The season finale of CSI was called “Living Doll” and it aired on Thursday May 17. I am a bit late getting this recap up, so I apologize for that. At any rate, episode 7×24 finally revealed the identity of the miniature killer and featured some good moments throughout. Plus, it left us with a cliffhanger, which I actually like in season finales. After all, there should be some compelling reason to want to tune in again in the fall! Anyway, here’s what happened in the latest CSI ep.
The writers decided to reveal the killer early on in the episode so we could watch her working on her latest miniature crime scene and try to guess who her next victim would be. The killer is a young woman named Natalie, and yes, she was indeed one of Ernie Dell’s foster children. The time line in this episode was completely non-linear, so we get Natalie’s backstory in bits and pieces of flashbacks intermingled with current scenes. It was a little confusing to watch, so I’m just going to retell it in chronological order from what I was able to piece together.
When Natalie was a small girl, she pushed her sister Chloe out of their tree house to the cement sidewalk below. Chloe died on impact, with a large puddle of blood pooling around her. Later on, Natalie’s dad tries to clean the blood off the sidewalk with bleach, which apparently accounts for Natalie’s aversion to the substance now. Natalie then went into foster care at the Dells’s home, but was sent back to child services after she repeatedly pushed another kid out of the top bunk at night.
The flashbacks made it seem like Natalie was with the Dells for only a very short time, yet later on she’s shown to have a pretty strong relationship with Ernie — strong enough that he would take the blame for her and kill himself in front of Grissom in an attempt to save Natalie. That didn’t make sense to me at all.
Anyway, Natalie blamed Gil for causing Ernie to kill himself (nice logic there, psycho!) so she decides to return the favor by offing someone Gil cares about. Natalie saw Gil caressing Sara’s arm at some random crime scene and rightly deduces that those two are romantically involved, so she sets her sights on Sara as the next victim.
Towards this end, Natalie gets a job with the night cleaning service at the LVPD and CSI labs. That’s how she’s able to plant her latest miniature and get access to Sara in the parking garage. Natalie somehow manages to abduct Sara and take her out to the would-be crime scene, and at the very end, Grissom, Brass, and the rest of the crew are left to wonder where Sara is. The only thing they know is that she’s trapped under a car and that she’s alive.
My Reaction: As I said, there were some pretty good moments along the way, but I didn’t necessarily think this was a strong episode overall. I liked the way Grissom finally confessed that he and Sara are an item — and I just loved the various reactions from his co-workers. I also loved Brass being snarky when Natalie was in the interrogation room: “Let’s just drip bleach on her until she tells us everything!” (or whatever he said along those lines).
And I liked that Sara is the intended victim. She has annoyed me to no end ever since she and Gil began dating, so I’d love to see her knocked off the show. (And given Jorja Fox’s real-life contract problems, this could be a real possibility.)
Nevertheless, I thought the revelation of the killer’s identity was extremely anticlimactic given the fact that this case has been building up over the course of the entire season. Plus, I *hated* the fake-out in the interrogation room when Natalie sliced Gil’s jugular with a razor blade. That move actually made me gasp out loud, and I was pissed to see that it only took place in Natalie’s mind. Now that would have been an awesome twist and a daring move by the writers, but alas, it never happened.
I will definitely tune into the Season Eight premier of CSI next fall to see what happens to Sara. But in all honesty, I can’t imagine this turning out well either way (for the show as a whole, I mean). If Sara dies, then we’ll have depressed/morbid/brooding Gil to deal with all season. If she lives, then we’ll get the inevitable office politics bs that goes along with a supervisor dating an underling. Sigh.