Starting out the week on Monday at 10:00pm ET/PT, CSI: Miami will re-air “Hostile Takeover” from earlier this season. Newcomer Jesse Cardoza (Eddie Cibrian) returned to Miami—just in time to become a hostage when the lab was attacked.

On Wednesday at 10:00pm ET/PT, CSI: New York will air a repeat of this season’s “LAT 40° 47′ N/Long 73° 58′W”. Skeet Ulrich made his first appearance as Hollis Eckhart, the Compass Killer who led the team on a chase through the city as they tried to find him before they found another victim.

CSI: Crime Scene Investigation will be preempted by the NCAA Basketball Tournament on Thursday.

Before getting together with Eric, Calleigh didn’t have much luck in love. “Calleigh has poor taste in men,” Procter told Zap2It. “She’s the child of an alcoholic. She has an alcoholic father. She picks terrible people for herself.” She added, “One’s dead; one got married. Jake [Berkely (Johnny Whitworth)] disappeared, but I think he’s coming back. Then there was the guy that I rode out into the sunset with, that we never saw again. He rode off into Cougar Town. That’s true, he did.”

Calleigh isn’t the only one whose relationships usually end in ruin—leading man Horatio Caine (David Caruso) has had some romantic woes of his own. “If I were a Floridian, I would not date either Horatio or Calleigh. It would not be a smooth move,” Procter said.

Putting Horatio and Calleigh together wouldn’t be a smooth move either, she explained. “The only reason I could guess that they didn’t put the two of them together would be that he’s a really mystical character,” she said. “If you had him in a personal relationship, inevitably he’d have to expose some of himself, and I just don’t think that, as a character, it works.” Or, she added, “maybe it’s because it was important that he always have really beautiful girlfriends that got killed.”

The romantic development between Calleigh and Eric was not a surprise for the actress. “We both watch TV,” she said. “There’s wish fulfillment in entertainment. Let’s face it, we, the humans, watch other humans being human for entertainment. It’s a big, fat zoo. Why wouldn’t you want to see love in there? I mean, it’s the most powerful thing of all.”

“I think it would be fun if it turned into a Mr and Mrs Smith thing,” the actress continued, referring to the possibility of her character marrying Eric somewhere down the line. “It’d be nice to see them at home, with children, trying to balance having a job like this.” She added, “I always think that when you can take the reality of a situation and add the fantasy to it, it’s good.”

Tilly will play a former showgirl with a sex obsession and a penchant for popping pills. The character will be suspected of murder during the sweeps episode. Conway will play her husband.

You can check your local listings for air times. If you missed the show, don’t worry—CSI Files will post a link when the full episode becomes available on TV.com.

For more detailed ratings information, including other Thursday night programming, visit PI Feedback.

After a blogger and an unidentified man are found murdered, Mac follows up on a lead given to him by Reed Garrett.

Synopsis:

Mac is interrupted from his conversation with a beautiful woman in his favorite deli by a text summoning him to the site of a double homicide. When he arrives at the scene, he learns the two men have been dead for about twenty-four hours. Flack finds a wallet identifying one of them as Michael Paley, a popular muckraking blogger. Paley was shot, while the other man, who has no ID on him, was apparently beaten to death. Stella finds traces of gold near one of the bodies, and Danny discovers a four-leaf clover in a shoe impression. Lindsay finds an odd collection of junk: a spoon, a battery, and a glass container. Danny identifies four sets of shoe impressions and posits that the killer may have had an accomplice, especially once he works out that the gun slid under a cabinet during the murders and was apparently retrieved after the second man was beaten to death. In the morgue, Sid tells Stella that he compared their John Doe to a picture of Paley’s blogging partner, Cam Vandemann and determined Vandemann isn’t their unidentified victim. The coroner found vaccination levels of Hepatitis A and B, malaria, typhoid and rabies in the man’s system, suggesting he may have traveled internationally recently. Stella notices number impressions in the man’s head wound. In the lab, Lindsay identifies blue green algae on John Doe’s shirt while Danny finds the four-leaf clover is a variety native to Ireland. Mac gets a call from Claire’s son, Reed Garrett, a blogger himself, who asks Mac to meet him at the diner. Mac responds and Reed asks the CSI to meet with Cam alone. Reed maintains Cam is innocent and has information, and Mac reluctantly agrees to meet with the blogger. Before Mac leaves the diner, the owner, Phil, calls him over and gives him a message from the beautiful woman he met the night before: his kindness to her convinced her to stay in Manhattan.

In the lab, Hawkes and Stella are able to recreate the pattern from the murder weapon, and are shocked to identify it as a bar of gold bullion. Stella and Hawkes go to a bank that just received a shipment of gold that morning, and are shown to the vault by U.S. Treasury Agent Pangle. They are joined by Adam in their hunt for the murder weapon, and the lab tech is the one who comes across it first. Hawkes tests the bar and finds blood on it. Agent Pangle tells the CSIs that the bar came from a shipment from the manufacturer, Elemental Precious Metals. Lindsay gets a lead on John Doe when she matches the blue green algae to a type used by a bar in the city for making green beer for St. Patrick’s Day. She and Danny go to the bar where the bartender, Finnegan Hansard identifies their John Doe as Charlie Cooper, a cad he kicked out of the bar. Charlie promised Hansard an engagement ring for his girlfriend—then delivered a cubic zirconium one and proceeded to sleep with Hansard’s girlfriend. Back at the lab, Flack tells Mac that Paley’s apartment was ransacked, while Stella has learned that Charlie has been in and out of China. Charlie also worked for Elemental Precious Metals, which made a mint on melting down reclaimed gold and turning it into bullion. Mac is distracted, noticing a newspaper with a listing for an apartment in SoHo—something he recalls the beautiful woman he met at the deli had circled. Mac contacts the realtor and sends her a message asking her to meet him at the deli the next night at 8pm. Mac turns back to the case, questioning Tom Weir, the owner of Elemental Precious Metals. Weir claims he can’t think of a reason why anyone would kill Charlie—he got along with everyone. Weir denies involvement in either death. Both Mac and Flack don’t believe his excuses.

That night, Mac meets Reed and Cam Vandemann approaches cautiously, protesting his innocence. He tells Mac that he and Paley were working on a story about international gold fraud and got a tip from a Chinese source. Cam was late to the meeting, and when he got there, he saw Paley and Cooper get murdered. Thinking the killer had left, he went in to see what he could do, and he grabbed the gun from beneath the cabinet when the killer returned. The man left when Cam threatened him with the gun. Mac tries to get Cam to turn over the gun, but fearing it’s the only thing that proves his innocence, Cam flees. Reed tells Mac the reason for Cam’s paranoia: the killer was in uniform—he was a cop. Flack is skeptical when Mac fills him in; Paley was killed with a .22, which isn’t a standard issue police weapon. Mac and Hawkes turn to the collection of junk Lindsay collected from the scene and put together that someone was using the materials to test the authenticity of gold. Tracing the clover and a piece of limestone to the Irish Hunger Memorial in Battery Park, the CSIs are able to track down Vandemann and Flack brings him in—and gets the gun. Though the serial number is scratched off, Mac is able to recover it, and trace the gun back to Finnegan Hansard. Flack and Danny go to arrest the bartender, who runs—right through a St. Patrick’s Day parade—but Flack catches him. Flack interrogates the bartender while Mac and Stella question Weir: Weir’s company was trying to pass Tungsten off as gold and Paley and Vandemann were about to expose them. When Weir couldn’t get them to back off, he sent Hansard, dressed in a security uniform, in to kill the bloggers and their source. When Weir tells them they can’t prove he’s connected to the murders, Mac sends in Agent Pangle, who charges him with a litany of offenses, including counterfeiting and fraud. Reed thanks Mac, but Mac begs off on dinner, going instead to meet the woman in the deli, who introduces herself as Aubrey Hunter.

Analysis:

Halloween has always been the logical go-to holiday for CSI shows to build a murder around, but St. Patrick’s Day fills in pretty nicely here, even if at times the ties feel awfully coincidental—like the four-leaf clover and the limestone from the Irish memorial that happens to be right next to Paley and Vandemann’s home base. Still, there’s no arguing that it’s not fun to see Flack and Danny chasing a suspect through the big St. Patrick’s Day parade in Manhattan… in which their other suspect is marching. A fun bit of trivia: apparently the show went out and got LAPD officers to dress up as the NYPD officers participating in the parade, a nice tribute to the real life heroes.

There are two pieces of big news in this episode, the first being the return of Reed Garrett, last seen falling victim to the Taxi Cab Killer in “Taxi”, nearly fatally. An aspiring journalist with a popular blog, Reed worried Mac, and while he never quite crossed the line into complete irresponsibility, he took chances the taciturn CSI certainly wished he hadn’t. Reed appears to have mellowed somewhat here, though he’s obviously still on the blog circuit given that he’s close to fellow incendiary bloggers Paley and Vandemann. Though Mac is skeptical about meeting Vandemann alone, he trusts Reed’s judgment enough to go along with the plan. Vandemann, played sympathetically by Aaron Ashmore, also trusts Reed enough to agree to the meeting, despite believing he has a good reason to stay far away from the authorities. Reed does leave out a big part of the story as to why Vandemann is so spooked: the blogger believes the man he saw murder his friend and their informant was a cop. It’s not clear why Reed doesn’t fill Mac in on this, other than the fact that it makes for a terrific (albeit ultimately misleading) act out; even Vandemann seems surprised that Reed didn’t tell Mac. Regardless, it’s great to see Reed brought into the story in such an organic way, and it’s nice to see that he and Mac are still close.

The other big news in the episode in the episode is the introduction of a new love interest for Mac, played by the sparkling Madchen Amick. The challenge of introducing a love interest for Mac is that the woman needs to bring out the playful side of the character; otherwise, the supposed chemistry falls flat. Claire Forlani’s Peyton Driscoll managed to access that lighter side, and Kristen Dalton’s Quinn Shelby proved a great foil for the somber CSI, but sparks didn’t fly with either Jessalyn Gilsig’s Jordan Gates or Julia Ormond’s Gillian Whitford. There’s a remoteness to Mac, and a reserve that is hard to penetrate, and any actress cast opposite him has to contend with that. Mac might be a brilliant scientist, but like shy people so often are, he’s simply a little bit awkward when it comes to making new connections. Gary Sinise seems keenly aware of this barrier his character unconsciously puts up, and it’s a testament to his skill and consistency as an actor that he doesn’t simply morph the character to make romance progress smoothly.

I’m pleased that Amick’s character, Aubrey Hunter, was able to believably get through to Mac and even get him to make the first move. While not seeming as closed off as Mac, Aubrey is grappling with her own problems when she meets Mac: she’s burned out on Manhattan and thinking of throwing in the towel if she doesn’t encounter a single act of human kindness on her trip to the deli. It seems like an arbitrary ultimatum, but people teetering on the edge of a decision will often let it come down to something that might seem small and relatively insignificant to others. Aubrey’s decision is likely about to go the other way when we first see her—a woman shoves her out of the way to get to the number dispenser at the deli. When she drops her newspaper, Mac picks it up, hands it to her and then offers her his second number. That could have been the end of it, but because it was significant to Aubrey, she decided to leave a note for Mac.

What’s even more surprising is that Mac tracks her down. Recalling the circled SoHo apartment listing in the paper—not surprising for someone whose job requires him to be as detail oriented as Mac’s does—he sends her a note through the real estate agent showing the apartment and even asks her out… inspired by something Reed said to him in reference to Vandemann, about having to sometimes take a chance on someone else. Intrigued, Aubrey shows up, and they awkwardly exchange a few words before she sits down with him. For all of her obvious attractiveness, Aubrey seems to possess a reserve similar to Mac’s, and also a similar desire to be drawn out. She’s nothing like the vivacious Peyton—but when Mac met Peyton, he very much needed someone outgoing and assertive, someone who would be the aggressor in the relationship. Because of Peyton, Mac has been at least partially drawn out of the protective shell he built in the wake of Claire’s death. Can anyone imagine the Mac of season one or two asking a stranger to meet him at a deli? It’s nice to see he’s made progress, and I’m curious to see where this new relationship will go.

Flack seems to have mellowed out a bit since last week’s intense interrogation of a suspect in “Uncertainty Rules”, but I had to raise an eyebrow when he claimed that an Irish temper is “not really a problem for me.” That’s not quite an accurate statement, especially this season in the wake of his shooting of Simon Cade. Flack seems to be carrying a fair amount of anger around this season, as well as a certain world-weariness that he never seemed burdened with until his girlfriend was murdered and he executed her killer. Flack even seems to have washed his hands of Danny’s problems, which he used to relentlessly take on in previous seasons, even when met with resistance from Danny. Flack’s frustrated response upon learning that Danny’s badge had been stolen—and that Danny had avoided reporting it missing—in “Flag on the Play” was not followed up with a heroic attempt on his part to recover the badge—a notable change from his behavior in the past. Seeing Danny lag far, far behind Flack in their pursuit of Hansard made me wonder if Danny’s injury was slowing him down, or if it was the fact that he didn’t have a badge to flash when breaking through the parade participants (many of whom were NYPD officers). No good can come from Danny’s badge being missing this long—and probably in the hands of Shane Casey.

The humor in the episode comes from the always reliable A.J. Buckley, notably when Adam joins Stella and Hawkes in the vault and sees the gold bullion stacked in piles all around him. “This is what all the money in the world looks like,” the lovable lab tech sighs. “So pretty!” When searching for the bar that was used to kill Charlie Cooper, Adam is caught sniffing a gold bar by a scowling security guard. Adam’s excitement is always fun to watch, and it’s rewarding when he is the one to discover the bar the team is looking for.

A meddling receptionist is murdered during a fire drill at an ad agency.

Synopsis:

A fire drill at Tabula Rasa ad agency almost disrupts the plans for a surprise birthday party for the office assistant, Valerie Metcalf, but the party goes as planned… until Jeffrey Lipton gets in the elevator and is hurt in an accident, which also reveals the body of receptionist Renee Dorsett, tangled in the elevator cords, an ax sticking out of her head. When the CSIs arrive on the scene, Horatio surmises that the fire drill was pulled as a distraction. Calleigh notices that the alarm contained an identifying liquid that would have sprayed the hands of whoever pulled it. Calleigh and Walter test the employees on the 19th floor and Valerie’s hands are the ones that test positive for the liquid. Valerie admits that she pulled the alarm to buy herself time to pick her boyfriend up from the airport during work hours. Though she denies killing Renee, she describes the woman as the “office Nazi,” who was always out to criticize people. Valerie suspected she was getting people fired. Ryan believes he’s found a lead when he discovers a broken piece of a ceramic mug with a child’s face on it. There’s a picture of the same child on Kent Ackerman’s desk, but Walter opens the frame and pulls the picture from it—revealing that it’s actually a page from a magazine. Kent admits that he faked having a family in order to be able to take time off from work for supposed familial obligations, and not get stuck working late like the single people at the office are expected to do. Renee confronted him and told him he needed to come clean—the mug broke during the confrontation. Kent swears he had nothing to do with her murder. Horatio and Jesse are interrupted from going over Renee’s desk by a noise in the ceiling. They follow it and are surprised to find Teddy Enwald crashing through the ceiling. The Tabula Rasa employee admits he’s been living in the corridor above the ceiling to save on rent. He ran to avoid getting found out, but the CSIs become suspicious of him when they search his living space and find bloody paper towels among his possessions.

Calleigh matches the blood on the towels to Renee in the lab, but Teddy professes his innocence. In the morgue, Calleigh asks Dr. Loman to remove Renee’s nail polish and discovers mees lines on her fingernails, indicating Renee was being poisoned. When low levels of arsenic are found in Renee’s system, Calleigh tests a food wrapper from Teddy’s hideout and find it has arsenic in it. The CSIs question Teddy, but he claims he simply takes other people’s leftovers and is disturbed to find he’s been ingesting poison. Valerie is the one who distributes the lunches. Calleigh obtains a warrant and finds the poison among Valerie’s possessions. The office assistant admits she was poisoning Renee—but only a little bit. After Renee brought up Valerie’s herpes medication in front of a bunch of their co-workers, Valerie decided to get revenge, but just by making her sick… not actually killing her. Calleigh informs Valerie that what she did is just a felony. Ryan finds a threatening letter written to Renee tucked away in one of her books reading: “You ruined my life. You’ll pay for what you’ve done.” Horatio notices the postmark on the letter is dated July 2007—before Renee came to work for Tabula Rasa. Calleigh, Ryan and Jesse go to Renee’s house to get some background on her and are impressed by the size of her abode, given her meager salary as a receptionist. Calleigh and Ryan are surprised to find a diploma on Renee’s wall from a prestigious MBA program, and the pair discovers that in 2007, Renee worked at a big investment firm as a broker. Ryan discovers that in 2007, Renee started making monthly payments to a local cemetery. Back at the lab, Jesse gets Travers to run some motor oil he found in Renee’s front yard, near tire treads from a vehicle that apparently drove on her lawn. Travers reluctantly runs the test and finds the motor oil is from an older car, likely a classic model. Horatio and Tripp find the classic car owner among the Tabula Rasa employees: Mark Bullock. They discover lemon trace from Renee’s lemon trees in Mark’s tire treads, confirming he was the one who vandalized Renee’s property. Mark admits he went to confront Renee after getting a call from HR. He assumed Renee ratted him out for bringing his dogs to work, and that he was going to be fired. But when he confronted Renee she covered for him, telling their boss that the dogs were service dogs—she was riding the employees to save their jobs, not sabotage them.

The graveyard proprietor, Luis Velasquez, tells Horatio and Ryan that Renee was paying to maintain the grave of Paige Shorehaux, who died at the age of 28. Renee visited her grave every Friday, apparently with a guilty conscience. Calleigh asks Dave Benton to look up Paige’s death report and learns the young woman committed suicide. When Calleigh sees the handwriting on the suicide note Paige left, she recognizes it as the same writing on the note Ryan found in Renee’s book. A little more digging reveals that Paige was fired from her job by Renee shortly before killing herself. Calleigh also learns Paige was engaged—to Jeffrey Lipton, who worked with Renee at Tabula Rasa… and found her body in the elevator. Calleigh and Walter try to question Jeffrey, but he puts them off. The CSIs realize they need a warrant, and Jesse finds a reason for one on Jeffrey’s clothes from the elevator. His shirt is covered in blood splatter from when Renee’s body fell into the elevator, but Jesse discovers a blood drop that isn’t like the others: it’s medium velocity splatter, from when the ax connected with Renee’s head. Horatio and Tripp confront Jeffrey: he killed Renee during the fire alarm, then dumped her body down the elevator shaft—only to be shocked by the body falling out on him in the elevator later. Jeffrey relents and admits that he took the job at Tabula Rasa to figure Renee out. When the fire alarm went off, he confronted Renee and accused her of killing Paige—and then attacked her with the ax. After he killed her and dumped her body, he cleaned up the blood and left the bloody paper towels up in the ceiling. Jeffrey is arrested and the CSIs go to leave for the day… and opt out of taking the elevator.

Analysis:

Workplace woes take center stage in this satirical outing, which offers more than a few chuckles that anyone who has ever worked in an office can likely relate to. Part of the reason The Office (both the British original and the U.S. version) is such a successful comedy is that pretty much everyone who has ever held a job can relate to having an annoying co-worker, a trying boss, or personal details that one wouldn’t want trotted out in front of office mates. Which is why the extremes of The Office and “Getting Axed” make us laugh. Who hasn’t been tempted to sneak a longer lunch or to unload on a devious co-worker? “Getting Axed” takes these desires to the extreme: Valerie pulls the fire alarm to allow herself enough time to pick her boyfriend up from the airport, Kent fakes a family so that he’s not unfairly overburdened by his boss, Mike drives his car into Renee’s prized lemon tree when he suspects she’s sold him out to HR. And then there’s poor scorned Teddy, who literally takes up residence in the ceiling and lives off his coworkers’ leftovers in order to save money. Valerie resorts to poisoning Renee after Renee spills the beans about her STD in front of the entire office. These are definitely extremes, but no doubt everyone can relate to one or more of these irritations—which is exactly what makes the Tabula Rasa employees’ reactions so funny.

The CSIs can’t show any sympathy, of course, but some of their reactions provide laughs as well, as when Calleigh questions Valerie after learning she’s the one who poisoned Renee. Valerie insists she wasn’t trying to kill Renee, and was simply using a “teensy weensy” dose. Calleigh retorts that it’s a “teensy weensy” felony. Each employee thinks he or she is justified in cheating the system. Kent is indignant that people with families get to cut out of work early or aren’t expected to work hours as long as those the single people work, so he invents a family and decorates his office with kids’ drawings that he’s done. Teddy is disdainful of his coworkers who actually shell out money in rent every month; why bother when there’s a perfectly good living space in the ceiling above the office. It’s perfect—unless a coworker commits murder and hides some of the evidence in the middle of your “living room.”

After doing a pretty good job of painting Renee as the “office Nazi”—she exposes Valerie’s STD to the office, she uncovers Kent’s fake family and takes him to task for the deception—the episode does a 180 and reveals that in fact Renee has been trying to get her coworkers in line so that they won’t be fired. After thinking she sold him out, Mark Bullock learns that Renee covered for him after he brought his dogs to work, claiming they were service dogs. We learn Renee is carrying a fair amount of guilt from her days as a high-powered investment broker, when she was forced to fire an underling who went on to kill herself. Wracked with guilt, Renee apparently decided to get off the corporate ladder altogether and opts instead to take a receptionist position. Renee’s actions are mostly explained away by her desire to protect her coworkers, save for when she calls out to Valerie that her herpes medication is ready. Was she just trying to get everyone to go back to work quickly and stop taking time away from work to flirt with the pretty office assistant, or did she perhaps dislike the calculating young woman?

The teaser has the feel of a horror movie; there’s an immediate sense of foreboding. First Valerie is summoned to the conference room by Kent and Mark, and the flash of a knife makes the audience think that this summons will spell doom for her. Fake out! It’s a surprise birthday party. Then Jeffrey Lipton heads for the elevator, leading the audience to suspect he’s the victim—especially when the elevator starts to malfunction when he’s inside. It’s another fake out—an ironic one, since Jeffrey is in fact the killer. The elevator falters and Jeffrey is knocked down—and the body of Renee comes plunging through the hatch in the ceiling, dangling from the elevator cord. As Tripp puts it in the end to the killer: “you got the surprise of your life.”

The elevator offers plenty of opportunity for humor. Ryan processes it as Dr. Loman works to detangle Renee’s body from the elevator cords. After he’s finished his task, the coroner asks Ryan to get a ladder to help him get down, but the preoccupied CSI simply wanders off, his focus on a lead rather than helping the coroner get down. At the end of the episode, Tripp steps into the elevator at the lab, ready to leave now that the case is closed. Jesse, Ryan and Walter rush to catch the door before it closes and hop on the elevator with him. The elevator quakes just a little bit, and Tripp makes a split second decision to opt for the stairs. Walter follows him, and Ryan is close on Walter’s heels. Jesse seems to be the lone hold out—until the lights on the elevator flash slightly and he, too, disembarks and heads for the stairs. It’s a cute end to the episode, an endearing little character moment—something we happily have been seeing more of this season on Miami.