CSI: Las Vegas Season 8 thread (1 Viewer)

Well, the last we saw her, Sara was trapped under a car by the Miniature Killer. Tonight we found out that Sara found a way to survive, and I hope she keeps that rearview mirror with her as her good luck charm.

Overall, a good opening episode, showcasing how Sara got captured and placed under the car a la the miniature set from the Miniature Killer.

Gee, Patrick...my son and I were both pretty disappointed with the episode.

Really...not much happened involving the miniature killer...except for the flashback scenes you mentioned letting us in on how the crime went down. (And I'm still not sure how she lowered the car onto Sara's arm.)

Nearly half the show was simply Sara wandering the desert...with us left to wonder whether the team would make it to her on time. And the resolution boils down to:

Nick spotting a momentary reflection (of the afore-mentioned rear-view mirror) while blindly driving down a desert highway. "Pull over here! Now!"


It seemed like the stuff of Saturday matinee serials. Not much high-tech detective work there. Another main clue was found:

written underneath a drawing of Sara left on the killer's wall right out in plain view! (the phone number of the junkyard where the killer purchased the car.) And this was after Nick was frustrated that "he wasn't leaving until he found something!"

I'm not usually this negative about a show I've been looking forward to for months. But this one really left me disappointed.

I mean...you just KNEW they were going to find her at the last minute and everything was going to be all right. Cheesy. No real drama. Nothing that utilized the best features of the show itself.

Sorry it didn't work for you. I thought it went against the grain for the usual CSI schtick, so I give them some leeway in telling the story. I figured the mirror would have been spotted from the sky, not from the road, that's where I thought they were going with her dragging it along with her.

It was worth the wait to me, and this was the one show I was looking forward to more than any other.

Yeah. Ever since the last episode of season 7 aired, my son and I would occasionally make the hand motion of the miniature Sara as a reminder that we were anxious to see the resolution of the story-line. Although I'm sure we're going to get several episodes of Grissom trying to climb inside the killer's mind.

But, anyway...maybe it was because of too MUCH anticipation that we were let down on how things played out. For us, great cliff-hanger. Lame resolution.

There was only going to be one of 2 resolutions.

What I didn't see coming was that she got out of the car. Then it was a matter of whether they'd find her in time. I didn't see that she was going to get out, that surprised me. When she broke the mirror off, I thought she might try to cut her arm off like that hiker did a few years ago when a large stone fell on his arm. Liked the end when they locked eyes in the copter.

I was thinking the same thing Nelson. I won't repeat it here, since it's in spoiler text.

I thought it was great, and a reminder why this CSI version is still the best.

I thought it was a very poor episode... Usually this show has some intelligence to it, but this one had some many dumb things in it.

Things I just didn't like:

- I could not believe they found a "random" dead body while looking for her...where was the searching party for that guy?

- Someone as smart as she is - bypassing shaded areas to wonder the desert during the middle of the day. Walking up and down a hill (that had shade by the way) to wander out into a flat desert...

- When going into the desert to look for her - why were the helicopters 8 feet off of the ground buzzing the cars (???) - they were actually going slower then the cars so they would not hit them. Get a little height and look around.

-Speaking of helicopters - where did they go? Why couldn't she hear them? After they found her, the helicopters showed up rather quickly - but you could not hear them buzzing around?

- At the end, she had what looked like at least a 5 inch gash on her face, but no blood was coming down. I said to my wife – that should leave a scar, but we will never see it again – bad makeup.

Yeah, I did too. Funny how Nick spotted the reflection but a helicopter covering more ground could not, speaking of which, I loved the jerky camera work in the copter because it really is that bumpy aboard one. Most movies show a smooth ride.
Overall a solid episode, not quite as riveting as the "Nick in the box" ep but a great start nontheless.

The random guy wasn't "missing." Grissom said, after speaking with the park rangers (or whoever issued his camping permit): "he was scheduled to hike out this morning."

I was somewhat disappointed, as well, some due to the 10 minutes of plot dragged out into an hour, but more so that I'd hoped we were finally rid of Jorja Fox for good.

For such an intriguing storyline with the Miniatures Killer, this closing episode was pretty "meh". I was doodling on my laptop the entire episode, to avoid boredom during the long desert stretches. Not a bad episode, just not particularly interesting to me.

My favorite moment, an homage to Monty Python, was when Grisson spies the stacked rocks in his field glasses. He points excitedly, passes the glasses to Katharine who confirms. Then they sprint the 10 feet to the rocks.

Grissom needs to get his eyes checked

That's right! I was wondering, "what the hell!?!" when they were only about three paces from the stack of rocks that they both needed binoculars to see.

I can see how the story went, but if Sara had any faith in her teammates, she would have trusted them to find her and not do what she did. Of course, that would have been boring.

??? "Faith" is one thing, assuming her teammates are capable of performing miracles is another. Have you heard the expression "finding a needle in a haystack"? She was a needle in several thousand square miles of nothingness and had no idea how much or little the rest of the team knew about her plight. (She certainly didn't know that they had captured the MK.)

Everything about the episode showed Sara as self-reliant and capable. Of course she did her best to rescue herself and find her way to shelter/water/safety or someplace where she was more likely to be found. Just sitting there with the wrecked car would have been nuts. Trapped where she was, without water, she was not going to live long in any event. (The rule of threes says that the average human can live 3 weeks without food, 3 days without water and 3 minutes without oxygen. And that's under normal circumstances, not with blood loss, trauma, 100+ degree heat, zero humidity and a relentless sun overhead.) Her only chance was to try to reach safety because she could not count on rescue.

I'm glad they didn't try to drag out the suspense further by keeping her out of the promo for next week. (Leaving open the possibility of her dying after she reached the hospital.) That would have been even more annoying than their leaving her fate an open question to the end. (I think the episode was structured the way it was in order to play with audience expectations and the conventions of the one-hour TV drama. If she's dead, do they discover the body at the halfway or three-quarters mark, and therefore leave time for the other characters to react? And how long can they not find the car? Hence the fake-out with Sara escaping from the car on her own, and the discovery of the drowned hiker - which also gave them some nice misdirection footage for the promos. )

Nice touch having Nick find her - and the flashback to "Gumdrops", one of the best Nick & Sara episodes. (Which was originally supposed to be a Grissom and Sara episode, and one of the first to really hint at their relationship, but William Peterson was called away on a family emergency a couple of days after filming had begun, so the script was hastily rewritten to feature Nick.)

I've never understood the hostility to Sara/Jorja Fox, nor to the Grissom/Sara relationship. I have to laugh when I see all the Ausholes whine about the show "turning into a soap opera." The GSR was barely even visible unless you looked for the subtle signs, and even after it was revealed to the audience never took up more than two or three minutes of any episode. (Usually only a few seconds - a line or two, a shared glance, and it was usually back to collecting bugs from the corpse.) Catherine and Warrick's peronal lives have taken up far more screen time than a major romance between two regulars, but hardly anyone bitches about them.

I did get a chuckle out of their answers to Eckely's question in the promo, though. Sara seems to answer in terms of when they started sleeping together, while Grissom says the relationship has been going on for nine years - since before the series started, in other words, when she was still his student. Amusing reversal of the stereotypical roles. Sara keys on the sex while the male (and usually more cerebral and emotionally detached) partner focuses on the start of the emotional relationship.

Regards,

Joe

Maybe it's the boyscout in me, but I kept thinking: Find a good place, get shade, stay put. You'll exhaust yourself less and as a stationary target, you'll be easier to find. Walking in the dead heat means you're burning more calories, losing water and more likely to avoid being found.

Just my thoughts though It wasn't bad necessarily, but I just watched on DVR (what Fridays are good for) and it was kind of a let down. And a preview of a controversy about their relationship? Seems ridiculous.

What struck you as ridiculous, the controversy or the fact that it figured in the preview? The controversy was inevitable once Grissom blurted out what he did about loving Sara. He's her supervisor. This is almost certainly a violation of policy and it certainly raises questions about conflict of interest. Now that we know that she's alive, this is the other shoe that had to drop from a story point of view. So I don't think the controversy was ridiculous. Nor do I think including it in the preview was. That served two purposes - it told those who wondered, "How is the revelation of their romance going to affect everybody?" that this question is going to be dealt with and that there will be consequences, and - as I noted above - it played fair with the audience by letting them know that Sara does, indeed, recover.

Regards,

Joe

I think they're afraid that it could turn into the silliness of the Miami version.

My initial reaction to the above post about the preview for next week was, yeah, how does Eckley find out given the close working relationship Grissom's team enjoys. Would they not keep this personal info about their boss private? But it probably leaked to Brass and so on up to Infernal Affairs. So it probably adds to a small annoying subplot for next week's show in between all the evidence gathering, assuming they don't suspend Grissom for an investigation. Maybe Hodges blabbed, but he seems too smart to want to ruin his budding relationship with Grissom.