bloodyrosemccoy | The Amateur Critic Strikes At TV

Plimsoll Day

XX Winter Olympics

Last night’s CSI was disappointing.

I got a bit suspicious when they put their little “mature content” warning up at the beginning. I have only seen them do that once before, and that was for the episode that everyone who watches knows as “The Baby Episode” despite there not being more than one mention of an actual baby.

I was always a little puzzled by their choice to put the warning in front of that baby one. It wasn’t a particularly gruesome murder, but it was a particularly weird backstory. The funniest thing was that it wasn’t mature content, if you want to get down to it. It was the exact opposite of mature. Creepy as hell, but you couldn’t really say mature. And further puzzling me, there were a lot more traumatic episodes that weren’t labelled, such as the two different ones with dads raping their daughters, the one in the mental hospital with the mother-son incest, and a lot of the fun fetish episodes, like the furry one or the Lady Heather one.

Last night's episode was more understandably labelled. However, I still think that the label is off, and I have a better one to suggest to them:

Warning: The writers of this episode don’t mind admitting that they’re a bunch of sick, twisted bastards who like to spend all their time coming up with clever ways for people to get killed. But even we’re forced to admit that this time we’ve outdone ourselves in creepy shit, so we suggest you don’t watch if weirdass illogical behavior bothers you. Trust us. This is some nutty stuff.

But more than the creepy stuff, which bothered me this time only because of the irritating illogicality of the perpertrator,* because this show was all about sensationalism. It had very little forensics and not much in the way of character development. It's like a Sherlock Holmes story where he doesn't put all the Clues together ~ very disappointing. The only thing it did was destroy Lady Heather’s character. I liked Lady Heather a lot. I especially liked the idea of her being an outsider, a sort of observer. Bringing her into the CSI’s inner investigations and then making her get into trouble, as well as killing off her daughter,** in point of view of the story, only managed to destroy what I liked about her.

I hope this doesn’t herald a long-term change.

*I drove Liz nuts sputtering “But … but … why?!” every few moments during the episode, interspersed with a largish amount of angry medical analysis. Liz, on the other hand, can handle the illogicality of serial killers and can be fascinated by people like Eddie Gein or Josef Mengele without getting absolutely overwrought by the inexplicability of their behavior.

**I mean, the writers killed her off. Lady Heather didn't.