Culture Blues

Tortured by Television: The CSI Trilogy: Night 2 – CSI NY

Every so often, one of our illustrious contributors can’t come up with something to write about. When this happens, we strap them down in front of a television and force them to take notes. The results are Tortured by Television:

The CSI Trilogy Night 2: CSI NY

[Pre-show] All right, time for round 2. Round 1 left me punch drunk, but I’m optimistic that tonight will be better. The commercials looked decent. I like Gary Sinise a hell of a lot more than I like David Caruso. And I don’t think that NY has the same showy, ridiculous visual style that Miami does.  I feel like Miami cleared up a lot of my questions about the CSI Trilogy, but maybe some things will change tonight:

1)     How integrated are the episodes going to be? My suspicions seem to have been confirmed and its just going to be Laurence Fishburne appearing on the other two shows. Some “trilogy.”

2)     Are they going to try to make this story more significant through some contrived device? Like linking it to a major character’s past or family? Unfortunately, it doesn’t look that way, although there needs to be some sort of explanation as to why Fishburne is taking this case so seriously. I mean, he flies to Miami for that girl who disappeared from Vegas, but that case is done and now he’s jaunting off to NYC for a tangentially related case. I’m hoping that he used to be a member of this gang they’re going after.

3)     Are there any actors/characters that I will really find worthwhile? Definitely none in Miami. Let’s see what happens here.

This episode of Criminal Minds with Gavin Rossdale as a vampire musician or something is ending. Let’s investigate some crime scenes!

9:58 Preview of the upcoming episode: “You move and I’ll put a hole in you.” OK, let’s go!

10:00 Scenes from the Miami episode and we get another shot of the bad guy I expect us to be following tonight. Is he a gang member or an emaciated emo rock star?

10:02 Miami started with a frantic mother and a hysterical 22-year-old girl driving in the middle of nowhere. NY starts with an armed trucker transporting human cargo and a drunk guy arguing with his daughter’s mother while driving. Then they crash into each other on a bridge. Advantage New York.

10:04 “End of the road for her.” And they give me the puns Miami wouldn’t. This is going well.

10:05 Baba O’Riley is currently playing us through the opening credits. Did you know that Teenage Wasteland was the primary working title for That 70’s Show? Now you do.

"I didn't want to be an innovator any more, i just wanted to make the quick and easy buck, i just wanted in."

10:09 They’re going to take the oil drum with the dead girl in it to the Medical Examiner intact? Why don’t you just take some pictures? What’s the first thing the ME does? Take the body out. What was the point?

10:10 What kind of medical examination is this? I want to dance!

10:13 This one dude sounds like Giovanni Ribisi. Boiler Room is a really good movie.

10:14 They just showed that lady’s whole surgically opened up chest. These shows are gross. My whole life, my father has refused to watch medical dramas (except for House and St. Elsewhere) because he thinks it’s perverse to watch people in pain for enjoyment, yet he watches all of these crime shows every week. I don’t get it.

10:19 So the CSI people are standing in front of a 6 ft. tall monitor looking at some information. And then one of them reaches out and starts manipulating the stuff on it. That’s a big ass touch screen!

10:20 Hey, it’s the hippy from Miami standing next to Fishburne. We officially have two characters that have crossed over. Also, the guy from the last episode that I thought we’d be chasing in this one, they just informed us that he was killed off screen.

10:21 “I’m on the first thing smokin’,” says Fishburne. I think he recycled that line from Deep Cover.

10:25 Sinise just mentioned someone they recently locked up who was involved in human trafficking. Was that actually a previous episode of CSI NY? That would be pretty cool (a quick internet search afterwards leads me to believe it was not.

Is soy going to ruin meatloaf night... and kill you?

10:29 Moments after meeting, Sinise and Fishburne are having a personal chat in front of the WWII memorial (it’s Veterans Day!). It seems a bit forced, but it’s not so bad. Can you imagine if they’d tried this with Caruso?

10:36 CBS 2 is going to blow the lid off the dangerous soy industry at 11.

10:38 This cop is slapping pictures of victims down in front of this crooked doctor while accusing him of betraying the Hippocratic oath. At least someone on a CSI knows how to interrogate.

10:40 Jesus, how many times are they going to rattle off all the terrible things these people use girls for? Forced surrogacy, prostitution, organ harvesting, bone marrow. The list went on for like 30 seconds straight. Gruesome.

10:42 Here’s a foot chase. Someone just slid under a platform like Tony Jaa.

10:49 Hey! They’re using dirt to find out where someone has been just like Miami. Utah and Pappas really wrote the book on CSI forensics huh?

Dr. Angelo Pappas

10:51 Fishburne just gave a really preachy speech about how deadly firearms are. He knows that he works for THE POLICE, right?

10:53 Casey Steele’s a shooter. Gunfight. Fishburne’s going for a motorcycle. It’s just like the Matrix!

10:54 The shot of Fishburne taking his bike to the ground and getting the shotgun off his back = bad ass.

10:57 The girl they’ve been trying to find is once again captive in a truck, and it’s headed for… LAS VEGAS. To be continued on CSI: Original Flavor Thursday night!

Post-Show:

Thoughts: The investigation made more sense than Miami. The acting wasn’t nearly as atrocious. It didn’t have the same distracting, gimmicky visual style. And they gave me a bad pun and some action. Definitely marginally better than Miami. This is starting to feel more like a NY/Las Vegas two-parter with a Miami prologue. Fishburne is trying to find the same girl in NY and Vegas, but Miami was only sort of related. I guess I should just be happy that there is some momentum heading into the finale. As for my questions:

1)     How will the stories be integrated? It’s still just Fishburne city-hopping, but we did see one Miami character here. It doesn’t help that these episodes don’t really feel “special.” And if these are special, then I really don’t know what people are doing watching these every week.

2)     Are they going to make the case more significant through contrived devices? Nothing further on this front. Fishburne is driven to find this girl solely because her mom asked him to. He’s a heck of a police officer.

3)     Any worthwhile characters or actors? That would be an overstatement, but Fishburne and Sinise definitely brought the episode some humanity that was missing from Miami. And I enjoyed Hill Harper’s interrogation scene.

How Torturous Was It? “Torturous” would be a bit strong. It wasn’t exactly good and there were definitely times when I was bored, but it was a relatively painless hour of television. And there were some parts I actually enjoyed in a detached sort of way (mostly just the opening crash and the chases).

Would you watch again? Probably not. I’m hoping they really go after this human trafficking gang in the next episode. And I’m feeling like I really wasted my time watching Miami. Anyway, the story has momentum right now, but I’m not as optimistic about Vegas as I was about NY. Two down. One to go.