The Bachelor of Science (C.S.I (Las Vegas))

Member Name: silverstreak2

Product:	C.S.I (Las Vegas)
Date:	22/07/05 (223 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Excellent acting, scripts and special effects

Disadvantages: Cockroaches

Police drama series have always been a popular and in most cases, hugely successful part of TV schedules, and in recent years, there has been a marked shift from the tried and tested format of the familiar partnership of the craggy-faced and cynical older cop, and his younger, better looking and headstrong assistant. One such example is the American import, CSI, which stands for Crime Scene Investigation, and which is aired in this country by Channel 5. The programme comes from the Jerry Bruckheimer stable and it’s been enormously successful on both sides of the Atlantic, spawning two further versions set in Miami and New York, but to my mind, the original, based in Las Vegas has been consistently superior.

The basic format is what you’d expect from a crime drama series, where murders are committed and the perpetrators brought to justice, except that CSI tackles this scenario from a different angle, concentrating on the work carried out by the people behind the scenes, the forensic scientists, whose painstaking and often frustrating job it is to gather sufficient evidence to secure a conviction. The programme leads us through the whole investigation procedure, starting with the crime scene, following through to the processing of evidence in the lab, and the subsequent questioning and arrest of suspects. Generally speaking, each episode contains two cases running concurrently, and the action switches constantly between both cases throughout the programme, meaning that the pace is quite fast, and as somebody not at all scientifically minded, I find that I have to concentrate quite hard so as not to miss a vital part of the plot. During the most recent series, the programme makers experimented with four different storylines in one episode, and despite having seen this episode twice, I literally lost the plot (or plots) several times in the space of an hour, leaving me to draw the conclusion that they’d be wise to stick to the two-case formula in future.

The special effects people have pioneered a unique way of depicting how the victim met his or her fate, which is to show, from the perspective of inside the body, how the means of death occurred. This means that we might see, in gory detail, things like how a bullet has made its way through the layers of skin tissue into the heart or brain, or the destruction and disintegration of the internal organs following the administering of a fatal substance, for example. Although I’ve never actually seen inside a human body, whether dead or alive, the reconstructions seem extraordinarily realistic, as does the sight of entrails being extracted from the bodies by the pathologist (Robert David Hall) during the autopsies, and I must confess to turning my head away in squeamish horror at the sight of such things.

With Las Vegas as the setting for the programme, it’s inevitable that many of the crimes take place in either desert or casino locations, whether it’s a mob killing, the murder of a hooker, or a jealous husband bumping off his wife’s lover, but to the scriptwriters’ credit, they manage to retain the individuality of each storyline, and bearing in mind that we’ve now had five seasons, each consisting of over twenty episodes, there’s remarkably little in the way of repetitiveness. Occasionally the plots border on the bizarre, with blatant overtones of the X Files, but generally we can accept these small aberrations, because of the authenticity of the scientific side of the stories, facts which are beyond dispute.

Heading the CSI team is Gil Grissom, forty-something and greying gracefully at the temples, whose personality is as much an enigma to his colleagues as it is to the viewer. William Petersen plays Grissom, or Griss as his co-workers often refer to him, and the fact that he also co-produces the series makes me wonder just how much of his own personality he injects into the character. Grissom is, as far as we know, a bachelor, although there have been vague hints of past liaisons, and there’s a certain amount of sexual chemistry between him and some of the female cast members, but it’s something which the scriptwriters very cleverly don’t pursue, merely offering tantalising hints which the actors convey brilliantly with a knowing look or the raising of an eyebrow in the right place. Very little emphasis is placed on any of the characters’ private lives in fact, something which helps keep the flow going, and which doesn’t detract from the already complex plotlines.

Grissom is a bit of an oddball – he’s supremely knowledgeable about his subject, and has an unfailing devotion to duty, which he expects everybody else to have too, and he seems genuinely puzzled when one of his team displays a human weakness of some kind – as he constantly reminds his team, they are scientists, and facts and logic prevail over speculation and assumption. He can be emotionally cold, to say the least, although he does have a sense of humour, and it’s not unusual for him to crack a joke or two, albeit a somewhat highbrow one, often based on his vast knowledge of literature and quotations. He’s a devotee of Sherlock Holmes, whom he regards as a cerebral equal, and there are indeed similarities in both characters. He has a penchant for insects, cockroaches in particular, which he breeds, and we could be some way here to discovering the reason for the lack of female companionship in his life. His remarkable knowledge of an insect’s habitat and life expectancy enables him to deduce almost to the minute, how long a person has been dead, owing to the rate at which the larvae have developed, and the amount of decay there is in the body. (Romantic so-and-so, eh girls, but useful for getting that big hairy spider out of the bath, perhaps?)

Despite his apparent lack of ability to form close relationships, he is actually a great team player, and he’ll back his team to the hilt when necessary, sometimes risking his own credibility and standing in the process. He acts as mentor to the younger CSIs, not least with spiky-haired Greg (Eric Szmanda), who began as the geeky and at times, outlandish lab assistant, analysing fingerprints and blood samples, and who for a long time, nursed aspirations to ‘go out into the field’ and become a fully-fledged crime scene investigator. This he has now done, under the fatherly guidance of Grissom, who has given him a bit of a rough ride at times, and there have been occasions when he’s seriously considered giving up his ambitions in despair, only to be praised unexpectedly by Grissom shortly afterwards. Greg, like Grissom, has some unusual hobbies, and I think possibly, that Grissom sees in him, something of himself as a young man, hence his desire to nurture Greg’s development, even if he does take a perverse pleasure in seeing the younger man rattled.

Of the two female investigators, Catherine Willows (Marg Helgenberger), a divorced mother of an eleven year old girl, is the senior member of the team, next to Grissom. Catherine has a somewhat shady past, having formerly earned a living as a lap dancer, and later discovering that her biological father is a casino owner, who has more than once dabbled on the wrong side of the law. She has a tendency to attract the wrong sort of person (although as I’ve said, we don’t see a great deal of the relationships angle in the programme), and Grissom could barely hide his disgust when she once briefly, but unknowingly, became involved with a leading suspect in a case. Was this anger at her lack of professionalism, or poorly-concealed jealousy? – I’m inclined to think it was the latter, as Grissom clearly has feelings of some kind for Catherine, whose toughness he respects greatly. Again, the scriptwriters have given only the merest of hints, and the rest is left to our imagination, although I don’t think Catherine would be one to stand for the cockroaches.

Sarah Sidle (Jorja Fox) is the younger and often fiery female officer, so wrapped up in her job that she too has no private life, and again there are subtle hints that she and Grissom may have come close to starting a relationship, having been seen going out to dinner after work on one occasion. Sarah was badly hurt when she was passed up for promotion based on Grissom’s recommendations, although in his customary aloof manner, Grissom infuriatingly refused to comprehend her anger at having been rejected, both professionally and privately.

The team is completed by Nick Stokes (George Eads), a cheerful and likeable character, immensely popular with the ladies, and Warrick Brown (Gary Dourdan), who fought his way up from a poor background, with the pair frequently laying bets as to the outcome of a case, much to the disquiet of the puritanical Grissom, and it doesn’t help that Warrick is a recovering gambling addict, who once almost lost his job because of his penchant for playing the tables. Between them, these two provide much of the humour, and they often behave like naughty schoolboys to Grissom’s headmaster figure.

Every member of the team would gladly put his or own life in danger in order to help a colleague, such is the tremendous team spirit in evidence here, and the characters have become so close professionally, that it seems they can read each others thoughts even, and they know exactly how each other ticks. It helps, I think, that all the main actors have been in the show from the start, and it’s probably true that they too, have learned to read each others’ moves so well, which contributes greatly to the enormous success of the programme. The scriptwriting is superbly slick, and I’ve already mentioned the special effects, which bring the scenes to life in macabre fashion. The fifth season has just finished, going out on a spectacularly dramatic note with a two-parter written and directed by Quentin Tarantino, in which Nick was kidnapped and buried alive, with his colleagues left to watch in frustration via a web-cam, whilst working against the clock to find and save him. This was a truly powerful conclusion, during which the suspense became almost unbearable at times, and indeed the episodes bore such a shocking and uncanny resemblance to the bombing events in London on July 7th, that their screening had to be postponed for a few weeks. I’m not sure if I could sit through many highly charged stories such as this one, but happily, I think it was a one-off, and I await the (hopefully) more sedate arrival of the sixth season, with the familiar strains of the Who’s ‘Who Are You?’ as its opening theme.

If I have one small complaint about this otherwise realistic and professional series, it’s the manner in which the CSI team are allowed to practically run the whole investigation on occasions. Of course, like most people, I know nothing about US police procedures, other than what I see on TV, and I don’t doubt that the officers carry guns, which seems to be the norm in America, but I think it’s stretching the bounds of credibility somewhat to have us believe that a team of forensic scientists would have so much involvement and influence in how a criminal case is run. Although the police investigations are always led by the redoubtable Detective Jim Brass (Paul Guilfoyle), and while it’s obviously sensible to have an expert sitting in on an interview to ensure that the appropriate questions regarding evidence get asked, very often the CSIs will take over the interview totally, and it’s even been known for them to conduct an interrogation of a suspect without a regular police officer being present. And would they really be authorised to visit a suspect at home for questioning? As I say, I don’t know quite what powers they would have in US law, and because the programme is otherwise so compelling to watch, I’m prepared to forgive any minor faults, as I am such assaults on the English language as criminalistics, commonality, functionality and burglarisation. (My Word programme has rejected only two of these words, so that’s a worry!) One look from Grissom’s smouldering eyes, and I’d forgive anything, except perhaps a cockroach in the bed.

Look out for the next series.

Summary: A police drama series revolving around the crime scene investigation unit