CSI“Kill Me if You Can”
Original Air Date: Feb 26th, 2009
Crystal - TwoCents Reviewer
crystal@thetwocentscorp.com
If procedural dramas have taught us anything over the years, it would have to be these facts: if the maid discovers maggots coming out from underneath the door at a shady motel, there will be a dead body; if there is some blood spotted next to a pool by a scraggly teenager with earphones in, there will be a body; if you see a giant Hummer speeding towards a man standing by his car, there will definitely be a body.
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CSI
ReplyDelete“Kill Me if You Can”
Original Air Date: Feb 26th, 2009
Crystal - TwoCents Reviewer
crystal@thetwocentscorp.com
If procedural dramas have taught us anything over the years, it would have to be these facts: if the maid discovers maggots coming out from underneath the door at a shady motel, there will be a dead body; if there is some blood spotted next to a pool by a scraggly teenager with earphones in, there will be a body; if you see a giant Hummer speeding towards a man standing by his car, there will definitely be a body.
I’ve been out of the CSI-loop for a little bit having stopped watching after the loss of both Sara and Warrick, so I hope you’ll bear with me this week while I cover for Nicola. It’s nice to see from the opening that some facts are still the same.
We start with the death of an art dealer Carsten Pennington in a segment called “Lifestyles of the Rich and Felonius.” Ray and Wendy are working the scene, a dead body in a swimming pool with blood on the tile around the pool.
Wendy and Ray are outside at the pool. Inside the grotto, there are signs of a struggle: a trashcan full of yogurt tipped over, some broken pottery. The archaeologist in me got really sad at that, and hopes it’s not one of the Mesopotamian vases dated back thousands of years that are part of the dealer’s collection. Although they don’t really look Mesopotamian to me; I would say that the ones the set designers used are actually Greek, but that’s just me being nitpicky. Carsten’s cat Gareth keeps getting all up in the evidence, nomming things that cats should not be nomming, like blood and pottery.
Archie and Ray take a look at surveillance and find a man who upset Carsten, and does some cool imaging stuff on the guys face to find out that his name is Jeffrey and he’s an employee at Marakesh Casino. Meanwhile, Wendy suspects that the broken pottery is part of a missing vase from Iraq that was smuggled in to the country. Ray finds a mysterious substance in the crate in question and oddly starts sniffing the pottery.
It turns out that the stolen vase is actually a replica made by Carsten. You take a replica vase and smear it with yogurt and let that soak in while you mix in minerals from the geographic region you are trying to replicate and let it sit in a hot dry place. This process ages the piece and creates a mineral match, which is so good it even fools the experts, according to Ray. But it didn’t fool that yogurt-hungry cat. I could go on a rant about the archaeological inaccuracies of this segment, but I’ll spare you.
Despite Jeffrey’s anger at the attempted con, it turns out to be the fiancé. The art-faking Carsten was getting ready to skip town, but didn’t tell her. Well it looks like she found out, and was not a happy camper. There’s blood on her dress and now handcuffs on her wrists.
Next, Catherine calls Ray in to take a look at a person of interest in her case. She’s got a video up on her computer screen paused on a man labeled as Tripp Linson, but it looks just like our dead art dealer Carsten. The plot thickens as we rewind back to the beginning and follow Catherine this time.
Catherine and Greg are investigating the death of a young woman lying on a bed in that shady motel. She has maggots on the brain, literally, as her head is completely busted open. Her name is Jenna Makin and she has a gunshot wound underneath her chin that blew her brains out the other side in a segment called “Hooray for Hollywood.”
Catherine finds a turtle under the bed that has blood spattered on its shell. Aw, blood-spattered turtle, let me take you home and clean you! Mandy, Hodgins, and Catherine find what looks to be a fingerprint on its shell (ah, some familiar faces that haven’t changed, even if one of them is Hodgins.) Mandy gets an instant hit on a guy named Mickey Ross, who kind of looks like a less scary Mickey Rourke and is also an actor.
Mickey is kind of a skeezeball. When questioned about his wife, he starts crying, giving a sob story about how upset he is that he didn’t recognize how suicidal his own wife was. Cue irony and karma, as the detective has an angry voicemail to her from Mickey, blasting her for running off with another man. Voicemails, like diamonds, are forever.
Remember that scene where Catherine’s person of interest looks like Ray’s dead guy? Yeah, we’re back to that scene, and now Nick comes in and his person of interest is also Tripp/Carsten. Rewind to Nick’s body, a guy shoved under the steering casing in a car. He has a phone and ID and his name is Shawn Hagan, private investigator. “The Son He Never Had” begins.
A detective is interviewing Hagan’s client, Paul Anton, who hired Hagan to find Ryan Morton, and gives the detective all he knows of Ryan, which is merely an advertising video featuring Ryan plugging a real estate venture. In the morgue, Nick and Riley are unfurling the victim, bones cracking loudly. Anyway, Nick finds a contact on Shawn Hagan Our victim doesn’t wear contacts, so they could be from the killer. Riley finds a gunshot entrance wound, and a game of “ballistic pinball” reveals that the bullet went through his hand, and eventually bounced off of a bunch of organs and landed in the spleen. A gun was found near the scene, and it was registered to Paul Anton, but he claims that he gave it to Ryan Morton when he met him a couple of years ago. He thought Ryan was his son, so Ryan cons some money from him, and leaves town.
Meanwhile, Wendy is running DNA on the contact lens, and it has seven alleles in common with Carsten Pennington, aka Tripp Linson, aka Ryan Morton. He has a brother named Gareth Morton. Gareth, as in, the same name as that cat from the first case, the name of the tortoise in the second case, and the name of the dog in the advertising video that Ryan was in. “The Brother He Never Wanted” starts.
So, let’s break it down. Jenna Makin sees a picture of Tripp in a magazine, and goes to find him. But he’s Carsten now, and doesn’t even recognize her, so she kills herself. The P.I. goes looking for Ryan Morton and finds Gareth Morton, and Gareth shoots Shawn Hagan. Gareth then goes to Carsten and smashes his head in.
Our CSIs comb the car, finding a case with once contact, and a hundred grand in the trunk. All of the clothes are from a bargain shop, except for a pair of expensive underwear. Ray has the answer; Carsten Pennington, when he was found in the pool, had on boxers from the same bargain shop as the clothes Gareth had. Okay, what does this mean?
Gareth says Ryan gave him the money, but he can’t explain the underwear. Gareth pins Darcy, Carsten’s fiancé. But she’s watching from the other side of the two-way mirror. The man sitting before them is actually Carsten. Darcy witnessed the brothers arguing. Carsten knocked Gareth down, and his head hit the pavement, killing him. He took Gareth’s identity and promised to come back for Darcy, but never did.
And things end chillingly with Carsten’s last confession: “It the truth, I swear to God. Even if it never happened.”
I got chills from that ending, but the rest of the episode was very convoluted. If I hadn’t been jotting down these things as they were happening, I would probably have to rewatch it to catch everything that went down. But what did you all think? Was it convoluted to you, or just perfect? Did the ending leave you with chills, or were you just annoyed? Thanks for bearing with me as I came back to CSI for the first time in a while.