The episode begins with a phone ringing; as it rings, the camera pans out from the skyline to the outlying 'burbs, then to the dark interior of one house. After a few rings, a mechanized male voice says, "No one is available. Please leave a message." Someone does: "Jane, you there? Pick up. Okay...I'll call back later." We see that the answering machine is on a small telephone table in a darkened hallway, and it's crammed full with 64 messages. Then we see Jane. She's crouched on the floor, her back against the wall, clutching a baseball bat and sobbing in fear as she listens to the message. No sooner does that message end than the phone rings again. Jane starts, and breaks into fresh sobs. The message plays again; this time, the same male voice hisses, "Slut. You can't hide from me, bitch." Jane stops sobbing, clearly pushed into a new level of terror by the anger in the man's voice. She looks over at the machine. The message continues, "Jane, you there?" We see three deadbolts on the door. Still, the voice persists as Jane cowers, gnawing on her fingers for comfort: "Now, didn't I tell you not to bite your nails?"
Jane's fight-or-flight instinct kicks in. She pulls out the answering machine's power cord, ricochets down the hall, closes her bedroom door, then hides in the closet. The bedroom door opens; Jane watches with wide eyes, gulping down her sobs in a valiant effort to stay quiet. Her cute little dog comes over to the door, whimpering. She urgently whispers, "Go away. Go away." The dog keeps whimpering, and Jane eventually pulls him into the closet, cuddling him close. She backs into a corner of the closet -- and right into the legs of her black-gloved attacker. Jane has time to scream, and the camera fades up and out on the attacker wrestling Jane to the ground.
And now, I'm stepping away from the computer so I can turn on every light in the apartment and throw all the closet doors wide open. My cats are overjoyed about this -- every time I open a closet door, they bolt in as if they're expecting an express trip to Narnia, and here I am, thoughtfully providing them with multiple itineraries to magical places. It's almost too much for their tiny, walnut-sized brains to process. Fortunately, they rise to the occasion, and after watching them go into raptures over discovering that they can stand on the Igloo cooler and be taller than the other items in the hall closet, I've managed to stop babbling nervously in response to one of the creepiest things I've ever seen on CSI. So I lock the cats in the closet and resume recapping.
Jane is now very dead, and very redheaded. We know this is not normal, as we got to watch her last few moments as a live blonde, but Catherine, snapping photos of Jane slumped over a toilet does not. "Posed?" Gil asks her, acting as the lighting tech on this shoot by aiming a Maglite in Jane's general direction. "Reading my mind," Catherine responds. Gil and Catherine look at the tub, which is festooned with streaks of hair dye, and ponder the nature of the smears. Catherine's reasonably sure it's not blood, as it's the wrong color and texture. She swabs one of the smudges and concludes that it's hair dye. Gil is a little puzzled and asks, "Her hair's still wet. Do you think the assailant surprised her while she was dying her hair?" "Or maybe her assailant was Julia Louis-Dreyfus and this was a Nice and Easy dye job gone horribly wrong," Catherine suggests. Kidding! Catherine says no such thing. She only asks who called in the dead body; Gil responds that a neighbor heard the dog yelping and subsequently called the police. Catherine continues to look around the bathroom and notes that the bathroom window is nailed shut.
As Catherine and Gil walk down the hall, Gil inquires as to the whereabouts of the dog. Catherine notes the presence of canine paraphernalia, but no actual canine. Well, Catherine, rest assured: this is a shaggy dog, mentioned only as an extraneous detail. You'll not see hide nor hair of that dog in the fifty-six minutes, nor shall we. Catherine and Gil continue to explore the house; Catherine notes the triple door locks, the drawn shades, the state-of-the-art alarm system. She tells Gil, "As far as we know, her place was perfectly hermetically sealed until the cops batter-rammed their way in." We see the doorjamb, all sorts of splintered now. "Prisoner in her own home?" Gil queries. "So how'd he get in?" Catherine volleys back. "More importantly, how'd he get out?" Gil replies.
And we go to The Who, as I sit here in awe of Catherine and Gil's ability to intuit the gender of the perp with nary a clue.
When we get back from break, Nicky is looking down at Jane. He looks deeply shaken; for a moment, I have a Deputy Andy flashback. Gil comes up behind Nick, startling him. Not like that's hard. Gil apologizes, then asks mildly, "You've been staring at this girl for ten minutes. Do you know her?" Oh, Gil. Does anyone really ever know anyone? Nicky shakes his head. Gil suggests that Nicky take care of the bedroom; he'll wait for the coroner and finish the bathroom.
Nicky scrams into the bedroom, where Catherine is running an ALS over the comforter. He gallantly offers to step in, but Catherine declines, commanding instead, "Tweeze me." There are so many things to say to that, and yet I'd like to finish this recap before the deadline. Nicky hands Catherine tweezers, and she comes up with a thick, light-colored fiber. Catherine prepares to vamoose, but before she goes, she tells Nicky, "Don't forget what's under the bed." "What's under the bed?" he replies. "You would have gotten it eventually...crime-stopper," Catherine replies. Nicky chuckles wanly and asks, "They're never going to let me live that one down, are they?" Catherine straightens up and jibes, "Now that you're a celebrity, you may want to think about getting a new shirt." Nicky replies, "I'm short on options. Besides, the dry cleaners keeps losing my stuff." I wonder if they can be trained to lose the olive-colored shirts? Anyway, Nicky ducks under the bed and finds a plastic shopping bag. Gil comes in, asking, "What'd you get?" "A lot of crap from Catherine," Nicky shoots back. No, he doesn't. I wish he would -- Nicky's so good-natured, one of two things is bound to happen: he'll either become a doormat and start Season 3 with "WELCOME" written across his forehead, or he'll snap one day, and Gil will be forced to extract posthumous revenge after Ecklie investigates the night shift's stunning mass murder and concludes it was all a wacky accident. Ahem. Back in the actual episode, Nicky's telling Gil he found a shopping bag with a red smudge in it. Gil sends Nicky off to fume the bag and to recruit Warrick and Sara on this case too. Then he does a happy dance around the bedroom because he's the boss of them. Do I really need to tell you when I'm kidding about these things?
Nicky lopes through the Labitrail. As he passes a row of clipboards, each bearing a stack of papers that give the impression of being both official and utterly useless, he notices a color-copied article. The headline -- written in "Christ has risen!"-sized text -- boldly declares, "CRIME STOPPER: Nick Stokes." Nicky sighs and rips the paper off. Then he heads into the break room, where Sara's cackling mercilessly as she and Warrick read the article to each other. Nicky handles the heckling a lot more gracefully than I would, especially when Sara reads, "'And in his off-time, he enjoys creating and inventing toys.' That's fascinating...what kind of toys do you invent?" "I invent shut-up toys!" Nicky screams back. No, no, no. Nicky deflects the question and takes the high road by not inquiring as to whether or not Sara spends her free time ripping the heads of underprivileged children's dolls. He then says, "I thought I got my hands on all the interdepartmental newsletters. Where'd you get that one?" Sara and Warrick chorus, "Liam." Nicky's not surprised. He deftly changes the subject, saying, "Gris wants us to divide and conquer. Blonde hair for you, Warrick --" he tosses it over, and Warrick quips, "I do love a blonde." Sara's on phone records; she greets this with her usual enthusiasm. Nicky then leaves for parts unknown, taking the newsletter with him. As he balls it up and tosses it in the trash can, Warrick calls out, "Hey, I wasn't done with that!" "Yes, you were!" Nicky calls back, his good-natured laughter masking his boiling rage.
Cut to David The Respiring Coroner, starting to say, "I know two things for certain," prompting the husband and me to recite, "There's no way to tell good flan from bad flan, and there is no war in Albania." David knows two different things for certain: Jane Galloway died from suffocation, and she's a natural blonde. Cue everyone's eyes swiveling toward Catherine. Catherine responds, "You had your chance to find out ten years ago." I wish. She actually says, "What are you looking at me for?" Gil looks repentant and apologizes, then says cheerily, "So! What! Suffocation!" David and the TMICam -- now in Corpse Gray and Asphyxiation Blue -- walk us through the usual signs: petechial hemorrhaging, blue fingertips, blue face. Gil notes that Jane may have been suffocated, but there's no sign of strangulation. David replies, "If she had struggled with her assailant, that effort alone could have limited her oxygen intake, causing further O2 depletion of the brain." And then, in an unprecedented TMICam shot, we get to see Jane's neurons shorting out. There's no way they can top that, short of showing actual DNA base pairs screaming, "It wasn't me! DNA profiling is still an imperfect forensic tool! I was at the movies! Gattaca!" We establish that the unnamed attacker -- who we're all assuming is male -- murdered and posed Jane, but declined to either rob or rape her. "So what's his agenda?" Gil asks. You can tell Gil is yearning for a serial killer here, since those people have agendas complex enough to make the Franklin-Covey people beg for mercy.
Meanwhile, Warrick walks in on Liam shopping for new hairdos in the pages of Teen. The two banter back and forth about the fiber: Liam tells Warrick that he snipped a little bit of the fiber, ran it across immuno-electrophoresis (the premise: charged particles of anything migrate across an applied electrical field, and the distance of the migration is related to the particle's density; therefore, electrophoresis is used to separate items according to physical properties like density and electrical charge, thus identifying those items according to their properties. Immuno-electrophoresis identifies specific proteins, antibodies, and immunoglobulins), and it came up empty. Then Liam introduces to Warrick to Pink, stopping only to ask the cover rhetorically, "Do you know how hot you are?" Warrick warns that Nicky's even hotter. "Don't I know it?" Liam responds. Fan-fic writers across America swoon in ecstasy. Oh, come on. Liam asks, "How mad is he?" Warrick responds, "Watch your back."
Having decided that the best defense is a good offense, Liam hunts Nicky down, asking, "I heard you were looking for me?" Nicky's all, "Liam! C'mere, I want to talk to you for a second." Liam wisely hangs back, trepidation written across his features. Nicky insincerely assures him that no bodily harm is forthcoming. Liam foolishly comes over and asks, "What's up?" Nicky cracks. Seriously -- he gives Liam the Vulcan nerve pinch, snarling, "Stop invading my privacy, man. I don't like it. I'm just trying to do my job around here. I don't need extra attention." Liam nods, then foolishly points out, "You are the one doing the 'forensic spotlight' in the department newsletter." Nicky pinches harder -- you can see Liam's veins beginning to throb -- and gets downright scary-looking as he exposits, "I didn't do anything, man. Someone from the community wrote a letter of commendation, Public Affairs ran it. Cool?" Liam gasps assent. After that scene's over, Nicky's usual sunny smile is fixed to his placid expression, and Liam is left to tremble over having glimpsed the rage within. Or something equally dramatic. I actually think this entire scene was a little out of place: we've never known Nicky to be overly zealous about his privacy before, so we really have no idea what the motivation is here. Is Nicky feeling betrayed because it's his little lab groupie spreading the newsletter around? Is he worried that his coworkers will mock him even more than they do now? Is he dealing with some external threat to his privacy that has made him more sensitive to scrutiny in the workplace? We'll never know. ["I'm rolling the bones with 'jerry-built retcon in the writers' room,' myself." -- Sars] And now, Liam and Nicky conveniently forget that they even had that frank exchange of ideas. Liam asks what Nicky's doing; Nicky's fuming the shopping bag. He explains, "I'm trying to get lucky, see if I can get prints off it." Liam watches the bag intently, then asks, "Did she die of suffocation?" Nicky looks spooked at Liam's knowing this until he walks around to Liam's side of the lab bench, where the bag -- looking for all the world like the plastic shroud of Turin -- shows Jane's face. We hear her sobs echoing as we go into a flashback of the asphyxiation in question. Nicky looks spooked.
Cut to Brass practically skipping though the Labitrail as he burns off the excess energy accumulated by waiting fourteen minutes before delivering even one piece of exposition. It turns out that Jane had a temporary restraining order placed against her ex-boyfriend, Red. Sara excitedly points out that Red called Jane thirteen times on the day of her murder; Brass points out that this is thirteen more times than the restraining order permits. Gil takes all this in, and then the three split up: Brass and Sara run off to interview Red Herring, and Warrick collars Gil for some quality mystery-solving time together.
The shot is of a thick, smooth fiber under a magnifying glass. Warrick's explaining that he couldn't find a Becke line. Gil reminds Warrick, "Hair refracts light under cross-polarization; glass doesn't." Warrick connects the dots, concluding that they may have a fiberglass sample right there. Gil's all, "You'll figure it out."
Meanwhile, Brass and Sara go fishing for Red Herring; they find him in his car, parked across the street from his house. Sara and Brass walk over to the car. Brass pulls on a latex glove and goes for his weapon as Sara tells her walkie-talkie, "Control, this is P-9241, requesting back-up and medical assistance." She and Brass walk over -- Red Herring is covered in blood and slumped over the wheel of his vehicle; Brass exhales nervously and Sara goes for her gun. Then Red starts. Brass responds assertively, and Sara jumps back a little, startled. Brass guides Red over to the grass and they establish that yes, he's covered in blood and no, it's not his. It's too bad he doesn't remember how he got the blood on himself. Once Red's in jail duds and talking to Sara and Brass, we establish that Jane was having security issues. Since Jane and Red did not enjoy healthy communication habits, she declined to share why she felt threatened, and Red responded by pounding on her door and screaming at her. Shortly after Red makes a slip-up regarding his pharmacological habits, Catherine walks in to inform us that we've been wasting our time watching this. Where were you when this scene started, Catherine?
It's dusk. Nicky's walking up the sidewalk, reading his mail as he goes and passing by a repairman before entering palatial Stokes Manor. Seriously -- the way Lady Bray was carrying on a few episodes ago, you'd think the CSIs were making so little as to prompt a diet of ketchup soup and ramen, but here Nicky is in a lushly landscaped house. For the record: big-screen television, lots of neatly sorted books, the occasional trophy on the shelves, spotless kitchen. Nicky powers up the laptop, logs on to Internet Online, and learns that he has mail. From someone named Horndog. Clearly, Nicky needs to learn how to install spam fil-- oh, wait. He knows someone named Horndog. And he's thrilled at the prospect of photos. I scan the email text for the usual "must be 18 to click here" disclaimer. Nicky chomps on a sandwich while grinning fondly; we learn that he went to the prom with Horndog, and she's sent photos to remind him of the good times. We see her in various stages of intoxication, then slumped over the toilet, passed out. Nicky stops eating and gapes at the computer screen, stunned by what he sees there. His prom date was in the exact same pose as Jane Galloway.
In the scene, Nicky and Warrick are in the locker room -- Nicky, incidentally, is in a wretched olive pullover, which leads me to conclude that the dry cleaners are losing the wrong clothing -- and they're talking. Warrick asks, "What did your prom date say when you called her?" Probably something a lot more civil than what I would say to mine, were he ever to call me. Nicky explains that "she said she was cleaning out the attic one day, stumbled upon them, and thought she'd send them to me for a laugh." Warrick wonders if Prom Date is a suspect. Nicky shrugs that off with a chuckle: "She lives in Bosnia, man. Maine or something --" It's a long way from New England to the Balkans. I'm just saying. Nicky continues, "She's got three kids. What's she going to do, fly in for murder?" Warrick laughs, then reminds Nicky that stranger things have happened. Nicky brings the foreshadowing with, "I don't know. Something in my gut tells me it isn't right. What if someone from work tapped into my email? Maybe I forgot to log off one day." Warrick dismisses this. Nicky insists, "But Liam's capable of anything! We had one night of -- I've said too much." No, he doesn't really. Nicky insists that he's serious -- there are uncomfortable parallels between Prom Date's pose and Jane's.
Then the plot veers off into pseudo-science. Gil and Brass are walking down the hall, preparing to meet someone who, as Brass says, "was an eyewitness, sort of. He says he had a vision right before Jane Galloway's murder hours before it happened." "He's a psychic?" Gil asks. No, he's a time-traveler with an extremely limited way-back machine. Brass defends the psychic's presence by pointing out that he produced details that weren't on the news or in the press release. The two men walk into the lobby; Gil introduces himself to Mr. Pearson and gets down to business: "Captain Brass tells me you had some sort of vision about Jane Galloway's murder?" Pearson confirms it by saying, "I did...screaming face in a plastic womb." Oh, hell, that's your average trip to Wal-Mart for a family of four. What else have you got, Twitchy? "Blood shower." Anything else? "Three hearts beating very fast, two large, one small." Gil turns to go, asking Brass sotto voce, "This is your eyewitness?" when Pearson calls out, "The dog didn't make it, did it?" We don't know, Twitchy -- we never find out for sure. But Gil's all convinced now.
Catherine and Sara are talking about the last three weeks of Jane's life: she quit her job, she got subscriptions for Valium and Librium, she went on what Sara calls "a frightened woman's shopping spree," buying locks and alarms and other home-security devices. Sara concludes, "Make no mistake: Jane Galloway was being stalked. Emotional terrorism at its finest." Sara's handling this rather calmly, considering her track record with crimes targeted toward women. And frankly, while I'm still feeling horrible for Jane on account of her miserable, terror-filled death, I'm now feeling even worse for this poor fictional character, because she did everything you're supposed to do when being stalked -- changing phone numbers, canceling credit cards, altering routines, heightening personal security -- and it still wasn't enough. What's even more appalling, in my opinion, is that the first anti-stalking statute on the books is only twelve years old (California passed the first one in 1990), and that we didn't have a national statute on the books until 1994 (Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, Public Law 103-322, Title IV, Subtitle B, Chapter 110A, 2261-2266). What the hell took so long? CSI wisely steers clear of that question and returns to Jane's sad case. Sara steels herself and says, "Here's the, uh, worst part. I ran a phone check on all her incoming calls. Guess where they were coming from." Catherine views the log and says, "Inside her house." Creepy!
Back in the psychic plotline, Brass is telling Gil that Pearson happened to be at the Monaco Hotel -- and in an adjoining room to Jane -- the night Jane was murdered. Brass digests this news, and the bamboo flutes and gongs start in again. The camera pans over to Pearson, who's dunking a tea bag in time to the gonging. I half-expect some little kid to materialize and tell Gil, "There is no spoon." We're entering a whole new weird area here. And then we're leaving it to go to commercial.
Back from commercial, Gil, Brass, and Pearson are standing in a hotel room in the Monaco; Pearson is saying, "I didn't know she was your victim." Brass tells us, "According to the front desk, you placed a call to Jane Galloway's room at 9:12 PM? Lasted twenty-one seconds?" Gil's all, "May I ask what you two were talking about?" I love that iron-fist-in-a-velvet-glove approach; nobody ever calls him on it and snots, "Actually, you just did ask, didn't you?" Anyway, Pearson says they talked energy; in a flashback, he called Jane to warn her: "I'm calling from the room. I don't mean to alarm you, but I'm feeling some serious negative energy coming from your room." Jane slams down the phone. Who can blame her? The odds of getting a call like that are pretty slim, unless you're being targeted by telemarketers from Marin County. Pearson notes, "She wouldn't talk to me. I get that a lot." Gil notes that Jane got three calls -- all from Pearson -- and shortly after Jane fled the hotel that night, Pearson also checked out. Gil wants to know why. Pearson says, "Well, she was suffering. And I shared her fear. It seems my intuition was accurate, as it turns out." The soundtrack accentuates this by breaking out some Wyndham Hill Records Presents the Sixth Sense Sonata and making with the otherworldly noises. Pearson caresses the wall and sighs heavily before asking, "You don't believe me, do you?" Gil answers indirectly with, "Mr. Pearson, I am a scientist." Pearson throws back, "I am a clairvoyant. You see science without abstractions. I see visions with abstractions. Am I less credible than you, Mr. Grissom?" Gil, thinking back on the history of science and, concluding that things like phrenology and eugenics really make dowsing and tarot cards look good by comparison, decides to investigate the nature of Pearson's visions. "These visions you've had in the past -- nothing specific triggered them?" We learn that sometimes fear will trigger the visions. Gil asks if Pearson was hoping to somehow heal Jane's fear. Pearson clarifies, "I was only hoping to comfort her. I'm bound by that obligation." Oh, so he's an ethical clairvoyant. I wonder if ethical clairvoyants have a guild where they have meetings and blackball clairvoyants who only use their powers to win lotteries. Then again, wouldn't they all know when someone was...oh, never mind. Gil presses to see if Pearson has any other crime-related visions. Pearson takes a breath; the wifty sonata on bamboo flute kicks in, and then he begins: "Three locks...hanging ghosts, hanging ghosts, chest to back, chest to back, A-frames, wooden beams, church dark." Back in the sixteenth century, Nostradamus shakes his fist at the heavens and screams, "I am a model of clarity to this guy!" But Nostradamus's quatrains never had the benefit of the flashback style -- when we're talking about hanging ghosts, we see a closet, and the A-frame shows us an attic.
Speaking of A-frames, we get a shot of suburbia -- the lack of architectural diversity is stunning -- and then we're at Jane's house. Pearson and his soundtrack walk through the door. Gil closes the front door, then asks, "Are these the three locks you saw?" Pearson confirms that they are, although he recalled them from a much different angle, almost as if someone was looking down when viewing them. Gil and Pearson then walk over to a closet; we confirm that this is what Pearson saw, only from above. Gil looks up at the top of the closet and notices a crawl-space entrance to Jane's attic. Cut to Gil in the attic, noticing that there are a number of holes drilled into the ceiling and labeled with the room location. Reflexively, I look up, despite the fact that I live in an apartment building with no attic. Up in the attic, Gil calls Catherine on her cell phone and bids her to pick a number between two and five, then display it with her fingers. Catherine asks why. You'd think that working with Gil as long as she has would have broken her of that habit. Gil says, "Please, humor me." So Catherine does, holding up four fingers and looking around the empty room. Gil's voice floats out, tinny and disembodied, with, "Four. Thank you." Catherine looks understandably freaked out. Gil shares with her the secret of Jane's stalker -- the bedroom closet had a door to the attic. Before Catherine can join him, Gil notices the insulation. He decides to kill two birds with one stone by using the stalker's phone-tapping equipment to call Warrick and tell him that the blonde fiber is insulation.
Catherine comes up, and Gil says angrily, "Guess what? He tapped into her second line. And he's got a peephole in every room in her house. They're labeled." Catherine peers down into the bathroom; Pearson looks back up at her with an expression halfway between anguish and resignation. Catherine says, "Gil, there's a --" "That's Mr. Pearson. He's our psychic," Gil says. Catherine just nods. Gil theorizes, "You know, I don't think this thing was about sex at all. I think it was about control. Voyeurism. Jane was like his, uh, little goldfish." Or worse -- Jane was the stalker's version of reality TV. Y'all just know that once Real World 25: Plano has aired, the Bunim-Murray empire is going to decide that StalkerTV is the untapped reality niche, and dedicate a show to following a stalker around as he snoops on seven people who stopped being polite and started getting real. It's only a matter of time. Anyway, Catherine wonders why the stalker left his digital camera with fiber-optic lens, night-vision goggles, digital recorder, and other assorted gadgetry in the attic. Then Gil and Catherine abandon that question in favor of wondering how the stalker got in. The attic is out; Gil hypothesizes, "It's possible that at some point, Jane let him in." Catherine and Gil skip on out to the roof -- where the satellite dish is in plain sight -- and Catherine wonders, "Who do we let into our homes every day?" Gil looks around at the profusion of servicemen in the neighborhood and says, "If you've got a uniform on, you can walk through the front door." That's usually because the person on the other side has been waiting for four hours since the alleged appointment time and by this point is so desperate for digital cable/broadband Internet/the resumption of basic electricity or plumbing that they've lost all critical thinking faculties. Catherine figures that the team can go through Jane's bills and see which utilities came to her house.
We go to a montage of the team members asking separate utilities workpeople God knows what. Then Nicky and Warrick are walking up to a house with a cable van in the driveway. Nicky's all, "Luna Cable! Good company -- same as mine. A hundred and fifty channels. I'm telling you, you've got to get it, man. The last three weeks have been heaven." Nicky is, like, the only person in America who doesn't actively hate his cable company. Warrick declines to comment as the two men head up the stairs and knock on the cable guy's door. When the cable guy failed to materialize in 0.94 seconds, Nicky opens the unlocked door and calls out, "Mr. Crane?" Just then, Warrick's cell phone rings; owing to crappy reception, Warrick peels off and heads back to the stairs, leaving Nicky to enter the seemingly empty house all by himself. Nicky, whose 150-channel package apparently didn't include any channels that ever aired horror movies, blithely trips inside, shouting, "Mr. Crane, your door's open! Just want to ask you a couple of questions." As Nicky winds his way further inside the near-empty house, Warrick turns his back to the door and tells whomever he's speaking with, "I can hardly hear you. We're at the satellite guy's house that installed Jane's cable." (Note: This is the point where a friend of mine turned to me and said, "You recap the show. Why on earth would a satellite company be installing cable?" I couldn't answer, since I was hung up on wondering why Warrick said "satellite guy...that installed" as opposed to the correct "satellite guy...who." Frankly, I have no good answer to either question.) Nicky, meanwhile, notices a trail of dark red splotches. He whips out the latex gloves and opens the kitchen cabinet where the trail ends. The cabinet houses a recycling bin; music in the background begins to swell ominously, and not just because the guy mixed his plastics with his aluminums. As Nicky continues to look for the source of the trail, the camera zooms over to the pantry, where someone is lowering themselves to floor level silently. Just as Nicky finds a pair of latex gloves covered in hair dye, he hears a noise and looks up.
Cut to a shot of Warrick -- still facing away from the house and still jawjacking on the cell phone -- hearing the tinkle of breaking glass and turning his head just in time to see Nicky go flying out the window. He shouts, "Nick!" -- undoubtedly deafening whomever he was on the phone with -- and pulls his gun before heading into the house. Then he bolts out, pulling out his walkie-talkie and blurting, "Patrol, I need immediate back-up. Officer down, officer down. I need emergency medical assistance." Then he takes off, shouting Nicky's name and hoping to God he's not going to be ribbed back at CSICentral for his unfortunate habit of leaving people alone in houses while he carries on elsewhere. Warrick ends up over by Nicky's sprawled form, repeating his name and looking up as if expecting an explanation for what just happened to come flying out the window as well.
After the commercial, Nicky lies unmoving in a hospital bed, probably thinking that the defenestration demonstration he and Gil did has taken on a whole new relevance. A doctor checks on him, then comes out to tell the rest of the CSIs that Nicky's got a concussion, two cracked ribs, a sprained wrist, and stitches to the forehead. Everyone looks taken aback. Warrick -- who is looking plenty guilt-ridden, which leads me to suspect that he's thinking about Holly Gribbs, even if nobody else is -- asks if Nicky will be all right. The doctor says Nicky can go home soon, and Gil -- who's also looking somewhat concerned, which surprises me given how he usually treats Nicky -- thanks the doctor. She takes off, and Warrick whips out the cat-o-nine tails for some self-flagellation. Gil reasons, "You helped out Nick. That was the right thing to do." Warrick replies that it sure doesn't feel like the right thing. Catherine decides that the sympathy portion of the evening is over and points out, "You know, Nick was alone. The stalker could have killed him and didn't." Gil's wondering why. Warrick's wondering if he can pick up a hair shirt. Gil and Catherine decide to head over to Crane's house. Warrick says, "I'm coming with you." Gil says, "No, no. You need to calm down a little. Talk to Nick when he wakes up. And go to the men's room -- I think I saw Liam run in there, sobbing hysterically, when he heard Nicky was injured." Okay, so I made part of that quote up. Sara and Warrick are left standing in the hospital hallway, shifting uneasily from foot to foot.
Back at Casa de Cable Guy, we find out we're dealing with one Nigel Crane, age 37, a cable company employee for eleven years. Gil says Nigel has no immediate family; in Seattle, two effete psychiatrists sniff, "That's what we want you to think." Anyway, Nigel's a loner. What a surprise. Naturally, Catherine and Gil are wandering around Casa de Cable Guy in the dark. Catherine shines her Maglite in a corner and observes, "Not a stick of furniture except a computer and a chair." Gil -- who apparently does not think, "Gosh, I'm wandering around alone in a house where a colleague was also wandering around alone until he was attacked. What are the odds of it happening twice?" -- wanders off into the kitchen. He heads toward the pantry, flips on the light, and notices the door to the crawl space. He pulls himself up into the dark attic. Man, Gil has no sense of self-preservation whatsoever. Does he expect Catherine to come running in to rescue him every time his curiosity overtakes his caution? Anyway, Gil hoists himself into the attic, which is crammed with the accoutrements of daily living. Although the powers that be have eschewed the usual Hollywood decor de pathologique -- lots of Francis Bacon prints, journals filled with crabbed handwriting, assorted biological odds and ends floating in mason jars, collages, et cetera -- they do include a pan over Crane's extensive video library and his videocamera.
Meanwhile, Catherine's rifling through the same recycle bin where Nicky met Crane. Suddenly, Gil drops down through the pantry, scaring the bejesus out of her. Gil ignores Catherine's jump and startled rebuke ("What the hell?!") to babble excitedly, "He lives up there! Not down here. Works, sleeps, changes his clothes, everything in the attic. He looks down on the world, separating himself from others. Fascinating, really." Catherine's got her own news -- showing Gil the gloves. Gil turns to her: "Dinner and a movie?"
Cut to Gil and Catherine commencing the Nigel Crane Film Festival. The first tape is a perambulatory meditation on the denizens of the Strip: "Walking pukes. Soulless, lost, useless, sick puppets. Little sheep looking for direction. Gullible." The tape does a sloppy cut to the Nigel Nostril Shot, and Nigel ruminates, "From an airplane, they used to look like ants. And now...they're all ants, all the time. You squash one." Gil looks repelled. Catherine sighs without taking her eyes off the screen and notes dolefully, "Just think -- this is only tape one." Gil looks back at her unhappily, then says, "I've trained for this. I've seen Magnolia." Oh, no, he doesn't either. But it's in his face.
Meanwhile, the doctor wasn't kidding when she said Nicky could go home soon -- he's being released now. I can just see the doctor shaking her head and explaining, "Don't blame me, blame your HMO." Anyway, she's giving Nicky a rundown on the perils of Vicodin, then leaving him to be wheeled out to the car by Sara after instructions that Nicky's not to work for at least a week. Sara thanks the doctor and begins pushing Nicky down the hall. Nicky's slumped over in the chair and seeming understandably less amiable than normal when he asks about the gloves he found. Warrick tells him, "Catherine thinks he might have gotten away with them. But we did find a wacky video collection." Nicky asks, "Of what?" Sara chides him for even thinking about work; it's really cute, especially given their history of talking about work versus not-work.
Back at Hour 17 of the Nigel Crane Film Festival, Gil is looking as though he's conducting an internal debate. Subject: "Do I keep watching, or do I permanently blind myself?" Catherine peers at the screen; it's night-goggle footage of Jane Galloway sleeping as Nigel intones, "I see you, Jane." Whatever. These guys think they're all interesting and twisted and different; then they open their mouths, and what issues forth is less than stunning: "Do you feel me? You will never get me. No. Not the way he does." Sara and Warrick come in, apprise Gil and Catherine of Nicky's condition ("Groggy," says Sara), get the world's shortest film review ("Epic," says Catherine), then settle into watching more Nigel. I am stunned that no one's thought to bring in popcorn. Catherine looks back over at the film and notices something; she bids Archie to zoom in on it -- and everyone looks up to see Nicky's smiling mug, circled in red pen. Catherine says, "That's our crime-stopper article." Gil asks, "Isn't our newsletter in-house only?" He says this like he's surprised that someone who lived in another person's attic wouldn't have logistical difficulties getting his hands on a newsletter. I bet Nigel's the one who wrote the letter of commendation to begin with. ["I assumed that, too, and was surprised it wasn't confirmed later." -- Sars]
Warrick begins putting pieces together, saying, "He may know him well enough to read his email." Sara picks up the thread: "Found that photo of his prom date. Used Jane Galloway to emulate the photo?" Gil is confounded: "Why would he do that? Why Nick?" Why is Gil asking? Does he think there are other people in the department more deserving of stalking? And why is nobody asking, "Why Jane?" She let the cable guy into her house, same as Nick, and yet nobody's puzzled over why he'd stalk and kill her. The CSIs catch up to the obvious as they remember that Nicky has cable. Gil gets a bright idea -- skip to the end of the film festival and see what the most recent bulletins from Nigel's cranium are. Tense, time-is-running-out piano music starts up as Gil hands Archie a tape; Catherine begins to look worried.
Nigel's face fills the giant screen as he earnestly explains, "It's like, he's, he's the kind of guy I always wanted to, um, to be." Well, Gil, you've got your answer. Maybe if you're so inclined later, you can go back and see why Nigel picked Jane too. Nigel continues, "And, and that's why it's so great, because we're friends now. I feel like I can count on him, you know?" Catherine looks concerned, yet steely. Gil is now looking openly skeptical -- either he's thinking, "Who really thinks like this?" or he's wondering, "This guy wants to be Nicky? Why doesn't anyone want to be me?" Sara and Warrick both look quite concerned as Nigel stammers on tape, "I-I think if it came down to it, he would lay down his life for me. Ask him. Ask-ask Nick." Catherine turns around to gape at Gil, who's looking disgusted with the tape. Onscreen, Nigel asks earnestly, "Nick. Would you let me stop your heart?"
Right then, the camera zooms in on a shot of Nicky's Vicodin bottle as Nicky shakes out two and swallows them, wincing. I'm kind of amazed that he was left alone, but I guess it's possible if he was insistent, or if the lab really needed Warrick, Sara, Catherine, Gil, or Liam. Just as Nicky's eased his aching self down onto his couch, there's a polite, urgent tap at the door. It's Pearson, calling out, "My name is Pearson. Morris Pearson. We haven't met. I worked with Mr. Grissom on the Jane Galloway case." Nicky pushes himself up, chiding Mr. Morrison for coming by at 1 AM, but letting him in anyway. Pearson says he's had more visions, and implores Nicky to let him in. As it turns out, the first vision Pearson had was of Nicky's address (fortunate, since I was wondering how he got there), and then things get a little more spooky -- Pearson begin pacing around in agitation, saying, "I see falling and crashing, somebody seeing through the back of his head. I don't know. I don't know. Green tea! Green tea! Does that mean anything to you? Green tea." Nicky -- who, I should point out, is currently whacked out on Vicodin -- is struggling to make sense of this and formulate a reply when his cell phone rings. Blearily, he picks it up. Gil says, "He's been in your house." "Who?" asks Nicky, who is, as I pointed out a sentence ago, currently dozy with drugs, as well as deaf to viewers screaming, "There's a stalker in your house!" Gil clarifies that Nigel Crane's been to Nicky's house; he's loping through the Labitrail as he talks to Nick, flanked by the concerned-looking Catherine, Sara, and Warrick. We learn that Brass is coming over with two uniforms to keep Nicky company; Nicky replies that he's already got company in the form of a psychic. Gil tells Nicky to keep Pearson there. Nicky would -- except that Pearson appears to have disappeared.
So Nicky pulls a gun from a drawer in a hall table and does a careful circuit of the house. Regrettably, Nicky's safety circuit is for naught, as the dead Pearson and the live Nigel wreck his ceiling by crashing through it. Conveniently enough, they land on a rug with a green T in the center -- poor Pearson not only detected danger for Nicky, he saw his own death. Nicky, unfortunately, drops his gun in the fracas. As he tries to go for it, Nigel says amiably, "You gotta watch who you let in here. The guy was snooping all over the place." Nigel gets the gun first: "Smart move -- spare gun. Keeping it right by the phone, right? Near your address book and takeout menus." Nicky tells Nigel the cops are on the way. Nigel's busy running around closing the shades as he says, "Yeah. I heard that." Nicky finally notices that Nigel's wearing his clothes. Nigel's speech patterns, plus his black haircut and general presentation, remind me of Hecubus. I half expect Sir Simon Milligan to fall out of the ceiling, screaming, "I am a man possessed by many demons. Polite demons that would open the door for a lady carrying too many parcels, but demons nonetheless!"
But we're not in The Pit of Ultimate Darkness; we're in Nicky's house with him and Nigel, and Nigel's working up to the usual "I'm sorry, but I'm going to have to kill you now" monologue. It goes like this: "I picked [your clothes] up at the dry cleaners and I hope you don't mind, it's just that, I just get a little confused about what's yours and what's mine." Nicky mentions that he's confused to -- and understandably so. He asks Nigel, "When did we meet?" Nigel looks wounded to the core: "Sports package. One hundred and fifty channels. I even threw in a few movies channels free. We talked for, like, forever. It's like I knew you my entire life." Nick finally begins to connect the dots: "You installed my cable." Nigel confirms that, then goes on, "The minute I met you, I knew we connected, because you told me what you did, and I knew exactly what you were talking about, because that's what I do. I do it too. You know, I observe people. I notice everything about them. I watch them all the time." Nicky, still connecting dots: "Like you watched Jane Galloway?" Nigel doesn't answer yes or no. Instead, he says, "Jane was cool. But it never would have worked out between us, you know. Never. I mean, she had a boyfriend, and she was kind of stuck-up. And you know what? She would have totally, totally gotten between us. So, you know, consider that...a gift." Nicky's struggling to follow the line of logic here. Nigel clarifies, "Prom night. Your date, Melissa. Bent over the toilet puking her guts out. Is that ringing any bells?" Wait a minute -- Nigel's under the impression that Nicky needs to work out issues stemming from a bad prom date? No, no, no. Carrie White needed to work out issues stemming from a bad prom date; Nicky's basically like the rest of America in that he went to prom with someone who got hammered, and probably drank himself into that state as well.
Nigel carries on about how he knows how much Nicky loves redheads, and says, "You know, you mentioned her name in your sleep." Nicky's a little creeped out that Nigel watched him sleep. Nigel, thinking that he should keep the chatter light, beckons to poor, dead Pearson and asks conversationally, "You want to open him up?" Nicky, never taking his eyes off Nigel, hunkers down to Pearson and says, "No, no. That's not my job. That's a coroner's gig. You should know that." Nigel asks edgily, "Are you humoring me, Nick?" Nicky, barely audible, says no. Nigel's not paying attention anyway; he wants to tell Nicky, "We made friends that day, and every time since, you just blew me off." Flash to Nicky passing Nigel as he read his mail, and when he went into the house with Warrick. Nigel begins ranting: "You are so self-absorbed. I was right in front of your face. Manners, Nick! MANNERS!" Nicky, correctly sensing that this situation needs calming down, appeals to Nigel to focus on the dead body and work with him; Nigel wants to do no such thing. Instead, he points a gun at Nick's face and begins babbling about what a 9MM slug does to a skull at close range. Nicky, to his credit, says calmly, "I don't want to disappoint you, Nigel. But this isn't the first time I've had a gun in my face." Then he gets a little emotional -- he's still calm, but he's tearing up as he asks in a near-whisper, "How do you want this to end, Nigel?" The other man, his gun hand trembling, asks, "How do I want this to end? I want you to be able to remember my name." Then he more or less guarantees that Nicky will never forget by turning the gun on himself. The two men wrestle for the weapon, but then the cavalry arrives. Brass pulls aside the heavily-breathing, heavily-freaked-out Nicky and paternally reassures him, "It's done, it's done." Nicky, who is deep-breathing in what looks to be an effort to not burst into tears, can only gasp, "Yeah."
Cut to Nigel in the tank, repeating over and over in a monotone, "I am one and who am I?" In the other room, the five CSIs watch him; everyone is arrayed around Nicky. As they watch, Nicky asks, "Why me?" Gil offers his usual brand of comfort with, "I don't think it was about you, Nick. Or Jane Galloway for that matter. I think it was more about Maslow's hierarchy of needs." See what I mean about the Grissomian brand of comfort? Gil continues, "[Maslow's] premise is that social beings strive to belong. In Nigel's mind, Jane Galloway was someone he could control, which was okay for a while, but you...you were someone he could actually become. See, Maslow's fifth tier of the hierarchy is self-actualization. The problem for Nigel is that you would have to die in order for that to happen, or else he would." There's a moment of silence as Nigel heads toward the one-way mirror. Sara breaks the quiet with, "Twenty-five years to life, Nick. It's over." Nick corrects her: "It's not over for me. It's over to Jane Galloway." The rest of the CSIs file out, leaving Nick to watch Nigel continue falling apart before his eyes. The show ends with Nigel asking, "Who am I?"