Stuff That Eats My Brain

Team CSI

Previously on CSI, Holly Gribbs had a crappy first day, then it got better, and then it truly turned into the shittiest day ever when she was shot. This is what comes from taking Catherine’s advice.

It turns out that Holly’s shooting doesn’t bring the city to a screeching halt. Who knew? A couple right out of “New Jersey trash” central casting are bickering in a casino. She wants to give one of the $20 slot machines a whirl but he thinks it’s a waste of time and money. However, her screeching wears him down enough to try out a machine, which is just being abandoned by a dejected loser. Mr. Jersey pulls the handle once then twice with no result, as he expected. He yanks the handle a third time and starts walking back over to Mrs. Jersey without seeing the result. Mrs. Jersey’s delighted shrieks and the clanging alarms clue him in that he’s just won approximately a gajillion dollars.

Cut to a montage of the thrilled Mr. and Mrs. Jersey being presented with their check and celebrating the big win. Later, they’re escorted to the penthouse suite by a porter, who helps Mr. Jersey with the difficult key card. Mr. Jersey is Josh Lyman? As soon as the door closes, Mr. Jersey tells Mrs. Jersey to take a hike. She’s all, “Bzuh?” and he coldly tells her that he’s got no use for her now that he’s a gazillionaire. Before she can react, room service knocks.

By dawn, Mr. Jersey has splatted all over the pavement outside the casino. Grissom ducks under the police tape and peers at the body, while a detective yammers about the jackpot curse. He says Mrs. Jersey is in custody but Grissom wants to talk to Mr. Jersey first. The detective wonders how Grissom’s going to do that without some chicken blood and a voodoo chant. Grissom picks up Mr. Jersey’s broken glasses and says he lets Mr. Jersey talk to him. In fact, Mr. Jersey just told him that he didn’t jump. Suicides don’t want to see where they’re falling, so Grissom is sure Mr. Jersey fell or was pushed. The detective boggles that Grissom can tell all that just from a pair of glasses. Grissom smugs his way into the credits.

At the lab, Grissom collects his messages from the receptionist and boggles at the big stack, as well as the stares from the lab rats. We get clued in as to what’s going on when he enters Brass’ office and announces that he’s been tapped as the new supervisor. It turns out that Brass has been demoted down to a homicide detective for the Holly Gribbs fuckup. Grissom tries to look on the bright side: “Cop versus scientist. Interesting, huh?” Brass just grunts in reply, then advises Grissom to cover his ass.

The rest of the team is in the break room, watching a news anchor talk about Holly’s shooting. Nick and Catherine chastise Warrick for not sticking with Holly like he was supposed to. Warrick’s defense is, “Look, I feel bad enough, okay?” Gee, I can’t imagine how that steller responsibility-taking could hurt him in the future. Grissom arrives before Catherine can smack the self-absorption out of Warrick. He recaps what we already know, then starts handing out assignments. Warrick’s benched, he’s taking Mr. Jersey, and he wants Nick to investigate Holly’s case since he’s the only one who didn’t have contact with her. Catherine balks and demands the case on the grounds that she convinced Holly to stay. Oh, I see. Catherine and Warrick are the “it’s all about me” twins. Grissom doesn’t put up too much of a fight because he doesn’t want to deal with Catherine’s whining. He wraps up by saying he’s called in Sara Sidle, an old friend from San Francisco, to help with the internal investigation. Catherine’s even bitchier about this because god forbid she not be the only hot lady investigator around. She flounces off and Grissom tasks Nicky with helping on the Mr. Jersey case. He doesn’t complain about losing his solo case, because that’s how Nicky rolls.

Catherine arrives at the scene and discovers two important clues. One, Holly’s gun has been fired and she believes Holly shot back at her attacker. Two, she finds a pager under a table.

Morgue. A pretty coroner that only last a couple of episodes is filling in for the geezer from the pilot, who presumably croaked on account of being a million years old. Mr. Jersey has wounds on his arms and the coroner tells Grissom and Nicky that he was sliced with something made of glass. Grissom notes it’s black glass.

Back to the casino, where Grissom and Nick find a broken champagne bottle and bloody towels in the Jersey’s room. Nick asks what Grissom thinks happened and Grissom tells him to use his big boy pants level 3 skills and figure it out for himself. Nick surmises that the couple had a fight, resulting in Mrs. Jersey breaking the bottle and using it to slash at Mr. Jersey’s arm. His theory stops there and we go to them questioning Mrs. Jersey, who insists her boyfriend left the room to probably seek first aid, and never returned. Grissom points out that the hotel keeps a log of the key being used to open the suite. Unfortunately, Nick confirms the log backs up her statement and she leaves in triumph. Since the room seems to be out of play, they decide to check the roof for evidence that Mr. Jersey took his swan dive from there.

Warrick’s on the phone trying to get a status update on Holly when his other line beeps. It’s Judge Cohen, who’s irate because Warrick bet on the wrong team. “The spot in fifteen minutes,” he barks. I’m hoping the “spot” refers to shady illegal dealings and not a romantic rendezvous. Warrick’s hotness is not enough to make that visual appealing in any way.

Grissom and Nicky have set up a little science experiment on the roof. They’re going to push, throw, and simulate a fall from three different dummies representing Mr. Jersey. It would’ve been hilarious if they’d used the real thing. It’s not like he would’ve felt in. Nicky brushes at his dust-coated pants and Grissom says it’s not going to brush off. He exposits that all the casinos use the dust to reflect sunlight, then scampers down to watch the results of their experiment. A crowd has gathered and they cheer as each dummy comes flying down. Grissom waves graciously to the crowd, then begins marking how the dummies landed. “Norman pushed. Norman jumped. Norman fell.” “Wouldn’t you if you were married to Mrs. Roper?” a voice pipes from the crowd. A dazzling grin comes across Grissom’s face and he says he doesn’t even need to turn around to know who it is. He does anyway, because who wouldn’t want to turn and look at Sara Sidle, with her adorable curls and grin that matches Grissom’s. He’s thrilled to see her and vice versa, even though they tease each other about her high-tech and his hands-on approaches to science. Then the mood turns less celebratory and flirtatious as Holly’s mentioned. Then Grissom utters what may be the cheesiest line ever on this show: “God, Sara, I have so many unanswered ‘why’s.” Not even William Petersen could save it. Sara ignores the stinky cheese and says she just wants to find out why Warrick left Holly alone.

Speaking of Warrick, he meets the judge in their spot, which is a parking garage. Warrick’s day goes from bad to worse when he finds out he’s got one hour to pay the $10,000 he owes to Judge Cohen.

Lab. Catherine’s working when Sara arrives looking for her. Catherine pretends she’s not herself but Sara didn’t fall off the stupid truck yesterday. When Sara doesn’t go away, Catherine snarls that Sara can forget it if she tries to take Catherine’s case. Sara placates Catherine’s ego by saying two sharp women working together are better than one. Catherine thinks a moment, then shows Sara the pager she found but she hasn’t had any luck tracing it to the owner. Sara says Catherine’s got it under control, then asks where she can find Warrick. “Try one of the casinos on Blue Diamond Road.” Sara takes off, after Catherine jokes that she’ll page if she gets any new information.

Grissom and Nicky are in the casino’s surveillance room. They look at the tapes to see who was at the slot machine before Mr. Jersey won his big jackpot. They find the dejected loser and determine that he was there for almost 12 hours, dropping anywhere from $10,000 to $20,000. Grissom orders Nick to get the loser’s name from his slot card. Later, Grissom finds the loser at another slot machine. He sits down next to the guy and plays his own machine before announcing that the loser is under arrest for murder.

With an assist from Bobby in Ballistics, Catherine learns that Holly was shot with her own gun. She imagines how it probably went down: the guy held a gun on Holly but his pager distracted him. Holly fought back and the guy lost his gun, but grabbed hers and shot her with it.

As Catherine predicted, Sara finds Warrick gambling in a casino. Presumably, he’s trying to win the money he owes Judge Cohen, but his known habits indicate he also does it because he can’t not gamble, especially when he’s stressed. He gets shirty with Sara when she takes him away from his game but drops the ‘tude quickly when she reveals Holly died on the operating table. I know I should be focused on the sadness of Holly dying or Warrick’s emo manpain but I’m so distracted by how pretty Jorja Fox looks in this scene with her curls and green sweater. Seriously, so pretty.

Montage o’ grief. Everyone reacts to the news of Holly’s death. It’s all very tragic, in a slow-mo, overwrought kind of way.

Later, Sara return to the lab and grabs a drink from the fridge while Catherine stands around looking distracted. A pager goes off and they look around in confusion until realizing it’s the suspect’s pager. Catherine jumps on the opportunity to both catch the killer and practice her roleplaying skills. She calls the number on the pager and talks to the suspect, pretending she found it and wants some “bling-bling” to return it. Obviously not the sharpest tool in Home Depot, the shooter gives up where he’s staying. Catherine hangs up and asks an amused Sara if she actually just did that.

Grissom interrogates Loser, who admits he was on the roof to commit suicide but failed at that like he does everything else. He also confesses to confronting Mr. Jersey about winning on “his” machine right after he left it, and Mr. Jersey responded with the same charm he showed his girlfriend. He did, however, buy Loser a few drinks. Loser says he left Mr. Jersey on his floor and continued up to the roof, where he had his failed suicide attempt. Grissom tells Loser that he believes him, and a lack of roof dust on Mr. Jersey’s shoes will back him up. Loser looks over at Nicky and mutters, “I like this guy.” Nicky’s like, “BACK OFF, HE’S MINE. I WILL CUT YOU.”

The cops, accompanied by Catherine and Sara, move in and take Holly’s shooter into custody. Catherine notes a nasty scratch on the guy’s face and Sara says they need to collect a DNA sample to get a conviction. Catherine calls the rest of the team to tell them they’ve caught Holly’s killer.

Unfortunately, Warrick can’t take too much pleasure in the news. He’s delivering the $10,000 to Judge Cohen when he gets the call, but Cohen isn’t done with him. He tells Warrick that he’s not getting off so easy and says, “I own you.” Now, that’s just a really tacky thing for a white dude to say to a black dude. Warrick agrees but since he’s in butt-covering mode, he realizes he’s trapped.

Catherine arrives at the morgue to collect evidence from Holly’s fingernails. Grissom’s waiting for her and said he wanted to be there in case she needed him. She admits she probably does need him but it’s something she needs to do alone. She goes in and with as much gentleness and respect that she can give, collects the evidence she needs.

Grissom and Nicky examine Mr. Jersey’s shoes and determine Loser was telling the truth, because there’s no roof dust. Grissom goes through the rest of Mr. Jersey’s belongings and spots fibers caught in his watch, indicating he was dragged. Nick says he’ll go back to the suite to look for more evidence. Grissom tells him to have Mrs. Jersey brought back into custody, since she’s now their prime suspect.

Grissom gets more information about the case. The coroner shows him a diamond-shaped contusion on the back of Mr. Jersey’s skull. She says it was the blow from whatever hit him that caused his death, not the fall.

Catherine and Sara make small talk about quitting smoking while they wait for the DNA results. Greg comes out of his lab and announces he’s got what they’re looking for. The DNA under Holly’s nails is a match to the pager guy. Catherine is pleased and proud of Holly for having the presence of mind to get the evidence needed so her killer could be brought to justice.

One case down, one to go. While Nicky matches the fibers to the carpet in the suite, Grissom returns to poke around. Now that he knows what he’s looking for, he quickly finds the murder weapon, a statue. He also finds a trail of blood to the balcony using Luminol. After testing one thing with the key card, Grissom and Nick meet with Mrs. Jersey in interrogation. Grissom explains that she waited for hr boyfriend with the murder weapon in hand. He had trouble with the key and she yanked the door open while it was still in the slot, which didn’t register on the log. Once Mr. Jersey was in the room, she bashed him over the head then dumped his body over the balcony. She used the excuse of the fight with the champagne bottle earlier to explain why there were blood-soaked towels in the room, which she had used to clean up after she killed Mr. Jersey. Mrs. Jersey, not caring that she was caught, rolls her eyes and holds out her wrists to be cuffed. Nicky is astonished that she doesn’t give a crap that she killed someone, because he is so new he’s still wobbly on his legs.

Back at the lab, Warrick is waiting to find out if he’s still got a job. Grissom joins him and says the department and Sara’s report say he’s got to fire Warrick. Warrick isn’t surprised and hands over his gun and badge, but Grissom stands up and says if he’s got to fire Warrick, then he needs to fire himself, Catherine, and Brass as well since they’re all culpable. He hands the badge and gun back to Warrick and says he’s not going to lose another person over this. Warrick looks like he wants to make out with Grissom. Get in line, dude.

Closing montage. The team assembles outside to watch Holly’s killer, in cuffs, loaded into the back of a police car by Brass. We get a lovely glamour shot of the team, of which Sara is now obviously a permanent member. “Let’s go home,” Grissom says.

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