TVSquad

As Jane wrote a couple of weeks ago, CBS was hot on the heels of landing a big name star to fill the void when William Petersen leaves CSI later this year. The names bandied about included Kurt Russell and John Malkovich, and one other major motion picture star, Laurence Fishburne. Today, the network announced Laurence Fishburne will indeed be the new addition to CSI.

His character is a forensic scientist, like Grissom, but don't expect him to have Gil's fascination with insects. No, Fishburne's man has other bugs: he's a former pathologist and college lecturer who's focused on why people commit acts of violence. It should be interesting to see how his preoccupation with the why integrates with the other CSI gang who are all Grissom-trained and generally obsessed with how a crime is done and who done it.

Fishburne will be introduced in the ninth episode when his character meets members of the CSI team during a murder investigation and ends up joining them.

Every time he thinks he's out, they pull him back in again! No, just kidding. It's not like that. This isn't Michael in Godfather 3. Nobody's forcing anyone.

However, it is true that William Petersen is returning to CBS's CSI for the ninth season. This is great news for fans of the show -- and the star -- because for years now he's been yelping about leaving the hit series to do other things. Last year, for example, he was written off the show for a brief hiatus in which Liev Schreiber was cast as a temporary replacement for Gil Grissom in the Las Vegas crime lab.