High and Low

The show opens in Vegas, which should surprise nobody at this point in its history. Someone impossibly hip is busy singing about how they woke up with a head full of snow, a phrase which is either a metaphor for modernist alienation or an allusion to some sort of controlled substance. Then we see the skater punks who are busy scraping the paint off the handrails of Las Vegas's civic accessibility ramps with their little stunts. As one guy prepares to do something that will undoubtedly leave him sterile if he screws up, the other offers encouragement via "Don't puss out on me!" When did that become acceptable to CBS's standards and practices department? And when did I become old enough to begin entertaining the opinion that network censors are too lenient? That's kind of horrifying.

However, my encroaching old age is nowhere near as horrifying as what happens onscreen, namely, a body falling from the sky and landing on the plaza by the skaters' feet. Quoth the skater: "Oh, my God." It's an appropriate sentiment; in the following shot, we see that the falling man glanced off something on his way downward, as his right side is pulverized relative to his left. A crew of paramedics is wheeling an empty stretcher away from the body; I have no doubt that it's all part of protocol to check and make sure the person's still alive, but there's something faintly ludicrous about the sight of a bunch of EMTs rolling out the stretcher, looking down, confirming that the guy is dead, and rolling the stretcher back again. As the EMTs clear the scene, Nicky and Warrick stride up. Nicky quips, "We beat Grissom here? That's a first." "Maybe for you," Warrick replies, blissfully unaware that he's talking himself into a starring role in Nicky's latest Rage Diary entry. Brass greets the boys with the cheerful news that the jumper's a John Doe. Nicky assesses the pile of broken parts John Doe is currently comprised of, and concludes, "That's the least of his problems." Nicky needs to think about the wisdom of pointing out the obvious, especially around his coworkers. Brass checks out the building -- done in a relentlessly bland civic style -- and wonders if it's a six-story building. Warrick says, "Six stories, sixty stories, it's not how you fall, it's how you land." In other words, the fall isn't what killed this guy; it was the sudden stop. Nicky notes, "If he landed headfirst, there should be more blood." Warrick adds, "And more brain matter." Just then, Gil's disembodied voice rings out: "He didn't jump." Okay -- either Gil's learned to throw his voice, he's developed long-range telepathy skills, he's been assumed into Heaven and is now solving crimes from beyond the veil (and won't Horatio be jealous?), or...wait. It's only a walkie-talkie. For what it's worth, it takes Warrick and Nicky a moment to figure out where the voice of Gil is coming from too. At least they don't check for a burning bush first.

It turns out that Gil's somehow stealthily made it up to the roof already, and has been peering down at his crew for some time. We see Gil running his flashlight over the ledge at the top of the roof, where John Doe apparently deposited a few pints of blood and a spare body part or four before heading down to the plaza. Gil quips, "It's never the fall that kills you."

And we go to The Who. Wow, that was a howler of a parting shot on the teaser. I'm disappointed.

Aprs-commercials, we're back at the plaza, which is now clear of all but two figures. I can't believe there wouldn't be a crowd attracted by the lights from the dozen or so rescue vehicles present in the pre-commercial scene, or a reporter who's got access to a police scanner poking around the place, or random skate rats coming back out after their friends text-messaged them about the dead guy. The crowd control methods the LVPD uses must be brutally efficient. The camera pans back up again, and we see Gil up on the roof. Nicky approaches, shines a flashlight over the big splotch of red, and says, "Rain or not, I'm not finding any shoe prints." Rain? What is the point of setting the show in the desert city of Las Vegas when you're building the plots around a Seattle-like climate? Gil points out, "High-velocity spatter usually implies a gunshot." Nicky shakes his head and shares that he's not found the usual bits of evidence that accompany a shooting. Gil begins forming Hypothesis B: "Severe head trauma. It happened before the fall." The bits and pieces of brain matter on the rooftop ledge might support that theory. Nicky thinks Gil's on to something and asks, "Hand-to-hand combat?" Gil thinks not: "Kill and dump." We see a flashback of this likely scenario, but it misses the part where John Doe's head bounces off the ledge on its way down. As the body falls, the Osmont Cam kicks in, and Warrick "watches" -- or rather, imagines -- it falling down. The camera cuts out the funny stuff and we're left with Warrick standing by the body, imagining its trajectory from roof to plaza. Warrick begins taking pictures, and hones in on the grains that are trapped in the guy's pants cuff. Emergency Backup David comes over, they exchange greetings, and Warrick says, "I think the prints are out. Bones burst right through the skin." David picks up the bloody, droopy hand and says, "Compound fracture of the long bones, including the phalanges, and extensive laceration." Warrick asks about making an ID from dental records, and David opens the non-wrecked-by-meeting-the-pavement part to conclude that there might be enough to work with. Before they can get too excited about dental potential, Warrick notices the tattoo on the guy and says, "You might have something else to work with. Check out that artwork." David positions it for optimal photography, Warrick snaps a photo, and we all have a flash of insight that the tattoo will end up being important to the case.

Meanwhile, Catherine and Buzz are at a tacky stucco bar that actually looks like it belongs in a desert town. Buzz is providing exposition tonight, telling Catherine, "Wallet was with the vic -- money, cards, IDs. Roger Edmonds. Car's his too." The two of them finally reach Roger, and Catherine notes how he's got a single gunshot wound to the chest. It's quite massive, and the unburned gunpowder indicates that Roger was shot at close range. Catherine also notes how the car door was closed but not locked; she and Buzz ponder whether Roger was in a hurry to get into the car, or to get out. As Catherine walks around the car, looking for clues as to what happened, she notices a smudge of dried blood and hair on the upper left-hand corner of the license plate. "Maybe the victim got a piece of the perp," she muses. Buzz tells Catherine, "Waitress phoned it in," and Catherine looks startled for no reason whatsoever.

Cut to the waitress -- a pretty actress whom they've uglified Hollywood-style by putting her hair in a sloppy ponytail. That move's right up there with putting a pair of Larry King-style spectacles on a girl to signify that she's ugly/cerebral/nerdy, or making the actress walk around in a baggy shirt because she's supposed to be fat or dumpy. Girls with bad hair have lousy jobs and poor social pedigrees! Thank you, Hollywood, for pointing that out! Anyway, the waitress snits, "I gotta get out of here, okay. My kid's with a sitter, and it's not like this gig covers daycare." Wow, if Catherine weren't already on this case, that line would have brought her in like a tractor beam. Catherine instantly attempts bonding: "Yeah, I know what that's like. I got a kid at home myself." The waitress snits some more with, "Now we're, like, related?" Catherine's undeterred, and bonds through empathy: "You know what? Get it off your chest. It sucks. You're living for everybody but yourself. But you know what? You're still breathing." Well. That magnificently banal speech has blown down the barriers of weary cynicism, and now the waitress is ready to share. "So, I'm out here busing tables, and I hear loud voices. It's nothing new around here, pretty routine for this part of town. And it's like a bomb goes off, I thought I was deaf." Here, the waitress is alluding to the point in the flashback where she heard the shooting. She continues, per Buzz's prompt, "Then one guy's on the ground, and the other guy's taking off. No, I didn't see his face." Nor did the waitress catch the shooter's license plate, but she can tell Catherine that the vehicle in question was a pickup with a camper top on it. After rolling her eyes some more, the waitress finally gets around to the real relevant information: "Roger was a regular, okay. Draft beer. Tonight he's drinking JD straight up, six in an hour. If you ask me, he was looking for trouble." Catherine gets that startled look again. I have no idea why.

Back on the rooftop, click, click, click, we're looking at evidence with CSI Nick, checking turbines for stray clues, or helpful prints from strangers' shoes. Nicky walks over to Gil, saying, "I've been searching high and low for a blunt object, a crowbar, brick, something like that. Nothing. But I did find this crack pipe. I'll get it back to the lab and see if I can get some prints off it." As Nicky's talking, Gil squints, focuses his flashlight on the pipe, and we get the Distorto Sound Effect indicating that Gil's hearing is taking a little break right now. We hear Nicky's voice fading as he says, "This roof's not that accessible, you know" He turns his head, oblivious to Gil squinting intently at him, and his voice fades even further as he continues, "Besides, who's going to come up here just to get high, you know. Don't you think?" Interestingly enough, the closed captioning reads something completely different from what Nick said. Talk about your situational irony. As Nicky turns back to Gil, there's a sharp popping sound, and Gil attempts to cover for his confusion by saying loudly, "Swab it, print it, bag it. See if you can find out who smoked it." Nicky gives Gil an extremely confused look -- either because he said he was going to do so in the moment where only his mouth was moving, or because Gil seemed to completely ignore his question. Gil walks off, leaving Nicky to wanly call after him, "Ohhh-kay?"