CSI: Vegas – Episode 10.01 – ‘Family Affair’ Recap

CSI: Vegas – Episode 10.01 – Family Affair
Air Date: September 24, 2009

[Photo: Sonja Flemming/CBS ©2009 CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved]

• The season 10 premiere of CSI: Vegas began with an amazing…I mean AMAZING 3-D look through the entire lab and lot outside where a huge incident was taking place. We see shards of glass and blood droplets in mid air, along with bullets frozen in their trajectories. Dr. Robbins was using his crutch to take out a gunman and Langston was in mid-kick sending a gunman backward through a window. It was incredible. I’ll try to get you a clip of it.
• 48 HOURS EARLIER: Stokes is studying a book about caring for arachnids while a large tarantula crawls through an aquarium. I guess he’s going to take over the bug thing where Grissom left off.
• Catherine told someone on the phone about Riley leaving them with 100 open cases. And Langston got promoted to CSI Level 2.
• The team is called to the scene of an auto accident where a popular actress is dead. The other driver still had a pulse and the evidence shoed that he had kept his foot on the gas pedal after the crash. She had been stopped when he hit her.
• Catherine assigned Greg Sanders to go to a fleabag motel to check out a dead body. He protests because he thinks he should be able to stay and wants someone with less seniority to go. He loses his argument.
• A young man was in Brass’ office where he is questioned about the starlet being on the road at 4 am. He tells Brass that she had been on her way to the set of a movie she was working on. He’s her significant other and his father owns a casino.
• At the motel, Sanders finds the man’s body. He was robbed and had been dead for at least two days. He finds some fibers between two teeth in a dental partial.
• Dr. Robbins tells Catherine that the starlet had been 8 weeks pregnant. We see that he has a ghoulish hobby of collecting photos of dead people’s faces.
• At the hospital, the doctor tells Langston that the drunk managed to survive the crash, but with a broken C2 vertebra. He had had blood alcohol level of 1.8 and GHB in his system. Stokes finds a small vial of something in the man’s duffel bag and they take it to analyze it.
• When they look further in his possessions, he has a scrapbook full of pictures of the starlet he killed, along with duct tape, rope a hunting knife and a teddy bear. He had been stalking her.
• The guy had hacked into the film production company’s computer and had all the info from the actress’s call sheet, so he knew where she would be.
• Langston thought the guy wanted to kidnap her, but not kill her yet. Stokes thought he wanted to kill her with the accident. Just then, Brass found out that the driver had regained consciousness and he went to talk to him.
• The guy knew he had killed her but wasn’t making much sense otherwise.
• Langston & Stokes studied some security tapes near the crash scene for clues. They figured out that someone overrode the traffic signal to make her have to stop.
• When the boyfriend went to the morgue to view the actress’ body, he almost showed no emotion at all. Was he in shock?
• They didn’t find an “emitter” in the man’s car, but knew one had to have been used to stop her at the light. The one that had been used was an illegal one, without an identifier, so it hadn’t been one of the police, fire or ambulance ones.
• Langston went to the hospital to check out the driver and found bruises from a seatbelt on the passenger side. He hadn’t been driving after all. They figure that the real killer hit her, pulled the unconscious man to the driver’s seat and broke his neck.
• Just when Catherine was getting read the riot act about information leaked to the press, Sara Sidle walks in. She married Grissom and while he’s lecturing at the Sorbonne, she came to help out temporarily.
• Catherine read riley’s exit interview where she basically trashed Catherine as a leader. Then, when looking over the bad press on the case, she finds an article about the boyfriend having other women sue him for paternity.
• Langston & Stokes go to the hotel where the guy in the hospital had stayed and paid cash. The surveillance video showed him being taken from the bar by the boyfriend’s security man.
• Brass took the security guy to talk to him while Catherine asked the boyfriend about the reason he hadn’t been with her that morning. He took an engagement ring from his pocket and told her he was going to give it to her, but hadn’t had the chance.
• The security guy told Brass that he had talked to the stalker to get him to go away, but Langston did some homework on the guy and found that he raced cars. He searched the guy’s room and found a crash helmet, with white powder on it. He suspected it was airbag dust from the crash. The guy asked for a lawyer.
• The dust was confirmed to be airbag talc. Catherine confided in Sara about the exit interview. Sara suggested that Catherine make someone the second in charge to help her.
• Just then, men with dark sunglasses, black suits and white shirts burst into the morgue. The bodies were all pulled out and things were in total disarray. They carried out a body in a body bag. Dr. Robbins tried to stop them and the bullets started to fly. Two of the men got into a large panel truck with the body and fired at Stokes and Sara as they drove away.
• Two people from the lab were injured, but stable. They seemed to be Russian mobsters and instead of taking the actress’ body as people expected, they took the body of the bum that Sanders had been investigating. The bum’s DNA came back and he was the actress’ father.
• Nick & Sara arrived at a scene where the father had been put through a wood chipper. They found out that the man had been a diagnosed schizophrenic and the actress had been taking care of him as well as she could.
• The boyfriend’s father had hired the security guy to breakup the actress and the boyfriend. When the security guy went to talk to the father, they struggle and he kills the father. So now the only thing he can do to fix things is to kill the actress too.
• They know they have to find a way to connect the security guy to both murders. The father had bitten the man’s sleeve and swallowed his cufflink. They sifted through the remains to find it. He was arrested for killing the father, but they couldn’t connect him to the actress.
• Catherine called Nick Stokes to her office and promoted him to Assistant Supervisor on the Graveyard Shift. Then she handed him a pile of folders to go through for her.
• The episode ended with Langston going to visit Robbins in the morgue. Robbins is doing an autopsy and when he opens the abdomen, they are both shocked and puzzled. We don’t get to see what it is. I guess we have to wait for next week.

Discussion Points:

1. Were you disappointed at how little Sara was involved this week?
2. Did I miss something? Why were the men in black that broke in to the morgue to steal the man’s body from the Russian mob? I didn’t see how they were ever connected that way, did you?
3. What are your thoughts about Riley leaving in such a negative way?
4. What are your thoughts about Grissom & Sara being married now?
5. Did you notice that Hodges was intent on protecting Wendy? I wonder how long he’s going to have a crush on her before letting her know…
6. Did you like this episode? What did you like/dislike most about it?

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