CSI Miami Episode 716

There’s a party on luxury yacht ‘The Terrible’ as an awful cover of ‘you spin me right round’ plays on the soundtrack. This would all be completely normal for the show except for one thing: The yacht is owned by one Sean ‘Stay Puft’ Combs! That’s right, it seems our favorite, um, whatever it is he does, has returned to terribly portray a lawyer for the second week in a row!

Things go horribly awry when Stay Puft is convinced to invite some hot strangers onto the boat. Hot strangers that turn out to be twisted murderers! They rob the passengers, steal Stay Puft’s laptop, and when people try to rush them, accidentally shoot Stay Puft’s fiancee!

Or do they?

Actually, it’s pretty obvious that they don’t. Here’s the relative positions of the key players, including the gunman, the two guys who rush him, and Stay Puft’s fiancee (the woman in white against the railing between the guys.

Note the angle of of the gunman’s arm. Now here’s where his arm is, just a fraction of a second later, when the gun goes off.

He obviously couldn’t have shot anyone. So who wanted Stay Puft’s fiancee dead? Was this whole robbery a cover to kill her? Keep reading to find out!

Back at the dock everyone’s hands are checked for gunshot residue, just to make sure that none of the other passengers pulled the trigger. Stay Puft doesn’t like people suspecting his friends, but accepts that he doesn’t get to run the investigation.

The hot people’s boat is quickly located, in a local salvage yard where someone towed it after it had been abandoned. The salvage guy is quickly dismissed as a suspect, and more importantly, the jewels and wallets from the robbery are found still lying in the boat! So what could have been the real motive? The laptop? The dead woman? The team goes looking for Stay Puft’s laptop by checking its tracking information.

Now it’s time for a quick character aside, as we discover that Eric’s father is a Russian mobster, and that the russian mob is trying to kill him. I assume these two events are interrelated, but I don’t think I saw the episode where they came up, so hopefully this one can fill me in.

The hot people are quickly arrested while using the GPS-enabled computer. They offer no explanation for why they didn’t bring the jewelry along with them when they ran, other than to claim that there were ‘too many cops around’. Um, yeah. If you can run away from the cops with a laptop, you can run away from the cops with a small garbage bag full of jewelry and wallets.

The Eric story picks up again as a female undercover cop is employed to kill Eric, picking up the job where the last person left off. She immediately reports the news to Horatio, so he can put his messiah powers into effect protecting his former brother-in-law. Horatio’s move in that respect? Tracking down the man who put the hit out on Eric and introducing the two of them. Turns out the Ruskie is Eric’s dad, and there was a hilarious misunderstanding where the Ruskie thought Eric was a cop who was investigating him, so he put a hit out, not realizing it was his own son! They all shar a laugh about it, if by ‘share a laugh’ you mean that the Ruskie’s a dick about taking the hit off and Eric punches out one of his teeth. Rather unpleasantly, after the Ruskie storms off, Horatio grabs the tooth, which I’m sure will be important later. Will he do a DNA test to make sure they’re related?

Finally the team catches up with the audience in re: Stay Puft’s fiancee’s murder. They discover she wasn’t shot with a bullet at all, but a dart from an underwater assault rifle, fired by a scuba diver who was waiting underwater next to the boat in the position that Stay Puft had told his captain to go to at the beginning of the show!

You know, sometimes I forget why I watch CSI: Miami, what with me liking good writing, and it being the worst-written show on television, then there’s a preposterous murder scheme like this one, and I can’t help but smile.

Horatio immediately accuses Stay Puft of the muder, because that’s what he does (as you can see for yourself in the video), and then lets Stay Puft leave. Eric heads underwater to search for evidence of the submerged sniper, and comes across a suba tank left in a fishing net. How on earth did he miss that the first time? But before he can get DNA off of the evidence some government goons drag Eric away because someone found out he was born in Cuba.

As usual, there’s an insta-result from the DNA test, and it turns out that the salvage guy was the submersible sniper! You may wonder why he’s the killer – it’s a simple equation. The producers only have so much money to spend on guest stars each week, and the whole ‘Eric’s an illegal immigrant’ thing is chewing up a lot of the budget. In what might be the most preposterous threat to the investigation ever, lab woman whose name I don’t know explains to british guy that the evidence won’t hold up in court… because it was obtained by an illegal alien! Yes, that’s right. A ten-year veteran of the force would have all his work thrown out because people discovered he was born in Cuba. Judges would just assume that he was a commie spy dispatched to frame innocent Americans. That makes total sense.

Horatio things the whole Eric thing happening on the same day as a preposterously elaborate murder is too big of a coincidence and he decides to check Stay Puft’s laptop, looking for evidence of a connection to the case. It turns out that birth certificate came from Stay Puft, who profusely apologizes for the mix-up and offers to help Eric stay in the country. Which is a really nice thing for him to do.

Horatio questions the salvage guy, who, confronted with the evidence against him (you know, none), immediately confesses to the murder, explaining that he was hired by someone to commit the crime by a man who hated that Stay Puft got people out of murder charges.

Here’s a twist – remember how Stay Puft wasn’t charged last week with conspiring to frame an innocent man? Well Stay Puft figures that the person who hired the salvager must be the father of the woman whose murder he covered up last week! So the dad’s the killer (and here I was wondering why he had a single line last week and was then never mentioned again), and somehow knows that all the evidence against salvager is inadmissable (which it’s not), even though the salvager confessed, and that confession would likely be admissable, since no pressure of any kind was put on him.

The the dad proves that he has no idea how these ‘law’ things work, because he turns to Stay Puft and, in the middle of a police interrogation room where the conversation is being recorded, and confesses to the crime. Seriously, watch-



So, because of bad writing, they’ve got to find away to catch this criminal mastermind who knows the system better than anyone! The criminal mastermind who just confessed to the crime on tape in front of a cop.

Now that we know who the killer is, let’s take a moment to think about the scheme – he hired a salvager to hire some armed robbers who would rob a boat and line everyone up along one side of the boat, so that one of the victims could be shot with an ‘underwater rifle’. What part of that is better than just driving by her house and shooting her through the window? It’s not like the armed robber thing is going to fool anyone into thinking that she was shot by the hot people. Here’s what the bullet they pulled out of her looked like:

So yeah, not exactly flying out of a snub-nosed .38. Hell, he even devised a plan that would require him to be out on the water in a completely traceable boat when the murder (which he had a motive for) occurred. Let’s compare this to the old ‘shot with a rifle through the window’ scheme. 1: You don’t need to hire other criminals to get her to stand in front of her window. 2: You don’t have to acquire a preposterously fancy and easily traceable weapon. 3: You can drive away in a hard-to-trace car as opposed to an easy-to-trace boat.

So why the crazily elaborate murder scheme? Because this is Miami, god bless it, and that’s just how they roll.

The Eric storyline picks up once more, with Horatio’s mole explaining that the Ruskie’s origins are a mystery. No one knows who he really is! Lucky Horatio snagged that tooth, huh? Although since the fake personality starts nearly fifty years ago, I cant imagine how much use it’s going to be. It seems that, by pulverizing the tooth, you can tell where someone was born by the oxygenation of the calcium. Um, okay… anyhoo, turns out Ruskie’s actually an American, so he can give citizenship to Eric! Yaaay!

It seems that Eric’s dad was a CIA agent sent to Cuba with fake Russian papers, who was abandoned after the Bay of Pigs. The problem is that all the Russian mobsters don’t know the Ruskie’s background, so confessing to being an American might put his life has risk. He does it anyway, because that’s just what a great guy he is. Aw.

This also lets Stay Puft get the evidence Eric was working on admitted, although the judge warns him that a jury would have a field day with Eric’s reliability. Which seems to be overlooking the fact that Eric’s testimony is unimportant – if the DNA is in, then the scavenger’s confession is in, so it doesn’t matter what the jury thinks of Eric.

The episode ends with dad being carted off to jail, after a final staring showdown with Stay Puft. There’s a silver lining to it all, though, with Stay Puft explaining that after all this mischegoss he won’t be able to defend criminals any more. Horatio commiserates Stay Puft about the loss of their respective significant others, and then Stay Puft leaves, sadder, but a little wiser.

THE END.

As in last week’s episode, no one seems to think it worth pursuing that Stay Puft clearly conspired to frame an innocent man for a crime one of his clients committed. Seriously, how else would some random golf pro have gotten the top criminal defense attorney in all of Miami? I can’t be the only one who noticed this, can I?

And now, false accusation theatre, featuring Sean “Stay Puft” Combs.