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Episode Guide
By Kristine Huntley
Posted at November 17, 2005 - 8:28 PM GMT
See Also: 'Bad Beat' Episode Guide
Synopsis:
At an upscale New York apartment, a poker game between
four men goes south when one of the guys is caught
cheating. The other three kick him out after beating him
severely. Several minutes, a knock on the door
interrupts the preparation for the next game, and one of
the men, Joel Ivey, goes to the door to look through the
peephole. He sees the barrel of a shotgun the instant
before it goes off, killing him immediately. When Mac,
Stella and Flack arrive at the scene, the other men,
Mike and Eddie, tell them about the guy who cheated,
Kelly, and assume he must have been the one who killed
Joel. Mac follows a blood trail to the garbage chute,
and he dispatches Lindsay to search through the gigantic
dumpster. Flack doesn't have any luck with Joel's
neighbors, but Lindsay finds a jacket and a shotgun in
the dumpster.
Danny joins Dr. Hawkes in Strawberry Fields where the
body of weather girl Tara Stansfield, lies prone. Hawkes
judges by the lividity that she's been dead at least
eight hours, but Danny is more exact: he notices her
coat is damp and recalls a brief rainstorm the night
before, approximately ten hours ago. There are no signs
of a struggle or robbery, save for a gash on her head
that Hawkes finds glass in. At the morgue, Dr.
Hammerback tells Hawkes that the blow to the head didn't
kill Tara; she drowned. Hawkes notes that it doesn't
appear that she was moved and there was no water near
her--how could she have drowned? Hammerback also sends
skin from under Tara's nails to DNA.
In the lab, Lindsay tells Stella that the shotgun was
fired recently, confirming it's the murder weapon and
she also points out that the jacket has GSR on it.
Stella traces a cigar Kelly was smoking to a fancy cigar
shop, where she and Flack get the reluctant owner to
tell them that Kelly is a regular customer, and that he
participates in nightly poker games at the shop. Danny
and Hawkes pay a visit to the channel 8 studios where
Tara worked and talk to her cameraman, Leonard, who
tells them he and Tara went their separate ways after
working on a pothole story. Danny finds an unspooled
videotape and takes it to Adam Ross in the AV lab, who
respools and repairs it and plays it for Danny. The tape
reveals Tara having sex with a man, who Danny recognizes
as Ethan Fallon, the producer at the TV station. He
confronts Fallon who claims he didn't know about the
tape. Fallon has scratches on his arms, but he says they
were from a sexual encounter with Tara.
Stella and Flack attend the evening poker game at the
cigar shop and find Kelly cheating at poker once again.
When they corner him, he seems genuinely surprised that
Joel is dead. He admits to throwing his jacket away
after being beat up, but he denies killing Joel saying
that it wasn't "part of the plan." Stella presses
further but Kelly clams up. Back in the lab, Stella
recreates the final game and discovers that it was Joel,
not Kelly, who was poised to win the pot. Kelly and Joel
were working together and Kelly stood to get half the
pot, so it wouldn't have been in his best interests to
kill Joel. Sure enough, DNA proves the blood smears on
the wall are not Kelly's. DNA also gives Danny and
Hawkes a lead: the skin under Tara's nails is from her
identical twin sister, Kayla. Danny pays her a visit and
notices a scratch on her cheek and concludes she and
Tara fought about the sex tape. Tara was planning to
sell it, but Kayla, a schoolteacher, was afraid it would
hurt her reputation. She denies killing her sister, and
tells Danny Tara even left her an apologetic voicemail
later that evening apologizing and promising not to sell
the tape.
Lindsay goes over the 911 calls from the apartment
building that came in from Joel's neighbors, but finds a
hang-up that came in two minutes before the others.
Stella tracks down Heather Davidson, the woman who made
the call. She tells Stella a drunken man harassed her
and her boyfriend, Scott, in the elevator and followed
them to her apartment and banged on the door. Heather
says she hung up on the 911 call because she's been
illegally subletting her apartment. Hawkes has gone back
to Central Park to scan the crime scene. When it starts
to rain on him, he notices a deep impression on the
ground where Tara was lying, in the exact place her head
was. Back at the lab, Lindsay tells Mac the DNA profile
of the shooter indicates he has brown hair, green eyes
and uses marijuana. Mac and Stella head back to the
building to examine Heather's apartment door. They talk
to her boyfriend Scott, who admits to getting into an
altercation with the man. Mac notices blood on the up
button for the elevator--the killer must have gone up,
most likely to his own apartment. He came back down
looking for Scott, but he was drunk and got the number
mixed up, going to Joel's apartment, 8C, not Heather's,
9C.
Hawkes gives Danny more glass he found at the part to
analyze, and Adam tells them he found a DVD of the sex
tape being sold at the bodega near the office. Someone
released Tara's tape. Danny reconstructs the glass
pieces while Hawkes concludes from the scans that Tara
drowned in a puddle formed in the impression in the
ground by her head. The scan also shows an impression in
the ground left by a tripod, leading Danny and Hawkes to
Leonard Percy, Tara's cameraman. Danny interrogates
Leonard, who was planning to sell the tape with Tara,
but argued with her when she changed her mind. When she
found out he made a copy, they argued and he hit her
over the head and left her. Leonard protests that he
didn't kill her because she was alive when he left her,
but Danny, disgusted, holds him responsible. Mac and
Stella go over each floor of the apartment building
methodically until they find a doorknob on the 15th
floor with GSR on it. Prepared for the worst, the knock,
but a young girl answers, her father passed out, drunk,
on the couch behind her. The man, James Moore, once had
the perfect life, but a brutal mugging left him angry
and bitter, and he turned to alcohol. His altercation
with Scott brought it all back, and vowing not to be a
victim again, he took his shotgun and went back, but as
Mac notes, he killed the wrong man.
Analysis:
"Bad Beat" is a perfect example of why the CSI shows are
so popular. It's an appealing mix of good cases, clever
revelations and most importantly, great character
moments. The combination of these elements almost always
makes for a superior episode (unless the ending is
botched somehow) and when it's done right the episode
flows with an impressive ease. It seems like writer
Zachary Reiter had fun writing this episode, and that
gives it a refreshing feel.
Kelly's guilt in the poker case seemed so obvious
initially that I assumed much of the episode would
involve tracking Kelly down and then looking for the
final piece of evidence that would clinch it, so I was
genuinely and pleasantly surprised when that turned out
not to be the case. This is hardly the first case of
mistaken identity being behind a murder, but I bought it
in this episode.
Mac takes a backseat to his team this time around,
something that seems to be a trend with the leading men
of CSI these days. It's not a bad move at all. The
central characters of each of the CSI shows are already
firmly established, so it's nice to see the junior team
members get a chance to shine. Or even the leading
ladies--Stella and Flack share a few fun scenes
together, and Stella proves herself a poker expert. Her
recreation of the game seems like a stretch, but it's
fun to see her showing off the knowledge, and also to
see Flack tease her about her poker face.
Eddie Cahill has such perfect comic timing that one
can't help but wish he got more screentime. The scene in
which he attempts to question the neighbors and is
greeted first by a cranky woman who berates him about
the time and then by a large man wearing nothing but a
pair of white briefs is laugh-out loud funny. Flack's
bewildered and slightly cowed polite demeanor is just
the right tone for the scene. It's not long before Flack
gets to whip out his trademark snark in the scene in the
cigar store when Flack and Stella try to get the owner
to talk. Cahill is a master of the deadpan expression
and he gets plenty of chances to use it in this episode.
Just like Cahill is at his best when he's delivering
snarky one-liners, Carmine Giovinazzo does his finest
work with Danny's emotional extremes, whether he's near
tears over a stressful situation or enraged over a
criminal's blasé attitude towards his or her crime.
Danny's inability to mask or control his emotions is
arguably the most interesting thing about the character,
and Giovinazzo has the intensity to make Danny's anger
believable and sympathetic. More often than not, Danny
reacts to situations like a child would, emotions raw
and close to the surface. Of all the characters, he's
clearly the one who takes crime and its implications the
hardest.
Hawkes is coming into his own as a CSI--at one point he
even gives Danny an order to process the glass. And yet
it's clear he also misses the morgue--the moment when
Hammerback asks him if he's jealous of Hammerback
elicits a chuckle. Hawkes also discovers a truly
inventive piece of the puzzle in the case he and Danny
are investigating: the weather girl drowned in a shallow
puddle. Like the twist in the poker case, I didn't see
that coming either, and was pleasantly surprised.
I also got a little laugh from Mac's somewhat
exasperated response to Lindsay's explanation of what
THC is. Her perfectionist, head-of-the-class attitude is
even grating on Mac's nerves, so hopefully she'll take
the hint and tone it down. It's also a moment that clues
viewers in that the writers do indeed know that Lindsay
is a tad on the annoying side. More likely than not
they're setting her up for an eventual (though perhaps
gradual) change, which is good because while her
alter-ego might be irritating, Anna Belknap seems like a
likable and talented actress. There's a nice glimpse of
a lighter Lindsay when she comes across Danny and Adam
watching Tara's sex tape and proceeds to tease Danny,
asking him if it's "footage from his 30th birthday
party." It's nice to see her relax a little bit.
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