I haven’t really been watching the show this season, but I caught the one that was on this week.
Can someone explain to me all the weird tension between the characters?
And why they seem to be split up into two groups or something?
I happened on Thanksgiving, and I fell asleep during the last 10 minutes. TWoP has a good recap, but basically, Katherine is now in charge of the night shift, and Eckley split up the team because he was pissed off at Gil.
Ecklie (the former day-shft lead CSI) has been been promoted to the head supervisor of the Crime Lab. In typical eeeeevil supervisor fashion, he has promoted Katherine to swing-shift lead and broken up Grissom’s team, spreading them out across days, nights and swing. This was apparently a shrewd move on his part designed to cause every single person in his charge to vote for him in the coveted Bunghole Boss of the Year awards.
The changes, of course, had had no apparent effect, since everyone was in the office at the same time in last night’s episode. 'Cause, ya know, everyone hangs around the office seven hours after their shift ended. I do, don’t you?
TWoP?
So what’s Gil’s job now?
Katherine is in charge of the swing shift, with Warrick and That Other Dude under her (man, would I love to have Warrick under me! - sorry). Grissom is still in charge of the night shift, but is down 3 CSI’s (Katherine, Warrick and that other dude). But he was given Sophie who was “demoted” as acting day supervisor. That was her punishment for not doing what Eckley wanted when he set her to investigate Grissom’s supervisory techniques (he wanted her to find that Gil was negligent, but Sophie instead (and rightly so) reported the truth: that he did nothing wrong).
Television Without Pity. I would also recommend TV Tome.
Gil is still the night shift lead.
Oh yeah. I did notice that there was a new person.
Man, it seems like this show didn’t have longer story arcs like this before.
Thanks people!
As I was watching this, I really began to question if this could ever happen. I mean, you would apply for certain shifts at the crime lab because they work well with your schedule (or because you’re willing to sacrafice your schedule for whatever reason). All of the sudden having your boss tell you that you’re no longer working days, that you have to change your whole life around just to suit your boss’ psycho-political motivations and spend your nights as a subordinate when three minutes ago you were supervisor?
I can’t see any real crime lab, let alone most companies, drastically changing someone’s shift without approval from the employee. You’d think HR would have some sort of policy regarding that. And you think that someone would have to approve the demotion, which Ekley never gave a concrete reason for.
Of course, it’s only TV and it was mainly an excuse to get Grissom to spend more time with Sophia. 
Thanks for the link to TWoP… it matches my feelings.
Emphasis mine
My feeling is that this is a way to give William Petersen the opportunity to work on some other projects without being written out altogether.
It has happened at my company. One guy went and begged to be put back on night shift(he had structured his whole life around working at nights like he had been doing for the past couple years) and was refused. They decided it was more important to rotate people through shifts. Six weeks on each shift that way they get a chance to work during the day and interact with the specialists who work 9-5 and learn from them instead of the night shift being clueless about how things work and doing nothing more than paging people if something happens on their shift. I can see some arguements for both sides. Changing your shift every six weeks really screws up your social life as well as your biological clock. On the other hand if you are out of touch with what happens in the office and spend all your time paging people out then you’re mostly useless.
Still, it happens. People working shifts get screwed sometimes.
Enjoy,
Steven
While a lot of employers will try to accomodate your schedule, public safety jobs tend to put the job in front of employee preference.
The individual employees likely would file some sort of grievance, but CSI: Union Hearing would be a really dull show.
This is probably right, since I noticed that he wasn’t in last night’s episode much. I gotta add, though, that I HATE that kind of political/infighting/power-play/BS crapola. I watch CSI to see people solving crimes (and, of course, gross-out camera close-up trips into dead bodies and such). If I wanted to watch political infighting BS I’d watch West Wing, which I don’t.