(spoiler!) So we learned right at the end of season 6 that Sara and Gil were living together (or sleeping together), as she walked into the room in a bathrobe at the end of the season finale. I've always noticed from the beginning of the series that occasionally there are very brief hints into their personal lives, but nothing ever seems to be really revealed.
We've known for a few years that Sara is interested in Grissom romantically, Nick's personal life is almost entirely secret still (except for a fling or two early in the series), Warrick popped up married out of the blue one day and Catherine was clearly disappointed to have lost an opportunity, but it has always seemed like any revelations like this were thrown in using just a few seconds of screen time, and then back to the cases.
I like that the show doesn't turn into a soap opera because I would lose interest in a hurry, but this is one of the few episodes that tells us more about what's going on. Very little more, but still more.
I loved the cases that they dealt with. A new homicide leads the team to an old and supposedly closed case of a double murder. Catherine goes off on her own to meet the guy they put in prison for it, and finds a foul-mouthed dirtbag that claims he's innocent. In order to get him to cooperate and answer some more questions about the crime that he's already been imprisoned for, she promises to unbutton a button on her shirt for each question that he answers satisfactorily.
As it turns out, he was apparently coerced by the police into giving a confession for the double murder, badgering him during questioning and claiming that they already had enough evidence for a conviction, and if he didn't confess he'd get the death penalty.
Catherine was pretty angry with the local cop for coercing a confession, but wasn't that blouse-unbuttoning a bit of coersion too? At least it was more enjoyable than the first time, I suppose.
Anyway, the two cases taken together highlight the CSI team's skills compared to the bungling foolishness of other police forces. Once the local cops had coerced their confession, they actually stopped investigating, even though they knew there were more bullets buried at the residence where the murders took place. Nice work!
The local cops also left a massive plot hole in the story, something uncommon in a CSI episode. There was a little boy at the residence who was hiding, but apparently they never asked him any questions about what happened. When our team comes in, Nick and Catherine ask him his version, and he gives one that doesn't reveal anything that they didn't already know, but for some reason they seem to feel that they have gotten some valuable information.
The boy was hiding under the sink when the killer knocked on the door, forced his way inside and then stabbed and killed his mother and sister, then he walked outside into the backyard. Then, he says, the killer came back in the front door and called the police.
I don't know why anyone was interested in this news, because they already knew the sequence of events leading to the boy's mother and sister's deaths. There is, of course, no way of knowing if the man who came through the front door and called the police was the same man who had just walked out the back door. Why would he leave through the back and come in through the front?
Anyway, the hiding under the sink was funny to me, because when I was five or six, I used to hide under the sink drinking maple syrup while my mom was at work, then when she came home I'd run up to her and say, "I wasn't drinking the syrup!" I was a terrible liar.
Gil leaves on sabbatical at the end of the episode and is supposedly gone when he gets a large box from the miniature killer, which is good because the conclusion to that 3-episode case was a little disappointing.
In a huge change of character, he tells Sara on the way out the door that he'll miss her...
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