom, clearly puzzled that this method of study isn't immediately obvious. Just then, a remarkably humorless woman comes in, identifies herself as Dom's court-appointed lawyer, reminds everyone of the abundance of lawsuits raining down if Dominic should be treated like Richard Jewell, then tells Brass to quit talking to her client. Dom waves her off, but Warrick says, "Dominic, you should roll with your attorney. Thanks for your help, though." That Warrick, he's trying very hard to subtly convey to Dom that the guy's being played like a guitar, but it's all wasted effort on Dom. Anyway, Dom takes his leave, imploring Brass, "Tell Grissom if he needs me, just call me at home." Brass's eyebrows fly up, exiting his hairline and entering orbit around his skull. Warrick just looks tired.
Meanwhile, Sara and Catherine are sifting through a lot of twisted, burnt little pieces and educating us, the viewers at home, on what bombs do. Sara asks the question I've had since 9:02 tonight: if the area surrounding the bomb was blown to bits, why was Jake still in one piece. Catherine replies, "The vacuum effect. The air is being pushed out so fast, that when the bomb detonates, there's a calm at the center." "Calm, huh?" Sara replies. "Well, except for when he lost his ears," Catherine amends. While they're having this exchange, we get to see the explosion again courtesy of the TMI-cam, which takes us from the detonator in the briefcase all the way to Jake's airborne carcass. The two women also establish that they have yet to find out what the "FP" scratched into the bomb part stands for. Just then, Gil trips in, dying to share his discovery with the two women: one of the cogs in the bomb has some orange substance melted all over it. "It looks like a piece from a clock," Catherine says; Gil confirms, "The bomb was time-delayed and this was part of the timing device." Sara makes the mistake of asking about the orange stuff, and thus gets assigned the task of finding out what it is. That'll learn you to ask questions, missy.
Just then Nick comes in and asks if he can grab Grissom for a moment. "We're kind of busy here, Nick," Catherine snipes and Nicky snaps back, "Yeah, I know that, but I don't think this can wait." It's wrong to laugh at a man whose one-night stand has just been murdered and yet, here I am, because Nicky smacking down Catherine is just too much fun to watch. Anyway, the two men repair to Gil's office, where Gil is giving Nicky quite the reproachful glare. "You told me you weren't dating her," he reminds Nicky. "Well, I wasn't until last night, when I broke up this fight she was having with this guy...uh...Jack." Well. That's putting a spin on the situation. Gil continues, "And Ecklie's at her house now." Nicky confesses, "I can tell you what he's going to find: my fingerprints, my DNA." Talk about your awkward workplace conversations. Gil speaks for the entire viewership when he asks, "What were you thinking, Nicky?" And Nicky rebuts with a statement of the obvious: "I wasn't."
We then go to flashback, with Nicky narrating a blow-by-blow (as it were) of the encounter. It's every bit as cliched as you might imagine. We find out that Nicky left this night to remember around 4 a.m., and just as Gil begins to muse about the many, many ways Ecklie will be making Nicky's life miserable, Catherine comes in to offer her condolences to Nicky. Jesus, news travels fast at CSI Central: did Ecklie run the world's speediest PCR, make a match to Nicky, then hang the results in his office? No -- Catherine mentions she ran into the day shift coroner, and Nicky blurts, "So he told you I was with Kristy last night." "Not yet," Catherine shoots back, letting us all know that Nicky's big mouth will get him into more trouble than the actual evidence might. She and Gil exchange Meaningful Looks; you just know they're going to be talking about this the minute Nicky runs off. Nicky wonders if he should just go talk to Ecklie and come clean on where he was last night; Gil responds, "When you're a suspect, and you're innocent, you keep your mouth shut." Hey! Words for our CSI groupie Dom to live by too. But I digress. Gil says he'll talk to Ecklie, and Catherine helpfully reminds him that he gets along with Ecklie like Pakistan gets along with India. She says she'll work Ecklie. Nicky decides to displace his grief by getting into the investigatory action: "I can't just sit here!" "Take a walk," Gil coolly replies. "Maybe you'll accidentally bump into your guy Jack? ID him, but don't approach him." Nicky wanders off to do that.
Catherine watches him go, then turns back to Gil with a dismayed expression. I'm dismayed too: Warrick's been wearing a hair shirt around the office for months as penance for his screw-up; there is to be no retribution for Nicky's asinine lapse in judgment? Catherine's shocked for different reasons than I: if Nicky's arrested, he's booted from CSI Central. It won't matter if he's cleared; the arrest is enough to earn him an automatic dismissal. Gil and Catherine share a moment where they just kind of sit there, looking exasperated and exhausted. Curiously, I'm reminded of my parents.
We get to see Kristy from the ankles up while the coroner rattles off the particulars: "Liver temp indicates time of death was 6 a.m. Petechial hemorrhaging, cyanotic tongue…" Catherine comes in. David the coroner is no Jenna the cool chick coroner; he gives Catherine a hard time about looking over a body on Ecklie's case, and Catherine snaps back, "Eyes, no hands." She notes the particularly brutal ligature marks and the burst blood vessels around the eyes; Kristy struggled a lot before being violently strangled. Catherine inquires about whether or not David's taken fingerprints off the body yet, and he gives her a hard time about massaging the evidence in Nicky's favor. She sets him straight.
Cut to Gil comparing one bomb-warped clock cog with a fresh new one. There are about three dozen alarm clocks surrounding him on his desk; their collective ticking sounds like the opening of a Pink Floyd tune. Just as Sara comes in, one of the clocks goes off; Gil asks her to locate the offending timepiece and turn off the alarm. God, he's sadistic sometimes. Sara finds the clock after a few tries and asks if Gil's found the clock model used in the bomb. Gil testily replies that he hasn't, and Sara picks up a plain little number and tells him that according to the Bomb Data Center -- which, in keeping with its name, has information on all sorts of bomb components -- the most recent timing device of choice is the "Timetell Snoozewell," retailing for $10.99 at any local drugstore. I can see where the writers might be wary citing Timex or WestClox for something like this. Gil looks disappointed and tells Sara, "You...spoiled all my fun." Before the two of them can resume their little reindeer games, Warrick huffs in, in something of a bad mood. He's assigned with figuring out which tool engraved the "FP" on the timing component. It's a mind-numbing task, nothing but trial and error. "What are you guys doing?" he asks. "We're going to go blow up some bombs," Sara says happily. You know, I'm normally against workplace romances on television shows, but I have to say: I can totally see Gil and Sara dating. They have the same sense of what constitutes a good time. Warrick snits, "Oh, I definitely got the wrong end of this investigation," and Gil quips, "Alas, poor Warrick!" Hee! It's even funnier on my closed captioning, which reads, "Can't always be 'cakes and ale.'" Man, the deaf community is getting a whole different TV show from the rest of us.
Cut to Warrick undergoing said mind-numbing, repetitive task. I won't bore you with the details.
Ecklie's slithering around the halls of CSI Central, heading toward Gil's office. Catherine heads him off, and they have a little exchange wherein we establish that Ecklie, in addition to his many other flaws, is also a poor CSI who doesn't bother to question the most obvious evidence. Just then, Nicky strolls by. Catherine hastily interjects herself between the two men; Nicky, who's determined to be a good sport about this whole thing, puts on his game face and says, "What's up, Ecklie?" Ecklie says, "I need a DNA sample from you, Nicky," which is only a little less subtle than tossing our boy a plastic cup and a Penthouse, steering him toward a bathroom, and barking, "You know the drill." Nicky smokes Ecklie out on intent, noting that his DNA will match the, um, sample in the condom. He then goes on to offer Ecklie the license-plate number for Jack Willman, the guy who was manhandling Kristy before Nicky rode in on his white horse to rescue her. Ecklie insincerely promises to check out the plate, then says, "Come on: your DNA, your fingerprints. That's what's going into evidence." I wonder briefly if Ecklie got his training in Texas, Illinois, Virginia, or any other state which has recently had to admit that they've convicted men on faulty evidence; given the way he conducts investigations, it seems like a natural fit. Anyway, Nicky says, "You just love that, don't you?" Ecklie smirks and says, "You think I want to believe a CSI could commit murder? Hell, I don't even want to believe that a CSI could sleep with a hooker." Oh, Ecklie; you really shouldn't leave yourself wide open like that. Catherine tries to protest, but Ecklie tells her Nicky's private life is no longer private, and she's more than welcome to disprove him on the evidence he's already collected. Then he storms off to strip naked and roll around in piles of forms filled out in triplicate, or so we're led to think, what with his emphasis on the importance of protocol and procedure.
Gil and Sara are out at the bombing range, taking turns calling Warrick on their cell phones to taunt him for drawing the short straw in this week's plot assignment. I jest: Gil and Sara are out at the bombing range to determine the type of pipe used in constructing the bomb. They're going to do so by testing 1:5 scale bombs with three different types of pipe -- a plumber's exflow pipe, a plumber's inflow pipe (which is thinner), and a pipe of galvanized steel. As I'm writing this all down, it occurs to me that this week's episode is more or less a primer on how to make bombs, and anyone who's reading this will be able to blow up a few city blocks after they shut down their browser window. So it is true -- you can get bomb-making directions off the Internet. Someone alert Joe Lieberman; I understand the job he has now allows plenty of leisure time for pursuing errant entertainment juggernauts. Meanwhile, Sara and Gil don some superfly sunglasses and prepare to blow stuff up real good. I can't wait to see where he takes her for their second date. The bombs are color-coded: the exflow model explodes in a hail of green fragments, the inflow pipe blue, and the galvanized steel red. Sara is grinning like a loon; I'm telling you, she and Gil are made for each other. The two then take the little wheelie-thing around to measure the explosive radius of all the fragments. The exflow and inflow pipes don't have the same distance distribution as the galvanized steel pipe, thus leading Gil and Sara to conclude that the bomb's container was galvanized steel. As Gil and Sara are pondering the specifics of pipefitting -- hey, it sounds dirtier than it actually is -- Brass comes wandering out onto the testing ground, quipping, "I love the smell of sulfur in the afternoon." He gets style points for not barking, "Get a room, you two!" Brass then fulfills his contractual obligation: advancing the plot by providing all the off-screen details. In this case, the episode gets a nudge forward when we discover that Dom has been buying an awful lot of SnoozeWell clocks recently. Gil looks dismayed.
We then see Gil and Brass pulling up to a double-wide trailer home complete with swimming pool and trellised porch. Dom's waiting on the porch; he heard them approach on his police scanner. "It makes me feel a part of things," he explains. Oh, man. Brass ducks into the background, the better to offer Gil an unimpeded opportunity to kill the hopes and dreams of his one-man fan club. Gil faces Dom and, waving a sample of the SnoozeWell clock around, bluntly tells the other man that he's got proof that Dom's purchased the same clock as was used in the making of the bomb. Dom does not connect the dots: "That houses a nice little detonator!" Again, he is participating in an entirely different conversation from the one that is actually taking place. Brass guilelessly asks if he can see Dominic's SnoozeWell, and Dom leads the boys inside, eager as a puppy. Once the three men are inside, Dom pulls out a cardboard box packed with clocks and other assorted bomb-making parts. He carries on about how he made a few bombs a few months ago, and blowing them up in the desert is something of an avocation for him. Gil's trying to determine if Dom's made any bombs more recently -- "recent" being defined as "within the timeframe of this episode" -- and Dom answers in the negative. Unfortunately, Brass happens to notice that Dom took home a piece of the Hansen bomb (as the explosion at the beginning of the episode has come to be known as). "You were keeping a key piece of evidence that could nail you?" he asks incredulously. "Hey, that's sentimental," Dom replies. "Well, that's cute," hard-boiled Brass snaps, and Dom defends himself by saying, "No! It is. That's like Waco and Trade Center. That's historical." Cut to Gil looking horrified. Dom barrels on: "I didn't have a war, all right? I'm too flat-footed for the PD. That's as close to history as I'll get. I collect souvenirs -- that's my building, you know? That's my place of employment, man." His lawyer then materializes out of thin air; Brass sniffs and notes, "Hey! Sulfur!" I'm kidding about that part, but really -- how does this attack lawyer appear without notice? The attack lawyer commands Dominic to be silent -- perhaps if he says her name three times, she'll disappear again -- but he ignores her advice and tells Brass, "I'm proud of that container piece." Oh, Dom. Anyway, Brass arrests him, since Gil's face is frozen into a rictus of uncomprehending horror and has therefore incapacitated the rest of him. Dom is heartbroken when they cuff him. As he notices the fleet of television news trucks heading up his driveway, Dominic catches Gil in mid-frozen stare and asks, "Will you do me a favor and put your jacket over these [handcuffs]? I don't want to be seen on TV like this. This is not who I am!" Gil does so, his face unfreezing from horror to mere acute mortification. I don't blame him: arresting Dom is like arresting a golden retriever. He's too friendly and dumb to warrant being treated like a felon. Anyway, as Dom gets into the squad car, Gil turns to Brass and says, "I can't decide whether he's brilliant or nuts." "Welcome to my life," Brass shoots back. Actually, he says something less snide. Why? Because I don't write the scripts.
Sara elected not to go kick puppies with Brass and Gil; she's in the lab using a series of micropipettes and test tubes to determine what that orange substance gooped all over the timing was. After sticking everything in what looks to be a high-tech centrifuge with a printer attached -- let me digress and share my most fervent wish that CBS would add something to their website telling us what equipment and tests were depicted in each episode -- and out spits a piece of paper telling us what the mystery substance is. For the organic chemistry fans in the audience, it's polyethylene terephtalete. For the rest of us, it's polyester.
The good news is, Nicky's still having a good hair and wardrobe day. The bad news is, he's staring down at Kristy's strangled corpse. He and David the uncool day coroner have a conversation establishing that Kristy was alone in the world and nobody will be claiming her body for burial. Nicky steps up to the plate. David asks, quite rightly, if that's the prudent thing to do under the current circumstances. Nicky says, "Doc, I'm giving this girl a proper burial. I don't much care about my career right now. If someone wants to throw me in jail for that, so be it." Give him credit for persistence: he's carrying that rescue complex to the grave.
Cut to the holding cells at the police station. Gil comes by to see Dom; he asks how the security guard is doing. "Just using the current experience to understand the other side of law enforcement!" Dom replies, clearly trying to make lemonade out of this particular lemon. "That's resourceful," Gil replies, obviously still enmeshed in that brilliant-v.-nuts debate. "You think I'm guilty, don't you?" Dom asks. "I think the evidence raises some serious questions about your involvement," Gil cautiously replies. Dom pleads that he's one of the good guys, then asks Gil if there was anything incriminating. Gil echoes Warrick's earlier advice, imploring Dominic to let his attack lawyer do all the talking. He tries to extricate himself from the conversation -- this is Gil, after all, and if it's not about evidence, he's not comfortable -- by saying he just happened to be in the neighborhood and wanted to see how Dom was. "You do what I do!" burbles Dom, reasoning that Gil never actually admits to wanting to see people, but instead manufactures flimsy excuses for doing so. "You're just like me, only better looking." Gil does a good job of looking like this idea hits a little close to home, mumbles about swinging by to see Dom later, then flees. As he's heading toward the door, Brass is propping it open and noting that there's been "another Fourth of July" at the Thrift-Right car rental on Flamingo Avenue. As the poignant string music swells, Gil turns back to look at Dominic, who just hunches over and looks disconsolate.
Cut to the Thrift-Right parking lot; it's night, and the rain pours down. I steel myself for Catherine's comments on the vast inconvenience of having firemen and inclement weather trashing the crime scene. Sara fills in for her. We all learn that the one fatality at this site was in line for a car rental, and the team has no idea what triggered the bomb. Gil, meanwhile, is picking through the evidence with ungloved fingers. Is that procedure? He's found a mousetrap, covered in orange stuff. He deduces that "form follows function…someone picks it up, motion trips the trap, sets off the timer." And then Parker Brothers picks up the phone to their own team of attack lawyers to determine if the mad bomber is violating their copyright on the beloved Mousetrap. After sharing a flashback on the bomb's likely movements during detonation, Sara notices a rental-car agent in a snazzy orange polyester blazer. She charges off and absconds with his jacket.
Gil goes to free Dominic from the now light-and-airy holding cell area. Dom quizzes him as to the nature of the second bomb, and Gil hedges. As the two men approach the entrance of the holding tank, Dom says ruefully, "I guess you're not going to be needing my expertise anymore. I mean, investigation-wise. I knew it was too good to be true." Cut to Gil, trying not to smile. Dom salutes Gil, and Gil stammers, "Dominic, I'm not a police officer. I-I-I'm a crime scene analyst." "We know who really solves the crimes, don't we, sir?" Dom says conspiratorially. He shakes Gil's hand, and Gil goes to flee. At the last minute, Gil turns back and says, "Hey, Dom? time -- try not to be so trusting. You don't have to be a hero." Dom nods, eager to please. I wince, suddenly filled with the knowledge that this episode is not going to end well for our boy Dom.
Cut to Catherine and Ecklie watching Jack Willman's interrogation. It doesn't go well. Actually, it goes well for Jack; it just doesn't go well for Nicky, especially after Jack spins a little flashback thread showing us all how a half-naked Nicky allegedly throttled Kristy. Anyway, that whole scene just ends badly; Catherine pleads with everyone involved to give her twelve more hours to clear Nicky before they place him under arrest.
Then she runs off to harass Liam the lab tech, who's understandably a little squicked out over having to run tests on his friend's DNA samples, considering the source and all. "Nick's little soldiers," he says, scooting the microscope bearing a semen-filled slide over to Catherine. We get the TMI-eye view of Nicky's little soldiers; they're all AWOL. Catherine pings Liam on the time the sample was frozen. He places it at 10:15 in the morning, and asks why she wants to know. Catherine, displaying a heretofore unseen ability to divine truth using only frozen semen, realizes something's not right about the sample's freezing time versus the time it was, uh, collected, and sprints off to wrap up this whole awkward internal investigation before anyone else in the office has to handle Nicky's effluvia.
And rap she does, with Gil. "The sperm found in the condom was all heads, no tails." "I'm not quite up to speed on the particulars --" Gil says, remembering the last sperm-related conversation he had and not wanting to go there again, but Catherine mows over him, saying, "It takes about seven hours for bacteria to eat away at the tails, placing ejaculation at about two a.m., but Kristy's time of death was six a.m." Gil points out, correctly, that the evidence only shows a lag between the tryst and the murder; Catherine snits that he could be a little more supportive and sprints off to find more evidence to get Nicky off the hook.
While Gil's standing there watching Catherine speed off, Sara charges over to fulfill Brass's customary role. In the interest of advancing the plot and wrapping up this recap, let me sum up: the Thrift-Right jacket's polyester matches the orange stuff on the bomb. Thrift-Right's corporate headquarters are in the Hansen building. The second bombing site was the erstwhile employer of one excessively disgruntled Norman Stirling. "Guy's been unemployed ever since," Sara notes. "Sitting around, making bombs," Gil intones, with an inflection last heard when Rob Schneider was makin' copies.
Cut to a garage, where a father and son are tending to manly housekeeping chores. Brass and Sara walk up and ascertain that the father is indeed Norman Stirling. "Yes?" Norman replies warily, then gets downright nervous when he notes the many police who have suddenly flooded the premises. Brass moves this plot further toward resolution -- fortunate, since it's 9:49 and all -- by telling us, the viewers at home, that Norman's got motive (getting let go at his job, suing unsuccessfully to get his job back, receiving a TRO from the company after he threw furniture around the corporate HQ), and incriminating evidence (a rack of stylish orange polyester blazers), and he and his lawyer can discuss defense strategies at the station. "Call your mom," Norman implores his son as he's led away; the kid looks horrified.
Dispatching another plot with alacrity, Catherine barges into Kristy's all-white ranch house. The decor is a nice nod to authenticity: when Susan Faludi wrote on adult film actors and the sex industry for the New Yorker a couple of years ago ("The Money Shot," November 11, 1995), one of the things she commented on was the overwhelming neutrality of the decor. Anyway, Catherine's not conducting a semiotic analysis of Kristy's choice in sectional sofas; she's looking for something specific: the murder weapon. She finds it after tossing the house -- it's the tie-back cords on the living room curtain. The texture matches the abrasions around Kristy's neck. Catherine takes the cord back to Liam and asks if he can a) find epithelial skin-cell samples, and b) determine who they belong to via DNA testing. He does, and they do: the samples are a perfect match with Jack Willman. Nicky does a nice job of looking relieved at being off the hook, but grieved over the whole matter of Kristy being dead. He goes to hug Catherine, and she's quite moved. The scene was very well played; it's one of the few where we've gotten a genuine sense of whether these folks regard each other as friends as well as coworkers.
Meanwhile, down in subplot hell, Warrick has nailed down the implement used to carve "FP" on the bomb: it's an etcher, sold only in bulk, to the Las Vegas school district. Coincidence of coincidences, the one high school which ordered the etchers, Summit High, is also the same school where Stirling's son Tyler goes.
Cut to Gil and Brass having a Q&A with Tyler. We find out that the poor kid's all mixed up inside, what with the past year's events having made life miserable for him, between the lawsuits and his parents' subsequent split. We also find out that young Tyler has quite the future ahead of him as an anti-capitalist protester; he's quite versed in corporate America's hiring and firing practices and is filled with resentment over his dad being fired so two younger, cheaper workers could take his place. Norman's looking kind of queasy, but his face drops into horrified disbelief after Tyler reveals that the letters "FP" carved on components in each bomb stand for "fair play," a phrase Norman used to shout around the house when he was embroiled in the lawsuits. Norman just wanted fair play; Tyler decided to help him out, explosive-style. "You sent them bombs?" he asks in a panicked voice. "You said you wanted to kill them?" Tyler responds weakly. "How did you even know how to do this?" Norman asks his son. "Off the Internet?" Tyler responds. See! I told you. Then Tyler, who's already displayed something of an impediment when it comes to interpreting rhetoric and practical intention, asks, "Dad? Are you mad at me? I did it for you." Because that's what any father needs after a year filled with an ignominious firing, acrimonious lawsuits, and the dissolution of his marriage -- a boneheaded son killing people by blowing them up. Gil intrudes on this little moment by asking if Tyler's made any more bombs. Norman says brokenly, "Son...if you did this for me, tell them where the bombs are."
Dom's listening to his police dispatcher when he hears the news of a bomb at Summit High in classroom 22B, locker 897. As he leaps to his feet, pulls on his jacket, and bolts out the door, he misses the tail end of that dispatch: "Bomb is trigger-activated and motion-delayed. Do not handle. Repeat, do not handle." I sigh in defeat, knowing how this will end. Hint: not well.
Cut to the school being evacuated. It's all quite orderly, except for Dom barreling upstream through the kids, imploring them to clear out as he heads for classroom 22B. He find the locker, jimmies it open, and sees the bomb. He picks it up, and the mousetrap taped to the bottom of the cardboard package triggers the timing device; we see the clockface begin to turn rapidly toward explosion.
Cradling the package carefully, Dom pussyfoots out of the building. As he exits the building -- pushing a group of kids in front of him -- Gil's CSIMobile pulls up, and Gil hauls ass down the stairs and toward the plaza where Dom is standing with the bomb. "Dominic! Stop right there! Put it down!" Dom wags his head in reassurance and says, "It's all right. Everyone's safe." Gil's getting even more frantic: "No, no, no! Drop it! It's active!" Dom's face freezes as he finally parses Gil's words over the roar of adrenaline in his ears; there's a long moment on screen where the two men look at each other in mutual terror, then as the bomb stops ticking and the fuse ignites, we see Dom looking down at the suddenly-silent package in confusion, then up at Gil. Gil looks back at him, mouth agape, and then he gets knocked back by the force of the fireball emanating from the bomb. When he manages to sit up again, he takes off his sunglasses and looks over to where Dom's body presumably lies. Gil looks like he's fighting tears.
Before I can get caught up in the overwhelming sense that fate is a cruel, cruel thing to treat trusting would-be heroes so badly, the episode switches plots: Jack Willman's being frog-marched into custody as Nicky watches in a self-righteous glower. "Tell me why you did it," he demands. "I got nothing to say to you, cowboy," Jack responds. Nicky slams Jack against the wall, growling, "She was going back to college, turning her life around, getting out of the business and you killed her for it. Why?" Jack sneers before replying: "Is that what she told you? She was 'getting out of the business'? She was going to college to recruit more girls." Gosh, he makes it sound like Amway. Nicky asks, "You think I'm going to believe the john that killed her?" Jack laughs, saying, "You think I was her client? I was her pimp. She was leaving me to start her own racket. So wake up. This isn't Pretty Woman, she's not Julia Roberts and you're no Richard Gere." Nicky looks like someone socked him in the solar plexus; he's so rattled, all he can come back with is, "I guess you're right, 'cause there's no happy ending for you. Twenty-five to life." Huh? That makes no sense. Nicky's got a history of spouting colloquial-sounding gibberish, but this is above and beyond.
Gil's drinking a cup of coffee and reading the paper. He notes something -- we can't see what, since he's facing the camera and therefore the paper is obscured from view -- and says ruefully, "Above the fold." Gil tears out whatever article he's noting, then walks over to the breakroom bulletin board. In the lower right-hand corner is a memorial to officers slain in the line of duty, with a plaque reading, "One of our own." Gil pins the newspaper clipping -- which is the article detailing how local hero Dominic Kretzker gave his life -- to the area immediately above the memorial. It's a very sweet, if downbeat, ending.