See Also: 'XX' Episode Guide

Synopsis:

A man and a woman are tailing a bus that is driving along too slowly. The woman urges the man to pass the bus, but before he can, an object flies out from under the bus and strikes the windshield of the car. It's a human arm.

Catherine, Nick, and Brass arrive on the scene. The bus was carrying women from a correctional facility. The body under the bus, now in pieces, was that of a woman from the facility. Catherine observes the white stripes of cloth that were used to secure the woman to the bottom of the bus. As they sift through her scattered remains, they presume it was a failed escape attempt.

Grissom and Warrick are at the scene of another crime: a man lies dead in his brother's apartment from multiple stab wounds. The victim, Adanto Adams was stabbed in both the front and the back, but Grisson quickly notices that the blood spatters don't match up with the wounds.

Back at the lab, Dr. Robbins tells Catherine that the woman from the jail, Antoinette Stella, wasn't trying to escape; she was murdered. She was killed when someone struck her in the head with a blunt object. He also points out a marking on one of her arms--a heart tattoo.

Sara and Nick visit the prison, where Warden Hutton brings them to the cell where Antoinette, who was known as "Baby Girl" around the prison, had been for the last few weeks. She'd been recently moved from her old cell after it was discovered that she had smuggled a necklace into the prison, which is illegal for inmates. Kristeen, Baby Girl's new cellmate, is hostile and defensive, but Nick finds no blood in the cell.

Sara questions Hanson, the officer who was driving the bus the day Baby Girl's body was discovered. He tells her that the inmates have access to the bus because they are the ones who clean it. While Sara questions Hanson, an inmate watches from afar.

Grissom is examining the knife that killed Adando Adams back in the lab. He finds a clear print of the hilt. At the crime scene, Frank Samuels, the guardian of Adando's brother Zero, arrives on the scene and wants to know what happened. Warrick is about to answer when a stricken Zero shows up, clearly agitated.

Back on the bus, Sara and Nick find blood, and another, unexpected substance: semen.

Warrick questions Samuels and Zero, who tells him that he found Adanto in the kitchen. When Zero and Adanto talked that morning, Adanto had promised Zero that they were going to be rich.

Catherine questions Antoinette's former cellmate, Juanita, who is also the inmate who was watching Sara talk to Hanson earlier. She tells Catherine that the only men permitted in the prison are correctional officers.

Back at the office, Sara recognizes the substance used to make Antoinette's tattoo as coming from an Egyptian beetle. When Nick and David ask her how she knows about the beetle, she tells them she learned it from an entomology text that Grissom gave her last Christmas. Nick and David joke that they didn't get anything from Grissom at Christmas, but Sara doesn't respond to their teasing.

Warrick arrests Samuels, whose printers were on the knife that killed Adanto. Samuels protests that he was trying to protect Zero, who he thought might have killed his brother.

Grissom and Robbins discover a piece of paper in Adanto's stomach. Warrick recognizes it as a marker for ten thousand dollars at the Palm Casino when he looks at it under a microscope. Warrick heads over to the Palm to request the casino's surveillance tapes. The manager swears he's seen Warrick before, but Warrick shrugs it off, saying it must have been when he was working on a previous case.

Catherine, who has been going through Antoinette's purchases as the jail convenience store, discovers that Antoinette stopped buying tampons a few months before her death. She has Dr. Robbins perform a pregnancy test on the body, and it comes out positive.

The surveillance tapes from the casino reveal that Adanto went in with ten thousand dollars and lost it all. After he lost the last hand, he rolled up the ten thousand dollar mark and swallowed it.

Catherine gets a warrant to perform DNA tests on all of the male COs at the jail to find the father of Antoinette's baby. The men unhappily submit to the testing.

Warrick tells Samuels that Adanto got the money from Zero's account. The release was signed for by Zero and Samuels. Samuels insists he never signed it, and a test reveals that the signature on the release is indeed a forgery, though Zero's is authentic.

Greg tells Catherine that Hanson, the bus driver, is the father of Antoinette's child. Catherine questions him while Sara and Nick look on. Hanson admits to the affair, but insists he didn't kill her.

Grissom and Warrick reexamine the evidence from their case in a different light. What if Adanto wasn't stabbed by someone else? He was in a desperate state...

Catherine's case deepens when Greg tells her the skin cells on the strips used to tie Baby Girl to the bottom of the bus were from a woman, not a man. Meanwhile, back at Zero's apartment, Warrick studies the blood splatters again. Chafing in the wall suggests that Adanto may have stuck the hilt there and run into the knife himself. Back at the office, Warrick tells Zero that Adanto killed himself. When Zero gets upset and asks for Frank Samuels, Warrick apologizes and tells him Frank is going to go to jail for obstruction of justice.

Nick and Sara examine Antoinette's skull. Sara quickly recognizes the pattern of the indentation: it is from a combination lock, like the ones the women have on their lockers in the jail. Brass visits Juanita's cell and finds a white substance on the lock. Catherine has Juanita remove her shoes, revealing blood stains on one of her socks.

Talking in private with Catherine, Juanita reveals that she took the fall for her boyfriend's crimes. Catherine gets her to talk about her romantic relationship with Antoinette. Juanita was hurt by her relationship with Hanson, even though Antoinette said she was doing it for them. When Antoinette was moved out of their cell days later, Juanita assumed she had requested the transfer. She caught Antoinette after a tryst with Hanson and struck her on the head, killing her, and then tied her to the bottom of the bus. Sadly, Catherine reveals that Antoinette didn't request the transfer--she had smuggled in a necklace, that was presumably for Juanita. Heartbroken, Juanita is led back to her cell.

Analysis:

From the plain title to the two relatively straightforward cases, this is a thoroughly average episode of CSI, which is not to say it's a bad one at all. Certainly, it ranks among the more graphic episodes, with the arm in the teaser and close-up shots of Antoinette's body parts in the beginning of the episode. It's certainly interesting to see Dr. Robbins reconstruct the body, literally having to sew it back together.

There are some very emotional moments in this episode, but they really come from the guest stars, not for our characters. Juanita's heartbreak at the end when she realizes that she's killed her lover over a misunderstanding of where her affections lay is a chillingly sad end to the episode. And Zero's heartbreak over losing both his brother and his guardian in one fell swoop is equally tragic.

But what about our characters? It's a land of missed (just narrowly so) opportunities. Warrick's former gambling problem is alluded to, but never really comes into play, other than the identification of the marker. When the casino manager recognizes Warrick, Warrick brushes him off, but it doesn't go any further than that. And in the last scene, all Warrick can offer Zero, who has just lost his brother to the kind of downfall Warrick once risked, is a weak, "sorry." Though Dourdan's subtle acting suggests there's more going on beneath the surface, there's just not enough in the script itself for the viewer to know exactly what that might be.

The scene where Sara mentions the entomology text Grissom gave her is another example. After Grissom's moving speech in "Butterflied" which, unbeknownst to him, Sara overheard, one might expect more of a reaction from her to Nick and David's gentle teasing. Rather, she looks at them blankly, as if they've made a joke that's gone over her head. Some sort of reaction was probably warranted there, especially in light of what she overheard Grissom saying. A blush perhaps?

The cases themselves are of middling interest. They're not boring by any means, but they don't have the creepy originality of the cases in episodes like "Suckers," "Fur and Loathing" and "Jackpot," or the emotional impact for one of the characters like in "Butterflied." If more emphasis had been given to the gambling case and Warrick's reaction to it, it might have fallen into the latter category, but the prison story is clearly the primary one here, and of the two, it is the more interesting case.

Every episode can't be strange, especially significant, or stellar. 'XX' is a solid if unremarkable outting, and certainly an entertaining hour of television.

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