CSI - For Gedda (Episode 817)

Maybe he's on his knees to pray for a miracle that will get him off the hook.

Previously on CSI: Warrick got drunk and hooked up with a stripper.  Subsequently, horrified viewers were subjected to the most painful, cheesy montage in the history of television.  No, not just the history of television.  The history of entertainment.  I’m a diehard fan, and I had to change the channel - it was just that embarrassing.  Anyhoo, the stripper ended up dead (assumedly murdered by a mob boss named Gedda), and I wasn’t sad because I really wanted to avoid more cringeworthy drunken stripper montages.  Warrick was sad, though.  And pissed off at Gedda.  And also, almost fired by Grissom.  

Currently on CSI, an African-American funeral procession makes its way through a cemetery as a gospel choir sings.  The pallbearers are lookin’ a little uncomfortable, however, as the coffin they’re porting starts to creak as though the dude inside is trying to escape.  CSI: Dawn of the Dead!  That would be awesome, but no such luck.  The bottom of the coffin disintegrates and out falls the body of a white man, followed by the body of a black man.  As Nick so eloquently says, “Can’t get much deader’n this.”  Hee!  The funeral attendees don’t know the white guy, whose body was hidden in the false bottom of the XXXL coffin.  As SuperDave tries to take both bodies away, he’s accosted by angry funeralgoers.  Dude, the African-American guy was supposed to get buried, and now he has to go back to the morgue!  To Grissom’s chagrin, Nicky promises the department will buy a new casket, and the dead guy’s wife breaks up the brouhaha by ordering everyone to let SuperDave through.  The gospel choir sings the body to the van, apparently replacing Grissom’s usual episode-opening quip. 

Brass questions the wary mortician, a strong silent type who will only write one word on a pad of paper: “Lawyer.”  Greggo tells Catherine some boring fascinating facts about Vegas mobsters and double burials.  Turns out his useless knowledge will soon come in handy: Greg’s shopping a book to publishers.  See, Greg’s living the dream.  My head is also filled with useless fangirl knowledge.  Getting paid to put it down on paper… what could be better?  Meanwhile, Nicky photographs the coffin and dusts for prints.  Warrick chats him up, then goes down to talk with Doc Robbins.  The John Doe from the coffin bottom was suffocated.  Gratuitous gruesome CSI moment!!  As the doc repositions the mask-like skin of the dead guy’s face (squick), Warrick nearly shits a brick as he realizes he knows him – it’s Lenny Harper, a Private Eye.  Lenny used to be a cop, so the Undersheriff, a.k.a. Captain Underpants, decides this case is high priority.

Nick and Grissom visit Lenny’s office, which looks like it came straight out of a 40’s detective novel.  I half expect a woman wearing a red dress and a hat with a net on it to sashay in and tearfully beg for Lenny’s help.  Grissom notes that the shredder has been emptied and the trash is missing; somebody cleaned up.  Nicky finds keys that unlock Lenny’s car, parked just outside, which has also been cleaned.  The boyz surmise that the killer used Lenny’s own car to transport his body to the mortuary, then for some reason had it detailed and drove it back here.  Apparently they’re looking for a neat freak Valet who has access to coffins.  Back at the lab, Warrick sits alone in Grissom’s office remembering the Night of the Awful Montage.  Please, CSI, don’t make me relive that thing.  I can’t handle it.  We’re spared by Warrick’s phone ringing, and Snoopy McNosypants, a.k.a. Hodges, listens in on ‘Rick’s conversation from the hallway.  Warrick’s yelling at someone, asking how they got his number and where they should meet.   He goes striding off down the hall as Hodges scampers away and feigns nonchalance by holding a giant book up to his face.  Real subtle there, Hodges.

Archie can’t get much from the computer Nick brought back from Lenny’s office, but he does manage to open some audio content.  Linda Tripp Lenny was in the habit of tape recording meetings with his clients, and guess whose voice we hear?  Warrick Brown’s!  Apparently because Grissom threatened to fire Warrick’s ass if he tried to investigate the stripper’s death, ‘Rick hired Lenny to do it, instead.  So that’s how he knew the guy!  Nick figures that Gedda realized he was being followed, and had Lenny killed.  Grissom furiously calls Warrick and leaves him a message, and Warrick calls back.  He’s standing in a dark room with a gun in his hand, and his voice is dazed and shaky.  He bewilderedly says that he doesn’t know what’s happened.  Grissom demands to know where Warrick is, and suddenly police burst into the room, screaming at Warrick to drop the gun.  Grissom’s hollering Warrick’s name into the phone and Warrick’s hollering that he’s a CSI as he kneels on the ground, and it’s complete chaos, and HOLY CRAP Warrick looks like he just got in a water fight and the opposing team decided to fill their Supersoakers with blood.  That’s a lame analogy, but it’s the only one I can come up with.  Blood is literally dripping off of him.

Grissom goes down to Gedda’s strip club, where he finds Warrick handcuffed and kneeling dejectedly.  There’s a ginormous pool of blood on the floor beneath Gedda, who’s clearly dead, tied to a chair with approximately 56312497 gunshot wounds to the chest.  The cops showed up because someone heard the shots.  Looking utterly defeated and confused, Warrick swears to Grissom that he doesn’t know what happened.  The bloodsoaked gun on the floor is Warrick’s, and his handcuffs are on Gedda.  “We need to get you a lawyer,” Grissom grits.  Thank you, Professor Obvious.  Brass shows up and advises Warrick not to say a word.  Warrick’s escorted, stumbling, into the back of a cruiser.  Catherine and Nick arrive, shocked to see Warrick: 1) in the back of a cop car and 2) apparently about to burst into tears.  Because they’re too close to it, Grissom’s team is off the case; day shift will process the scene, and Internal Affairs is taking over the investigation. 

Like any suspect, Warrick is photographed and his bloodspattered clothes are taken as evidence.  Ecklie leaves him some orange prison scrubs to wear (how optimistic).  Ecklie also advises him to get a lawyer, because as we recently learned on SVU, cops have a 48 hour period before they can be charged with a crime.  Warrick says he wouldn’t know what to tell a lawyer, because he doesn’t remember anything.  He sticks to this story as a moron detective in a fugly tie “interrogates” him.  Warrick does remember hiring Lenny (in violation of orders) and he recalls receiving a call from Gedda while pontificating moodily in Grissom’s office.  Gedda asked him to come down to the strip club.  Warrick entered with his gun drawn.  Next thing he knew, he’d blacked out, and when he woke up, he was lying on the ground and Gedda was dead.  Bad Tie Detective thinks Warrick went to get revenge, handcuffed Gedda and shot him point blank.  “You’re a CSI, what’s the evidence telling you?” he smarms.  As Grissom watches from behind the mirror, Warrick admits that it doesn’t look good for him.  But he maintains that he can’t remember what happened.  Meanwhile, an IA agent takes a statement from Hodges about Warrick’s episode in Grissom’s office.  Nicky gets his manties in a bunch over Hodges’ tattlesome ways, but Hodges stoically maintains that he had to tell the truth. 

Ecklie is playing with doing serious experiments with lasers to determine bullet trajectory, and Grissom asks to see the raw test data reports.  Even though night shift isn’t supposed to be on the case, Ecklie wins some brownie points by promising to send over copies.  This guy has really loosened up over the past few seasons.  Remember when he was cockblocking Grissom’s investigations at every turn?  Meanwhile, Catherine asks to have a few minutes with Warrick (as a friend).  He tells her he’d feel better if he could get out of the neon highway cone-colored scrubs.  Warrick always has had good style.  I loves me his unbuttoned shirts.  So does Catherine, so she promises to bring him some duds, and tells him to stay strong.  Hello, YoBling!  But this is no time for ‘shipping, because it’s back to Bad Tie Detective.  He talks about the stripper’s death.  Then for some reason he brings up Holly Gribbs, the rookie CSI who was killed in the first episode when Warrick left her alone at a crime scene.  Bad Tie Detective thinks that these two deaths, years apart and totally, completely unrelated, somehow show a pattern of reckless, obsessive-compulsive behavior on Warrick’s part.  Um, yokay.  Whatever, ya douche.  If you were paying attention, you’d know that what really shows off Warrick’s OCD is in his apartment: photos and newspaper clippings of Gedda, tacked up all over the walls.  A shocked Catherine is ordered to take clothes out of his drawers and touch nothing else.  Bad Tie Detective continues his “interrogation,” and since most of this is yawnworthy filler I’m not going to describe it.  Long story short: Warrick wisely decides that it’s lawyer time. 

Grissom’s team powwows.  There were high velocity Supersoaker bloodstains on Warrick’s shirt, and they match Gedda’s blood.  The bullets all came from Warrick’s gun.  If this was any other suspect, at this point they would pretty much tack a flashing red neon sign to his forehead that read “GUILTY.”  Catherine sighs that they’ll get him a shark lawyer, but Greg’s seen firsthand what juries think of “rogue cop” suspects; Warrick will be crucified.  Just then, Bobby Dawson saves the day.  He’s found Chloroform in Gedda’s body.  Nobody believes Warrick would have needed to knock Gedda out, and the use of chloroform can cause short-term amnesia.  Now that sounds familiar!  No tox screen was done on Warrick, so they hightail it over to do one.  Maybe Warrick was doped, too. 

The test shows that Warrick didn’t have chloroform in his blood, but Hodges points out that its half-life is short.  By the time they got around to the test, it would have no longer been in Warrick’s system. Grissom notes voids in the blood on Warrick’s shirt.  It looks like he had something blocking the spatter under his arms.  Experiment time!  I rub my hands together with glee.  I adore it when CSI goes oldschool and recreates crime scenes.  Especially when Grissom uses various hapless lab techs as guinea pigs.  Case in point: Grissom makes Hodges put on a clean shirt like Warrick’s, and has Nicky grab him from behind and hold him up under the arms.  Nick props up Hodges’ hand, and Grissom splatters them with fake blood.  What this shows: if Warrick was unconscious and the shooter propped him up and put the gun in his hand, it would have left this exact void pattern in the spatter.  The experiment doesn’t conclusively rule Warrick out, but it does provide an alternate explanation: Warrick’s been framed. 

More evidence soon points in the same direction: Grissom takes another look at the ligature marks on Gedda’s wrists, and they’re too wide to have come from Warrick’s handcuffs.  It looks like the cuffs were switched after Gedda died.  Brass has always believed that there was a mole in the police department who worked for Gedda.  They’re looking for a dirty cop, one who probably offed both Lenny and Gedda (they find chloroform in Lenny, too).  Grissom decides to review the evidence logs.  Usually if they find a cop’s prints, they write it off as accidental contamination, but this time it could lead them to their dirty cop.  A fingerprint from an officer Daniel Prichard was found on the casket Lenny was hidden in.  Brass and Grissom of course go charging down to Prichard’s locker.  Nobody’s seen the guy for a couple of days, and his handcuffs are missing from his utility belt.  Grissom tests the handcuff key and finds traces of blood.

Say a cheerful bye bye to Bad Tie Detective, y’all!  Grissom lets Warrick know that he was framed by Gedda’s mole, Prichard.  He theorizes that Prichard was with Gedda when he made the call to Warrick.  Right after, Prichard overpowered Gedda and handcuffed him.  When Warrick arrived, Prichard chloroformed him as well, used him as a shield as he shot Gedda, and then replaced his handcuffs with Warrick’s.  Warrick wonders why, and Grissom shrugs it off, saying there’s a long history of tension between cops and mob bosses.  That seems a little odd to me – it’s too neat a wrap up, and leaves the question of motive unanswered.  Warrick agrees with me, and is skeptical that Prichard was the mole.  He thinks it would take someone higher up than the average cop to take down Gedda.  However, the evidence gets him off the hook, so it’s all good, right?  Sure, fine, whatever!  For Warrick’s administrative violations, he’ll be suspended and demoted, but not fired.  According to Grissom, Captain Underpants just wants to make Warrick sweat.  At that… Warrick hauls off and hugs Grissom.  Like, a big, squishy, real-life, heartwarming man hug.  Awwwwww!  Warrick thanks Grissom and even cries a little with relief.  To his credit, Griss somehow manages to pretend it’s not the most awkward thing that’s ever happened to him.  Brass processes the still-tearful Warrick out, reminding him how lucky he is. 

Once Warrick’s released, the entire team goes to breakfast together at a diner.  It makes my little fangirl heart happy to see Grissom, Nick, Catherine, Warrick and Greg sitting around, talking, laughing and razzing on each other.  It also makes me more than a little sad that Sara’s not there.  Warrick picks up the check, saying warmly that there’s no place he’d rather be.  As breakfast wraps up, various members of the team head for home.  Catherine tells Warrick he’s welcome to call if he needs to talk, and Nicky promises that they’ll get a beer sometime soon.  Warrick walks out of the diner and down the street, to where his car is parked in a lonely, dark alley. 

Dark alley, you say?  Yes, that’s right.  Let me just say that I’m not a spoiler fiend anymore, but I keep up with the news in TV Guide, and I knew Gary Dourdan was leaving the show.  I also knew the producers of CSI promised a “Shocking!” season ender.  So I’ve been worried about Warrick for awhile.  With that diner scene, there for a second I almost let myself believe he was going to get out of this episode alive.  And then they had to go and have him parked in a seedy alley.  Goddammit.  Scenes in alleys never end well.  My heart starts beating a little bit faster as Warrick gets in the car.  Will it explode when he shuts the door?  Nope.  Still okay.  And then there’s a knock on Warrick’s passenger window, and I just know it’s all over.  Who’s the man at the window?  Why, it’s the Undersheriff, a.k.a. Captain Underpants.  Apparently he wants to know if Warrick’s done being a vigilante.  Warrick assures that he is, but says the person behind the whole mess is still out there, and that they’ll get him eventually through legitimate CSI sleuthing.  “Grissom taught you well,” Comments Captain Underpants.  “You’ll never give up.  You’re a great CSI.” 

And then he pulls out his pistol and shoots Warrick through the neck. 

Warrick sits very still for a long moment.  It’s almost as though the shock of who did this to him is more surprising than the gunshot wound itself.  Blood is flowing, and he can’t speak.  The camera takes us back and shows from a distance as the detached Undersheriff fires a second shot through Warrick’s window.  Then he calmly wipes the gun down and drops it.  Warrick Brown slumps softly forward against the steering wheel.  It’s a heartbreaking end for a memorable character, a longtime pillar of one of the best shows on TV.  So long, Warrick.  Enjoy that great montage in the sky.