Manhunter

Massive props to Dragon, without whom you'd have a recap that covered only 60 minutes of this episode and not the full 75.

We got no time for the beachy shores of Miami today; it's all about the prison action, at a location presumably close enough to make prison breaks an issue for Miami suburbanites. Why they don't float felons on a barge off the Keys is a municipal mystery that may never be answered. Anyway, we get plenty of shots of the prisoners taking their recreation out-of-doors. There are many men who have that "Body By Prison Weight Room, Tattoos By My Bitch" look. Two of them get into it on the basketball court. While we're getting acquainted with this setting, some sort of rap music is playing in the background; I suppose it's to give this some sort of hard-core cred, but really just sends middle America the message that anyone who makes or listens to rap is but one drive-by shooting away from carjacking a viewer's minivan and committing a drug-fueled act of violence out in the local soccer fields. Anyway, a shanking ensues.

We then see the prison gates opening to frame a shot of an empty courtyard under a Sergio Leone-filtered sky. Then, as if by magic, Horatio has appeared in the doorway and is now striding into the prison. He gets buzzed through the gate, and presumably heads right out to the basketball court where the bald, tattooed victim of the shanking has bled out. The weapon -- a toothbrush which has been altered so as to resemble a knife on one end -- is lying nearby. There had better be a really good reason Horatio's here, like finding out that the prison is but blocks away from the Miami Dolphins stadium and thus well within the jurisdiction, or maybe that Horatio lives to the prison or something. Otherwise, it seems like the Department of Corrections might have a few employees who would investigate this themselves. Anyway, Horatio and a security guard glower at the body for a moment, bemoan all the free time the prisoners have on their hands. Well, when you cut things like high-school equivalency classes and programs that actually attempt to give convicts some marketable skills to fall back on once they're in the real world, the result's going to be a lot of free time. The sky-high recidivism rate is only a side effect, no doubt. Anyway, Horatio and the security guard head over to where the other basketball players are on their knees with their hands behind their heads. The net effect is...well, let's just put it this way: there is nobody on Earth who's going to be able to wear a prison jumpsuit well.

Horatio decides to pick one and ask him what his name is. The man balks, and Horatio's all, "Come on, partner. What's your name?" The guy replies, "Ramirez, Rico. Booking number ." Horatio takes this opportunity to pull down Ramirez, Rico's collar and notice the "Montoya" tattooed on the back of the guy's neck. Oh, how sweet: his mom put her name on his collar, kind of, in case he gets lost and can't find his way home. Horatio gives the guard a look and asks him what his name is again, and the con replies, "Ramirez. You deaf or something?" Horatio asks, "Did you forget your name when you got this tattoo? We've got a bracelet switch here." Note that this is the first time we, the viewers at home, have had a chance to see the bracelets all the convicts are wearing on their right wrists. How these bracelets get there and how the prison guards prevent convicts from switching them as a matter of routine isn't covered. The guard notes that the prison's been in lockdown for half an hour and they're only now beginning to check IDs.

Just then, Horatio looks up and asks, "What's that? This airspace is restricted." "That" is a helicopter, and it's hovering mighty close to the prison courtyard. The guard sounds exasperated as he says, "Someone get on the horn to air patrol and get that chopper out of here." Someone scampers off to do precisely that. Horatio's all, "The air patrol doesn't fly A-stars. This murder is a decoy. We have an escape in progress!"

We then go to a truly bizarre camera shot -- Jack Crawford, as framed by Gil's bicep. Then we draw back; Gil lights a cigarette as Jack puts two photos, face down, on the driftwood, daring Gil, "If you can't look anymore, I understand." Well, I understand that he's baiting Gil to come back; judging by the look on Gil's face -- persecuted -- he understands too. "Don't try to run a game down on me, Jack," he says. Jack has the good grace to look ashamed, then says, "If I really didn't need you to come back, I wouldn't ask. This guy's on a lunar cycle. I have three weeks and a few days until the full moon." And now we have the built-in dramatic tension for the rest of the movie. Will Gil catch this guy in time? Like I have to ask. "We have a better chance to get him fast if you help," Jack continues, and because we're all of three minutes into the movie and we still have many more to go, it's a safe bet that Gil's going to turn over those photos, then decide to help. The synthesizer kicks in again -- I suspect it's part of an experiment to condition us to react with dread every time we hear a Moog -- and Gil's all, "I'll think about it." Just then, a tall blonde and a blond kid come walking by the log; the woman's sporting a pair of big plastic earrings and an all-white outfit. Ah, eighties fashion! Between this and the occasional thirtysomething rerun, I'm almost nostalgic for power-perms and the puffy belted-shirt thing. Almost. Anyway, the blonde -- who's also wearing Ray-Bans, as was apparently legally mandated for all occupants of Earth in the 1980s -- gives Jack a tight grin. Ah, so she's Mrs. Gil, and none too eager to see Gil returning to work.

: a heartwarming scene of domesticity. Gil and the blond kid are erecting a fence around a turtle nest to ensure the hatchlings' safety. Perhaps this is the result of watching a year's worth of Gil Grissom, the man who wrote the book on moody loner behavior, but the whole father-and-son thing here just seems wrong. While the two of them are carrying on about turtles, the blonde, Molly, is giving Jack a piece of her mind, saying, "You're supposed to be his friend, Jack. Why'd you call him?" Jack sidesteps the question, saying, "If he decides to do it, Molly, I'll keep him as far away from it as I can." Having concluded that non-conversation, the two of them brood into a picturesque sunset as the synthesizer throbs. I suppose this is the point where we infer that Gil's feeling all torn up inside due to conflicting personal and professional demands.

Cut to another blue-lit night: it's an all-white bedroom, where a shirtless Gil and a not-very-dressed Molly are lying on their stomachs in an all-white bed, illuminated by the moon shining on the ocean behind them. Jesus, didn't people close their blinds in the eighties? "We've got it good, don't we?" he says, and she mumbles, "We've got it more than good. All that happened to you before lets you know that." Well, that was spectacularly uninformative. Thanks, Molly! Gil continues, "If I went back, I wouldn't look at evidence. I wouldn't be deeply involved. He wouldn't even see me or know my name." I laugh, knowing that Gil's just guaranteed that he'll be wading through gruesome exhibits and coming face-to-face with the killer. Molly's not buying it either. She and Gil dicker over whether or not he should go. They decide the thing to do is to send him off into harm's way, then celebrate their decision-making prowess by engaging in one of the most clumsily-composed love scenes in the history of Western cinema. It's one thing to have to roll around in a weirdly blue-lit room, but to do so to one-note synthesizer "music" amidst a tangle of big, permed 1980s hair and indistinguishable body parts is well-nigh unwatchable. Gil then works his way down Molly's neck; she lies back and, going by the look on her face, proceeds to think of England.

And now, on to the chapter entitled, "Scene of the slaughter." After establishing with some local yokel that he will be spending the rest of his evening wandering about a murder scene, then viewing home movies of the deceased in his motel room, Gil exits the car and walks over to the house, accompanied by the mildest of synthesizer chords. He walks into the dark house with his inimitable pigeon-toed stride, going through the kitchen and winding his way up the stairs. This is all so reminiscent of the "Buffalo Gals" episode, I half-expect Marg Helgenberger to pop out and make a snippy comment about the evidence. Gil continues to walk through the house, using only a flashlight to guide his way, and just as I irritably wonder why these crack investigators insist on working in the dark, he opens a bedroom door and flips on the lights. We establish two things: one, that Dante Spinotti never met a white interior he didn't love; and two, that this killer emptied about a gallon of blood all over said white interior. It's gruesome. Gil looks wary. He also looks overdressed -- skinny tie, supersaturated colors. He then whips out a handheld tape recorder and begins speaking: "The killer entered through a sliding glass door. He used a glass cutter anchored to a suction cup. His entry was skillful." I immediately scream and cover my ears. I hate the passive voice with the burning energy of a thousand fiery suns. The action -- entering a building -- is dynamic. Don't make it the passive subject! He entered skillfully! He demonstrated skill when entering! Not "the entry was skillful." Yargh. Now I'm so peeved, I'm just going to forgo transcribing the rest of Gil reading a FBI report into the tape recorder; it's a ritualistic syntactic slaughter.

Gil's taking pills and drinking out of the bathroom faucet when the phone rings. He freezes -- and who can blame him? -- and listens to the machine pick it up. We learn that the deceased family's surname was Leeds. The quick cut is of Gil watching the Leeds home movies on mute, still reading the FBI report into his little tape recorder and musing over the timeline of events. We then go to another weird cut: Gil's over in the right-hand corner of the screen, boxed in by the back of the TV. He eventually clicks everything off and hunkers on over to the phone, where he calls Molly. Judging by her appearance, she hasn't moved from the bed since last we saw her. They exchange I-love-yous, and she hangs up; he hunches over on the bed. Awww, poor Gil. Molly collapses back into the weirdly-lit blue bedroom, since talking on the phone while lying down evidently took a lot out of her. The camera cuts back to that weird TV-and-Gil right-skewed composition, and Gil puts the videotape back in. He settles back down to watch it, looking considerably more strung-out than he did a few minutes ago. "What are you dreaming? That's something you can't afford for me to know about, isn't it? God, she's lovely, isn't she? It was maddening to have to touch her with rubber gloves on, wasn't it?" he asks the television rhetorically. Ah, see -- this is where we see why Gil's the real deal: he's getting in the killer's head so he can anticipate the moves. As Gil talks, his voice rises steadily and he looks slightly more deranged. He continues, "They found talcum powder on her leg. But there wasn't any talcum powder in the bathroom. The talcum powder came out of a rubber glove as you pulled it off to touch her. You took off your gloves to touch her, didn't you?" And now, Gil commences shouting: "Didn't you, you son of a bitch! You touched her with your bare hands! And then you put the gloves back on! Did you open all their eyes so they could see you!?" Gil, please stop. I'm embarrassed for you. Happily, he heeds my plea and shuts up, electing instead to call Jack and have him send down the FBI's print guy so he can dust the corneas of the Leeds' eyes.

Cut to Gil handling the Atlanta police, snippily reminding them that they didn't dust the eyeballs. The conversation turns into a police briefing; Gil discreetly sits in the back while the local sheriff gives his people their to-do list. One colorless little man gets up and shows a model of the killer's teeth. As much as I appreciate the forensic geekery, I have to express my skepticism at being able to apprehend someone based on their incisors. The science show over, Gil gets put on the spot to give a thumbnail sketch of the victim. Thankfully, when he brings up the entry detail again, he does so in the correct tense. He goes on to profile the guy: "He's an organized individual, who lives life competently with little or no leakage." Is it wrong to snicker and think of adult diapers here? Gil continues, clarifying, "There's a rich and intense fantasy life. The elevated experience fuels the fantasy. The act is the fantasy. To discover what he thinks he's doing in there, why he picked who he picked, did what he did, to understand his motive, you have to understand his illusions, his dreams." Someone asks off-camera, "Which are?" Gil replies, "I don't know." Thank you, Gil, for an impressive load of psychobabble. The local sheriff goes back to giving assignments, assigning the vice and narcotics squads to the leather bars -- charmingly referred to as "the KY cowboys" here, since, as we know, no Thomas Harris-derived work is complete without a derogatory reference to the non-heterosexuals among us -- and finishes by cautioning everyone to stop referring to the killer as the Tooth Fairy. Everyone laughs and ignores him.

In the scene, all the law enforcement officials are carrying on about how they don't know the Tooth Fairy's motives while Gil says woozily, "It's in his dreams." "The motive?" asks someone in a suit. "Yes," Gil replies simply. The guy in the suit asks Gil, "Fisher was saying you're the one who got Garrett Jacob Hobbs, and that Doctor Lecktor three years ago. Lecktor killed nine people, didn't he?" Aaaaand we have our first Hannibal Lecter reference, except here he's Dr. "Lecktor." Whatever. Anyway, Gil says, "Nine that we know of. Two didn't die." After establishing that yes, Lecktor is a psychopath, the local sheriff drawls, "I understand he cut you pretty good." Jack rolls his eyes; Gil gives him a peevish look and changes the subject. Apparently, the Leedses had a dog -- currently at the vet's thanks to a puncture wound in the stomach, and the Jacobis (the family killed in Birmingham) had a cat, although the little beast is MIA. It probably wandered off in search of another person to open the cat food can. Gil commands a methane probe to see if the cat's dead and buried; before the locals can come down on him for that oddity, Jimmy Price the FBI fingerprint guy calls and validates Gil's earlier theory: the Tooth Fairy did indeed pull off his gloves to touch Mrs. Leeds, and to touch the eyeballs of everyone in the Leeds family. Everyone looks around, startled that Gil and his freakish, tangential ways have been vindicated.