[Rant commences]
So I’m watching CSI and it’s got that typical Vegas night-time opening, y’know, stock footage of the strip etc. Then you see that yellow crime scene tape and it’s time to meet this week’s victim. You know it’s a bad one because they never show the dead guy’s face, just his sprawled lifeless body from the chest down, plus the first CSI regular to walk into the scene winces for half a second when he/she see the corpse and says something witty like “Wow, party time.” You know, something witty like that.
So the bald pudgy cop says, in his bald pudgy coplike way (pioneered by Detective Sipowicz) “Looks like he ate his gun.”
“Uh-huh,” replies the CSI character.
The Grissom shows up and some cop hands him a plastic bag with a revolver in it. “It was in his right hand,” says the cop. Grissom pops open the bag, takes a sniff and says “Recently fired, too.” Then Grissom checks the cylinder. “Hmm, all the chambers are empty.”
The other CSI character (who it is isn’t important, since at this point any of them could be playing Grissom’s straight man) says “Maybe a game of Russian Roulette?”
“Could be,” says Gris, as the music starts to rise. “Even with the odds five to one in your favor, in Vegas the house always wins.”
Theme music follows loudly while the wittiness of Gris’s comment sinks in. Of course, a suicide could be wrapped up in about five minutes, so we know that ain’t all she wrote.
Anyoo, cut to the gimp coroner. “Preliminary exam said death was due to self-inflicted gunshot wound upward in the mouth. It looks like the bullet went through the hard palatte (slow-mo effects shot of bullet crunching through red flesh, complete with lovely squishy sound effects) traumatized the frontal lobe (further shot of bullet pulpling brain matter, squishing sound continues) bounced off the inside of the skull (boinging sound effect) and came to rest behind the left eye, partly evacuating it.”
“It pushed his eye out,” observes Gris, just in case anyone in the audience doesn’t know what “evacuated” means, or has not yet been totally grossed out by the re-creation.
“Yup,” replies the doc. The bullet’s gone to forensics."
Cut to ballistics. Pretty-boy CSI (white or black, does it matter?) is asking questions of the ballistic tech; “Funny, that handgun at the scene was a .357. The slug should have gone right through the top of the vic’s head all the way to Mars.”
“Uh-huh,” replies ballistics tech, obviously an extra being paid by the word. He check the slug in a microscope. “.357? Nah, this came from a .380. Tenfolio Titan.”
“You sure?”
“Yep.”
At this point, the mystery stuff begins, and we take second commercial.
“A .380? Are you sure?” asks Gris.
“Yup,” replies other CSI character. “I’ve sent the slug off for detailed analysis.”
At that moment, the geeky tech guy walks in as if on cue. “I ran the DNA on the slug you sent me 20 minutes ago (thus revealing the miraculous pace of TV forensics). There’s two patterns on it. And one of those patterns has traces of Carpomi cells.”
“You mean lung tissue?” asks Gris, in case the audience doesn’t know what Carpomi cells are.
“Yup.”
“Hmmm, the vic in the morgue didn’t have any lung trauma. I’d better check with the doc.”
“Hey, Doc,” says Gris. “We’ve got a slug that didn’t come from the victim’s gun with someone else’s lung tissue.”
“It gets stranger, Gris,” replies the Doc (thus entering Phase 3 of the CSI plot-twist sequence, right on schedule). “I was so busy looking at the top of the vic’s mouth, I didn’t check his jaw. See these enamel fragments?”
“A broken tooth?” asks Gris (because some audience members might not know what “enamel” is).
"Yep. It looks like the bullet came downward first, shattered the third molar (lovley slo-mo shot of bullet destroying a permanent tooth) then ricocheted upward, through the hard palatte, through the brain, off the skull and down behind the left eyeball (repeat of earlier disgusting sequence, sound effects intact.)
“Hmmm,” says Gris and we go to commercial.
After commercial, two CSI techs (which ones? does it matter?) are setting up their laser-thingies at the crime scene, checking angles. They also have their supercomputer laptop with them which can effortlessly chart bullet trajectories and whatnot. All by itself, this piece of equipment would likely bankrupt the state of Nevada, but I digress. After some hemming and hawing and flirting (assuming the CSI members are of diferent genders) they decide the bullet probably came from that hill half a mile away. The bald pudgy cop says kids used to go up there and use it as an unauthorized shooting range, knocking tin cans of fenceposts and crap like that. The CSI guys decided to take a hike.
At this point, I’d like to reveal that if CSI has taught me anything, it’s never to live half a mile from anything, because sooner or later a stray bullet is going to get you. So I’ve decided to either live in the desert, miles from anything, or in a really tiny apartment, where everything is within 30 feet. But I digress.
Up on the hill they find another body, this one with a hole through the lung, and thus we are treated to a beautiful shot of a bullet punching through a human lung, which creates a lovely red aerosol spray. At this point it hits me: this is really just a gross version of The Twelve Days of Christmas with an extra trauma added at each verse.
Anyhoo, somebody shot this guy and the slug kept going and took out unfortunate vic #1. There are a bunch of shell casings around, and some of them fit vic#1’s gun, so maybe he was here earlier (CSI loves goofy meaningless coincidences, I have observed). There are also some Tenfolio .380 shells. At this point the luminol comes out (every CSI episode needs a luminol scene, and there has to be some extra on hand who can have the purpose of the luminol explained to him, just in case the audience… well, you get the point). Well, by gum, there’s lots of blood around, and not just from vic #2. There’s a splotch with what looks like a piece of thumbnail about ten feet from the body. Hmmm…
Commercial time.
Okay, time to start wrapping this fiasco up, so they run prints off the Tenfolio shell casings and trace it to some teenage sleazebag. Gris asks "Do you go to movie a lot, son? Because if you watch too many movies, you might think it’s cool to hold your gun sideways. Well, in addition to lousing up your aim, there’s also a chance, with the Tenfolio, that the slide will chop off the end of your thumb (lovely slo-mo effect of an automatic slide hacking off the end of a human thumb, as the cloud of gunpowder residue slowly spreads, complete with slowed down gunshot sound effect). “Can I see your hands?” asks Gris.
Now, if it was me, I’d tell Gris that he could see my hands when I could see his warrant, but we’ve already blown 49 minutes on this, so let’s not let legalities stop us now. The punk lifts his hands and has a big-ass bandaid on his right thumb.
“So,” says Gris. “You shot vic#2 while holding your gun sideways…” and thus begins the entire chain of events. Sing it with me now:
Chopped off his thumb,
Punched through the lung,
Smaaaashed off his toooooth.
Shot through the palate,
Pulverized his brain,
Bounced off his skull,
And pushed out his left eyebaaaalllll…
I’d stop watching this dopey show, but that Marg is so damn hot.
[rant concludes.]
