Snowspinner
Terracotta Army
Posts: 206
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Two things compelled me to begin watching this show. The first is Emily Proctor, who, back when she was on The West Wing, was the hottest thing ever to happen to the GOP. The second is David Caruso, so wonderfully referred to by Warren Ellis as "Carusobot." David Caruso is, without a doubt, the greatest thing to happen to robots since the Governator. Which is good, because if it weren't for the fact that the characters were all prone to interesting and well-written dialogue, this show would be fucking intolerable.
I mean, let's be frank here. This is not a detective show. Detective shows have mysteries. The point of watching a detective show is playing along it's trying to figure out the solution before the end of the hour. That is not what you do on CSI: Miami. The closest thing to mystery solving that the audience gets to do here is "Gee, I wonder what the hell that green powder is." And it's not as though they're ever going to guess, so, really, what the fuck's the point? (Besides showing us one more time that Caruso and his minions are so much cooler than we are, as if we couldn't figure that out by the fact that they're in Miami, which is, as we all know, the absolute hippest place in the world to get shot.)
The point is that it's fun to watch David Caruso be a superior son of a bitch to people, it's fun to watch Emily Proctor babble, and it's fun to watch whoever their coroner chick is play gleefully with the dead people. So, basically, the show sinks or swims depending on three things. 1) How interesting a person David Caruso is being a cock to, 2) What Emily Proctor gets to babble about, and 3) How weird a dead body coroner chick gets to slice up.
Coroner chick got a stabbing, a shooting, and a self-inflicted axe wound to the forehead. Self-inflicted axe wound to the forehead was promising, but that particular poor bastard was to be the focus of a far less interesting character. Upshot coroner chick pretty much only got to play with the shitty bodies this week.
Emily Proctor, now she was good this week. Got a nice bit about cleavage in addition to all of her bits about not liking ants. Sure, it's not as good as her spouting Aaron Sorkin-penned dialogue about the ERA and about corporate welfare, but we take what we are given. At least this week they were not wasting her talents. Plus, she got to shoot a gun.
But David Caruso, ah, here's where the episode really falls apart. See, last week on CSI: Miami we got a rerun. It was from a bit earlier in the season retarded dude is witness to a murder, Carusobot has to befriend him to get the evidence. Midway through the episode, our loveable retard has a run-in with a baseball bat, and becomes a dead loveable retard. This sends Carusobot into a rage. Disappointingly, he does not level Miami by shooting death lasers from his eyes. He just catches the criminal and sends him to jail for killing his loveable retard. And then he attempts to show compassion, which is unfortunate, as, really, all Carusobot is good for is obnoxious one-liners indicating that he is bringing a criminal down. Sympathy, not so much.
Back to this week, we have, astonishingly, the exact same plot. Except instead of loveable retard, we get tremendously obnoxious forensic science fanboi. And instead of him getting murdered, he bashes his skull in with an axe. Which, while it might have been a promising adaptation of this plot, was more than undermined by the fact that Carusobot was not the one to be deeply moved by the plight of this mouthbreather. Instead, we got one of Caruso's minions one of the ones where it's not even worth knowing their name. And instead of going on a murderous rampage, the Caruso minion's response to his agony over the death of his poor mouthbreathing witness is to
watch blood be tested for DNA.
Now, if you're going to make an episode of CSI: Miami that features a disappointing lack of David Caruso, that's fine. Even washed up television actors who should have fucking stuck with NYPD Blue deserve days off. After all, before South Park debuted, all of their ads featured a David Caruso joke. For that, at least, we thank him. No, the problem is not the lack of David Caruso. It's that this episode followed a repeat of an episode with the exact same fucking plot, only this time, it was done with more worthless characters. For fuck's sake, CBS, pretend the viewing public has a memory stretching back a whole week. Please.
In any case, next week it's David Caruso vs. Terrorists, in what looks like our best hope for Caruso breaking out the death lasers this season. Woo.
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