Review: CSI: New York — ‘Get Me Out Of Here!’

A fraternity prank gone wrong leaves the pledge master dead, and the race is on to find a missing pledge.

Synopsis:

Some teenagers are chasing each other through a cemetery, and a girl falls into an open grave and lands on top of a body. The young man was hit in the head, and there are four cellphones in his pocket. There are guards at all of the entrances to the cemetery, but kids find a way to sneak in every year on Halloween.

The victim was struck with a large metal object. He struggled to survive, leaving dirt all over him and inside his lungs. There is also arsenic in his system. The three cellphones belong to fraternity pledges, and the dead man is their pledge master, Paul Warren. There’s a video of one of the three pledges, Anthony, being closed in somewhere.

The team finds an old tin eyecap and very old dirt containing arsenic, which was used to preserve bodies until 1910. This evidence suggests that Paul was in contact with an older grave at some point. Danny and Lindsay test soil in the cemetery, and Danny sees a beer can. They look at the code on the bottom, and it matches a document on Paul’s phone. Danny, Jo and Hawkes figure out that they’re looking at codes for grave plots in specific cemeteries around the city, and Hawkes and Jo locate the other two missing pledges, Thad and Curtis. Paul sent them on a scavenger hunt as part of a ‘six pack challenge’—each time they followed the clue on the bottom of a can to the next cemetery, they had to drink another beer and follow the clue. They have to find all of the cans in order to discover where Anthony is being held. Hawkes finds a metal object in the final can, which looks like a key with a W on it.

Arsenic levels are high in an area of new graves, but there shouldn’t be any arsenic if the cemetery is breaking new ground. the cemetery ran out of room, and they started digging up old bodies to make new spaces to bury people. Jo realizes the cemetery director, Stanley Fisher, is involved because she saw him popping aspirin to deal with a headache—headaches are the most common symptom of arsenic poisoning.

Flack and Mac head to the cemetery and find Fisher and another man putting skeletons in a mass grave to clear out old plots. Paul was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time, and Fisher hit him with a crowbar when he found him poking around. They buried him alive, but he crawled out of the grave and tried to find help before he fell into the open grave and died. Despite confessing to Paul’s murder, Fisher denies having any knowledge of Anthony’s whereabouts. Hawkes figures out that the metal object is a crypt key, and there is a tiny chip of tuckahoe marble wedged in one of the grooves. This leads the team to the Marble Cemetery, and they find the Warren family crypt. They head underground and hear Anthony yelling from inside a nearby tomb, so they push aside the heavy marble slab on top and find him dehydrated but alive.

Analysis:

CSI: New York celebrates Halloween with a story that spends a great deal of time in cemeteries, and “Get Me Out Of Here!” creates ample opportunities for personal scenes between members of the team. Danny and Lindsay decide to have a chat about death, and despite the morbid nature of the conversation, the scene itself is a lot of fun. Danny mentions that some day the pair of them will be side-by-side in the ground like a husband and wife that are buried nearby, but Lindsay says that’s a depressing thought. She adds that she doesn’t want to be buried in a place like this, to which Danny replies that the cemetery is beautiful and has a great view of the city. Lindsay points out that the burial plots are $20,000 each, and that’s money Danny would need for Lucy’s future if anything happened to her. Plus, she doesn’t need a view of the city when she’s dead. Besides, if Danny got remarried, his second wife would have to go somewhere, and she isn’t having any of it when Danny suggests that the new wife would be buried on the other side of him. She tells Danny they can have her cremated, but Danny hates that idea. He decides to shift the topic of conversation to his wake, and he reveals that he wants his loved ones to spend one week mourning for him and another week partying in his honor. The festivities would include music from their favorite band, Kiss, as well as a performance from the tattooed woman they saw dancing at Coney Island. That suggestion confirms Lindsay’s suspicions that Danny liked the woman, so she teases him by suggesting that she’ll haunt him after she’s gone.

Danny also has a couple of fun scenes with Adam relating to the victim’s fraternity. Adam goes through photos on the three extra cellphones in Paul’s pocket, and he notices that all three owners are wearing pledge pins. When Danny asks how Adam knows so much about fraternities, he admits that he “dabbled” a bit. The pair heads to the frat house and finds evidence of a big party from the night before, including several young men passed out in the living room. One man is perched on a couch, which has been lifted onto a stack of furniture so the man will receive a rude awakening when he rolls over. Nearby, another young man is spread out on the floor with beer bottles tracing his body like a chalk outline. They wake the man up, and he staggers to his feet, revealing that someone drew on his face. The young man tells Danny and Adam that Paul was a jerk, and he put the pledges through hell. He has no idea where Anthony, Thad and Curtis are right now, assuming they haven’t been kicked out, aka “dinged”. When they leave, Danny suggests that Adam got dinged during his college years, but Adam reveals the real reason he backed out of the fraternity: he drew the line at naked leapfrog. It’s always great to see Adam out in the field with another member of the team, and learning a bit about his background is even better.

These two particular duos are combined later in the episode when Danny and Lindsay are continuing their earlier conversation in the lab. Lindsay wants to be “put on ice” at Glacier National Park in Montana, but Danny doesn’t like the idea of trekking up the side of a mountain to do it. Lindsay teases that she and her rich new husband would fly over Citi Field in their private jet, and perhaps she’d dump Danny’s ashes into the toilet and flush as they went by, spreading his ashes that way. Adam walks in, and Danny asks for his opinion. The lab tech isn’t a fan of their ideas; instead, he wants to have his ashes launched into space by a company that puts human remains in a rocket. The plan is so very Adam, and Danny and Lindsay are clearly amused. They share a look while Adam goes on about the rocket idea, but they quickly interrupt him to get back to work on the case.

Sid gets out of the morgue this week, and he shares two amusing scenes with Mac relating to his new invention: the Hammerback Pillow. He noticed that the stand that is used for the corpses in the morgue holds the head at a good angle, so he designed a pillow to cradle a sleeper’s head in the same position. He convinces Mac to act as a beta tester, and he gives him the pillow and the carrying case so he can try it out and offer his feedback. Sid is eager and slightly nervous, and he gives the product the rather unappealing tag line, “You’ll sleep like a corpse.” It’s hilarious and so very Sid. Robert Joy is fantastic, and I love little moments like this that bring him to the forefront of a scene.

At the end of the episode, Sid approaches Mac and asks about the pillow. Mac is amazed, and he says it was the best night’s sleep he’s had in years. He only has one suggestion to improve the product, and Sid is all ears when Mac tells him he should think about changing the tag line to leave out the corpse comparison. I hope the Hammerback Pillow is a big success—the late-night infomercial for the product, with Sid showing how it works, would be amazing.

At the end of the episode, Mac tries to avoid participating in any more “Halloween fun”, but Jo won’t take no for an answer. It turns out she has arranged for the team to watch an old Friday the 13th movie in the lab. They’re eating popcorn and laughing at all of the unrealistic aspects of the movie, which prompts Jo to joke about how fun it is to watch movies with them. Lindsay can be heard calling them all “a bunch of geeks”, but I for one wouldn’t mind hanging out with the group when they’re watching a film. Their comments are entertaining, and it’s a great way to end the episode. The interaction between the team members is the hook that keeps viewers coming back week after week, and it’s always nice to see the characters in a more casual situation.

See also: “Get Me Out Of Here!” episode guide