CSI: Crime Scene Investigation series finale “Immortality”
A suicide bombing in a casino brings the gang back together for one last case. Never mind that Willows is now an FBI agent and has a conflict of interest because she owns the casino, and Grissom left law enforcement to become a maritime vigilante.
One of the pieces of debris from the bomb vest is a square of metal marked “LHK”, which Grissom recognizes as the monogram of “Lady Heather Kessler”. (She used her real last name as a pro-domme?)
The team finds that the bomber was taking commands over an earpiece, and was seeing Heather as a psychiatric patient until three months ago, which coincides with the death of Heather’s granddaughter in a car accident. (Just how many people Heather knows have met untimely ends?)
Another piece of metal, found in the body of a bomb casualty, matches the first piece as pieces of the key for the “red room” of Lady Heather’s house of domination. Investigating this part of the house, now dark and covered with cobwebs for an appropriately spooky atmosphere, reveals a bomb-making workshop.
Another suicide bomber shows up at a primary school show. She is also wearing an earpiece and was a patient of Heather. She detonates the bomb in the evacuated school, killing herself and a bomb disposal officer.
In the wreckage, Sidle disagrees with Grissom’s claim of Heather’s innocence. He applies the paradigm of dominance and submission to the case.
Grissom: I think whoever was on the other end of that earpiece was in the process of trying to exercise control. I think he was sending us a message.
[…]
Sidle: Gil, she’s [Lady Heather] a puppeteer. She’s been controlling people for a living for years.
Grissom: So, according to your theory, Lady Heather is the dominant in this scenario, giving orders. And the female bomber is the submissive, taking orders, right?
Sidle: Right.
Grissom: By rule, the dominant is not allow to hurt the submissive. And if for some reason they do, the submissive is allowed to use the safeword and discontinue the pain.
Sidle: This is not some fetish game.
Grissom: Sara, Heather would never hurt anyone with the intent to kill, especially innocent people and children. It goes against everything she stands for therapeutically.
Sidle: What was your safeword with her?
Grissom: “Stop.”
Sidle: We certainly could have used that word today.
If Grissom had just said “harm” instead of “hurt”, this would have made a little more sense. It also assumes that this is some kind of universal rule that Heather lives by in all facets of her life. Kink ethics are not sacred life-long vows.
The second bomber was one of the school’s teachers. Grissom claims she was mind-controlled by exposure to flowers containing “devil’s breath”, also known as “burundanga”, scientifically known as scopolamine. Contrary to certain urban legends, you can’t be affected by “devil’s breath” by touching or smelling it, and while it has an anti-inhibition effect, it can’t turn people into remote-controlled zombie suicide bombers.
Back at Lady Heather’s house, Sidle sees a person resembling Heather flee the scene and get into a car, which immediately explodes. In the autopsy lab, Grissom looks at the charred corpse from the car, and notices it isn’t wearing any rings.
Grissom goes to a bar and meets Heather in the flesh. (Didn’t she used to have a drinking problem?) He observes that she is still wearing her rings, which she never takes off. She says she is responsible for the bombings, which is a misleading way of saying that she is being framed.
In the first half of the story, the investigators hypothesized that Heather is behind the bombings, driven by grief over the death of her grand-daughter. This story is trading on the witchcraft-like powers attributed to both psychiatrists and dominatrixes in popular culture, that they can control people like puppets.
Contrary to Grissom’s usual emphasis on “what cannot lie: the evidence”, his belief in Heather’s innocence is based on his personal relationship with her. He persuades Heather to turn herself in.
In interrogation, both Sidle and Willows are thoroughly unprofessional with Heather, and frankly it gets a little catty with the three women sniping at each other. (This episode will not pass the Bechdel test.)
Heather: You only have your claws out because of the intimacy between your ex-husband and I.
She admits she never informed the police after an unknown person assaulted her in her home.
Heather: After the death of my daughter Zoe and the vehicular murder of my granddaughter Alison, I’ve lost all faith in law enforcement.
Heather provides a list of her red room clients (without concern for her or their privacy) and helps eliminate some of them. Interviews with the suspects turn up nothing. Grissom persists in applying dom-sub to the crime, combined with some questionable zoology.
Grissom: Whales and sharks. Metaphor for Vegas if you think about it. Whales bring the money in. The sharks take it away. Whales are bigger in size and stature but they’re the submissive. Sharks are smaller but they’re by far the more dominant. I think someone’s out there playing the dominant but he’s really the submissive.
His metaphor might apply to Las Vegas’ economy, and loosely to predator-prey relationships, but it doesn’t apply to kink at all. How are whales “submissive” and sharks “dominant”? Dominants and submissives need each other, not just for pleasure but to constitute each other through a complex interaction. Somebody thought they were really clever, even poetic, when they wrote this, even though they had no idea what they were saying.
After some business involving a dead guy in a suitcase, a fake cadaver and some insect-based epistemology, Grissom and Sidle track down the perp, Lady Heather’s first client, who has a bomb vest. Supposedly the stem cell therapy for his lymphoma changed his DNA enough that his blood wasn’t identified. His villain speech is about how he was Heather’s first client and the first client she slept with, until Grissom “turned her heart”. So, this episode is ultimately about jealousy over Grissom.
Grissom points out that Heather never slept with her clients or patients, and convinces him that Heather would never love him. Then he pulls the vest’s trigger, and it doesn’t go off. Grissom explains to Sidle that he knew the bomb was a dud, and that the perp wouldn’t leave the world without Heather.
In the last meeting with Heather, Grissom resolves the Grissom-Sidle-Heather triangle.
Grissom: When we first met, I had a shell around my heart. I’d lost my belief in humanity. The only truth I knew was empirical science. I just wanted to thank you for opening my heart. Through you, I learned to love someone.
Heather: Sara?
Grissom: She restores my face in the human being.
He’ll always remember that even though they aren’t together. Grissom and Sidle sail into the sunset together, while Heather’s future is not worthy of discussion.
CSI: Crime Scene Investigation went out the way it came in: weird. I’ll admit that I used to be a fan of the series (and the genre), but that faded once I became aware of the questionable forensic science, the “copaganda” inherent to the police procedural format, the show’s moral and political hollowness, and especially the paranoid-yet-prurient treatment of sexuality in general and sexual minorities in particular. It shows that “visibility leading to understanding” doesn’t work, by carefully staging the “visibility” so that understanding is shaped in certain ways. Thus, “Immortality” makes Heather into the asexual enabler of Grissom being with his supposed true partner Sidle. The deviance she represents much be contained, so that the heteronormativity of Grissom and Sidle’s relationship can function.
