Ray and Sara investigate the suspected mauling of a woman by a lion and stumble onto much deeper issues. Nick helps Doc deliver a baby whilst looking into the abhorrent world of cyber-bullying.
A woman being chased by a lion in the woods is mauled. Ray (Laurence Fishburne) doesn't believe she was hiking and wonders how she got out there. The bite marks on her were made anti-mortum. Sara (Jorga Fox) finds a piece of a tooth. The lion wasn't the cause of all her injuries. Sara thinks she may have "escaped from one animal, only to fall prey to another." Which was exactly the case. Catherine (Marg Helgenberger) and Greg (Eric Szmanda) were absent this episode. Sara gets to work with Ray again.
Nick (George Eads) had cheap steak and eggs fro breakfast, 3 courses and he "still ate for cheap." Whilst he's out with Doc Robbins (Robert David Hall) they're stopped by a man who tells them of a girl inside the house. She's DB in the closet, apparently she hung herself. Doc comments there's no pulse so it just happened and he needs to deliver her baby by C-Section. Nick helps and he got sweaty pretty quickly.
Ray finds the DB suffered a compression fracture of the tibia and fibia, showing she fell vertically. Also she has a broken jaw, blunt force trauma, injuries not caused by a lion. The broken tooth could belong to her. Ray notices she hasn't shed most of the trace on her and has two burn marks from a stun gun. Sara finds a match to Iona (Mariah Bonner) a social worker. She ran a battered woman's shelter with Debra (Abby Brammell) and was a battered woman herself once. Debra mentions boyfriends or husbands as potential threats, but not herself.
The DB girl is Maria, (Brooke Anne Smith) who was17. Nick tells the Doc how incredible he was today and he's glad to have saved a life for a change. Nick calls him a good man. It was like "being part of a miracle" for Nick. COD was asphyxiation and he found 4 contused finger impressions on her arm, she was forcibly grabbed. The leading COD in pregnant women are expectant fathers. Maria's mother (Allison Smith) turns up looking for her, a wreck. She couldn't cope with her daughter or the loss of her husband. She is unaware Maria was pregnant and refuses to see her granddaughter. Another case of the parents not knowing what's happening with their children or what they get up to. Ecklie (Marc Vann) holds the parents responsible at the end for what happened, as we delve into another emotional storyline for Nick, who best handles such stories and Ray having to confront his real emotions too.
Sara looks through Iona's diary and finds appointment with a Doctor K. No surprises for guessing it's Lady Heather, now Dr Heather Kessler (Melinda Clarke). Sara: "This changes everything." Apparently Heather knows all about Gil (William Petersen) being in Peru and Sara being married. Heather's been expecting them. Iona came to see her, she had a stolen childhood, which explains why she's drawn to protecting women. She expressed her longing for love through roleplay: as a cat. She kept one when she was little. Role playing is a legitimate form of therapy, and she looks to Ray for support who replies, she's the expert. They watch Iona's video attended by her boyfriend, Carter (Aaron Hill) who didn't approve of it. She left him and he broke into her apartment to find bondage restraints.
Brass (Paul Guilfoyle) and Nick check out Maria's room. They find her laptop and Nick believes he's found the father from a half torn photo of the Homecoming Queen. Maria either hung herself or it was staged. Her phone continues receiving texts. Archie (Archie Kao) calls them elite speak. NCulver12 was having a serious conversation with her and there are yet more messages. Such as KPC = Keep parents clueless. Hodges (Wallace Langham) talks of sparks flying between Sara and Heather, "I'm sure you dominated." Trust Hodges to get a comment in, which Sara doesn't appreciate. The tooth was fake. Leading to a dentist, Tyrell Neth (Tony Curran) with his huge mansion, where he's throwing a party. They're his "pets" and all are free to go. They are able to release themselves from their restraints. Sara: "Cat got your tongue." Iona lived in a pine tree outside, where Ray finds gouge marks in the bark. She fell from the tree. They theorize Neth dragged her and material from her catsuit caught onto the sprinkler head. A man dog growls at them, he exhibits the same burn marks too.
Nathan Culver (Cody Longo) calls Maria his girlfriend. His father (Dylan Neal) asks if his son is the only one being questioned. He's the father of the baby. Brass calls him lucky otherwise they'd be charging him with double homicide. His belt was in the closet, he grabbed her by her arms and he didn't want anything to do with the baby. His alibi; he was at school. Nick is angry at him and Brass says he had motive. Nick says everyone was angry at her. Archie notices she's still getting thousands of hits on a hate e-mail site about her. Receiving 11 million global hits. Ecklie is disgusted. Nick strongly makes his case for murder. Maria was bullied. Archie agrees it was cyber-bullying. Maria killed herself and the school kids are responsible. Nick believes she "deserves some justice and we're obligated to give it to her." In a similar speech to Hodges some episodes ago, when he wanted justice for the man who was killed on his motorcycle. Ecklie demands proof and then he'll back him. Doc visited "our baby girl" but Maria's mother didn't. He puts the timeline down to 9.30am and TOD at 15 minutes later, so Nathan was at school.
Heather advises Ray they're making assumptions about Neth based on false premises. In attributing all the power to Neth, but he'd be nothing without his subjects. It's a reciprocal bond, like hunter and hunted. Alluding to Ray and Haskell (Bill Irwin). He doesn't want to talk about him and Heather surmises Haskell was performing for Ray's benefit in the courtroom (In Targets of Obsession.) Ray leaves and Heather adds, under her breath that he'll return. Sara found the stun gun but it doesn't match the wounds. So she went shopping and found Iona had her own gun. Hodges found partial ridge detail on the material from the sprinkler, belonging to Debra. She wanted to save Iona from what she was doing so that Iona would thank her in return, just like Iona helped her. When Iona fell, she thought she was dead so she left her there. Instead of helping her, which is exactly what she wanted to do, but she couldn't be bothered to check on her, that's defined as wanting to save her. Ray explains Iona wanted to be taken care of for a while, she didn't want to be a cat forever. He's also talking about himself when he says "they don't know how" to ask for help.
Archie finds Nathan dated the Homecoming Queen, Cathy (Victoria Geil) eight and a half months ago. Then he found Maria and dumped her by SMS. She and her two friends didn't like that, so they uploaded a video and photos of Maria around the school. The Principal (Wendy Schenker) found them offensive and the girls were suspended, which isn't an appropriate punishment, she didn't deal with the root of the problem. They went global with the hate. Even Nathan saw the hits and did nothing to help Maria, who was the object of ridicule and jokes, of bullying. It got too much for her to handle and Nathan added to it by dumping her and the baby. Nick refers to their photos as mugshots, they're the real killers and they need to be taught a lesson. Ecklie explains they're sending a message: "You send hate, you go to jail."
Nick says their parents work and don't talk to them and agrees with Ecklie when he says the parents have a responsibility, as do the 11 million people watching the video when they shouldn't have. What's the law going to do about them. The short answer being nothing cos nothing can be done to stop people from watching without censorship issues coming into it and policing the Net. When it gets out on the web, the damage has already been done. For too long, the popular kids can do what they please and get away with it, even murder. Parents do carry a degree of responsibility. Also the school didn't do much to deal or deter against this sort of behaviour, not even remotely associating it with bullying.
Ray opens up to Heather and yes he did return to her. When he applied for an internship to medical school, he was asked why he wanted to become a doctor. He replied, "if I'm helping people, I'm not hurting them." They laughed at him but he got in. There's violence inside of him and he can taste the blood. He again says what he told Haskell, "DNA is not destiny." But it's coming to the point where he appears to be strongly rejecting that in favour of his DNA. She tells him it's okay to lose the muzzle for a while, almost as if she's advocating violence, that it'd be fine for Ray to kill Haskell. If Ray gives in to his nature, he won't catch him, he'll kill him. Heather agrees. Maybe this meeting with her wasn't a good idea after all.
All this build up for Haskell's appearance and Ray really does have a hidden dark side in him, which is only emerging now the longer Haskell remains at large. We're being prepared for the build up, as it's obvious what Ray's going to do next. Heather only seems to be added to carry the story forward as far as Ray goes and she'd be the only one geared to understand what role playing can achieve. CSI has done episodes where people have been obsessed with animals or mimicking them and delving into that part of the human psyche; such as Fur and Loathing in Las Vegas.
Cyber-bullying is a phenomenon that can't really be legislated against since it's global - short of such websites being shutdown, thereby giving rise to all sorts of issues of enforcement, cost, but parents need to take an active role in this area. Good to see Ecklie actually standing by Nick for a change on such an important matter, usually they're at odds with each other. Also Ecklie being a parent himself can't see how other parents could have ignored such behaviour from their own children.
Another good use of the title, Unleashed referring to animals and their behaviour, as well as humans also being unleashed and behaving worse than animals.
Allison Smith was also in the CSI episode Got Murder and here, she and Dylan Neal only got a scene each. Dylan last time in CSI:Miami played a DB, mostly, in the episode Vengeance.
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