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.

Mac and the team must get to the bottom of a multiple homicide after a man is found in the street wielding an axe covered in the blood of his friends.

Synopsis:

A disoriented young man wanders into the street covered in blood and wielding an axe. The police take him down with tasers, and when Mac and Flack go to the hotel room he was staying in, they find the bodies of four people: two men and two women. Flack interrogates the young man, James Roberts, who claims he was attacked by clowns and doesn’t remember anything after that. Flack asks what kind of drugs James took, and though clearly high, James insists he doesn’t remember doing any drugs. Flack scoffs at James’ story of recalling swimming with sea horses and throws his hands up in disgust. Mac and Stella watch from behind the mirror and posit that James must have taken LSD. Stella tells Mac that James is a physics major at Chelsea University. Mac notices eleven missed calls from someone named Sara on James’ phone, and has the girl brought in. Sara insists that James has never done drugs in his life, and says he was out the night before with his two best friends, Mark Turner and Daniel Vaughn, to celebrate his 21st birthday. The girl asserts that James is not the partying type. Danny and Hawkes collect evidence from the hotel room, noticing a gap in the blood splatter pattern on the wall, indicating a person other than the killer was in the room. Hawkes also finds a gun. Danny is able to at least confirm part of James’ story: he finds clown masks in the room with DNA from James’ friends, indicating they surprised him in costume. The two women are identified as Jackie Wright and Lacey Deshane, but while all the men tested positive for LSD, neither woman did. Hawkes goes over the clothes, finding shampoo on James’ jeans and an unidentified substance on Mark’s shirt–but no blood splatter cast off on James’ shirt. Adam pieces together the order of events, and looking at the bathroom door, Stella notices there’s no blood on the edge, indicating it was shut at the time of the murders. She and Danny go back to the scene and find a shower curtain with sea horses, and, recalling the shampoo on James’ jeans, realize he must have been in the bathroom at the time of the murders. He’s not the killer.

Mac questions James, telling him he knows that he didn’t kill his friends. He asks James about where he met the two girls, and James swears he doesn’t remember. He tells Mac there’s no way he would have done LSD, and gets increasingly agitated. Stella, Danny, Flack, Hawkes and Adam try to piece together the order of events of the boys’ evening. Danny notes that DNA hadn’t yet come back from a bite mark on James’ calf, but Adam has managed to recover a photo from the evening: the three friends at an assisted living home. Danny and Flack pay the home a visit and learn that the boys played bingo with some senior citizens and won some serious cash: $25,000. When DNA from the bite matches Calvin Moore, a 3′9 wrestler, Danny and Flack track him down and are surprised to find Calvin admitting he “did it” for a grand—until they learn that Calvin merely agreed to wrestle James. Calvin says the boys weren’t acting like they were on drugs, and doesn’t recall any women with them. Mac continues to try to jog James’ memory, taking him out of the station for a cup of coffee when James spots a poster of a bull and freaks out. He tears it from a vendor stand, remembering that he rode a bull the night before—one without a face. Flack tracks down the bar James was at and the bartender recalls James and his friends—and the two women that were with him. She admits that the girls might have put something in the three guys’ drinks. Flack calls Stella to tell her the news, and she reports that the substance on Mark’s shirt as antifreeze from a taxi. Stella and Danny head to the cab depo where they find a driver, Gerald Gordon, dealing with a heavily damaged cab. Gordon admits that the boys were in his cab—and not just as passengers. He let one of them drive the cab for $100, which ended in a crash. The guys paid him $1500 for the damage.

Stella and Hawkes go over the footage from the video camera in the cab and discover that the boys stopped to pick up the two girls randomly. Stella posits that the women saw the kind of cash the guys had on them and drugged them intending to steal it. Stella notices Jackie slipping a gun in her purse. Danny and Flack go to the building where the girls were picked up and knock on the door of sleazy drug dealer Rufus Knox, who is nursing a nasty gunshot wound to the face. Danny and Flack surmise that the girls sold drugs for him and decided they wanted out, shooting him in self-defense to get out. Rufus insists he has “nothing but love” for the two women, and says he heard their killer was caught. Danny and Flack tell him that the guy they caught proved to be innocent, but they have nothing to arrest Rufus on… until Hawkes gets DNA results back on epithelials from the axe that match Rufus. Stella, Danny and Flack go back to arrest the drug lord, but he’s not at his apartment. Rufus and his bodyguard have tracked down Mac and James, and take aim, but Mac spots them first. He takes down the bodyguard and James gets a hold of his gun, recognizing Rufus as the one who killed his friends. He prepares to fire the gun, but Mac talks him down and arrests Rufus. Stella and Mac muse about the sad twist of fate: Rufus went looking for the women that James and his friends randomly picked up, and killed everyone but James, who was tripping in the bathroom. Mac reassures James, who feels guilty about what happened to his friends. Mac reunites the boy with his parents and girlfriend and watches as they leave the station together.

Analysis:

CSI: NY takes on The Hangover in this cleverly plotted entry, albeit with a much more tragic event anchoring it than last summer’s hit comedy. In The Hangover, three friends woke up in Las Vegas after a wild bachelor night with their soon-to-be married friend, whom they somehow managed to lose. The three friends had to retrace the night, none of which they remembered, using clues as varied as a hospital bracelet, a tiger in the bathroom and a baby in the closet. Here, the CSIs are the ones following the clues, trying to piece together what happened over the course of the night, and how James and his friends ended up meeting up with the two girls found dead in the room as well. Obviously with four dead as a result of whatever happened on James’ birthday, the tone of the episode isn’t very light, though there is some humor seeded throughout the hour.

There’s an obvious bit of humor when Danny and Flack go to question Calvin, the little person James wrestled with, and get their signals crossed. Danny and Flack think Calvin is talking about the murders, while Calvin’s answers are based on taking a grand from James’ friends to let him into the ring for a match. The increasingly baffled expressions on Danny and Flack’s faces as Calvin flippantly discusses the transaction definitely garner a laugh, as does Calvin’s own huffiness when he realizes they’re not talking about the same thing he is and asks, “What are you talking about?” It’s a great little scene, as is the one before it where Danny and Flack pay a visit to the retirement home, much to the delight of the elderly Mary Riesling, who is enjoying the parade of young men coming through the senior center. It’s fun to see Danny and Flack working together, something that has happened far too infrequently in recent episodes. These two play off each other too well for the show not to utilize their dynamic.

However, the funniest scene in the episode is one I suspect is completely unintentional. After it’s clear James isn’t guilty of the murders, Mac reaches out to the young man, trying to form a bond with him and get him to remember what happened the night of his birthday. In order to do so, Mac reaches out to the boy, finding a commonality in their love of science. Deciding to get James out of the police station for a little while, Mac takes him outside to get coffee and starts asking him about the paper he was writing, which James tells him was an open letter to Albert Einstein. Mac then starts to go on about Einstein and physics theories—and suddenly James takes off in a sprint. Now, I knew there had to be a reason James got spooked, but as the episode cut to commercial I couldn’t help chuckling, thinking that it seemed like James got so tired of hearing Mac drone on about physics that his only option was to make a break for it.

All joking aside, it is nice to see Mac reach out to James, and try to make a connection with him. Mac can be terribly awkward when it comes to relating to people, especially young people, but here he immediately gloms on to the fact that James is a physics major. When Mac realizes they’re both science guys, suddenly he’s much more at ease, which leads to him going on about Einstein and not picking up on the fact that James has seen something that upsets him until the young man has literally bolted out from under his nose. Because Gary Sinise is such an understated performer, the bonding scenes with James aren’t the over-the-top variety that procedural shows sometimes employ, where at the end of the hour, the cop and victim are suddenly bosom buddies. Indeed, at the end of the episode, Mac simply offers a few words of comfort and calls in James’ family and girlfriend, rather than behaving as though he’s fixed all of James’ problems simply by catching the person responsible for the death of his friends.

Given the similarity of James’ plight to Lindsay’s backstory, it’s a little surprising to see her completely absent here, but it was probably a wise dodge. Were Lindsay around, it would have been necessary to connect what happened to James’ friends to her in some way or another, and the quickest way to tank a storyline is to hang it on your weakest performer. Instead, James shares scenes with Sinise, and with Eddie Cahill, who in the initial interrogation of James channels such intensity that it bursts off the screen. Flack isn’t just disgusted—he’s actually angry that four people are dead in a hotel room because (he thinks) James partied too hard and took drugs that made him lose control. Flack’s rage gives weight to the deaths in the hotel room, and James’ explanations about clowns attacking him and swimming with sea horses only serve to further revile the literal-minded detective. Cahill is so good in this scene, so full of passion and fire, that he turns what could have been a routine interrogation scene into a fantastic character moment.

The only scene that’s a bit much in the episode is the one in which Rufus Knox and his bodyguard track down Mac and James and get into gun fight with them right in the middle of a busy Manhattan street. How did Rufus even find Mac and James in the first place? And how did Rufus know what James looked like if he never saw him in the hotel room? The whole shootout scene was nonsensical. CSI: NY tends to sit somewhere between CSI and CSI: Miami in terms of realism, and this out of the blue firefight was something I’d expect to see in a Miami episode, not a NY entry. Dominick Keating, virtually unrecognizable to those who knew him as the straight-laced security chief on Star Trek: Enterprise, turns in a memorable performance as the offbeat, sleazy drug lord.

According to TVGuide.com, Eric will launch an undercover investigation of the lab for the State’s Attorney’s office. He’ll also return to be by Calleigh’s side when she faces a dangerous situation at a crime scene. Co-executive producer Barry O’Brien promised that after all the ups and downs in their relationship, the pair will have some closure. “They’re going to face a defining moment of decision,” O’Brien said. “All the starts and stops in their relationship are going to be put to the test and they will finally make a decision that will inform their relationship for the remainder of the series.”

CSI Files previously reported that Mädchen Amick would be joining CSI: NY in a recurring role as a love interest for Mac. However, things may not end well for the pair. TVGuide.com reports that Mac will have to choose between Amick’s character and another woman—one that New York fans are familiar with.

As CSI Files previously reported, Sinise and his Lt Dan Band performed for service members at the Marine Corps Air Station in Yuma, Arizona this weekend as part of a USO (United Service Organizations) tour. “I love my country and I know we are in dangerous times and it doesn’t look like these times are going to get any less dangerous as the years go on,” Sinise said during a news conference. “What would we do without defenders? They are the ones who sign up… to fight America’s wars. I just want to do what I can to keep them strong, keep their families strong and help them through some tough times.”

“It is a good feeling to know you can help some folks out and play a little music for ‘em and make ‘em feel better,” the actor continued. “I think it helps them to know they are appreciated. The USO does great stuff. It’s all over the world and I’ve been able to travel to places most people never get to go and see. I’ve met extraordinary people on this journey I’ve been on to support the troops.” He added, “I love when they are smiling and are having a good time. That is my purpose. The mission here for us is to keep their spirits up.”

Sinise stays busy as a full time cast member on New York, but he still finds the time to give back to the men and women in the military. “I just try to fit in as much as I can, and I know that people are in need of entertainment and support,” he said. “Our military is stretched, and they are working hard and suffering in so many ways. If I can fit that stuff in between my television schedule and the family life, then I’m going to do it.”

Sabato guest stars as a race car driver who becomes the victim of a big explosion on the track. The actor enjoys racing cars on and off screen, and he was pleased to work with famous race car driver Danica Patrick in the episode. “She is a hell of a driver and she brings a lot of attention to the sport,” Sabato told ET Online.

“This is really the first time I’ve been able—outside of commercials—to do acting, so it’s a good opportunity,” Patrick said. As for Sabato’s acting, New York’s leading man Gary Sinise (Mac Taylor) thought he was pretty good—as a dead guy. “He was a corpse on the table the day I worked with him,” Sinise joked. “He said nothing. He was perfectly still. It was a very good performance I thought.”

You can watch a video, featuring clips from the episode as well as the actors talking, below:

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.”

Giovinazzo thought about writing an episode of New York for the past few years. “I finally just went for it,” the actor told Hollywood 411. The end result, “Sanguine Love”, focused on something that is popular right now: vampires. “It’s fascinating, the real vampirism that’s out there, or people that believe in it,” Giovinazzo continued. “It’s their religion and their way of life, so it’s a fun episode about that.”

However, the actor didn’t pen the episode around his own character. Costars Gary Sinise (Mac Taylor), Hill Harper (Dr Sheldon Hawkes) and Melina Kanakaredes (Stella Bonasera) had more to work with in the script. “I wrote a lot for Gary. He’s been really into it and curious how it’s going and really passionate about it, which is all I could ask for,” Giovinazzo said. “Hill’s been great, and Melina—I kinda tried to write me in as little as possible.”

Giovinazzo hopes to write more episodes for CSI: NY. He’s also hoping to try out a different role behind the scenes by directing an episode of the show. You can watch the video of Giovinazzo’s interview below:

Source: YouTube. Thanks to perlnoir on TalkCSI for the heads up.

Thanks to perlnoir from TalkCSI for the heads up.

A case gets complicated when the New York team uncovers an incident of evidence tampering at the crime scene.

Synopsis:

A judge is about to deny bail in the case of Antonio Reyes, who stands accused of the murder of eighteen-year-old Christine Reynolds when Stella bursts into the courtroom with evidence that sheds new light on the case. The ADA prosecuting the case, Craig Hansen, planted evidence at the scene: a cigarette lighter belonging to Rob Meyers, the man having an affair with his wife, Sarah. Hansen snuck into the scene and planted the lighter under a bed—not knowing the CSIs had already used a chemical to lift shoe impressions—thus leaving more of the chemical on the face-down side of the lighter and making it clear that it placed there after the murder. Though physical evidence puts Antonio Reyes at the scene—his prints are found in the bathroom—and the CSIs learn Christine’s boyfriend owed Reyes money, giving him motive—the planted lighter discredits all the physical evidence and hangs the case on a single eyewitness: a young neighbor named Karen Winston. Stella angrily confronts Hansen, who she’s known for fifteen years, accusing him of planting the evidence so that the lab would identify Sarah’s lover for him. After she faces off with Hansen, Christine Reynolds’ mother approaches Stella, furious that Reyes made bail—and might go on to murder again. In the locker room, Lindsay catches Danny putting a heating pad on his back and is concerned that he’s clearly in pain once again. Danny reassures her that he’s fine. A frantic Sarah Hansen comes to see Stella: Rob is missing, and she suspects Craig has something to do with it.

Stella and Lindsay go to Rob’s apartment and find no sign of the man, though a broken table leg indicates a recent struggle. Stella finds an alarm clock by the window–a possible murder weapon, but it’s been cleaned with peroxide and left out in the sun to degrade any DNA on it. Hawkes scours Hansen’s car and finds a flake of road salt in it. He’s able to recover the GPS’s memory log, which shows that Hansen made a trip up to the Catskills. Mac and Stella go to the address, hoping to find Rob’s body. The dogs lead them to a snowblower, but the blood Hawkes recovers off of it is canine, not human. Stella asks him to run it again. Danny visits an acupuncturist in the hopes of lessening his back pain, but when he finishes with his session, he finds his wallet–and his badge–have been stolen. He places a frantic call to Lindsay, who promises they’ll deal with it. Hawkes confirms the DNA is canine, and Stella wonders if the dog was Rob’s–she noticed a food bowl and a leash at the man’s apartment. Danny returns to work and gets a call from Flack: Reyes has slipped bail and is likely going after the eyewitness, Karen Winston. Reyes breaks into the young woman’s house, but instead of Karen, he finds Lindsay and a team of officers. He’s arrested again. Hawkes takes the snowblower apart and find a bone fragment, which the CSIs match to Rob. Stella confronts Craig, who continues to deny the murder–and even tries to pin it on his wife. The evidence, however, is overwhelming. He’s arrested, and Stella returns to court to watch Antonio Reyes’ trial.

Analysis:

A departure from the normal whodunit CSI formula, “Criminal Justice” is a thoroughly entertaining and refreshing entry despite the fact that by the end of the first act we know the identities of both perpetrators. We meet the first, Reyes, in the teaser, when Stella dramatically bursts into the courtroom to stop the proceedings–and, as we find out after the flashback—arrest the prosecuting ADA. All in all, Craig Hansen’s plan was rather inventive, if somewhat short-sighted: after all, the possibility that his wife’s lover might name her as his alibi should have at least crossed his mind. But Hansen was clearly desperate to discover the identity of his wife’s lover, so much so that he jeopardized a case and risked letting a killer walk free to get his identity. Couldn’t he have just called in a favor from Stella, who the episode establishes he’s known for fifteen years, instead? Of course, that would have put a major kink in his plan to murder the lover–if that was indeed his plan.

Craig Hansen, played with a smooth ruthlessness by D.B. Sweeney, is certainly a slick customer. Not only does he concoct a plan to find out the identity of his wife’s lover, but then he follows the guy from the police station, confronts and kills him (and his dog) and then drives the body all the way up to the Catskills, where he obliterates it with his snowblower… and then manages to make it back in time for court the next morning! Talk about cold. What’s more, once the game is finally up and Stella has presented all the damning evidence against him, Craig pauses to say he loves his wife… and then goes on to try to implicate her in the crime, suggesting that perhaps she killed Rob to cover up her affair! Stella—and the audience—is thoroughly disgusted. Given that he jeopardized the conviction of a man who killed an eighteen-year-old girl, it’s not altogether surprising to discover Hansen has no conscience, but it’s still startling to see him turn around and try to pin the crime on the wife he claims to love.

It’s fun to see Stella take the lead for this one. It’s quite the moral quandary she’s facing: she knows that in order to nab Hansen on evidence tampering, she’s basically invalidating all of the legitimate evidence found at the scene—evidence needed to convict Antonio Reyes. And indeed, after she questions Hansen for the first time, Stella is confronted by Christine Reynolds’ angry mother, who accuses her of letting a killer go free, possibly to kill again. Stella is between a rock and a hard place on the case: if she hadn’t come forward to alert the judge that Hansen had tampered with the evidence, she would have not only have been helping to cover up Hansen’s crime, but also putting into jeopardy Reyes’ eventual conviction if the evidence ever did come to light. Still, it’s also easy to empathize with Mrs. Reynolds’ understandable anger—from her point-of-view, Stella just helped the man who killed her daughter go free.

Antonio Reyes is definitely not a brilliant criminal; it’s a bit baffling as to why, if he’s planning to flee the country, he’d bother to risk getting caught and go after the one eyewitness in his case. The minute he gives the cops following him the slip, the CSIs hear about it, and—somewhat improbably—Lindsay is sent in to impersonate Karen Winston. I was under the impression that Lindsay going undercover in “Not What It Looks Like” was something of a special case, since time was of the essence, but if there were already cops on their way to Karen’s apartment, couldn’t an officer specializing in undercover work have joined them as well? It’s a minor quibble, and it’s nice to see the character of Lindsay has toughened up a bit since her first undercover venture, but it’s another instance where one has to wonder, “Why would they send a CSI to do this?” The eyewitness, Karen, is played by Gary Sinise’s daughter Sophie, who acquits herself well in the small role. Sinise’s Steppenwolf Theater co-founder, Jeff Perry, also shows up as the judge who is none too happy to have his court proceedings interrupted by Stella.

It looks like Danny Messer’s speedy recovery from the shooting at the end of last season that left him in a wheelchair at the beginning of this one wasn’t a full one: in this episode, he finds himself grappling with back pain. He tells Lindsay that he twisted something as a result of the frantic pursuit he and Flack engaged in during “Manhattanhenge” when they thought they were chasing down the Compass Killer, but in typical Danny fashion, he brushes off her concern about him coming back to work too soon and reassures her that he’s fine. He’s clearly not, since later in the episode we see him trying acupuncture, something it’s easy to imagine Danny was probably initially skeptical about. Danny’s not really the type of character one imagines seeking out alternative medicine—and to see him do so underscores how desperate he must be to find some sort of pain relief. It is nice to see the writers are (at least thus far) avoiding the clichéd “addicted to painkiller” route that so many characters who are injured physically fall into.

But this is Danny, so naturally he does find himself in trouble before the episode ends: after his acupuncture session, he goes back to the locker where he put his belongings and finds his wallet and badge missing. Danny freaks out, but rather than keeping it to himself, he actually calls Lindsay and tells her what’s going on—major progress for a couple who have never communicated well to each other. Bafflingly, Lindsay doesn’t tell him he needs to report it, even after hearing that his badge is gone; she simply tells him to come back to the lab and they’ll figure it out. It was understandable that Danny didn’t report his gun stolen in “All in the Family”—he was trying to protect a distraught friend and wanted to get the gun back without having to file a report. But why on earth wouldn’t Lindsay counsel Danny to report the badge missing immediately? Rather than talking sense into Danny, Lindsay seems to be working on his level, and while it’s great to see she’s become a nicer character since her marriage to Danny, I’m not sure she’s a wiser one. Danny managed to escape the gun incident more or less unscathed thanks to Flack’s judicious interference, but I wonder if he’ll be as lucky this time.