The CSI Trilogy: Las Vegas

This episode opens in a security office, as cameras show a woman frantically trying to escape from someone. You’d think that she was safe once she reached the elevator, but no, after a group of drunks get on with her and press all the buttons, she flees to the stairs rather than waiting around. I don’t know, unless there’s a bomb about to go off, it seems like that’s a pretty safe place to be.

The fleeing girl heads for the lobby and then runs out the front door, putting on her shoes and then being attacked by a woman who stays just out of frame so as to prevent us from being able to identify anything but her long dark wavy hair.

Also she seems to be wearing a dress and carrying a purse. But it’s not on the camera, so the cops don’t know anything yet. The hooker is dead on the ground with her throat slashed, but the CSIs can’t start investigating because they don’t know where Larry Fishburne is. I thought there was a rest of the team, but whatever.

The CSI Trilogy: New York

Okay, admission time – I’ve never watched CSINY. I caught the crossover episode of Miami, and I think I saw one episode where they had to find a rat that had eaten evidence out of a corpse or something like that, but other than that, I’ve got no idea. So you’ll have to bear with me, since I don’t know any of the characters’ names or have any idea about their relationships, this might be a little rough as reviews go.

So let’s start!

A trucker, played by the man who killed Brandon Lee, is driving somewhere with a person locked in his cab. What this has to do with the punk and the missing girl from Miami, I’ve got no idea. But presumably it’ll be explained soon. At the same time a jealous dick is driving over to his ex-wife’s house, and causes an accident because he’s too busy drunkenly arguing to notice that a truck had swerved through the concrete divider onto his side of the bridge. The trucker was distracted by his victim escaping from a poorly-padlocked cupboard, FYI.

So he’s good at killing Brandon Lee, but bad at taking hostages. Good to know.

The CSI Trilogy: Miami

The show opens with a woman trying desperately to escape from… something? It’s not clear just what, but it’s bad enough that she’s driving on four flat tires. Her mother turns up at the police station, looking for help, and finds Horatio, the person in which the concept of ‘help’ lives. They quickly find the abandoned bar, but no sign of the girl. Looks like a mystery’s afoot, right after the credits!

Oh, and in a weird note – the car is found by an army guy.

For no clear reason. Weird, right?

Last Week's CSI Miami

You may notice that CSI: Miami skipped the end of October, robbing us all of the joy of discovering what Horatio Caine would dress as for Halloween. It’s not a cheat, though. Apparently they just don’t have Halloween in Miami. Who knew?

Someone’s in a costume, anyway, as a bride freaks out because her husband and his groomsmen have yet to appear for the wedding ceremony. Obviously she doesn’t know that she’s on CSI: Miami, or else she’d understand that weddings tend not to go well there. Although at least for once it looks like the bride isn’t going to get shot on her wedding day.

Hey, the father of the bride is that guy from Murder One! Neat!

As anyone who’s ever seen a television show can predict, the wedding turns out to be nothing but hitches, as some groomsmen are lying, unconscious, in a fountain, surrounded by human blood! And they’ve got no idea where the Groom is, but that’s probably his blood!

Oh, look! Someone in the CSI: Miami writer’s room saw The Hangover during the break!

CSI Miami Episode 805

The day starts ordinarily enough, with Eric dropping by the creepy ME’s hospital to check in with his doctor, then chat with his old friend. In an amazing coincidence there’s an emergency case just as Eric’s leaving. A young woman comes in, barely able to breathe, accompanied by her boyfriend. Eric takes the boyfriend aside to talk, where he announces his plans to propose to the girlfriend, which means, based on the laws of television writing, that she must immediately die, making it more tragic. She does, and then Creepy ME tells Eric that the boyfriend probably did it, well within earshot of the guy, making this perhaps the first ever pre-credits murder accusation in the show’s history!

Yeaaaaaah!

CSI Miami Episode 804

The episode begins with a chauffeur arriving at a private airport, while a not-coincidental radio report discusses a financier’s assets being frozen. Is the Chauffeur actually the financier, trying to sneak out of the country? An assassin there to killer the financier as he escapes? Nope, he’s a repo man looking to collect the financier’s plane. The airport security stop him immediately - he made the questionable choice to try and distract security by parking a suspicious limo and then telling them to tow it while he snuck into a hangar. Not a terrible plan, but since he parked the limo in front of the exact hangar he was planning to rob, all he did was ensure that the guards would be as close as possible to him when he tried to drive the plane out.

You know, I might be defending this guy’s actions too much. What was he going to do with the plane? Drive it to another hangar? How could he not think people would notice that? It’s not like he could fly it somewhere – flying without a registered plan is unbelievably illegal, after all.

Anyhoo, the guards smell a corpse on board, and make the following unpleasant discovery:

Yes, that’s the financier’s corpse in the toilet tank. I’ll say this for CSI: Miami – eight years in, they can still surprise me with something new and disgusting. In his continuing tradition of not saying something interesting before going to the credits, Horatio asks a question – did someone break the financier out (he’s under house arrest await trial), or set him up for murder? Why is that an either or? If he’s under house arrest and you want to kill him, isn’t breaking him out first kind of a necessity?

CSI Miami Episode 803 - Puma Village

It’s time for a look at Miami’s official sport… Beach Volleyball! Although, rather strangely, it’s not being played by hot women in sports bras, but rather shirtless young men. What the hell show am I watching? Oh, wait, they keep cutting away to women of a certain age in the crowd.

Could it be that CSI Miami is finally getting around to addressing the red-hot topic of four years ago, Cougars? Well, given that the lady from the still just blew a kiss at one of the players and then had it returned, I’m going to say yes. Also, is that the Relic Hunter in the crowd?

Things take a turn for the less sexy when three of the four guys on the court suddenly seize up and collapse. But what could have killed them that didn’t affect the fourth guy or anyone in the crowd? That’s the mystery the team is going to have to solve, with the aid of a really loud, but largely pointless montage. At the end of the montage Jesse finds some mysterious crystals in the sand. Could they have been poisonous? We’ll have to wait until the end of the credits to find out!

CSI Miami Episode 802

After the flashback-intensive season opener it’s time for things to get back to normal. After a ‘character’ scene in which we discover that things have been tense between Callie and Eric because of the whole him committing a crime and her shooting him thing, Jesse (from last week) shows up, looking for work. He picked the worst possible day to start, as this guy-

Shoots up the place Terminator-style (only without killing anyone), and takes a few hostages, demanding to talk to Horatio. What does he want? We’ll find out after the credits!

CSI Miami Episode 801

CSI Miami is back! Catch the fever! Whooo!

Okay, seriously though, there was something of a cliffhanger last time, with Eric stumbling out of the car he rescued his father in, after having been accidentally shot by Callie. Why, you may ask, did he leave the car and go wandering into the everglades? That’s not a question I have an answer to. Hopefully Eric will survive long enough to tell us all.

Horatio and the team finds Eric barely conscious by the side of a road, and as they perform extreme life-saving measures Eric drifts off into a flashback. We can tell it’s a flashback rather than a dream sequence because of two factors – 1: A little countdown showing the year roll back to 1997, and 2: song choice.


That’s an oddly correct song choice for setting the date, from a show that’s usually way behind the times. After all, they did a ‘the Bachelor’ episode roughly five years after everyone stopped caring about the Bachelor. I’m surprised he wasn’t listening to Nirvana.

CSI Miami Episode 725

It’s season ender time here on CSI: Miami, and I’m sure we all know what that means… Cliffhanger! Well, probably. But things move quickly right from the start. Wishmaster is poisoned in prison! His hospital transport is attacked! And then, rather preposterously pushed in front of a train! Because it’s plausible that they could have arranged the transport and attack to have happened at exactly the moment when a train would roll by. But maybe I’m being too hard on the show – it is a cool stunt:

Suddenly no longer choking to death on his own blood, Wishmaster grabs a gun off a fallen cop and runs for his life, while the cars that caused the accident make no attempt to rescue him. Rather confusingly Horatio is then on the scene, standing over the dying guard. I’m not sure what happened to the other two cops, who were shooting at Wishmaster. So, when presented with a badly injured prison guard (whose injuries Horatio didn’t witness, so his only clear symptom is a bloody uniform front), what does Horatio do? Run and get medical supplies? Sure, the ambulance is on fire, but he's got to have some in that hummer of his. Does he start extreme lifesaving measures? No, you’re thinking of what a decent person with a heart might do in this situation. This is Horatio Caine we’re talking about. He’s too busy looking concerned while watching a man die to, you know, actually do anything about it.

Aw, well at least it's heartfelt neglect, right?

CSI Miami Episode 723

It’s a busy day down at the old cafe, where a waitress is preparing some bananas foster, best known as the dish that explodes into flame. It proves an appropriate choice when, moments after it’s served, someone throws a grenade through the window! That’s not the end of the carnage, though – after getting the corpses back to the morgue there’s a second blast! It seems that a second grenade’s trigger had failed to release, and been blown up someone’s pant leg. It wasn’t until it fell out onto the floor of the morgue that it finally went off.

Neither grenade proves to have been that deadly – only two of the six people at the diner are killed, and no one’s hurt in the morgue. Apparently that’s a common thing for grenades: Not being deadly. Especially when dealing with homemade ones, as the team is this week. The only real damage done in the morgue is to New ME’s reputation. After the blast goes off she desperately scoots across the floor grabbing her illegal prescription pills.

CSI Miami Episode 722

It’s the Bachelor on CSI Miami! Dietrich Bader is playing the host, and the episode begins with opening section of the final episode. I’m sure this is hilarious satire if you’re familiar with the Bachelor, but I’ve never seen an episode, so it’s a little lost on me. The episode takes a turn for the shocking when, after the fakeout/dismissal of one of the contestants, they check the limo to meet the other only to find her dead!

Way to break the hell out of that fake TV show thing, guys – everything up until the body is discovered is presented as part of the show, including the chintzy titles-

But the second the body is found, suddenly there’s five cameras filming everything at different angles. Also, if they found a corpse while shooting the footage, why did they edit it together like a regular episode of the show? It’s not like this was live…

CSI Miami Episode 720

Time for another non-standard episode of CSI! This one opens with the freshly-tortured smuggy being tossed out of a van. A series of flashbacks reveal that the mob feels smuggy owes them money because he helped the horse doctor escape back in the horseracing episode, and now they need him to spike a case for them. He refuses to help at first, then concedes when they pull out a tooth and threaten to kill the horse doctor’s son.

The murder he’s supposed to cover up happens almost immediately – a broker is shot in his office by a thief, who then para-jumps off the roof of the building. Which isn’t a crazy plan, actually. They come up with a couple of clues right away – the bullet is still there on the scene, but it’s too mangled to be useful. Smuggy pockets a shell casing, while Eric collects some suspiciously purple water from the pool upstairs. The broker’s assistant explains that her boss’ job was to have cash on hand to exchange with shady foreigners, and mentions that two million dollars are missing from the office safe. They accuse her of murder a little, but not so intensively that she’s cleared of any involvement.

CSI Miami Episode 719

Things open on a creepy note tonight, with a woman arriving at home… only to find that it’s been robbed, and the criminal is still on the premises! She finds this out when he stabs her in the back. Which is among the worst ways of finding something out. She manages to shoot him once, though, driving the stabber out into the back yard where a vicious dog lives. The maid struggles through the house trying to reach the phone, because she’s the only person in the modern world to not have a cell phone. Amazingly the paramedics arrive in time to save her life, and as they work, her head lolls to the side and she sees the vision of an angel standing over her.

Okay, it’s just Horatio. But check out that backlighting, right? And really, at this point is there a difference between the two? Also, why is the head of Crime Scene Investigations there in the doorway before uniforms have even finished searching the house? Maybe it’s good that they get there that fast, because they manage to turn up a weird looking knife with a usable print trapped under a layer of wax! They figure that if they can find out whose knife it is, they may just have their stabber!

It seems that the stabbee is a personal chef, who worked for the man that the knife was stolen from! Is it all a big coincidence, or is she a thief? With her finally awake, Horatio is able to ask her directly. How great is it that for once they’re not dealing with a murder, right? I mean, there’s probably going to be a murder at some point this week, but it’s a nice change in the premise.

CSI MIami Episode 718

I hope you haven’t had your fill of preposterous murders, because this week’s episode is just extra-crazy. It starts when a bloody corpse falls out onto a baggage carousel, and it just gets weirder from there. Okay, it actually gets less weird from there, but still, that’s a nice idea, right?

The team begin investigating the scene, and discover the victim was a first-class flight attendant who someone got drunk, put in a ski case, and then loaded onto the luggage conveyor belt. The luggage attendant is no help, explaining that all he did was load some cases onto a belt. Smuggy ridiculously decides to charge him with possession of stolen goods, because he’s already begun the process of selling some skis he found in the plane online. Seriously? He didn’t even bring them home, just went straight to eBay? That guy deserves to be in jail.

CSI Miami Episode 717

Is there any better reason to have a party than a divorce? Jordan from Scrubs doesn’t think so, so that’s exactly what she’s doing! The party takes a turn for the disturbing, though, when Jordan’s ex-hubby’s corpse comes falling through the roof of her gazebo in the middle of her fake divorce ceremony.

Then, in a two-second joke about media culture, the party guests hurry to snap a picture of the corpse.

Oh, Miami. You’re temperature is the warmest, but your people have the coldest hearts.

CSI Miami Episode 716

There’s a party on luxury yacht ‘The Terrible’ as an awful cover of ‘you spin me right round’ plays on the soundtrack. This would all be completely normal for the show except for one thing: The yacht is owned by one Sean ‘Stay Puft’ Combs! That’s right, it seems our favorite, um, whatever it is he does, has returned to terribly portray a lawyer for the second week in a row!

Things go horribly awry when Stay Puft is convinced to invite some hot strangers onto the boat. Hot strangers that turn out to be twisted murderers! They rob the passengers, steal Stay Puft’s laptop, and when people try to rush them, accidentally shoot Stay Puft’s fiancee!

Or do they?

CSI Miami Episode 715

Remember how I said there were no courts in Miami? Well, turns out I was wrong. There are. It’s just that all of their walls are made of glass, allowing for the distracting sight of people walking behind witnesses while they testify. Also, they possess no juries, and no permanent seating for the audience.

Don’t believe me? Check this out:

Anyhow, we’re in court, where a country club employee is being accused using a belt to strangling a random woman. Amazingly, his lawyer is played by Sean “Puff Daddy” Combs, who for the rest of the episode I will be referring to by his preferred name, ‘Stay-Puft’.

CSI Miami Episode 714

The episode opens with Callie and Smuggy heading to a house. Because it’s a crime scene? Because there was a shooting there? No, because a neighbour called 911 to say she smelled something bad coming from the house. That’s right. The CRIME SCENE INVESTIGATORS, instead of investigating crime scenes, are now checking out reports of smells.

Isn’t that what we have, oh, I don’t know, EVERY OTHER KIND OF COP for?

So why the preposterous setup? So that Callie and Smuggy can get trapped in the attic with a corpse while a crazed murderer sets the house on fire. I’m going to cover the whole fire setting incident later on, because wow, yeah, it’s just… yikes. They escape (duh), but during her next scene Callie will have to be hospitalized few smoke inhalation. Wow – I wonder if this threat to her life will be what finally motivates Eric to reveal his feelings for her? (spoiler alert – it is) In an amazing coincidence, her emergency room doctor is none other than Creepy ME from the first six seasons. I know, right? What were the odds. Well, at least this gives her and Horatio a chance to hang out.

CSI Miami Episode 709

Convolutions were the theme in this episode, along with plans so poorly thought-out that they could only have been conceived of by people with severe brain injuries.

We open with a montage that intercuts the CSI crew’s morning routine with a woman being brutally tortured to death. This is a clever artistic move that lets us know that, ironically, as their days are starting, a woman’s life is ending!

Or it would be, except the intercutting is taking place at two different times. This isn’t entirely clear, but at the beginning of the montage we see the woman being abducted while shopping during the day, and when they arrive at the body, according to new ME, she’s been dead for a while. So the murder had to have happened the previous day, which kind of violates the show’s mandate of (except for flashbacks) only ever taking place within a twelve-hour period.