CSI Episode #902 “The Happy Place”

[rat­ings]

Very lit­tle foren­sics in “The Happy Place.” There were three story arcs, two of which were thinly veiled analo­gies explor­ing Grissom and Sara’s relationship.

The episode opens with Grissom and Sara in bed, Sara ask­ing Grissom to go on a trip with her to get away for a while after Warrick’s death. Grissom said he couldn’t because the lab was short staffed. He coun­tered by ask­ing Sara to hang around for a while. Sara of course said she couldn’t stay in Las Vegas.

The first arc had to do with an odd rela­tion­ship between a gam­bling addict, her tod­dler, and her now-too-old ex-lover and the toddler’s daddy — the 18 year old. Apparently it was the clas­sic tale of a high school guid­ance coun­sel­lor who was a lit­tle too hands-on with the guidance.

The anal­ogy to Grissom and Sara’s rela­tion­ship was that the rela­tion­ship died once there was no longer any risk. It wasn’t dan­ger­ous for them to be together any­more. Similarly, shortly after Grissom and Sara’s rela­tion­ship was out­ted, Sara left the show.

The sec­ond arc dealt with a hus­band who lived for eight years with a comatose wife. He wanted out of the rela­tion­ship, but couldn’t leave her. After years of feel­ing he was the only one left suf­fer­ing in the rela­tion­ship, he pulled his wife’s breath­ing tube and watched her die. Grissom explains to Sara it was so his wife could “leave him,” to which Sara asked Grissom which rela­tion­ship he was refer­ring to.

The third story arc explored hyp­no­sis as a means for fun, theft, and mur­der. This sto­ry­line included a scene fea­tur­ing foren­sic facial recog­ni­tion soft­ware, com­plete with a flash­ing “Facial Match” graphic that just screamed “I belong in CSI Miami!!”

Let me be clear on this issue, for the record. I’m not aware of any foren­sic com­puter pro­gram that auto­mat­i­cally searches fin­ger prints, bul­lets, faces or DNA pro­files, that flash­ing the sub­jects pic­ture on the screen, over­lays prints, and even­tu­ally flashs “MATCH” on the screen. Nor am I away of any foren­sic sci­en­tist worth their salt, that relies on the opin­ion of a com­puter pro­gram to base their con­clu­sion on com­par­i­son cases. The final com­par­i­son deter­mi­na­tion is done by humans. Which is the labor inten­sive part of foren­sics, mak­ing a case take days/weeks/months to com­plete, as opposed to sec­onds to have final results.

In the end, Sara can’t con­vince Grissom to leave, and he can’t con­vince her to stay. Sara packed her bags and left Las Vegas, set­ting us up for Grissom’s even­tual exit as a series reg­u­lar in just a few episodes.