TVSquad

Man, talk about quickly twisting plotlines. Last night's CSI, "Shooting Stars," threw a couple of curveballs within the first few minutes, with everyone from a muddy guy who has a case of munchies raiding someone's fridge to a group of people that looked like they were castoffs from an "of the Dead" film strolling away from a backyard they've ventured into. As it turned out, that group ended up dead, not just looking that way, just a short time later.

While some of my fellow TVSquadders think that CSI doesn't expand on its characters quite so much, I think that it does happen, but it's not so far outside of the plot of the show that it might seem innocuous enough to get by. Like, say, seeing Grissom gaze up at the sky to watch the Orionid meteor shower while the crime scene the team has come upon settles in. He is, as it turns out, a bit more deep than he would seem at first glance. And after his jaunt a few miles out into the Nevada desert with Catherine, we see his utter confidence in crime scene investigation when he opens the door to the bunker with nary a concern for a sidearm. Now if there were ever a long conversation I'd like to sit in on that show, this would probably be it - what were they talking about for the, say, hour or so that they made their way through the brush and sand? Probably no coffee-table book stuff, but it had to be amusing.

The problem with what I said earlier about the character development is that sometimes - it just doesn't fly. Like this week, we see Nick's concern about descending into the bunker, below ground - something that Grissom strolled into just moments earlier - so we're seeing Nick's worries about having been buried alive. Warrick is getting some medical tests from his new wife, and offers a bit of insight into his playful attitude, and it's quickly retracted when he sees her ex in the hallway. So it's almost as if sub-plots are rolling around episode to episode, and then next week, we might not hear anything about what is brought up with these characters, and maybe Greg and Sara will be the focus of attention. I guess that's a good thing, as we never want to "give up the ghost" in a matter of minutes on anyone, but sometimes it seems disjointed - which this show is definitely not when it comes to the main storylines.

You might have noticed that I'm staying away from the storyline for this particular week, and that's on purpose. If anything, it seemed a little weak to me, as it was obviously a copycat of the "Heaven's Gate" cult, with a little sheister-ism mixed in for good fun. Sure, they mentioned the cult in the show, but that didn't make it any easier to take. It's almost like you could say "and next, they're going to find out that so and so was the bad guy because xyz" - there weren't too many twists and turns after the introduction to the show, and it probably climaxed somewhere around the time that Warrick and his wife were getting their kiss on in the exam room, no pun intended. If anything, this episode was more of the "it's only a matter of time" essence than it was about the team finding the one piece of evidence that was ignored or missed the first time around. Or perhaps it's that after watching a few years of the show, figuring out which buttons are to be pushed isn't so difficult - but I doubt it, the overall show is too good to let that happen.

As for Nick Stokes, I have begun to feel more and more like he might end up leaving the show, perhaps on his own volition. There have been lots of allusions to his various fears in the first few weeks of the season, and I'm not sure his psyche is up to handling that while on the job. And, as we know, Grissom is usually one to call people up on what he perceives to be a problem, whether it be Catherine's ex or Warrick's problems with the chips - perhaps there will be a sitdown with Nick and the boss one of these days.