Thanks to Messers fan on TalkCSI for the heads up.

According to executive producer Carol Mendelsohn, an upcoming episode of CSI titled “The Panty Sniffer” will find the team helping the LVPD in a stakeout to take down some major Ecstacy pushers. The episode will also feature some personal time between leading lady Catherine Willows (Marg Helgenberger) and another character familiar to CSI fans. “Catherine will spend a good part of the episode in a hotel room with Detective Vartann (Alex Carter),” Mendelsohn told TVGuide.com. “We’ve already established a little flirtation between them in a prior episode, and although it’s not very CSI, yes, there is a kiss.”

Over on New York, romance is an everyday occurrence for Danny Messer (Carmine Giovinazzo) and Lindsay Monroe (Anna Belknap), who got married last season and welcomed a daughter, Lucy, into the world. Lindsay has been absent for several episodes so far this season, but executive producer Pam Veasey assures fans she’s not going anywhere. “She’s a mom. We don’t want to ignore the fact that sometimes mothers take time off,” Veasey explained. “You’ll definitely see her being a mother and trying to juggle the life of being a crime-fighter, forensic scientist and a parent.”

As CSI Files previously reported, race car driver Danica Patrick guest stars as a driver who becomes the primary suspect when her major rival, played by Antonio Sabato Jr, ends up in the hospital after a fiery crash on the race track. “Obviously Danica races cars, but Antonio does as well,” executive producer Pam Veasey told TVGuide.com. “It was great to have them both on the show. They have a lot of experience behind the wheel.”

Fans will discover in the episode that Mac Taylor (Gary Sinise) and Lindsay Monroe (Anna Belknap) have experience with the sport as well. “Mac has a fondness of racing, and so does Lindsay,” Veasey said. “Those are two characters that know a lot about racing, which no one would expect. Lindsay knows about the mechanics of a car and totally gets into racing, being a Montana girl.”

“As a kid, [Mac] built his own soap-box derby car,” she continued. “So there’s a little reminiscing for him and a fun little moment, in which both Mac and Stella [Bonasera, Melina Kanakaredes] get in the cars and race them. Our actors got to peel against some pavement and burn some rubber.”

When the body of a young woman is discovered in a snowy park surrounded by blood, the CSIs come to suspect she may be the victim of a vampire cult.

Synopsis:

Mac, Flack and Hawkes stand over the body of a young woman whose excursion to Central Park on a snowy day to take photographs ended in tragedy. Hawkes suspects she bled to death from a puncture wound to the neck, and Mac notices part of her ear appears to have been bitten off. In the morgue, Sid confirms that the young woman died of exsanguination, and points out an unusual scar on her wrist, while Danny develops the photographs from her camera, including several of a young man the CSIs suspect was her boyfriend. Stella and Flack retrace the woman’s steps through her photographs and find the building where she lived. The doorman identifies her as Estelle Christensen, and the man in the photographs as Estelle’s boyfriend, Keith Borgese. He tells Stella and Flack that Estelle and Keith used to go to Central Park together every day. Mac questions Keith, who tells him that he and Estelle fought the day before, so he wasn’t with her in Central Park the day of her murder. Mac wonders if the fight led to violence, but Keith breaks down and says he should have been with her, that he could have protected her. Hawkes runs a fleck of dried blood found on Estelle’s body believed to be from the murder weapon and gets multiple DNA hits on it. One gets a hit in CODIS: a tattoo artist named Billy James. Flack and Hawkes question Billy, who sports a scar similar to Estelle’s on his wrist. Suspecting one of his tattoo guns might be the murder weapon, Hawkes confiscates them. He tests them out at the lab, but none of them match the mark the weapon that killed Estelle made, and Flack reports that Billy’s alibi checks out.

Estelle’s parents identify her body and tell Mac that they brought their daughter to New York as a young girl. She loved the city. Mac, noticing a scar similar to Estelle’s on her father’s wrist, vows to find her killer. Sid stops by Mac’s office later to share a theory: acting on a hunch, he looked up the scar on Estelle’s wrist and found that it was consistent with a cutting ritual by a group known as Sanguine or real vampires—people who look at vampirism as a kind of religion. They believe they discover a higher plane through consensual blood exchange. Danny and Flack go over Estelle’s apartment, where Danny discovers an exposed roll of film in the refrigerator. Danny develops the film and finds pictures of some sort of ceremony. He recognizes Billy James and spots Keith in one of the shots, and notices an older man in several of the photos, holding a blade of some sort. Mac pays a visit to Estelle’s father and asks him about the scar and the pictures. After an initial denial, he relents and identifies the older man as Joseph Vance, the master of the local vampire haven. He tells Mac that Joseph has known Estelle since she was a child, and that he asked Joseph to keep an eye on her. After Danny identifies the blade in the photograph as an ankh, an ancient Egyptian symbol for eternity, he and Flack crash the haven and arrest Joseph.

Joseph tells Mac he has never harmed anyone, and that all he did was offer Estelle love and support. Mac is skeptical, and disturbed by Joseph’s practices. When the missing piece of Estelle’s ear is found in Joseph’s apartment and Hawkes identifies some of the blood on Joseph’s ankh as belonging to Estelle, it seems like the CSIs have their killer. But Danny finds foreign DNA on the piece of ear, and Mac assembles the team to try to put Joseph at the scene of the murder. Stella mentions that Joseph is claiming innocence, and threatening to sue the crime lab, saying they planted the ear in his apartment. The team discovers a discrepancy when they realize Keith’s blood is on the ankh, but he didn’t have a scar on his wrist. Mac brings Keith back in and the young man breaks down, claiming that the haven changed Estelle. He followed her to the park that day and attacked her in a rage, killing her. After Keith is arrested, Mac meets Estelle’s father in Central Park and gives him her photographs.

Analysis:

There’s an elegance to “Sanguine Love” that suffuses the entire episode, giving the whole thing a very stylized feel. Director Norberto Barba lingers over images of the snow-covered park, while haunting piano music plays over many of the winter scenes, and a cello punctuates the scenes with the vampire haven. Despite the grim subject matter, there’s a real beauty in the imagery, whether it be the bright red blood on the snow or the softly lit room where the Sanguines gather. The episode’s languid pacing and lingering shots set it apart, and also give some weight to what could be a silly subject matter. Vampires are all the rage right now—from Twilight to True Blood to The Vampire Diaries, they’re everywhere, and hotter than ever. The problem with putting them in a crime drama is that it runs the risk of putting the story over the edge, into absurd territory—something this episode does manage to avoid.

That the episode is penned by one of the actors on the show only brings more scrutiny. Following last season’s less than successful effort by Melina Kanakaredes, “Grounds for Deception”, which took the show out of New York to Greece for an outlandish action adventure escapade, I can say that Carmine Giovinazzo’s first credit for the show is much more true to the tone of CSI: New York. Instead of taking some sort of dramatic trip into his character’s past or turning Danny into 24’s Jack Bauer for an hour, Giovinazzo has written a restrained, fitting entry. Somewhat surprisingly—and gratifyingly—Danny doesn’t even take center stage in the hour; rather, it’s an ensemble effort with Mac leading the charge. It’s so refreshingly free of vanity that one can forgive Giovinazzo for shoehorning a song from his band, Ceesau, into the scene in which Flack and Hawkes go to interrogate the tattoo artist Billy James. The catchy tune, while perhaps not as natural a fit for the hour as the haunting piano and cello music, isn’t out of place in the edgy tattoo parlor.

Though it’s admirable Giovinazzo avoided turning the episode into some sort of absurd paean to Danny’s awesomeness, I can’t help but wish there’d been a little something more for Danny here—not a storyline or a connection to the victim or her family (that is wisely left to Mac), but perhaps a flash of the passion and energy that made Danny so interesting in earlier seasons of the show. He’s thankfully free of his albatross in this episode, but the marriage of Danny and Lindsay has proved the old adage that happy couples don’t make for interesting television. Of course, it doesn’t help that Danny and Lindsay have none of the heat Eric and Calleigh do on CSI: Miami or any of the deep connection Sara and Grissom shared on CSI. I’m hopeful that the return of Shane Casey alluded to in “Flag on the Play” will spell the return of a more dynamic storyline for Danny, who really is at his best when he’s under duress. Certainly it will be more compelling that having Danny quipping that he gets to scour the lingerie football players’ website because he’s “married.”

Danny does have a great line about Adam, delivered as he talks to Stella after he’s developed the film from Estelle’s camera. He tells Stella that Mac had originally assigned Adam the task, but the “kid” had no idea what Mac was talking about. “The digital generation,” Danny shakes his head. The comment is doubly amusing given that Danny isn’t that much older than Adam, and there are no doubt many high tech devices that Adam knows his way around—like the credit card theft device in “Some Buried Bones”—that Danny wouldn’t have the first clue about. It’s too bad A.J. Buckley wasn’t around for this episode—he, Robert Joy and Anna Belknap are apparently contracted for fewer episodes this season than in years past—because I imagine he’d have a clever retort for Danny. Stella tells Danny, “I hope you hit him,” no doubt a little unsettled that the guy she spent the night with in “Epilogue” doesn’t know how to develop a roll of film.

There’s some fun had at the Sanguine’s expense, but not as much as one would expect, which is refreshing as well. Mac does cast a skeptical eye Sid’s way when the quirky coroner comes to him with his suspicions. “I’m no vampire!” Sid protests, citing his source as “the world wide web.” Sid admits he has his oddities, but “with everything that’s out there right now, the idea of ingesting another person’s unscreened blood is quite frightening.” Sid might not be into the practice himself, but he’s the perfect character to put it all together, and the look on Mac’s face whenever Sid shares some odd trivia or peccadillo is priceless. Flack’s snark as ever is right on target: at one point he asks a vampiric suspect if he’s going to bite him, and when searching Estelle’s apartment he says to Danny, “That’s a relief—she’s got a bed.” Danny replies, “What did you think? She’d have a coffin?” Flack can always be counted on for a laugh—even the edgier, darker Flack that has emerged this season isn’t above a wisecrack or two.

Mac himself isn’t immune to a bit of disdain for the Sanguines. When Joseph Vance tells Mac he’s “deeply disturbed by Estelle’s death,” Mac offers a quick retort: “You’re deeply disturbed—I’ll grant you that.” The casting of Carlo Rota, who made a splash on 24 as sullen Chloe O’Brian’s husband Morris, was inspired; he brings a gravity to the role of Joseph that a lesser actor wouldn’t have offered. Rota’s cultured accent and polished poise give Joseph credibility he wouldn’t have otherwise had. Charles Shaughnessy similarly brings a somber note to his role of Estelle’s father, and he and Mac share a nice scene at the end of the episode, when Mac joins him in Central Park and brings him some of Estelle’s photographs. Once again, I was gratified to see Mac take the lead, simply because it helped to demarcate the episode as a typical CSI: NY outing, as opposed to an ill-advised departure. For a first venture into writing for the show, it’s a solid one.

On a lighter note, while CSI has test dummy Ballistics Joe, CSI: NY has a seemingly endless supply of pig cadavers. One has to wonder how many (fictional) pigs have died to help out the New York City crime lab. In this episode, Hawkes gamely tests out weapons on a porcine cadaver, getting frustrated when none of the tattoo guns prove to be a match for the weapon that killed Estelle. Each of the CSI shows has a few hallmarks, some of them cutting edge technology—like NY’s virtual autopsy or CSI: Miami’s massive touch screen display—while others, like Ballistics Joe on CSI and the pig cadavers on CSI: NY, are surprisingly low tech, but in their own way, just as critical to the CSIs’ investigations.

The New York team closes in on the Compass Killer as they try to prevent him from claiming his final victim.

Synopsis:

Picking up where “Cuckoo’s Nest” left off, the team tries to figure out how the Compass Killer, Hollis Eckhart, disappeared from right under their noses in Flushing Meadows. Mac finds the answer when he spots a manhole cover that’s been moved. He and Flack venture down into the sewers, discovering Hollis Eckhart’s hideaway: a series of rooms designed to look like a Manhattan apartment. Mac sends Danny and Flack to search the sewer tunnels for Eckhart while Lindsay and Hawkes process the apartment and Adam taps into the city’s surveillance cameras. Danny spots a man in a green hoodie and he and Flack give chase. They pursue the man above ground to an alley, but when they find him hiding, they see the man they’ve been chasing isn’t Eckhart. The man, Leonard, tells them that Eckhart accosted him in the sewers and then felt bad and gave him his jacket. Danny takes the jacket but gives the man his own in exchange. Back at the lab, the team works on the evidence from Eckhart’s makeshift apartment, going over torn up pieces of paper and a solar illumination gage. Stella determines that Eckhart’s previous three victims weren’t the people he actually held responsible for his wife Calliope’s death–including the man who sold her killer the gun, the psychiatrist who didn’t identify the killer’s violent tendencies and the guard who let him in the building–but people his psychotic mind had mistakenly assigned the blame to.

Danny and Flack race to a hardware store after Eckhart attacks a worker there and flees with a length of rope. Lindsay analyzes the torn pieces of paper and determines there’s a picture that’s been blacked out, and posits that the killer hates his final victim more than any of the others. Hawkes finds two faded tickets and begins to analyze them. Hawkes is able to put it all together: Eckhart was using the sun tracking equipment to pinpoint Manhattanhenge: the day when the sun rises in line with the city’s grid. Manhattanhenge is scheduled to take place on December 5th: Hollis Eckhart’s birthday, and the day his wife was killed two years ago. Mac realizes that’s today’s date, and that they have a mere two hours to find Eckhart before he claims his final victim. The search kicks into high gear and Hawkes recovers information from the tickets: they were for the Philharmonic. Lindsay is able to uncover the drawing details enough to see that the final victim is none other than Eckhart himself. Mac races to the Lincoln Center and finds Eckhart there with a note on his chest that reads: “I shouldn’t have asked her to come. I’m sorry.” Eckhart runs when he sees Mac, and the CSI gives chase, eventually cornering him in a Manhattan intersection as the sun rises. Eckhart, seeing the ghost of his wife, raises his gun to his head, but Mac manages to talk him down and the killer surrenders. Afterwards, Mac and Stella interpret the note: Eckhart was supposed to meet his wife at the Lincoln Center to see the show, but he was running late and asked her to come to his work instead… which resulted in tragedy. With the case closed, the team heads out to enjoy dinner together.

Analysis:

The Compass Killer arc ends with what is essentially an episode-long pursuit, as the CSIs race to catch Eckhart before he claims his final victim. “Lat/Long” introduced the killer, while “Cuckoo’s Nest” unraveled the mysteries of his past and his motivations, leaving “Manhattanhenge” free to focus on his capture. There’s a big red herring in the form of Leonard, the hapless homeless man Eckhart attacks and then offers his jacket to, and a few more pieces of the puzzle fall into place–most significantly that the person Eckhart intends to harm is himself–but mostly the hour is devoted to the manhunt, which is certainly exciting. Seeing Adam set up shop in the lab and turn it into a massive surveillance center gives viewers a thrill in part because we know how psyched Adam is to be a central point person in the big chase. Adam has been grappling with fears of being replaced or pushed aside this season, so it’s fun to see him taking on such an important role in the search for Eckhart.

Given the circumstances surrounding his wife’s death, it’s not exactly a shocking revelation that Eckhart’s final victim is himself. Though he tried desperately to protect her, Eckhart ended up getting shot and falling to the floor, forced to listen helplessly as the killer went after and killed his wife. To add another dimension to his guilt, we learn after he’s been caught that Eckhart was running late that day and rather than meeting his wife at the Lincoln Center as they’d originally planned, he asked her to come to his office first. It was a simple request, one that on any other day wouldn’t have had consequences any more dire than perhaps making the couple late for their concert. Knowing that, it’s easy to trace the course of Eckhart’s rage: if one of the people he holds responsible–the gun seller who didn’t check to see if the killer had a permit, the court-appointed psychiatrist who deemed him stable or the security guard who let him in the building–had raised a red flag, Calliope Eckhart and a lot of other people would probably still be alive. Hindsight is 20/20, and any tragedy can be traced back through a series of near misses–including the one that took Mac’s wife from him.

That Eckhart’s delusions caused him to take his revenge on the wrong people ironically makes him a more sympathetic figure rather than not–in addition to losing his wife now and carrying the guilt from her death, he now has the blood of innocent people on his hands. If he gets the treatment he needs, that realization is what awaits him. Whether he can survive such a realization is very much in doubt; Mac and the vision of Calliope end up saving his life, but at best he’s looking at life in an institution, locked away with his guilt and devastation. Nonetheless, it still feels like a win when Mac is able to talk him out of shooting himself. It might have been nice to see Flack, whose loss is much more fresh than Mac’s, be the one to step up and reach out to the man, but Mac’s entreaties and mention of Claire still made for an effective climax.

I found myself surprised at how much that climax tugged at my heartstrings, in part because of the gut-wrenchingly poignant performances of Skeet Ulrich and Josie Davis as the doomed couple. Her desperation and his guilt build an incredible intensity that make Mac seem almost like an afterthought. The drama here is not coming from Mac’s entreaties–really, who is Mac to Eckhart?–but from the war within Eckhart himself, to bring his quest for vengeance to its conclusion or to listen to the voice of his wife, to do what he knows deep down she would have wanted and spare himself. Ultimately his love for her wins out, and his surrender is a surprisingly gentle one: he lays the gun on the ground and sinks to his knees. Mac and Flack rush in with less violence than they might have otherwise, recognizing that the fight is over not because Eckhart is surrounded but because he’s truly surrendered.

Nice as it might be to see Danny back on his feet and acting more like his old self than he has all season, it feels more than a little unrealistic that Mac would put him on a major manhunt as his first real case back in the field. Danny might be eager to prove that he’s got his “sea legs” back, but it doesn’t stand to reason that he’d send someone who was walking with a cane a few weeks ago on an important chase. Even with Flack to keep a protective eye out, it seems like a risky move. What if Danny had been struck by crippling back pain in the middle of the pursuit? Danny seizing up in pain at a crucial minute could have cost the team Eckhart, and no matter how much Mac cares about Danny and his fragile self-esteem, it didn’t seem a risk worth taking on this particular case. Indeed, at the end of the episode at the restaurant, Danny is reaching for a bag of ice for his aching back indicating he over-exerted himself in the field.

Given his breakdown in “Cuckoo’s Nest,” Flack is a little too fine in this episode, especially given Eckhart’s backstory. Yes, Mac lost his wife in 9/11, but he’s not the only one who can relate to Eckhart–or to wrestling with guilt and remorse. Mac managed to get Flack to snap out of his funk in “Cuckoo’s Nest,” but for him to just be fine–and to not register some basic similarities between himself and Eckhart doesn’t really ring true. Perhaps Mac sending Danny out into the field with Flack was as much for Flack as it was for Danny–Flack has seemed at his happiest and most normal this season around Danny, and he never misses an opportunity to look out for Danny. Indeed, it’s Flack, not Danny, who jumps in and tackles Leonard. Though it’s nice to see Flack is in recovery, it would have made sense to at least see him clocking some of the parallels between his situation and Eckhart’s.

The person we do see really relating to Eckhart is not Flack but Lindsay, who is clearly thinking back to the shooting in the bar–and how she felt when Danny was hurt. It’s really the first time we’ve seen her address her feelings about what happened in the bar; in “Cuckoo’s Nest” Danny talked about his fears with Stella a bit, but up until now Lindsay has been focused on taking care of Danny and keeping things upbeat and positive for his sake. Trey Callaway’s script gives Lindsay some of the best, most introspective lines she’s ever delivered when she wonders aloud about how losing someone you love in the way Eckhart loved Calliope can break a person. It’s clear from the impassioned way she’s talking that she’s thinking back to the shooting in “Pay Up” and how she could have lost Danny in one violent and shocking moment. After all, she’s lived it before when her three best friends were killed in a diner shooting when she was a teen. More than anyone, Lindsay can understand how violence can change someone’s life in an instant.

I’ve never before thought of Lindsay as a character who could be carried away by rage, or even understand that impulse. In “Dead Reckoning”, she struggled to understand how a wife could kill her unfaithful husband out of pure passion, while the much more emotional Danny got it on an instinctual level. But Lindsay’s comment about Eckhart’s rage over Calliope’s death being “a rage you can’t control” suggests that this is something Lindsay gets on an instinctual level. Lindsay obviously believes that had Danny died in that bar, she could have become similarly unhinged. She’s carrying around a fair amount of guilt, too, as evinced by her response when Danny comments that Eckhart “blamed himself as much as anyone else.” Lindsay immediately jumps in with, “Maybe more,” clearly showing that she really understands where Eckhart is coming from. The through line for Lindsay in this episode adds real depth to her character, something we see all too infrequently for her. Anna Belknap handles these scenes well, injecting a real intensity into Lindsay’s words as she speaks about Eckhart and his motives.

The episode ends on a cheerful note, with the team gathering at a restaurant to celebrate closing the tough case. Team bonding is something we’ve seen featured heavily in all three CSI shows this season, and it always makes for a fun wrap up for the audience. Stella gives a toast, Lindsay helps Danny with his ice pack and the two share a kiss, and Mac and Hawkes banter about their living arrangements. Hawkes has been crashing on Mac’s couch after his financial struggles in “It Happened to Me”, but we learn over the dinner that he’s found a place of his own. Mac seems thrilled to be getting his place back–until he learns the place is unfurnished. Looks like that couch is gone for good! The back and forth–and the chance to see the show’s two most serious characters joking around–is fun to watch and makes for a nice cap to a serious and powerful arc.

November sweeps is here, and the big news in the CSI franchise is next week’s three show crossover, which brings Ray Langston (Laurence Fishburne) to Miami and then New York. In an exclusive interview with CSI Files, CSI: New York Executive Producer Peter Lenkov talks about the New York installment of the trilogy, as well as the big serial killer storyline and Detective Don Flack’s (Eddie Cahill) continued battle with depression.

CSI Files: The big CSI crossover is next week! What can you tell us about the CSI: NY entry?

Peter Lenkov: Well, obviously we’re the bridge between the beginning in Miami and the end in Vegas. And what we wanted to do in our installment was brand it in a certain way. Give it a true identity so you knew you were watching a NY episode. For that, we shot a lot of scenes in New York. We also ramped up the stakes and gave Ray a bit of an arc. It was also important for us to add a new dimension to the story, so we just didn’t continue what happened in Miami, but added something significant to the storyline. Another piece to the puzzle. But what makes me most proud of this ep is the action component. It’s CSI: NY on steroids. Lots of hero moments. Hope the fans enjoy it as much as we did making it.

CSI Files: What can we expect when CSI: NY lead Mac Taylor (Gary Sinise) teams up with Ray Langston?

Lenkov: Besides the immediate bonding, there’s lots of action from this dynamic duo.

CSI Files: Sweeps will also see the return of the Compass Killer. What can you tease about his reappearance and the team’s pursuit of him?

Lenkov: All I can say is you won’t see the twist coming. This is a story where you might think you know the villain — but you don’t.

CSI Files: Last season ended with a bang, literally, when shots were fired into the bar where the team was toasting Angell’s (Emmanuelle Vaugier) life. When and how was it decided that Danny (Carmine Giovinazzo) would be the one who got shot?

Lenkov: About midway through last season, we discussed the idea of Danny getting shot, and perhaps learning to walk (again) at the same time as his daughter is taking her first steps. It just morphed from there.

CSI Files: Was there ever any talk of killing the character?

Lenkov: Danny? Never.

CSI Files: Danny went from a wheelchair to walking in four episodes, after being given a ten percent chance of walking again. Why did his recovery take place in such a short amount of time?

Lenkov: Four episodes don’t necessarily translate into four weeks, in the same way four episodes of 24 don’t translate into four weeks, but four hours. I think we did enough research on the injury and recovery to justify our storytelling.

CSI Files: Will there be any other ramifications of the shooting for Danny?

Lenkov: Absolutely. It’s something we’re addressing.

CSI Files: Lindsay (Anna Belknap) was back in action in “Dead Reckoning” in a way we haven’t seen her since season two. Can we expect more of that?

Lenkov: We love it when Lindsay gets to mix it up in the field… so yes, it’s something we want to continue with.

CSI Files: One of the most compelling stories this season has been Flack’s struggle with Angell’s death and his execution of her killer. It’s very clear he’s not okay–will his struggle continue to play out?

Lenkov: Absolutely. Eddie’s got a great arc this season with regard to his grief. You’ll see this come to a head in 608, a really powerful episode written by Zach Reiter and newcomer Aaron Thomas.

CSI Files: Up until this season, Flack has arguably been the show’s most grounded character. What factored into the decision to send him over the edge?

Lenkov: Exactly that… he was the most grounded and dealing with the situation this way felt very real. We all knew that seeing Flack in this condition would be a shock, but all that stems from the fact that Eddie has given so much to that character.

CSI Files: What was the reasoning behind the introduction of crime scene cleaner turned lab tech Haylen Becall (Sarah Carter)?

Lenkov: We have always looked to start new seasons with something fresh. That could be a new lab, new arc, or new recurring character.

CSI Files: We’ve heard Hawkes (Hill Harper) has a big storyline coming up–can you tease that a bit?

Lenkov: This is also the year of Hill Harper. He’s got multiple big stories ahead. I’d rather let the press department unveil those as they see fit… but we are very proud of his character development this season.

Synopsis:

Deborah Carter’s murder of her husband Kevin appears to be an open-and-shut case. After Kevin returned from a business trip, Deborah cooked him his favorite meal for dinner and greeted him with passion–only to discover a ring and a card from another woman in the pocket of his jacket. Deborah made good on her vow to kill him if he ever cheated on her, stabbing him seventeen times. The next morning, Deborah turns herself in. When Stella discovers another woman’s DNA on swabs taken from a piece of bread Kevin took a bite out of and the murder weapon, she calls Mac to tell him Deborah had an accomplice. Mac and Flack vigorously question her, but Deborah vehemently denies that anyone helped her. After Mac leaves the room, Flack asks her if she regrets the murder, and she tells him she doesn’t. Danny struggles in physical therapy and gives up for the day–only to receive a lecture from Hawkes, who tells him he needs to push himself if he wants to get out of the wheelchair. Sid finds a partially digested dinner in Kevin Carter’s stomach, while Haylen Becall notices that the food Deborah made him was never touched. Stella and Mac surmise he was having an affair, which might explain the woman’s DNA on the bread, but not the knife.

Hawkes searches the database and finds a shocking 21 hits in CODIS from the DNA from their mystery woman. The team has a one-woman crime spree on their hands. Hawkes ties her to eleven homicides, eight burglaries, and two robberies–in seven different jurisdictions. Chief Brigham Sinclair urges Mac to come up with a suspect–he’s under pressure to give a press conference about the case. Stella and Flack search nearby buildings for Kevin Carter’s mistress and are surprised when a pretty young woman named Zoya who tells them Kevin is her husband. When they question her, she’s shocked to find her husband of one year was actually married to someone else. Flack tells Mac he buys her story: Kevin used his dead brother’s social security number to create two separate identities for himself. Zoya’s DNA proves to not be a match to their killer’s, forcing the CSIs to look elsewhere. Lindsay gets a lead when she finds three of the victims received packages from a company called World Send with cocaine from the same batch in them. All three were delivered by the same World Send employee: Marcia Vasquez, who has a criminal record.

Flack and Lindsay track down Marcia, only to have her flee. Flack corners her in a restaurant but she grabs a knife and holds him off. Despite her threat that he’d better shoot her or she’ll kill him, Flack is unable to pull the trigger. Lindsay tackles Marcia from behind, taking her down, but at the police station she tells Mac that Flack froze. While Stella interrogates Marcia, Mac confronts Flack, who insists he’s fine. Mac notices Marcia get distinctly uncomfortable when shown the pictures of the drug dealers, but she doesn’t react to the photos of the other victims, and denies knowing the Carters. Haylen finds evidence that clears her of one of the other crimes: she was delivering a World Send package at the time. She couldn’t have been in two places at the same time. Stymied, Mac catches sight of a lab worker using a white cotton swab, and gets an idea. He heads to the factory in Brooklyn and discovers one of the young women working there touching the cotton without gloves. The “Phantom Killer” is nothing more than a factory worker contaminating the swabs the CSIs use with her DNA. Sinclair tells a relieved press that there is no serial killer. Haylen cleans up the Carters’ apartment and is confronted by a distraught Zoya, who tells her if Deborah hadn’t killed him, she would have. While Flack drowns his troubles in alcohol at a local bar, Lindsay wakes up to discover Danny in Lucy’s room, holding their daughter–standing up.

Analysis:

Well, here’s one we haven’t seen before! The CSIs hunt a woman on a crime spree only to discover the “Phantom Killer” isn’t a killer at all but a girl working in a factory that makes the swabs the labs use contaminated a whole bunch of them because she wasn’t wearing gloves when she handled the cotton. Kudos to writer John Dove for coming up with a story we haven’t really seen before in the CSI franchise–and building a strong story around the biggest of red herrings. It’s fun to watch the team scramble around as the case grows bigger and more perplexing only to find their diabolical suspect isn’t a vicious killer at all, but a diminutive girl whose hands were irritated by the gloves.

My only real quibble with the episode is more of an overall problem with the show: the near-divine wisdom of Mac Taylor. To see him look across the lab and notice a tech using a swab and have an a-ha! moment rather than say, going through the boxes of evidence and finding all the DNA was collected using cotton swabs or even reaching for a swab himself to examine, feels ridiculously convenient. Yes, Mac is sharp and observant, but lately he feels like the second coming of Horatio Caine, who can practically tell a guilty party just by looking at him or her. With prescience like that, who needs forensics? The original managed to avoid this problem (at least until the departure of Grissom; the jury is still out on super-CSI Langston), but the spin-offs tend to make their leading men unrealistically infallible.

The rest of the episode is pitch perfect, starting with Mia Kirshner’s brilliant turn as a woman scorned. I loved her calm certainty–she didn’t have a single regret about stabbing her two-timing ex-husband to death. “Was it that many?” she asks absently when told that she stabbed her husband seventeen times. Not only did she kill him, but afterwards she took herself to the Ritz, had some wine and stayed the night–and then woke up the next day and turned herself in. She’s definitely a cool customer, to the point that after Mac leaves the room, Flack asks her if she would do it again. “All seventeen times,” she answers, going on to tell him regrets are a waste of time and that it’s impossible to change the past. Flack tells her that when she closes her eyes, it’s going to haunt her.

Flack knows what he’s talking about; he’s haunted by two deaths–that of Jessica Angell and that of her killer, whom Flack shot point blank. Though he seemed dead certain of what he was doing when he shot Simon Cade in “Pay Up” after realizing Cade was the man who killed Jessica, that shooting has been eating away at him this season. There’s no question Flack is different, but Eddie Cahill manages to get that across without changing his mannerisms in a way that’s too extreme. Flack is more tense, angrier, and in some ways more thoughtful than he was before. Flack has never been a character that has much use for grey areas, but lately he’s been living in one–how else could he justify what his old code of ethics would define as murder?

His question to Deborah isn’t the only indication that the shooting of Cade is weighing on him: when he confronts Marcia Vasquez, who is wielding a knife and threatening him, he finds himself unable to shoot her. I’m not sure the situation was as dire as Lindsay paints it to Mac–though Marcia was verbally threatening Flack and wielding the knife, it’s not like she lunged at him or made a move to stab him. Indeed, knife versus gun at that range seems like a fairly uneven standoff. It’s not clear how it would have ended had Lindsay not tackled Marcia, but I’m just not sure about her assertion that Marcia “easily” could have killed Flack.

When Mac confronts Flack, the detective is cagey and defensive. He’s irritated that he’s being “second guessed for not killing someone.” Mac tells him if Lindsay hadn’t acted, he and Flack might be having the conversation in the emergency room–or not at all. Despite Mac’s appeal, Flack retreats behind a professional shield, saying to the CSI that unless he wants to make it official, he’s got nothing else to say. Flack isn’t an easy person to get to open up if he doesn’t want to, and Mac isn’t especially skilled at initiating deep heart-to-heart conversations. Stella and Danny, the more emotional, warm characters on the show, are much better at reaching out in that way than Mac is. But Mac tries anyway, because it’s pretty obvious that Flack is not okay, though he does a good job of pretending he is. Unlike Mac, whose anger can get out of control, or Danny, who just falls apart, Flack puts up a pretty good front.

The episode leaves Flack at a bar, drinking a beer alone. While seeing a character in a television drama drinking alone is never a good thing, I don’t get the feeling Flack has fallen too far… yet. He’s drinking a beer, which hardly feels like the choice beverage of an alcoholic. But he’s drinking alone, isolated, wrestling with feelings of anger and guilt. Flack is going down a dangerous path, but gradually–and realistically. People like Flack, who pride themselves on being in control of every situation, rarely come apart all at once. Rather, they come apart piece by piece, slowly but eventually–if they don’t stop themselves–totally. The writers and Cahill deserve praise for giving Flack’s plight the gradual build it needs.

If only the same was true of Danny Messer’s recovery from the gunshot wound that left him paralyzed in “Epilogue”. A mere three episodes after finding out Danny was shot and wheelchair bound in the aftermath of the shooting in the bar, Danny is in physical therapy–and already walking again. It feels too soon–a storyline that had plenty of promise being rushed. When I saw Danny in a wheelchair in the first episode of the season, I expected his recovery would make for a big arc for the season, and to see it compressed into the space of four episodes–two, really, since we didn’t see him making an effort to walk until last week’s outing–feels rushed. It’s not much of a journey for the character to have him struggle through a few episodes only to more or less be walking in the space of a month or so (from the audience’s perspective). I have a feeling he’ll be walking by next week’s episode, and it just feels like it’s coming too quickly. Surely there was more to play in this arc than just a few scenes between Danny and Lindsay in which he’s dejected and she’s supportive, and one kick in the butt from Hawkes?

That being said, what we do see here is very compelling. Danny struggles at physical therapy and then gives up when it gets too hard, prompting Hawkes to give him a good talking to. Hawkes refuses to let Danny feel sorry for himself, telling Danny that he’s seen plenty of trauma patients who would gladly trade places with Danny. Danny sulks and talks about how much pain he’s in, but Hawkes refuses to relent, telling him about a fireman whose back was broken who managed to recover. Though Danny tells Hawkes to take him to work, later we see Danny go back to physical therapy and says he’s done whining: he’ll do whatever it takes to get out of the chair. Hill Harper and Carmine Giovinazzo play off each other well during the confrontation–though Danny and Hawkes are each irritated with the other, they’re good enough friends that they’ll listen to each other, even if they don’t see eye to eye.

After Danny gets back to the lab, he and Lindsay share an enlightening scene that highlights how different these two really are. While Lindsay wonders, amazed, how Deborah could stab her husband seventeen times, emotional Danny gets it, pointing out that if she hadn’t loved him, Deborah would have tucked the ring back in Kevin’s coat and shared a dinner with her rich husband. Lindsay cracks a joke about it being “obvious” that Deborah stabbed her husband because she loved him. It’s an interesting way to show how they don’t quite speak the same language. While Danny is all passion and emotion, Lindsay is logic and reason. Not to say Danny would ever stab someone he loves to death over a betrayal–indeed, unlike Flack, I don’t think Danny is capable of murder in any form–but Danny understands, better than anyone, actions based solely on strong emotion.

It is Danny’s passion that gets him through physical therapy and to the point where, at the end of the episode, he’s able to get up out of his wheelchair and lift his daughter into his arms and hold her–standing up. In what is an undeniably sweet scene, Lindsay wakes to hear Lucy crying on the baby monitor and goes to check on her, only to find Danny standing with Lucy in his arms. Anna Belknap deftly conveys the pure joy Lindsay feels in the moment as she takes in Lucy’s smile and Danny on his feet for the first time in months. Standing in the darkened room holding his daughter, Danny looks both vulnerable and happy, realizing it is indeed possible that he’ll be able to walk again.

New lab tech Haylen Becall is apparently pulling double duty, working at the lab by day and continuing to clean up crime scenes by night. After working the Carter murder case, she’s stuck cleaning up the scene after the book is closed on it. She’s surprised when Zoya Carter, Kevin’s other wife, walks in to look at the apartment and confesses that if Deborah hadn’t killed him, she would have. Haylen says nothing during Zoya’s confession, which is frustrating given how little we know of the character. It seems like her response could have provided some insight into her, but perhaps her lack of one indicates she’s not totally prepared for the part of the job that brings CSIs into contact with the families of victims–or suspects. It’s still hard to get a read on the character–so far she’s still just the eager newbie trying to prove herself. I hope future appearances shed more light on her.

New York has been around since 2004, but Veasey said the current cast will be sticking around–at least for the time being. “[W]e really wanted everyone to come back this year,” she said. However, the possibility exists that an actor will eventually leave the show. “We are prepared for when it happens but we’re not preparing scripts for it,” she explained. “We’ll deal with it when it happens but what we like is that we’re sort of in our stride.”

“In the last few years our cast has really come together, we’re telling more personal stories because the audience is familiar with them and we’ve liked how they’ve grown,” Veasey continued. “We didn’t feel like we were finished so we didn’t want anyone to leave. We have a lot more personal stories to tell inside some really great twisty-turny topical crime stories.”

The show will immediately delve into personal storylines as season six gets underway. The shootout that ended season five will have repercussions for every member of the New York team. Danny Messer (Carmine Giovinazzo) and Lindsay Monroe (Anna Belknap) got married and had a child last season, and this year they “are facing a real challenge in their marriage. They’re going to face that challenge and continue to grow as a couple and as working parents with Danny’s big life-changing experience.”

Don Flack (Eddie Cahill) will have to deal with the loss of his girlfriend, fellow detective Jessica Angell (Emmanuelle Vaugier), who was killed in the season five finale. “[H]e was beginning a relationship with someone he really cared about and he is challenged with doing your job and having a passion for it when you feel like there was an injustice in the world and he’s not so much in love with the cop work and he starts dealing with that loss,” Veasey shared.

“With Hill Harper, who plays Sheldon [Hawkes], we wanted to reflect some of the things that are going on in the world and Hill Harper will be a victim of a Madoff-like financial situation where he loses everything,” she continued. “We thought most people think it won’t happen to them. When you sit down and plan your retirement and you wake up and you don’t have it anymore where do you start again and what outlet to do you have and what do you change?”

Stella Bonasera (Melina Kanakaredes) is “faced with letting go”, Veasey explained. “She’s doing what comes to mind for her best interest,” the executive producer added. “She’s the opposite of Sheldon, who was planning his retirement and she’s more about living today and taking chances and risks and you’ll see things like that. You don’t really expect that from her but she’ll be pretty aggressive in her own life not just as a CSI investigator.”

As for leading man Mac Taylor (Gary Sinise), “he has got to be stronger than his usual self,” Veasey revealed. “Usually he’s strong in his leadership in the answers of right and wrong in terms of crime fighting. He is the moral foundation of investigating a crime and putting someone away but when it comes to seeing everyone around you all feeling and changing and having reactions to loss and losses of all kind. Mac has got to be the emotional foundation, leader and he’s the guy they can all go to and he’s connected with each of them on all these different levels. It’s going to be a really fun, emotional year.”