gategrrl

Last night, there was nothing else (really) on television, so I surfed through some cable stations, and the syndie listing for CSI: Miami caught my eye:  the CSI team track a bloody toddler back to her home, to find her family murdered. Except for her father, of course.  I stayed to watch because this particular episode involved a particular type of killer that fascinates me - in a purely WTF are you, mister! kind of way. I think it goes back to that movie that featured a killer in the early seventies who murdered his family, but nobody found them until a month later. 

Anyway. So, I'm watching the Miami episode, and of course they delve into the grossness of the crime (altho not as badly as some eps of the original CSI), but the whole way through the episode, I'm feeling like I'm jumping because someone is scratching that ole blackboard with their finger nails.  I've decided it was partly the jumpy cutting, the jumpy scenes and the irritating characters. The characters weren't out-and-out FU I HATE YOU in their irritatingness. It was more like, show some fucking emotion, will you guys? Even toward each other there was no emotion. If I want to see that sort of character interaction, I'll go watch Stargate thankyouverymuch!  Of course the killer turned out to be the Dad, but I have to admit, this particular time, the script was written well enough plot-wise that they kept me half-guessing and interested enough in the clue-gathering, that I stuck with it.  

Then, on another channel, was CSI: Original Fashion Forensics. I've no idea what season it was. But it involved the rather disgusting crime of a nurse having her throat slashed in a fancy bathroom, and her doctor paramour also killed and divvied up into parts and thrown out in the trash. Okay, that's a grossness I can get into, as long as they don't focus on the ickiness too much, which, fortunately, they didn't. Either that or I'm starting to get my tolerance back for gore. Must be all the horror and Stephen King novels I've been reading lately.

Onward to the show. What REALLY REALLY irritated me about THIS episode of CSI: OFF, is that the nurse in question, for no reason at all, is almost Sara's twin. Or could be. It hits Gilly really hard (the twinness), and he stays up for days and days and days at the crime scene with no sleep or food in order to solve the crime.  All because the dead nurse chickylooks like Sara. Okay, I could live with that. He keeps Sara out of the crime scene by making her do the perimeter search. Why, I had no idea, and neither did any of the characters. It didn't make any sense at all. After all, Sara is a grown-up girl, and just because someone looks like her while she does her job, doesn't mean she's going to fall apart, does it?  Apparently Gill seems to think so. What a jerk.

So Gilly goes ahead and does cell phone conferencing from the crime scene, does some Medium shots...there's another show that also shows the person in the scene while it re-enacts -- oh! That's right! Crossing Jordan! That's where I saw it first, years ago. Anyway.  At the very end of the show, Gilly and that Detective (whom I like very much, he's a very grounded actor and character and gives the whole series it's only dose of "reality") sit in the interrogation room with the guy who they figure out murdered the nurse and her doctor-lover, and Gilly, (after the Detective leaves) starts in on this siloquay, sort of, since it's aimed at the perp, but he's really talking about himself - and talks about how awful it is to work with someone and yet not be able to have a relationship with them (fucking, in other words) that perhaps could lead into bigger and better things. 

Of course, the camera pulls away and you see Sara standing there on the other side of the one-way mirror (in the hall-way? huh?) listening to Gill's heartfelt admission that he has the hots for her.   Gag. Me.

I admit that Sara's actress, who usually bugs the crap out of me, played her scenes very understated and well in this episode. She didn't irritate me, which I'm shocked to say.  But that last scene did. 

He is HER BOSS. He should transfer her OUT. Or STFU about his desires while on the job. I don't like Gill's actor, either, nor the character, since I think he/both have major sticks up their asses.  His overwrought scenes (in CSI terms) were the real killers on this episode. I'm not even a regular watcher of this series or the Miami series, but if it weren't for the occasionally semi-well-written puzzle here and there, I'd never watch these shows. The liberties they take with procedure and the role of the forensics experts and the detectives they work with are simply appalling.  

Crossing Jordan does it so much better. The UST, the character caring and interactions...the quirkiness.