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.

After a lingerie football player is found dead in the team’s locker room, the New York CSIs must determine if her death is connected to that of a teammate who died six months ago.

Synopsis:

A triumphant celebration for lingerie football team Manhattan Rapture is cut short when one of the players finds the star quarterback, a no-show for the game, dead in a whirlpool bath. Flack tells Mac the girl’s name is Kristen Melvoy, while Sid determines she was killed between 7 and 10am that morning—and that she was already dead when she hit the water. The team’s trainer, Alex Martin, tells Stella and Danny that Kristen didn’t have any enemies—just normal rivalries with the other girls on the team. Stella is skeptical of that after she finds a crumpled photo of Kristen that was clearly hanging in her locker. She also finds Kristen’s wallet and clothes, indicating she was killed in the locker room. In the morgue, Sid tells Mac that Kristen died of anaphylactic shock caused by an allergic reaction. Sid also tells Mac that he was approached by Leanne Baldwin, the mother of another player on the team, six months ago. Leanne’s daughter Natalie was only 22 when she died of a heart attack, and her mother was certain something was amiss about her death. The girl’s father refused to allow an autopsy, and Sid looked over the case results and found them sound. He’s now having second thoughts about that determination. Lindsay goes over a fleck of metallic paint from Kristen’s sports bra while Hawkes finds DNA from Kristen on a syringe from the trash in the locker room. He discovered traces of lidocaine and another substance in the syringe. Sid looks at Kristen’s medical records and finds the girl was allergic to lidocaine, confirming that the injection was what killed her. Sid and Hawkes find the injection site just above her left breast. Sid meets with Leanne Baldwin and gets her permission to exhume her daughter’s body.

Stella gets prints from the photo from Kristen’s locker and matches them to the second string quarterback on the team, Meredith Muir. Mac questions Meredith, who works part time as a dental hygienist and has access to lidocaine. Meredith admits to a rivalry with Kristen; she was jealous of the other girl because she was a phony and prone to bragging. Meredith denies killing her, but Mac has his doubts, especially when Meredith tells him she hated Natalie Baldwin, too, because Natalie was sleeping with her boyfriend. When Hawkes identifies the other substance in the syringe as human growth hormone, the CSIs’ suspicions turn to Alex Martin, the trainer, whose career in professional football ended because of steroid use. Flack and Danny question the trainer, but he insists he learned his lesson and isn’t doling out drugs to the women on the team. Lindsay follows up on the paint trace while Flack tells Mac that Meredith’s alibi checks out, and Alex Martin also has one, though his is his four-year-old daughter. Danny finds a picture online of Kristen wearing someone else’s triathlon medal, leading him and Flack to a pawnshop where Kristen bought the medal. They learn Kristen pawned her engagement ring for ten grand recently, but that a week later it was reported stolen, to the pawnshop owner’s dismay. Danny finds another stolen item among the wares at the shop: his grandfather’s Korean war dog tags. Flack immediately asks him what’s going on, and Danny admits his wallet and badge were stolen a week ago after acupuncture. Flack gets upset when he finds out Danny hasn’t reported the theft.

Stella and Lindsay learn that Scott Coleman, Kristen’s former fiancé, is the one who reported the ring stolen. Stella and Lindsay question Scott, who tells them that his engagement to Kristen broke up when they moved to New York and she started drastically changing her appearance with cosmetic surgery. Wondering if the connection between the two women’s deaths is cosmetic surgery rather than football, Sid begins the autopsy of Natalie and finds that there are massive amounts of silicone in her body, which is what caused her death. The silicon got into her blood stream and caused a clot, which caused the heart attack. Sid and Stella break the news to a shocked Mrs. Baldwin, who agrees to turn over Natalie’s cell phone. Hawkes finds the number of a “Dr. Alphonse Portero” in the recent calls list, and Lindsay traces the metallic paint to a plastic surgery clinic in Brooklyn. When Mac and Flack go to the clinic, the receptionist says she’s never heard of a Dr. Alphonse Portero, saying the only Al there is Allen Greenway, who works on the cleaning crew. When Allen sees Mac and Flack coming, he runs but Flack catches him in a tackle. In interrogation, Allen denies having anything to do with the deaths, but Mac mentions stolen Botox and Restylane packages found in his apartment, as well as the recycled syringe which has a print on it—which Mac is certain will match Allen. Allen finally gives up and insists Kristen’s death was an accident, that he had no idea she was allergic to lidocaine, but Mac has no sympathy for him. Leanne Baldwin thanks Sid for giving her closure, and offers him a football signed by the Manhattan Rapture players that belonged to Natalie. In the lab, Danny runs the prints he finds on his stolen dog tags and is shocked to find they match Shane Casey, a serial killer Danny helped bring to justice several years ago.

Analysis:

“Flag on the Play” is an episode filled with red herrings—perhaps one too many. First there’s Meredith, the lingerie football player who has a problem with not one but both of the dead girls. Then there’s the trainer who has a history of drug abuse but swears he isn’t supplying the women on the team with anything illegal. Then there’s the triathlon medal that leads the CSIs to the pawnshop (where Danny lucks into finding one of the items stolen from his locker in “Criminal Justice”), where they learn Kristen was engaged and pawned her ring. And then there’s the ex-fiancé, whose relationship with Kristen didn’t end well, but no–he didn’t kill her either. Yes, every episode has a few red herrings, or else the mystery would be over pretty quickly. But most episodes don’t leave me feeling strung along for three out of the four acts. I knew right away that the metallic paint sample Lindsay was agonizing over was the key to the whole thing—we just had to wait through most of the episode for the results of her search to come through, conveniently at the same time Natalie’s silicone-ridden body was exhumed. When the evidence points suddenly to cosmetic surgery gone wrong, it feels like a sharp left turn rather late in the game.

That aside, there’s plenty to enjoy here, most notably a personal storyline for Sid Hammerback, who too often is relegated to  simply relating funny anecdotes in the morgue over the latest corpse of the week. Robert Joy is very good at delivering Sid’s sharp lines with just the right amount of quirky flair, so it’s nice to see him take center stage in an episode. Natalie Baldwin’s case has obviously been weighing on his mind; though he deemed the other coroner’s findings sound, Leanne Baldwin’s insistence that something doesn’t add up about her daughter’s death obviously stuck with him. Sid is finally able to offer Leanne the closure she’s been seeking, even if the news that her daughter was undergoing extensive cosmetic procedures comes as a big surprise to her. Sid is obviously sad he can’t offer her more, but when she makes a note of how hard his job is, he comes back with a somewhat cheesy and pat line about parenthood being the hardest job there is. It might be true, but it’s a clunker of a line nonetheless.

Also somewhat on the saccharine side is the final scene of the show, when Sid offers to show Mac his football, but only if Mac “goes long.” Coming after what is a truly shocking reveal in Danny’s storyline, the moment not only feels out of place, but somewhat trite as well. I like cute team moments as much as the next viewer, but this one should have come before the big reveal that Shane Casey has apparently found a way to insert himself in Danny’s life—if it had to come at all. The scene between Sid and Leanne Baldwin would have been a much more powerful way to end the episode if the desire was to have it go out on an emotional rather than a chilling note. As it is, the unnecessary scene between Mac and Sid takes away from the shock of Casey’s return and also just a bit from the focus on Sid’s relationship with Natalie’s mother—and the lighthearted tone of it just doesn’t fit given the previous two scenes.

Shane Casey’s return is indeed Big News, sandwiched awkwardly between two emotional scenes or not. Introduced in “Hung Out to Dry” as a serial killer with an axe to grind with the system and last seen in “Raising Shane” when he framed Hawkes for murder and focused his bid for a fair assessment of his brother’s case on Danny, Shane is one of the most compelling killers ever to surface on any of the CSI shows. Played with a mixture of seething resentment and heartbreak by Edward Furlong, Shane lashed out at the people he believed were responsible for his brother’s wrongful conviction and subsequent suicide. In “Raising Shane,” Danny took on the unenviable task of proving to Shane that in fact his brother was guilty of the murder for which he stood accused. Danny, who like Shane has a troubled older brother, reached out to Shane after he and Flack arrested the young man, telling him he understood what it was like to want to defend a troubled sibling. Shane latched onto this moment of compassion from Danny, telling Mac in “Raising Shane” to send Danny to meet him at the scene of the murder his brother committed. Danny went, and managed to convince Shane to stand down. The last we saw of Shane Casey, he was taken away in handcuffs.

After the prints on the dog tags come up as a match to Shane, Danny seems genuinely baffled, recalling aloud that Shane is supposed to be serving a life sentence for the murders he committed. Given that Shane managed to escape from custody once before, you’d think Danny would be a little more worried that not only does it appear Shane has somehow gotten out of jail, but that he’s also fixated on Danny for some reason. I sincerely hope this storyline won’t lead to some clichéd nonsense about Shane kidnapping Danny and Lindsay’s child, or targeting Lindsay. Shane’s obsession with Danny is interesting in that it stems not from the fact that Danny arrested him but from a simple act of kindness, a few heartfelt words Danny spoke to Shane when he could have stayed silent and said nothing. I hope that whatever reason he has for coming after Danny now is as interesting and complex as Shane’s motives were in the previous two episodes.

I find myself just as frustrated as Flack seems to be with Danny’s refusal to report his badge missing. It was surprising to see Flack, who seems to have endless reserves of patience when it comes to Danny, lose his cool after Danny tells him he doesn’t “want to make a big deal” out of his badge being stolen. “It is a big deal, dammit,” Flack positively seethes, and actually storms out. Has Flack finally run out of patience for Danny’s endless problems? He certainly isn’t acting like the guy who chased Danny all over Manhattan after Danny’s gun was stolen in “All in the Family”. In his most recent CSI Files interview, Eddie Cahill said of Flack in the wake of Angell’s death and Flack’s shooting of her killer: “I just think he’s changed. I think sometimes we tend to nip it up and close it, and we have to, I understand that, but from a personal standpoint, I think he changed and now he’s different.” I can’t help but wonder if this is one example of how Flack is different; in the past, he’s dropped everything to help Danny, but here he seems to be washing his hands of the whole situation based on Danny’s absurdly childish response. I’ll be curious to see whether or not Flack ends up pressing Danny about the missing badge later on, or if he really is going to leave it to Danny to handle his own mess this time around.

Danny’s refusal to report his badge missing is incredibly childish, and shows that for all his supposed growing up when he became a husband and father, he still hasn’t totally changed. What’s much more baffling than Danny’s refusal to report the badge missing is Lindsay’s complicity in it—for a character who is such a by-the-book type, she’s being awfully lax about something that could have serious ramifications, especially since Danny has waited to report the theft. Lindsay presses him about it a bit early in the episode, telling he has to report it because it’s been a week, but doesn’t go any further with it. I imagine being married to Danny can’t be easy given how stubborn he is, but I’m surprised to see Lindsay just letting the issue go knowing what could be at stake. At worst I would expect Danny to be reprimanded for leaving his badge in an unlocked locker, but it seems like the consequences for not reporting it missing and having it used by someone like, say, Shane Casey, would be far, far worse. Now that Danny knows who has his badge, hopefully he’ll hightail it to Mac’s office and tell the CSI supervisor what happened. I can’t wait to see where this is going, and hope the return of Shane Casey injects some needed excitement and urgency into the season.

Thanks to perlnoir from TalkCSI for the heads up.

Hawkes is wracked with guilt after a man he treated while volunteering turns up dead a few hours later.

Synopsis:

A man lies dead in a crosswalk in the middle of a New York street, surrounded by a pool of his own blood. When the CSIs arrive, Hawkes is surprised to recognize the man, though he doesn’t say anything at the scene. The man’s wallet IDs him as Mark Stafford, the CEO of a small financial firm. Stafford apparently bled to death through his nose and ears, leading the CSIs to suspect he was poisoned. Later in Mac’s office, Hawkes confesses he encountered the man earlier that day working as with a volunteer medical unit in Central Park. A young woman with Stafford called for a medic, but when Hawkes examined the man, he noticed both he and the young woman were tipsy, and dismissed Stafford’s problem as a minor nosebleed–which it seemed to be at the time. Sid examines Stafford’s body and can’t find any evidence of the poison in his system, indicating it was absorbed quickly. He posits that it was ingested orally. He recovers granular trace from Stafford’s shoulder, and a piece of linguine from his inner thigh–under his clothes. Danny recovers prints and hair from the linguine, and learns that Stafford’s company went under recently and he filed for bankruptcy. Mac sends Danny over to Stafford’s apartment.

When Adam finds the prints and hair on the linguine all belong to different people, he offers up a theory: Stafford was “sploshing”–experiencing food in a sensual way at a trendy Manhattan locale. Flack and Stella pay a visit to a the restaurant that hosts the sploshing parties, but the hostess says Stafford wasn’t a member of the group. Flack spots Danny across the street in Stafford’s apartment and realizes that Stafford lived nearby. Danny peers through a telescope aimed at the restaurant when Flack calls him, and recovers a bootie in the sparse apartment. Danny gets samples from the liquids in the apartment, and Adam finds the culprit when the orange juice sample ignites when he tests it. Outside, Hawkes’ friend Brian Hamilton approaches him and tosses him an extra set of keys to his place. Hawkes thanks him, and Brian reassures the CSI he’ll get back on his feet.

Lindsay is able to identify the powder from Stafford’s shoulder as insect chalk made by a Chinese import company. Danny and Hawkes go over the YouTube videos of the sploshing party, and Hawkes spots the girl Stafford was with in the park on the video drawing something on the window. When he and Danny go to the site, they see an arrow drawn on the window pointing up, and head to the roof, where they find champagne glasses and a charm with a name on it: Tracy. Adam discovers the orange juice in Stafford’s apartment contained Dimethylnitrosamine (DMN), an incredibly potent toxin when ingested. Mac theorizes that after the invite from Tracy, Stafford mixed the orange juice and vodka and brought it over to the roof, where they drank it and hooked up. Lindsay is able to get Tracy’s full name by linking her with the purchase of the insect chalk: Tracy Wallace. Mac, Hawkes and Flack rush to her apartment, but it’s too late: Tracy is lying dead in a pool of water from her overflowing bathtub.

Sid confirms Tracy died from the same poison Stafford did, and together he and Danny perform an experiment to determine how long ago the poison was put in Stafford’s orange juice. Comparing the crystallization on the glass, they estimate it was about 48 hours ago. The CSI team discovers there was an open house at Stafford’s apartment, which was up for foreclosure, at that time. Dawn Higgins of Repo Luxe led a tour of ten people through the apartment, but when Stella looks at the sign-up sheet, she notices an eleventh name: Thelonious Cross. Stella takes the pen Dawn used to have everyone sign in, but finds too many prints on it to isolate just one. Across town, Hawkes is sleeping on his friend Brian’s couch when he’s woken by an unexpected knock at the door at 2am and several police officers burst in and arrest his friend Brian for grand larceny. Flack confronts Hawkes at the police station, but Hawkes denies any knowledge of Brian’s felonious activities–and refuses to elaborate on why he was on Brian’s couch, to Flack or Mac. Stella is able to isolate a print on the pen when she finds a foreign compound on it, identifying John Simmons–a former employee of Stafford’s company who lost his job when Stafford went bankrupt–as Thelonious Crook. Mac, Hawkes and Flack rush to his residence, and Simmons runs, about to jump off the fire escape out of guilt over his actions. Hawkes tries to talk him down, revealing that he too lost everything by trusting a crooked financial advisor. Mac and Hawkes catch Simmons just as he slips. When they return to the precinct, Mac tosses Hawkes his spare keys, telling the CSI he’s got an extra room–and it’s not up for discussion.

Analysis:

It’s about time Hill Harper got another juicy storyline thrown his way. After masterfully laying bare a past hurt in last season’s moving “Help”, Harper now gets to show Hawkes in another vulnerable situation, albeit a much different one. Sheldon Hawkes is not a rash man–he doesn’t act impulsively in the way Danny, Stella and even Mac are prone to, which is why he’s so thrown when he learns he made a bad call, and why he doesn’t reveal that he’d seen Stafford earlier that day right away. He might have made a split second decision about Stafford, but it was one based on his medical savvy. How many doctors would have seen Stafford and assumed that his nosebleed was indicative of a deadly and fatal poison? Probably not many. The episode goes out of its way to exonerate him–even noting that had he diagnosed Stafford correctly, there was nothing he could have done to save him–but no one really blames him for the understandable misdiagnosis.

His mistake is in not telling Mac about his prior encounter with the victim right away, but because he’s a man who gives care and consideration to everything he does, he has to go over what happened in his head a few times before going to his supervisor. Not only that–he also tries to do what he can to further the investigation, talking to Stafford’s neighbors to see if anyone can identify the girl he was with. It’s as though he doesn’t want to come to Mac empty-handed; he’s clearly hoping to contribute something alongside his confession. To his credit, Mac–who later admits to Stella that he was indeed angry–keeps his cool and doesn’t chew Hawkes out. He doesn’t offer comfort either, taking the matter-of-fact approach instead by telling Hawkes he can’t go back and save Stafford–all he can do is catch his killer.

Hawkes is wracked with guilt throughout the episode, imagining both Stafford and Tracy sitting up and saying to him, “You could have saved me.” The flashes are abrupt and jarring, physical manifestations of the sharp pangs of guilt Hawkes feels as he looks at the two victims. At the end of the episode, Hawkes is given a chance to redeem himself when John Simmons is ready to jump and Hawkes actually does act impulsively by opening up about the secret he’s been keeping for an entire month: that he lost a great deal of money to a crooked financial advisor. Hawkes’ split second decision to open up to Simmons gives the man enough pause that Mac and Hawkes are able to make it to him in time to pull him to safety. Saving a life–albeit not by medical means and in a way that’s quite unexpected for Hawkes–is just what the good doctor needs to restore his faith in himself.

Hawkes is definitely a proud man, which is what makes it so hard for him to ask anyone for help. Rather than turning to Danny, who expresses concern anytime he notices Hawkes is down, or Mac, who might be a hard man in many ways but has always expressed care for his colleagues and friends, Hawkes calls on an old graduate school acquaintance he isn’t close to, because it’s easier to explain his troubles to and ask for a favor from someone he’s not as close to–someone who, after he does get back on his feet, he won’t have to see on a daily basis and be reminded of the difficult times. Indeed, when he is confronted by the people he works with, he clams up, refusing to tell Flack, who takes the hard line with him, or Mac, who is more gentle but equally straightforward, what’s going on.

It’s Stella who is the most thrown by Hawkes’ actions–she’s always looked at him as someone who is both reliable and upfront. Stella tells Mac she’s not sure what to say to Hawkes–a common theme for her this season, it seems. Flack is one of her closest friends, but she hasn’t said anything to him about his out-of-character behavior, commenting about it to Mac instead. She’s queried Hawkes and Lindsay about Danny’s condition rather than asking Danny himself how he’s doing. While Stella might be more passionate and reactive than Mac, I think she’s equally uncomfortable around raw emotion–which is part of the reason she and Mac get along so well. She can confront Mac about bottling things up because she does the same thing–whereas confronting someone like Danny, who will pour his heart out at the slightest invitation is much more difficult for her. She’s able to talk to Hawkes once she’s made aware of exactly what’s going on with him, but she wants to know what she’s walking into.

But it’s Mac who does something truly unexpected when he tosses Hawkes the keys to his apartment, pointing out that he’s got a spare room–and that it’s not up for discussion. That’s a far cry from the Mac in season two’s “All Access”, who offered to get Stella a hotel room after she was attacked–rather than opening up his own home to her. Mac has been slowly opening up as a character throughout the series, growing more comfortable with emotions he once held at bay. Oh, he’s still plenty righteous and judgmental at times, but he’s a lot less rigid than he used to be, and more understanding. Would the Mac Taylor of a few seasons ago have resisted the urge to let his anger show when Hawkes came to him after the fact to admit he’d seen the victim? Probably not.

Danny seems cheerier this week than he has since the season began: he’s even able to crack a joke about his condition. After Mac tells him to go check out Stafford’s apartment, Danny quips, “I’ll hobble my way over.” Though he’s developed the somewhat irritating habit of calling everyone “buddy” or “bud”–he does it with both Flack and Hawkes here, and did with Flack in the previous episode, “Battle Scars”–it’s nice to see him more chipper… and it certainly beats out the overplayed “Montana.” Ever sensitive to the moods of others, Danny expresses concern for both Hawkes and Flack here, albeit the latter in a much more roundabout way. Noticing Hawkes’ pensiveness, Danny asks him if he’s okay and tries to make the good doctor laugh with a joke about the sploshing being “a disgrace to Italian cuisine.” With Flack, he’s much more subtle. Before he hangs up the phone with Flack, Danny ventures, “You be careful over there, buddy.” Flack, used to being the one concerned about Danny, and not accustomed to or comfortable with it going the other way, retorts, “Who, me?” Danny persists with a simple, “Yeah.” In their friendship, where Flack is so often the one checking up on and caring for Danny, the small exchange is significant.

Flack remains noticeably troubled–clearly grossed out by the sploshing (Flack has always been particular about his food and doesn’t seem to care for experimentation or tampering of any kind) and hostile with Hawkes after he brings him back to the station from Brian’s apartment. And yet when Flack spots Danny in Stafford’s apartment, an unabashedly wide grin spreads across his face. The only other big, genuine smile we’ve seen from Flack was in “Battle Scars”–again, directed at Danny as he’s arresting Al Santiago. I can’t help but hope that Danny plays some part in pulling Flack back from the ledge he appears to be teetering on. Eddie Cahill–who is doing such a marvelous job with Flack’s gradual downward spiral–and Carmine Giovinazzo have really made Flack and Danny’s friendship one of the most believable, deep relationships on the show. Their friendship is one of the few things Flack still seems to be able to find joy in, and it would be nice to see that pay off with Danny being able to get through the wall Flack has built up in the wake of Angell’s death.

Poor Adam is in distress this week after finding newbie lab tech Haylen Becall has rearranged the lab–which he thinks of as his. After nearly losing his job last season, it’s understandable why Adam feels so threatened by the new lab tech, who was pushy about getting her job, even after learning in “Epilogue” that it could come at the expense of Adam’s. Haylen’s presence is chipping away at the newfound confidence Adam seemed to be gaining after surviving the shooting in the bar, and sleeping with longtime crush Stella. Though that encounter is apparently being left as a one night stand (story), it’s a little surprising to see no residual sexual tension between Adam and Stella. Though I can understand why pursuing yet another coupling between regular characters might not be desirable, it does beg the question, why go to that well in the first place?

Sid gets out of the morgue for a bit to perform an experiment with Danny in the lab. It’s fun to see the quirky coroner in a lab coat working alongside one of the CSIs. Robert Joy injects a delightful curiosity into Sid that’s apparent in all of his interactions, and it’s gratifying to see him be able to offer up some non-autopsy-related help in solving the case.