The show eschews the normal shots of neon to give us a moody, sun-rises-over-Vegas shot. It's too bad it's an aerial shot and therefore too far away to see the gangs of people standing on the sidewalk pressing Dial-A-Hooker pamphlets into the sweaty palms of passersby, and the drunks stumbling up the street weakly saying, "Vegas! Woo! Omigod, omigod, I shouldn't have had the steak and eggs. Or those four giant Eiffel tower daqui -- BLEARGH."
So then we go from the shot of the strip through an aerial tour of the relentlessly bland suburbs to a construction site. The camera gets all arty as it lingers on the sight of a nail driven into a board.
From over on the couch, I get harassed with:
MABELL: Aren't you spending an awful lot of time writing about a nail?
ME: It's not just the nail. It's --
MR. SOBELL: There was a shot, and then there was a shot, and now there's a nail.
MABELL: I see.
MR. SOBELL: Yep. You're watching the sausage being made now. Shot by shot.
MABELL: And to think, by 10 PM tomorrow night, I might actually find out how this ends.
So. Someone nails the nail, and then we see someone sawing, and someone using a measuring tape, and then there's drilling and stapling, and it's all making me really want to head back to Home Depot and get a few more power tools, because I could so totally use one of those laser-sighted levelers, and maybe a stud finder.
Some non-hardhat-wearing guy goes wandering into an unfinished room ("OSHA would close them down in a heartbeat," snorts Mabell) and sees a body lying on the floor. He drops the box and calls, "Boss! Boss! We got a problem." Boss gets off the ladder, and we see that it's David Silver. I think the job site's problems have been compounded.
Within mere seconds, the place has been festooned with crime scene tape, and Gil is ducking some of it to enter the crime scene. He looks like he's taken the appellation "bug-man" to heart and found the pair of sunglasses that most makes him look like a fly. Gil finally walks into the room -- i.e. an unfinished structure hung with plastic sheeting, which makes me, 1980s MTV viewer, automatically look for a one-hit-wonder rock band because I'm conditioned to expect videos in settings like this. Anyway, Brass is sitting on his haunches. They both look at the body -- a teenaged male lying prone, with his pants around his knees and a lot of blood around his head. Gil takes the glass-half-full approach with, "Well, clean surfaces make for clean analyses." Brass thinks that's probably the only bright spot in this tableau, as the dead kid has no ID on him and he was killed some time this weekend. Gil hunkers down and notices a piece of red fabric clutched in the kid's hand; Brass asks if Gil's going to pry the cloth out of the kid's hand. Gil's going to wait on that. Brass asks if Gil has any ideas on what happened. Gil replies, "Well, based on the pants around the knees, I would say a crime of passion. Given the brutality of it, it seems to me an act of rage."
“ I liked it when these smartypantses explained how they knew stuff, because then, plot advancement also doubled as character development, like when we found out Nicky mainlines the Discovery Channel. ”
The Who are pretty mellow when they ask us who we are. No rage there.
Brass goes out to talk to a cranky construction foreman type, who grouses that he spends an hour a day picking up cigarette butts and beer bottles, since These Darn Kids think any house that's not nailed shut belongs to them. Brass is all, "Well, it's a crime scene, so it belongs to us now," and the foreman points out that he and his teenaged kids are the ones taking it in the shorts thanks to the job site closing down, as opposed to those good-for-nothing boozing-and-smoking kids. Brass mumbles something to the effect that virtue is its own reward.
Warrick and Sara have showed up to work the scene with Gil. Gil raises his eyebrows and bids his underlings, "Take a look at his head. Tell me what you see." Sara leans down and says, "Well, I see he's got some fabulous volume at the roots, and whatever conditioner he's using, it's moisturizing the ends while letting him control his natural waves." Gil and Warrick cough and stare pointedly at her scalp. Oh, they do no such thing. But they should: whoever thought it was a good idea to beat Sara's hair into submission should be checked into a 12-step program for straightening products. Warrick checks out the gaping hole behind the kid's ear and decrees, "Definitely blunt force." Sara adds, "That's a hammer head." Gil's all, "I thought you might say that." But why? Because Sara's an expert on Sears Craftsman-related homicides? Because she's been reading up on them in some forensics journal? I liked it when these smartypantses explained how they knew stuff, because then, plot advancement also doubled as character development, like when we found out Nicky mainlines the Discovery Channel. Anyway, Gil says they all know people commit crimes in familiar places. Sara gives him a look and wanders out into the hall. She turns her head as she goes, and her hair tries to move, but her hair is so dully straight, it defies normal forces. Man, if she got her hair chemically straightened, she should sue; that hair looks terrible. However, that won't matter to the mob of construction men awaiting Sara's fine forensic touch. Sara turns back to Gil and snaps, "You got to be kidding me." Gil indicates that he is not. Is he trying to cure Sara of her crush on him through extraordinarily tough love? Like, "Oh, sure, Sara -- you'll hate getting harassed now, but you'll thank me in the long run." Gil continues snapping pictures while Warrick decides to swab blood and make sure it's all the dead kid's. The two of them work in relative quiet until Warrick points out a bloody footprint. Gil's pleased by the discovery.
Meanwhile, Sara's off getting sexually harassed by the guy who found the body. Well, people do cope with shock in various ways -- maybe after a long day of saying idiot things like "I'll trade you a hammer for a screw," the guy heads home, drops a bath bomb in the tub, and eats spoonfuls of Chunky Monkey between the sobs.
“ Do none of these people listen to opera? This is precisely the kind of tragic situation that leads to the object of their affections staggering around downstage left while singing that they're dying. Only in this case, Marlene's having too much trouble breathing to manage a middle C, much less a complete aria. ”
Nicky's working solo on the B-plot. We see what looks like an interrupted move in progress -- "Look, honey! It's our move," I crack, since we did have the cops come along at one point, the cats did carry on as if we were murdering them, and I believe someone whose name might or might not rhyme with "oh, hell" may have exchanged a few homicidal threats with someone whose name might or might not rhyme with "Blister! Oh, hell." However, our move only required the presence of uniforms and not Det. Vega and Emergency Backup David. Also, we eventually spoke to each other again, whereas the woman lying dead on the ground with a gunshot wound to the chest will be doing no such thing. Nicky's all, "Do we know who shot her?" No, genius, it's the 9:09 mark. Vega says he patted down Marlene Mitchell's friends, and nobody's packing heat; he adds that she was breaking up a fight when she went down. Nicky makes sure nobody saw or heard anything. Vega says nobody did, and Nicky says confidently, "Somebody's lying." We see that Marlene's current and ex-husbands happen to be hanging around. Vega explains, "The Mitchells were moving in. The ex stopped by to say hi." Nicky asks, "Don't you hate it when hello leads to gunfire?" Oh, God, so many jokes, not enough time -- the NRA and their difficulty getting the UPS guy to deliver, the hazards of dating snipers, the perils of hitting on someone in a concealed-weapon permit state. I could go on. Y'all pick your own. Nicky heads out to GSR the husband and the ex. The husband's none too sanguine: "You think I shot my wife the day after our honeymoon?" Well, shooting her before it would be a waste of nonrefundable tickets. We establish that they were moving Marlene's stuff when the ex, Todd, decided to come by and violate his 100-yard restraining order in the name of happy housewarming. Naturally, this led to a wrestling match, and Marlene headed over to break it up. Do none of these people listen to opera? This is precisely the kind of tragic situation that leads to the object of their affections staggering around downstage left while singing that they're dying. Only in this case, Marlene's having too much trouble breathing to manage a middle C, much less a complete aria. Meanwhile, in the background, Vega is saying, "Yes, but there's a restraining order. You shouldn't be here. Now come here while I slap you on the wrist." Or something to that effect.
Now Gil has seen fit to handle the cloth. He lets a bloodhound sniff it while the handler orders, "Distinguish...are you ready to run?" Gil looks up and says lightly, "She does all my running for me." It is unclear to me whether he's referring to the dog, or to the dour-looking Sara who's making a face like she just checked out her hair for the first time. Anyway, the dog whines urgently and the handler, Sara, and another uniform take off. The dog leads them to a nearby mall, as they're heading down a conveniently stopped escalator, Sara comments that it's a "hell of a place to get lost." Sara should just be glad it's not Black Friday, or else she'd be wading through a crowd of people all edgy from the mob scenes at their local Wal-Mart. The handler explains, "We have five million olfactory receptors. Penny's got 220 million. She sees the world differently." What follows a Penny's-eye view of the world: all shades of gray, with the trail she's following in vivid red and other exciting odors swirling in different colors. Well, they got the dog spectrum mostly right: dog eyes are different from human eyes in that the central retina of the canine eye contains only about 20 percent cones, or visual receptor cells sensitive to color, compared to the 100 percent cones in the center of the human retina, and only two different cone types (it's called a dichromat) compared to the three humans have, with each cone type mapping to a different photopigment sensitive to a specific light wavelength. Researchers think dogs see like a deuteranope, or someone who's red-green colorblind, and therefore see mostly in yellows, blues, and grays. (Neitz, J., Geist, T., and Jacobs, G. H. (1989). "Color Vision in the Dog." Visual Neuroscience, 10, 119-125. ) So I'm kind of bummed Penny's not going through a mall decorated for the holidays, because I'd love to see how a dog sees the usual color scheme.