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Friday 6 July 2012

CSI: Miami - 9.5: "Sleepless in Miami" Review


A man in a dream state calls for help and is found in the Everglades along with a DB. he claims he was killing himself. The DB turns out to be a severed head. Is he guilty of murder? Events turn out to be close to home for Natalia.

A man unaware of what he's done calls and reports his own murder in the Everglades.   Horatio (David Caruso) naturally is on the case.   They find a head buried.   Jason (Shawn Hatosy) thought he was killing himself.   Horatio questions him on how he knew about the burial.   He thinks it's a dream.   Horatio: "the dream is over."  Natalia (Eva Larue) collects trace from him.   ME Tom (Christian Clemenson) is distraught as only the head is there and not a complete body.   Walter (Omar Miller) arrives funny comment in tow, "Sleeping Beauty still thinks he's trapped in a dream." He found his car.   It's heard to dream and drive, well Natalia will prove him wrong, kind of.   Jason remembers two dreams, one where he was standing on the dock and throwing a trunk in the water with a DB inside.

Walter has to accompany him and Jason wanders off, recalling throwing something in the incinerator.   Walter finds the hands.   ME Tom can now hope to solve the mystery of how he died.   Delko (Adam Rodriguez) questions Jason, surprisingly he doesn't judge him guilty yet and doesn't think he did it.   Natalia disagrees, the hair found on Jason matches the Vic.   Now it's Natalia's turn to be judgemental and she accuses him of building  a "dream defence."  There's no consistency in their characters anymore.  Natalia's outburst makes him ask for a lawyer.   Natalia is adamant he knows everything cos he did it.   Delko attempts to explain he could have overheard.   Natalia's ex used the same defence, which is why she's got a bee in her bonnet.

Natalia asks Travers (Christopher Redman) to run the hair.   He can only determine whether the hair came from the head or the body.   ME Tom finds the Tox screen comes back negative, but someone wanted him dead.   He was right.   He discovered hesitation wounds and asks for fabric softener, which he uses to hydrate fingerprints.  A match to Brandon Garrett (Jordan Murphy).   Tripp (Rex Linn) visits his wife with Horatio and another funny line from him about not looking like one of their customers.   His wife, Stacey (Merle Dandridge) tells them they weren't having any problems and she keeps touching her necklace, which she calls honouring the dead.   They were divorcing and she's spiritual.

Ryan (Jonathan Togo) and Delko check out Brandon's place and finds it devoid of furniture upstairs.   Ryan also locates  the primary CS as the bathtub using luminol.   A magic fish is found in the bathtub.   Ryan refers to it as a psychic trick, meant to read romantic mood and reacts to sweat.   The name on the fish reads Elena (Beth Littleford) who calls herself a healer.   She reads Ryan's aura which is green.   He's having money issues (doesn't everyone).   She advises him to rub some oil on his forehead and he'll come into money soon.   She touches the fish to read the aura, over-acting, and tells them it belongs to Jason, one of her clients.   Ryan tricks Jason into admitting the fish belongs to him and Natalia tells him the hair came from Brandon's body so he was in contact with him.   She accuses him of killing again, just cos she's hung up on her ex doesn't mean she can treat suspects in that way. Jason recalls being in Brandon's house.

ME Tom finds peticule hemorrhaging on the lungs indicating he stopped breathing suddenly.   Walter tells Horatio Stacey's rich and withdrew money, mentioning snail venom, which is a clue.   Stacey and Peter (Stephen Amell) were having an affair, if you could call it that.   Horatio's "Oh boy" when he and Delko realize what the noises are a sign of!  She saw a psychic to get pregnant.   Peter's surprised, she didn't tell him.   Walter points out an oily substance on Ryan's forehead!  Natalia is sure everyone is lying and Horatio believes Elena holds the key.   Prompting Natalia to come up with the idea of going undercover as a client.   Horatio agrees.   Like no one else could come up with the idea.

Elena notices Natalia's hearing aid and makes her talk about her ex.   She still harbours feelings about her ex.  She makes Natalia breathe into a candle.   Horatio arrives outside and he and Ryan notice Natalia is missing, taking her car with her.   Horatio recalls the GPS in her car and track her to an abandoned warehouse.   Natalia thinks she's in the lab and sees her ex.   She shoots at him, but she's really shooting at Horatio and Ryan, who manages to subdue her.   At the hospital she recalls she went to Elena's.   Ryan says Elena made her as a cop, well she was useless, playing about with her hearing aid like that, so much for going undercover.    She was hypnotized and that's what happened to Jason.   She apologizes, Natalia was also drugged.

Elena's stash of money is found at her house and Horatio predicts she'll return for it, which she stupidly does.   She admits to killing Brandon, she didn't mean to and Stacey wanted him dead.  She thinks she killed him without actually touching him.   Ryan agrees with Walter that they've got noting on Elena or Stacey other than her casting a spell.  ME Tom hears the symptoms Brandon suffered and the numbing began in Brandon's hands, allowing him to examine the hands for entry wounds.   He's so excited about his work,  he examines for neurotoxins.   He was poisoned, his muscles were paralyzed.   This wasn't apparent in the Tox screen  thus he needed to know the symptoms.   The venom was from a cone snail, which is a natural anaesthetic.   A four-pinned prong was used and the killer's hands would have been irritated from the venom.

Obviously it had to be Peter who killed him for Stacey, oh put away the lot of them.   Horatio posits he used a dead fish to extract the poison, which is what Jason saw in his dream, as well as the magic fish.   Stacey is also being charged.   Natalia says they'll help Jason.   Ryan and Horatio put back Natalia's firearm.   No one must know she fired at them, especially Natalia.   Ryan puts money into a vending machine and money falls from it.   Knew that was coming.   No one would believe this, he says to himself.

Some irony here then as Stacey wanted a psychic to kill her husband and yet there was Peter right before her eyes, who was ready, willing and able and did in fact kill him.   Also you'd be forgiven for thinking the opening "dream sequence" was some sort of an homage to Alfred Hitchcock.   He was big on such dramatic, or mind-boggling sequences in some of his movies.   Spellbound (1945) is one that springs to mind, where Gregory Peck plays an amnesiac who gets visions of death and someone being killed, which are triggered by things which seem ordinary to everyone else, such as fork marks on a white table cloth.  The killer appears to have e blanked-out, masked face; similar to the appearance of Natalia's ex.  

How come Natalia recalled so very little about her 'hallucinogenic' actions, whilst Jason recalled so much, conveniently forgetting who she actually shot at, wonder if she'll recall it later on.  Even though he said he had more than one dream.

Anyway, Natalia being in such a vulnerable state still over her ex, wasn't the obvious choice to go undercover; she was susceptible to hypnotic suggestions.  (Obviously Calleigh (Emily Procter) couldn't go.  As for breathing in from the candle; it could have been any noxious substance  she was inhaling.    Ryan's never-ending money woes  seem to always get an airing and with Elena's predictions holding true for him, not that he'll tell anyone, appears Ryan seems to be into this whole psychic gig, especially since he told Delko about the magic fish.   Then again he's probably done a lot of research into it, just like his reality shows; celebrity articles in magazines etc.

Not the first time CSI:Miami has delved into such a case and was in familiar territory in the season 7 episode Head Case where a man was found walking the streets covered in blood.   He also faced jail time, even though he didn't kill anyone, knowingly.  However this episode concentrated on sleep deprivation and its effects.  Delko empathized with the suspect telling Ryan they shouldn't jump to any conclusions.   Empathizing more so with the Vic as he too wanted to regain his memories after his near fatal shooting.   Was directed by Sam Hill too, as was this current episode.  

In CSI:NY episode 6.16 Uncertainty, a man is found wandering the streets, axe in hand and Flack (Eddie cahill) doesn't know what to make of his story when he tells him he was swimming with seahorses and being attacked by clowns.   He wasn't into drugs.   The shower curtains had the seahorses and he had been drugged by LSD and he was innocent of murder.

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