CSI: Vegas Episode 9.09 - 19 Down
Air Date: December 11, 2008

In a dimly lit living room, two men watch a video. On the video, a woman seems to be wimpering, as if she is held captive, perhaps being tortured or sexually assaulted. One man, seated on a sofa, says it brings back old times, and asks the man standing behind him what he thinks it’s worth. At that the other man strangles the seated man, and stuffs his lifeless body into a large trashbag. He drags the body out of the house, and places it into a car. In the dark, he dumps the body off a cliff into a ravine. The camera captures the body’s exposure to the elements and visible decomposition.

Grissom finishes a crossword, and walks out to hand Riley paperwork for a case of suspicious remains at the city dump. She jokingly pretends excitement over the assignment, “Awesome! Trash run for the low man on the totem pole.”

Greg gets a recovered stolen vehicle. To Nick he hands a possible arson at the Burger Giant. He hands Catherine a 419 in Green Valley. Grissom somberly announces his departure from CSI, and tells them that Catherine will take over. They will also get a new Level 1 CSI. He gets a message that there’s another case, that he’ll take. As he walks away, the team looks stunned.
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CSI: Vegas - Episode 9.08 - Young Man With A Horn
Air Date: December 4, 2008

A man and woman sing a duet in rehearsal for the show “Overnight Sensation” –an obvious take on American Idol. The producer gruffly stops them, complaining that the young man is lazy and insufficiently emotive. The man’s father rushes from offstage to defend his son. The producer reprimands the father and warns the Layla that she was flat. They resume singing. When the producer shouts over Layla’s singing, telling her to watch her pitch, she rushes off the stage, crying. At the producer’s order, the man continues singing.

Below a highway overpass, Catherine and Phillips examine what looks like a tablecloth rolled up like a handled sack. Cutting through the cloth, they find a woman’s face –it’s Layla Wells.

Wells had been wrapped up in the bundle, clothed in just her lingerie, hinting at sexual assault. Dr. Robbins notes the time of death is between 2 and 4 AM.

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CSI: Vegas - Episode 9.06 Say Uncle
Air Date: November 13, 2008

At a Korean street party, gunshots interrupt the fun, and send the crowd running, ducking, and scrambling for cover.

The team shows up, but no one seems to have seen exactly what happened. A young woman and a young man lie dead on the asphalt, she with two bullet wounds, he with three. Grissom spots only one casing nearby, but the rest may have been scattered by foot traffic from the crowd. Riley opens the man’s wallet, and identifies him as Sung Bang. He also has an prison release form in his pocket, indicating that he spent six months in detention for two DUIs and had just been released that morning. Hodges notes that the man is loaded with ID, but the woman doesn’t even have lint in her pocket. Just a few feet away from the bodies, Grissom finds a child’s sunglasses, spattered with blood.

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CSI: Vegas - Episode 9.05 Leave Out All the Rest
Air Date: November 06, 2008

The team works a scene out in the desert during a heavy downpour, where a man’s body is badly beaten up, and his fingers and toes torn off. Ligature marks on the man’s wrists make it look like he was tied up and dragged behind a vehicle. On his back, burnt motor oil, and scorched shirt fabric make it appear he was actually tied to the bottom of a vehicle.

Nine stab wounds are in the victim’s shirt. White tissue around the facial wounds indicate they happened post-mortem. No bleeding around the stab wounds in the torso, as well as lack of bruising around rope marks also point to happening post-mortem. Nipples are swollen with puncture wounds around the arioles.

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CSI: Vegas Episode 9.04 Let It Bleed
Air Date: October 30, 2008

A man in a police uniform runs out of a liquor store. Nick and Riley give chase. When the man runs into a building, Nick follows, but tells Riley to call for help. The man, cornered, jumps out an upstairs window, landing in a dumpster. Inside the dumpster is also a woman’s body. The man had small bills, beef jerky, and a porn magazine. Riley notes that the woman smells fresh.

An ink stamp on the victim’s upper thigh leads the team to a club. There, Catherine finds her daughter, dancing with a man, and sporting a fake ID. Catherine scolds her, and sends her with a patrolman. Riley says that she must have come in through the back, not having a wristband indicating she paid the cover at the door. She must have been in the VIP area.

Catherine and Riley show the Craig Hess, the club owner, a photo of the victim. He says he doesn’t recognize the girl. Catherine tells him about her own underage daughter being there, and threatens to card the other patrons and shut the place down. He smugly retorts that her parenting is the problem and she’s only seeking to ease her guilt by placing the blame on a legitimate club for accepting her daughter’s valid-looking ID.
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CSI: Vegas - 9.03 Art Imitates Life
Air Date: October 23, 2008

A woman is found dead and leaning casually against a light pole. She is seemingly frozen in place, like a wax figure. No burn marks, no signs of lightning. The body is in full rigor, and is roughly the same temperature as the outside air, around 100 degrees fahrenheit. She’s sporting a brand new mobile phone, that has no personalization yet. The only call on it, so far, is to MovieFone. Her purse is totally empty, and pretty new looking.

Back at the lab, the “frozen” woman’s fingerprints turn up in the health workers database. She’s Carla Peretti, an LPN at Desert Palm Hospital.
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July 7, David Weddle and Bradley Thompson, writers for the SciFi Channel series Battlestar Galactica begin their new jobs writing for CSI: Crime Scene Investigation. The pair make the move from the void of deep space to the hot sands of Vegas, after being released from writing the SciFi Channel’s Battlestar Galactica movie. Apparently, the CSI offer was just too good to pass up.

Read the original story at SyFy Portal.

William L. Petersen as Gil Grissom. Photo: Newscom.

Gil Grissom knows tough situations. William Petersen, though, isn’t accustomed to being in the airport when a bomb comes into the building. Apparently, while Petersen was at LA International Airport, last Wednesday, a man, Scott Juhun Lee, approached authorities, and told them he was a terrorist. The police arrested the man when he said he had a bomb inside his black bag. The upper and lower roads at the airport were immediately shut down and the LAPD bomb squad examined the black bag. They found only “junk”.

The CSI star probably kept his cool, but gave kudos to the police and fire personnel who handled the scene. In the video linked below, he said they heard the bomb being detonated in the distance. There are lots of loud noises at an airport, though.

Read more at the Los Angeles Times.

Watch the TMZ Video of the guy trying to get William Petersen to say that this was fairly normal in LA, or for actors. Said Petersen, “When I deal with it… it’s pretend.” Well said.

Photo: Newscom.

Get Grissom on the horn! Las Vegas, the hometown of the critically acclaimed, original CSI series is no longer home to a university forensic science program. Administrators at UNLV pulled the plug on the program, citing the need for budget cuts. The administration also points to the financial inability to appoint a program director and the faculty required to attain accreditation for the program.

Background Check

Creating the program was a brilliant move, actually. Build upon the mystique, and the fact that the country already associates forensic science with Las Vegas. Less than five years ago, the university began the program, hoping to build upon this association. Currently, the program, though, has a mere 80 students. Perhaps this is fewer than they would have liked.

The Mystery

Las Vegas Metro Crime Scene Analyst Daniel Holstein, who inspired one of CSI’s characters, spoke to the Las Vegas Sun. According to Holstein, Metro has hired many graduates of the program. This seems contrary to university staff claims that you need an accredited program to get a job. In fact, the Metro has no such requirement. Certainly, you would see accreditation as a positive, but Metro’s acting director of crime scene investigation Randy McLaughlin told the Sun that they would love to have locally trained potentials to select from, when hiring new analysts. “People that grew up here, people that were raised here, are more likely to stay around…”, he adds.

The Proof, The Rub, The Rebuttal

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CSI Emmy Nominations. Image: Newscom

The producers have put forward their Primetime Emmy submissions for the CSI franchise. There are plenty of proposed accolades to go around in all three hit series.

Episodes

• CSI: Crime Scene Investigation Dead Doll (season eight premiere)
• CSI: Crime Scene Investigation Who and What (Without a Trace crossover)
• CSI: Miami All In
• CSI: Miami Ambush
• CSI: New York Right Next Door

Leading Men

• William Petersen (Gil Grissom) for Dead Doll
• David Caruso (Horatio Caine) for All In
• Gary Sinise (Mac Taylor) for The Thing About Heroes

Leading Women

• Marg Helgenberger (Catherine Willows) for A Thousand Days on Earth
• Emily Procter (Calleigh Duquesne) for All In

Supporting Actor

• Gary Dourdan (Warrick Brown) for For Gedda
• Paul Guilfoyle (Jim Brass) for Grissom’s Divine Comedy
• Robert David Hall (Dr Al Robbins) for The Theory of Everything
• Wallace Langham (David Hodges) for You Kill Me
• Eric Szmanda (Greg Sanders) for The Theory of Everything
• George Eads (Nick Stokes) for “unlisted episode”.
• Jonathan Togo (Ryan Wolfe) for Cyber-lebrity
• Carmine Giovinazzo (Danny Messer) for Child’s Play
• AJ Buckley (Adam Ross) for Down the Rabbit Hole

Supporting Actress

• Jorja Fox (Sara Sidle) for Goodbye and Good Luck

Guest actor and actress

• Dennis Christopher for CSI: Crime Scene Investigation Lying Down with Dogs
• Anthony LaPaglia for CSI Who and What
• Harold Perrineau for CSI Go to Hell
• Bonnie Bedelia for CSI Grissom’s Divine Comedy
• Peter James Smith for CSI: Miami To Kill a Predator
• Elizabeth Berkley for CSI: Miami Ambush

Watch for more information, as the final nominations come out.

Who do you think will make the cut?

Source: Gold Derby Forums at LATimes.com.