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Tuesday 22 October 2013

CSI:NY 9.16 "Blood Actually" Review

CSI:NY gives us a Valentine's Day ep as its penultimate ep, trying to soften us for the finale!  But it didn't work! The CSIs have to solve three murders which all take place on this day and Mac (Gary Sinise) and Christine (Megan Dodds) have a date with destiny (well in the next ep at least.)  Mac looks for Valentine's cards and finds one which is blank inside so he can write his own message in there, whilst three people are getting killed.  Funny how they were all male! ha.

The first story: Love for Sale concerns the death of a man who attacked another man in a hotel room.  Jo (Sela Ward) processes the scene and collects some evidence such as a champagne bottle.  Lovato (Natalie Martinez) tells her the Vic's name was Theodore Hart (Trenton Rostedt).  Jo finds the room was registered to a Wayne Brown (Wayne Bastrup) and he lives nearby, so why the expensive hotel room?  Wayne is found and tells them he met a woman at a bar named Laura and they were having drinks.  They went back to the hotel room and then a man came in.  They fought and he tried to kill him so he says he got hold of the corkscrew and stabbed him with it.  He didn't mean to leave but didn't know the man was dead until she told him now.  He doesn't know Laura's last name.

Sid's (Robert Joy) autopsy finds there was a puncture wound on Hart's neck but it didn't kill him.  He has blunt force trauma to the back of his head which makes Lindsay )Anna Belknap) wonder how he could have got that if Wayne claims he was under him.  Sid also found green flecks in his wound.  So either Wayne lied or he was there with someone.  Lovato finds Hart was a pimp and Laura (Georgie Flores) worked for him. Laura Palmer (what this isn't Twin Peaks! Ha)  Lindsay tells Jo that Wayne was not in his room alone since there was a partial print on the bottle and also on a chocolate wrapper.  These merged into one print and belonged to Laura who has been arrested for solicitation.  The print on the bottle was reversed so she was holding the bottle from the neck and thus hit Hart on the head with it.

Laura says Hart was her pimp and he would check up on her but he forgot the time since she and Wayne talked.  He asked her everything about her life and seemed genuinely interested but she doesn't believe that true love exists.  Jo tells her differently since Wayne confessed to killing Hart for her.  Jo wonders where you'd look for a good man and Lindsay tells her good men are out there if you know where to look, which don't mean work!

Flack (Eddie Cahill) makes a date with Lovato (ugh) and suggests a slice, beer and a game.  She's happy with that cos she doesn't want all this sentimentality like other women.  Danny (Carmine Giovinazzo) also making a reference to having to fork out for expensive dinners on this day just cos other people do it. Lindsay promises him something else after work.  (Groan!)  Jo tells Ellie (Sydney Park) to go straight home after her date with her boyfriend and make her curfew, giving her an extra 15 minutes after midnight.

Story 2 Love is Blind finds Danny questioning the widow of Bernard Chandler (Clint Culp) Sarah (Amy Gumenick) and finds them to be a mismatched couple.  She is younger and he is more portly and older.  He had a penchant for chocolate but was on a diet.  Sarah also tells them he was diabetic so wouldn't eat chocolate.  They were meant to go away on their dream vacation and it was their fifth anniversary.  Hawkes (Hill Harper) finds a box of chocolates, empty and sweet wrappers and his phone when he tried to dial for help.  Danny prejudging thinks Bernard is rich and that's why Sarah married him cos they don't go together. Hawkes thinks he's prejudging and is about to tell him something but stops.

Sid takes his pills and Danny arrives at autopsy.  It's been a long time since he's been there and this is what Sid also tells him.  Suppose they had to get Danny down there one last time before the show was over!  Sid tells him COD was a sugar overdose.  Also it appears Bernard did try to inject himself with insulin.  Hawkes analyzes Bernard's stomach contents and finds the presence of sucrose as he tells Adam (AJ Buckley).  Yet the box of chocolates were labelled as being sugar free.  Part of the label had been ripped off and obviously the only one who knew Bernard was diabetic was Sarah.  The spouse being the prime suspect as always.

Adam went through his phone and thinks Bernard was having an affair with a woman named Evelyn as there were several messages to her.  Of course Adam is also prejudging as did Danny.  Sarah is brought in and Danny tells her she ripped off the label from the box and added sugar water to his insulin.  He ate the chocolates since she gave them to him otherwise he wouldn't have.  He tried to inject himself but he didn't have insulin in the hypodermic.  Sarah tells him other women were envious of her when they saw him with her.  Also that she found out he was going to take another woman on their dream vacation but Danny tells her Evelyn was his travel agent and he had booked tickets for Europe.  She killed him for nothing cos she couldn't see past her jealously, which isn't really love.

Hawkes shows Danny a pic of himself when he was younger showing he was overweight.  He liked a girl but no one could see past his weight and he had to do something about it.  Danny wants to keep the photo but Hawkes doesn't want him telling anyone about it.  Though don't know why he's ashamed, he overcame his obesity which is a good thing.  Funny he carries that photo around with him though.  Thought he was going to take out the photo of a woman or something so we know what's he's been up to in his personal life.

The third story: In the Name of Love sees Mac and Flack investigate the shooting of a man in the back in the street.  His wife was also there but fled the scene.  The Vic was Jeremy Howser (Mark Hengst) the CEO of a company and the name sounds familiar to Mac.  He was in the middle of a divorce with his wife, Wendy (Shanna Collins).  The gun was found underneath him.  Jeremy was being investigated cos he had swindled some of his clients.  Sid finds the bullets hit him in the back and the fragmented bones hit his heart.  Mac calls it an execution.  He also notices some ink on his wrist which Sid missed but Mac tells him he's allowed one mistake after 8 years of exemplary work.  Sid also found defensive wounds on his knuckles which were there a few ours before.

Adam finds the bullets from Jeremy didn't match the gun found under him as he was able to piece the fragments together.  He's loaded the info into the computer to search it and Mac will be notified when there's a result.  He removes his lab coat since he's got a date with Michelle and they're going ice skating.  Mac lets him know he can go, but first he has to decipher the ink stamp.  That's easy and says it's from a nightclub where they stamp your wrist if you want to leave and then come back.  Mac lets Adam go and he hugs him, yeah first and last time! Ha.  The computer finds a match to an officer Thomas Reynolds (Omar J Dorsey). He was recently cleared of an unjustified shooting case as Flack finds out and retired.

Reynolds now runs a security firm and has worked for Jeremy.  Reynolds was fired and he left with a black eye.   They go to Reynold's apartment and find some pics.  He was surveilling Wendy and so Mac thinks she was the intended target.  Also she said she fled the CS cos she was afraid for her own life.  So did Wayne in the first story.  As Mac drives back to the precinct, Flack notices a grey sedan and tells Mac.  Reynolds turns himself in.  He tells them how when he followed Wendy for dirt on her he couldn't find any.  She was good and helped people out using her money on them.  Then realized Jeremy was going to murder her.  He had the gun in the street and Reynolds shot him to stop him from killing her.  He wanted to be good like her but thinks it's too late now.  Mac tells him he did good by saving her life.  Jeremy got a stamp from a nightclub so he could return and establish his alibi there. Flack also tells him about the one way ticket Jeremy brought for himself to Geneva and the gun found under his body.

Mac meets Christine at the new bar and listen to Josh Groban singing.  As he gives her the card.  Danny and Lindsay spend time together and she bemoans them not doing much of that and just as they are about to get close, Lucy calls them telling them there's a vampire in her room.  Ellie meets Jo and tells them they'll have ice cream and watch movies together and it's not cos she feels sorry for Jo being alone.  She ditched her date for her mother.  Flack has a surprise candlelit dinner for Lovato who wanted all that sentimentality anyway. She tells him he'll have to meet her brothers now and he wants her to bring it on, he's not worried.

We don't get to see how Hawkes sent the night or Adam ice skating either.  CSI:NY getting all mushy on us and breaking the eps down into three stories.  Though they haven't covered much cases like this before which involved more than two cases in one ep, it kind of felt rushed and too easily concluded since their suspects were right there for them and were connected to the Vics.  Being Valentine's Day they had to bring chocolate into the stories, especially the second one and again it was the man who had the sweet tooth again alluding to season 1.17 The Fall choc ep where the obese man was meant to give up on choc and hid it outside and then fell from the balcony whilst getting it.

Lovato denying she's into the whole romance thing was silly, didn't she think Flack could read her as was her remark asking why the bottle is a giveaway as to what happened.  Of course if the bottle is held from the neck upside down it means it was used as a weapon!  Duh, how long she been on the force?  Danny telling Mac Christine is a fighter and he should hang onto her.  After Christine has a flashback to the previous ep when she was kidnapped.  Seth an Apep.

Seems each of the stories had a relevant title, the first one being love comes as a price and can only be brought but Wayne proved Laura wrong.  Who is probably going to get off with self defence.  The second one where Sarah didn't care about the appearance of her husband but she did care he was cheating on her and couldn't see him with anyone else, but she could kill him instead.  How twisted was that love of hers. The third story where it seems Jeremy did only marry Wendy in name only, quite ironically he didn't love her anymore at least and wanted her to suffer - in the name of love.  Of course we know that the overall title of the ep is a play on the movie Love Actually.  Each couple supposedly in love was out for blood!

Hawkes: "love has the power to overcome almost everything  but only if we all can get past our own prejudice and let it."

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