Hey, everybody! It's the missing recap for CSI! And guess what? The show still takes place in Las Vegas.
We start the show with a daytime shot of the Strip, panning out over the eye-numbing acres of ticky-tacky suburbia surrounding said Strip, and then into the mountains. We see a human bone fly up into the air and come back down again. It does not turn into a monolith, nor does a tribe of apes cluster 'round to begin evolving to the strains of "Thus Spake Zarathustra." Instead, a golden retriever catches the bone in its mouth and returns it to the stock moppet who is, in the fine tradition of someone we will never see after the opening credits, about to stumble across something grisly. The boy hands over the bone to his dad; Dad takes command of the situation by asking the dog, "What do you have here?" Because the dog is going to answer -- this isn't Lassie, you idiot. Stock Moppet asks Dad what he's holding. Dad replies, "Nothing, son. It's just an old...bone. Probably from some dead animal or something." He then looks around the rocky desert plain, as if expecting the rest of the body to magically appear. Some woman caterwauls mysteriously in the background, and a hawk cries; it's all very mystical.
Cut to the same desert, at night. Gil is waving a flashlight up and down the length of bone, noting, "It's a tibia...or most of a tibia." Catherine and Gil try to peg how long the leg has been in the desert, and conclude that time is irrelevant; what matters is that it's been long enough for the animals to pick it clean and the elements to wash away any evidence. Gil mildly inquires of Catherine as to why she's assuming they need evidence; she points out that tibias typically don't go on unaccompanied vision quests to the desert. Gil comments, "It's interesting how you usually assume the worst." "See, that way I'm never disappointed. And sometimes I'm nicely surprised," Catherine ripostes. Well, that explains a lot about her dating life. They dicker over whether or not this desert is a crime scene, and then Gil says, "Do you know there's 206 bones in the human body?" Catherine, who's feeling awfully feisty tonight, snaps, "Yes, Professor. I, too, took osteology." Gil, demonstrating his eternal optimism, does a little math and concludes, "Well, 205 more bones and we have a complete skeleton. If we find the rest, then we can determine whether or not it was a murder." Catherine replies, "Well, I feel it in every 206 of my bones that this was a murder."
Aaaaaand we go to credits. The one nice thing about recapping a rerun is I get to see commercials for shows which have not yet aired, thus enabling me to pass summary judgment before the fall rush. Boy, does Wolf Lake look like a big bag of suck or what?
“ One of the cadets finds something he hypothesizes to be a piece of skull bone. Gil elegantly refutes that hypothesis by licking the fragment. Eeeeew! You don't know where that's been, Gil. ”
Back on CSI, Gil's handing out cases since Brass is otherwise indisposed to perform his usual exposition duties and set the assorting plotlines in motion. Catherine and Gil are on the bones with Nicky playing back-up; Catherine comes charging into the mobile meeting (my Christ, what is it with all these shows where everyone's striding purposefully through endless corridors? Don't these people have desks? Or conference rooms?) and breathlessly informs Gil that she's got an entire class of cadets meeting them at Mount Charleston; they'll do a grid search to find the 205 remaining bones. Catherine then mentions off-handedly to Gil that perhaps Teri Miller might be the kind of person who comes in handy in these cases. "Teri Miller?" Gil feints. "I don't think that's necessary." I'm guessing Teri Miller shot him down at some unspecified time after her last appearance; Gil's got the look of a man who's scared to run into someone. "Well, why not? She's a forensic anthropologist, specializes in bones, and -- hello -- all we've got is a bone." Gil blurts, "But she's a girl and she's not on a slab, and that scares me!" Actually, he hedges about how he'll call Teri if he hits an impasse. Catherine gets a crafty look on her face.
Gil retreats to safer ground: sending other people out to gawp at the dead. Warrick and Sara are to attend to a dead body at the Lucky Seven motel. "Is that the place with the weird pool?" Sara asks. In Vegas? What are the odds? Warrick -- who is no stranger to Vegas's finer aquatic venues -- actually reads the report; the maid found a dead male body in the hotel room. "Any chance it's old age?" Sara asks. "Guy's 23. Nope," Warrick responds.
Back in the desert, the junior crime fighters are doing their grid thing. One of the cadets finds something he hypothesizes to be a piece of skull bone. Gil elegantly refutes that hypothesis by licking the fragment. Eeeeew! You don't know where that's been, Gil. Catherine calls him on his oral investigation, and Gil says, "Bones are porous. They stick to the tongue. This doesn't stick." The grid walk commences; in the scene, Gil is turning a piece of something this way and that as he muses, "Could be a wrist bone." "Well, do you want to suck it? To be sure?" Catherine replies. That's a hell of a line, Catherine; imagine what damage it could do in the wrong context. Gil punts on that question by calling for the flag man to come over and mark the spot. Cut to a montage of everyone finding bones over a wide-ranging area. By the end of the scene, the desert's been turned into a field of flags; the camera swoops from the still-life up to the mountains and out, then comes back in on Gil and Catherine at night, standing in the midst of the plain.
"So!" Catherine starts. "You thinking what I'm thinking?" Gil replies, "How amazing the universe is. Everything out there made of carbon. From stars to trees, trucks to human bones." I bet he's a lot of fun on dates. You know, romantic and all. Maybe he tried that carbon line on Teri Miller. Catherine, however, has squelched all thoughts of love and carbon: "I was thinking we have about a hundred bones. We could ID this body before the end of the shift." Then she does a double-take: "Stars and trucks?" Gil doesn't answer; he's busy gazing skyward, beatifically beaming.
“ Warrick informs the ladies that he'll be seeing them again; they look a lot less pleased about this than I would be if Warrick were telling me that. Then again, I'm thinking Warrick wouldn't be telling me in a professional capacity. ”
Cut to the weird pool -- it's vaguely reminiscent of the Wenatchee mermaid thing in Florida, where women dress up like mermaids and swim around for tourists in an underground restaurant. Sara and Warrick give it a small glance, then walk into the hotel room. It's festooned with Mylar balloons and streamers; Warrick bats his way through the tack and reads the dead guy's ID: Darren Pyne. Sara looks down at the shag carpet, kicks aside a few balloons, and notes a broken lamp: "Signs of struggle; I'll dust for prints." Warrick and Sara ruminate on the likelihood that the lamp did young Mr. Pyne in -- there's a noted lack of blood -- and speculate that maybe he was hit over the head in several discrete locations. Realizing they're not going to solve this one without an autopsy, Warrick turns to more practical facets of the investigation: "Who's the room registered to?" Sara replies, "Well, that would be Celine Dion." Hey -- she's committed to, like, five years at some tacky casino there, so it's not entirely out of the realm of possibility. However, Sara's leading us away from the celebrity-crime-spree angle by noting the room's bill didn't go to Canada's most maudlin national resource, but rather to Lynn Henry of Eau Claire, Wisconsin. Warrick dispatches O'Reilly the buzz-cut detective to find the last place Lynn Henry used her credit card.
And now we're in the Venetian casino; it's kind of evocative of the Renaissance -- provided the Renaissance had been bankrolled by Bootsy Collins. Sara and Warrick wander up and down the halls, finally finding the (presumably) murderous milkmaid (hey, Wisconsin is the dairy state). The two walk over to a trio of women nattering about veils and shoes and ask for Lynn Henry. A poor man's Selma Blair looks up and quips, "You know my name: what's yours?" Cagey much? Warrick introduces himself and Sara, and drops the news about Darren Pyne. Lynn checks out the Polaroid and does a totally fake, "Oh, my God. Yes. I do know him...sort of. We gave Meg a bachelorette party last night." Meg -- who really does look like the Swiss Miss with two ponytails sticking out from her head -- bleats that they did it over at the Lucky Seven because she didn't want her fianc to find out. You know, since most solid marriages are based on deception and skullduggery, or at least aligning yourself with a partner who'd freak over a bachelor or bachelorette party. We find out that Darren Pyne was an exotic dancer the girls hired, and get the full flashback treatment, with Lynn saying, "No husbands tonight, ladies!" Oh, that's just so pathetic. Meg the Milkmaid corroborates Lynn's story about leaving the party at 3 a.m. and says, "He was danced out, but he was definitely alive." Warrick asks why they left the dancer alone in the hotel room and Lynn -- who appears to be the spokeswoman for the group, thus confirming the dramatic clich that she is the closest thing to a mastermind these ladies have -- babbles about how the dancer was tired, and they had already paid for the room, so why not? As she's talking, she gestures casually, and Sara notices the bruises on her wrist. Lynn again feigns shock: "Omigawd, I don't know. I was totally tipsy last night, I mean falling all over everything." While she's carrying on, both Meg the Milkmaid and their third as-yet-unnamed friend both look alarmed by Sara's keen powers of observation. Warrick informs the ladies that he'll be seeing them again; they look a lot less pleased about this than I would be if Warrick were telling me that. Then again, I'm thinking Warrick wouldn't be telling me in a professional capacity.