‘CSI’ Is Haunted By The Past In ‘The CSI Effect’
3 min readA new crime scene dredges up old memories for Finn and Russell, in the premiere episode of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation’s fifteenth season. (Major spoilers after the jump!)
According to CSI Files sources, “The CSI Effect” opens with a bomb squad technician moving carefully toward an SUV in a parking garage. There’s a bomb underneath the driver’s seat, and someone is trapped inside as the timer counts down from 15 minutes. The person in the car is Finn, and whoever planted the bomb is on the phone with Russell. The distorted voice claims that Russell knows who he’s talking to, and this person wants something from the CSI—if he doesn’t play along, Finn will die. Russell has no easy option, and after the caller hangs up, he watches anxiously as another bomb squad technician approaches the car and tries to help disable the timer before it reaches zero.
Suddenly, the clock changes. Now there’s less than one minute until the bomb goes off. The bomb squad leader has no choice but to call his men back. Finn understands. There isn’t enough time to save her and save themselves. Russell is frantic when he sees the bomb squad retreating, and the phone rings again. The distorted voice on the other end tells him he needs to make a decision. If he doesn’t acquiesce to the caller’s request, Finn’s life will be over in a matter of seconds…
Flashing back to three days earlier, Finn is in the same SUV, but she isn’t alone. She’s fooling around with Daniel Shaw in the backseat. They worked together back in Seattle, before Russell fired Finn. These days, former detective Shaw is a private investigator. Finn wants to know his story, and he wants to know the story about Finn and Russell. When Finn gets a text from Russell, she ends their conversation—and their romantic interlude—to get to work.
Russell is already at the gruesome crime scene, and he looks troubled when Nick arrives. The body has been collected, and the entire scene has been processed. Nick assumes the coroner took the body and the CSIs processed the scene, but Russell reveals the disturbing truth: the killer took the body, marked the blood spatter with trajectory strings, and put down evidence markers on the floor. It’s an all-too-familiar sight for Russell and Finn, who arrives and immediately realizes what they’re seeing. This is the MO of the Gig Harbor Killer back in Seattle, who took the bodies of his final three victims and processed their crime scenes himself. Jared Briscoe confessed to killing seven female college students, and he’s on death row. He just lost his final appeal, and he is scheduled for execution in a week. Are the CSIs dealing with a copycat killer, or did Russell put the wrong man behind bars?
Please note that the above plot details have not been confirmed by CBS, Alliance Atlantis or Bruckheimer Films, and until such time you should treat this information as you would any other rumour. The above information comes from early script drafts and the details of the episodes are liable to change before the episodes are shown.
“The CSI Effect” is expected to air September 28 on CBS.
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I’m so sick of the new guys being in the spotlight, but sadly, I think it’s going to stay that way. It’s bad enough that we’ve lost so many long time characters (Grissom, Catherine, Warrick and now Brass 🙁 ); but the remaining originals have become shells of their former selves for the most part, and I doubt the writers will give them anything major before the show ends. I know they want to develop D.B., Morgan and Finn, but come on! I feel like I know way more about them than I’ll ever know about Sara, Nick and Greg (well…Nick and Greg especially, at least Sara went through a lot of development during the first 8 seasons).
Even the cases are not that interesting and when it seems like they’re actually trying, the stories are usually far fetched with a lot of done to death cliches *cough*CSIinperil*cough. If that won’t be the case with the Gig Harbor killer, and it’s more focused on forensics, it might turn out good (although I really don’t care about DB and Finn’s past), but I won’t hold my breath. I’m already betting that Finn, Russell or someone in his family will get kidnapped later in the season or be in some kind of peril (or who knows, maybe it will be Morgan AGAIN, god knows how many times she’s been in danger, even when it didn’t make sense…ugh).