TVSquad

Two great cases tonight, but as a result of them being so good, they were both chock full of details. Mac, Lindsay, and Danny are working on the death of a doll doctor. The man owned the premiere doll hospital in NYC and apparently people from all over the country would send him their Barbies for repairs. Now I'd just like to say that dolls freak me out. They're always so damn happy, even when they don't have a body attached to them. And when a whole bunch of them are lying on top of a corpse... ugh, dolls. Hate 'em. On the other side of the city, Stella, Doc Hawkes, and Flack get a call when a diner waitress is found dead in her bed. As I mentioned, both cases were packed. So methinks the best way to tackle this is to look at the episode in two separate parts.

Let's look at the creepy doll case first. The doll doctor was murdered in his own hospital and it turns out that the weapon of choice was the business end of a broken, porcelain arm doll. Go figure. He had a death grip on the arm of one doll and Mac reasons that this little lady must have held some importance. The doll, called a "Secret Sophie," talks and also has the ability to record audio if you speak to her - hence, she can keep a secret. The doll's owner is tracked down, and Danny speaks with her mother. The woman is a teacher and doesn't have much to say. Danny also meets two of her students, one of which has an arm cast. Later, Lindsay takes apart the doll and realizes that it has a "secret" recorded onto it. The secret is that of a little girl describing how she saw two people having a naked party - no mention of names or a location though. Mac discovers that the killer had entered through the second story window and trace amounts of plaster are found near the windowsill. Danny puts the pieces together and realizes that little girl's mother was sleeping with her student, the one with the cast. The daughter walked in on one of their tutoring sessions and then told her doll. The doctor informed the mother of the message he found while repairing the doll, and she in turn dispatched her teenage stud-muffin to retrieve the doll. But things went south and the doc put up his last fight.

On to the diner waitress case. Stella found her in her bed and noticed she was wearing a wig. The hair underneath was short, which indicated was going through chemo. The cancer was confirmed by Sid's (played by Robert Joy, who I love as the new M.E.) autopsy, but he determined that COD was arsenic poisoning. Danny raids the vic's kitchen and eventually finds that her teabags have been tampered with. They contained trace amounts of arsenic and also some meteorite dust... weird. Hawkes has some insight on that finding and he reveals that meteorite dust is often used to coat the strings of a violin to achieve a certain pitch. And the vic's neighbor happens to play violin. He and his wife also happen to be pregnant so they could really use an extra room for a nursery. The violinist, in the studio, with the arsenic - busted!

All in all, great episode. However, I'm not sold on Lindsay as the new CSI though. I still miss Aiden, even if she was a wee bit unethical. Am I alone in this feeling?