The revival series CSI: Vegas starts its second season with a dead sex worker, unsurprisingly. One of the first lines of dialog is a CSI looking at the bondage gear and saying, “The more things change, huh?” The cast of characters is mostly new, but the dynamic is largely the same.
The victim is pro dominatrix Lynn Zobrist, stabbed in her home with piece of a broken mirror. The perpetrator also took the time to drag all of the furniture out of her dungeon, cover the walls, floor and ceiling with glued-on mirrors, and leave Blondie’s “Heart of Glass” playing on repeat. Her housekeeper described her as “sad” and alone except for her clients.
Penny, a young CSI, examines the victim’s Instagram and comments,
Penny: “You know, about BDSM? I’m a little embarrassed to admit, but it’s never appealed to me.”
Max: “I love your generation. So this is what embarrasses you? Sometimes people, like, spend a lot of energy holding it all together. So they need someone else to take control.”
Penny: “No, I mean, I get it in theory. I don’t know. Maybe when I’m a boss, I’ll be into it.”
Max also says:
Max: “But I guarantee you, most of these guys are heartsick right now. I mean, the work she did– some people needed it that way.”
They also visit “yapper”, Lynn’s nickname for her psychiatrist, who is not Dr. Heather Kessler. She says Lynn had been abused as a child, and struggled with violent ideation. “I did worry that BDSM was the wrong career. Temptations,” she says, not distinguishing between pro-domme work and BDSM. “She did say it was like a release valve.”
In the interview room, one of Lynn’s clients gets inappropriate with Max and Willows about them interrogating him.
The killer is proven to be Alan Herskovitz, a socially marginal hoarder who is linked to Lynn Zobrist not because of her sex work but because they both received electroconvulsive treatment as children from a sketchy doctor. The rest of the episode sets up a conspiracy arc of other people who received the same treatment as children.
I suppose stating that Lynn Zobrist was murdered for reasons unrelated to being a pro domme is an improvement, but it does continue the subtextual association of sex and death endemic to CSI as a franchise. That this is in the season premiere has the whiff of exploitation.
CSI already feels like a relic of another time, pre-COVID and pre-Trump, when people had more confidence in scientific and government institutions. While Gil Grissom tried to make investigation a purely scientific process, Max Roby, the new lead, is passionate about her work and more interested in questions of truth and justice.
