The Scene: Some teen girls have traveled to the near future, where clothing stores have clear panels on the dressing room doors so that people can ogle you while you change, and the mirrors have been replaced by million-dollar wall-sized touchscreen technology that can show you what you'd look like in any outfit, in any location!
When one of the teen girls is killed after that selfsame touchscreen explodes, Horatio is called to the scene, along with the new medical examiner, whose name I haven't learned, and who hasn't made the opening credits, but whose habit of not gently fondling the hair of dead people has already endeared her to me more than Catherine from NewsRadio, who she's replacing.
Generic ME: Horatio, why target a fashion boutique? It seems too random.
Horatio Caine: On the contrary, this was by design.
Wow, right? In addition to being one of the most contrived setups he's ever been given (Really? What makes the ME think this wasn't a targeted attack? Going to the trouble of setting a bomb behind the wall of a futuristic 'virtual dressing room'?), this line of Horatio's doesn't have the slightest bit of insight or even indignancy. He's just making a joke.
Man, I love that guy.
The plot moves quickly from there, traveling along two separate paths. The first one involves the investigation of the explosion (here's the twist - it wasn't the wall that was blown up, the teen was trying on an... explosive dress!), and Horatio trying to sort out even more of Elizabeth Berkeley's money problems. If you'll recall, she's the mother of his secret son. Well, that plot took a twist when the neighbour who was harassing her wound up run down by her car... and Horatio's son is the chief suspect!
Further proof that the writers aren't in the least bit associated with the way that the law works, after the police discover that the teens were involved in shoplifting, Eric forces the second teen to reveal that she had a 150 dollar shirt hidden under her other shirt when the explosion went off. He then has her charged with a felony: Grand Theft. The problem with this idea is that he doesn't have any proof that she shoplifted anything but the shirt she's wearing, which is only worth 150 dollars. Far from 'grand theft' territory.
In the end, it turns out that the exploding dress was made by a known bombmaker whose face had been repaired by a plastic surgeon who the shoplifter was blackmailing. So, when confronted with a blackmailer, the doctor's plan was to ask a known criminal who he had a previous association with to plant a bomb in a dress that his victim had previously shoplifted for him, and then have the bombmaker deliver the dress in person, essentially handing it to the victim. So the doctor came up with a convoluted plan to murder someone, involving two different people who could be directly connected to him, and using a dress that the victim could have easily recognized since she'd been involved in stealing it, and that was totally traceable back to him, since he'd had his daughter wear it while they were at a public function where many pictures were taking. Who goes to that much trouble to come up with a plan specifically designed to implicate themselves? If he'd just driven by her in a car and shot her out an open window there'd have been less evidence tying him to the crime.
Let's not forget that the entire plan depended on a woman going to a store to steal clothes, then randomly deciding to try on one of the outifts just because it mysteriously showed up on her dressing room door, even though neither she nor her friend put it there. Also, the plan required her to zip the dress all the way up to detonate the explosion.
Even for CSI, that's an amazingly preposterous scheme. Not 'get eaten by a python' preposterous, but pretty bad.
In the second story, Berekeley's business manager stole her car and ran down her neighbor. It's not an interesting story, I mention it only because it led to a hilarious failure of computer graphics, presented here:
See how careful the graphics people were to put a reflection of the edge of the house in the fake pool of blood? See how careless they were about not noticing that since their pool of overlapped cracks in the brick driveway, it should have drained off into them?Oh, CSI, can't you do anything right?
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