CSI: Vegas
“Tunnel Vision”, Season 3 Episode 10
What do I know about this series going into it?
I’m vaguely aware of the original CSI, but only know two concrete things about it: It stands for Crime Scene Investigation, and I read an article once about various effects it had on the justice system (criminals who have learned crime-scene-cleaning techniques from the show, and jurors who expect unrealistic magic-database-style evidence from the prosecution). I also have a vague recollection of seeing part or all of one episode, where they ran a ransom note through a database of fonts to find out what magazines the letters were cut from.
I was not aware of this spinoff’s existence.
The Previously
I’m surprised there is a previously; CSI was a crime-of-the-week show. But maybe this is a two-parter, or the spinoff is less episodic.
“Folsom” is investigating Mojave Kinematic Designs. Everything is connected: Robert Cuevas’s murder, Cliff Roland’s accident, Valerie Hammond’s abduction. They found DNA, but it’s not Valerie’s, it’s synthetic DNA. Malware has invaded the CSI base’s systems and deleted all the casefiles related to these incidents. They’re investigating Truman somebody, who’s got a lab underground. The CSI team goes into the lab. They hear explosions. Cover your mouth, some kind of gas attack! Dr. Roby calls Catherine Willows just before she gets abducted.
Recap
Dr. Roby is being led through underground tunnels by people she can’t see for all the smoke. Meanwhile, Catherine runs into the room where the gas attack happens and finds Chris and Max on the ground – no, sorry, just Chris. He’s unconscious but alive. Max is missing, so I’m guessing Dr. Roby’s first name is Max.
Outside, other CSI techs are arriving. I get the full name of the bad guy: Truman Thomas. Chris is on a stretcher, but something weird is happening to the EMT’s hand. Mustache guy realizes: This is a nerve agent! It’s not still in the air because we’re not already dead, but we can still get contact poisoning, so use butyl rubber gloves to protect yourselves. Chris inhaled it, so he needs to go to the hospital (how is he not dead?)
Cathrine plays the recording of the call she got from Roby: “He’s six foot, gray suit, with a Baretta!” So we have a general description, but where did he go? There’s only one entrance to the lab, with a video camera opposite, and the footage doesn’t show anybody entering or leaving except for the CSI people. He must have taken another exit. Where? One CSI guy realizes that the dust in the air is swirling even though the lab is sealed, and searches until he finds a secret door that leads to a tunnel, with a door partially blown off its hinges. That explains the explosions they heard in the Previously. But one of the explosives didn’t go off and is still attached to the door, so they have to wait for the bomb squad. But even when they do, the tunnels lead to the Vegas flood channels, which is a massive maze of hundreds of miles.
In the tunnels, Roby and Gray Suit Man are taking a rest. I think he is Truman Thomas, and he’s angry at his goons for releasing the nerve gas, which they should’ve done only as a last resort. He’s the one who’s been encrypting hacking programs into synthetic DNA. Roby tells him he made all sorts of mistakes in the DNA, using her potential utility in correcting those mistakes as an incentive to keep her alive. Thomas agrees, but seeing she was affected by the nerve agent he gives her some atropine. Strangely, he insists that she inject herself with it rather than doing it for her. But her hand is shaking too much and she drops the needle, breaking it. That’s okay, he has another dose.
So what was the point of that? To leave a convenient clue for the people following, of course.
Opening credits. I’m eager to see who plays Dr. Roby, who I’m sure I recognize from somewhere. She looks a lot like the president’s wife from 24 but the actress’s name - Paula Newsome – doesn’t ring a bell.1
After the credits, the bomb squad carefully takes the bomb off the wall and puts it in a sealed container. K9 teams bring dogs into the tunnel. Should be easy to track their scent; how many people can have been down there recently?
Meanwhile the CSI team discuss the case: Thomas was using this lab to synthesize DNA, but that’s not illegal. So why all the secrecy? It must be something illegal they want to do with the DNA. Thanks to their nametags I learn that Joshua’s surname is Fulsom; Mustache Guy is named Finado; and Girl With An Accent is named Raj-something (the latter half of the name is covered by a flap on her vest).
At the hospital, Chris isn’t waking up despite all the atropine they’re giving him to treat the nerve agent. At his bedside, “Penny” is agitated; she tells her coworkers “Jack” and “Sonya” that Chris had said their engagement was fake (what would that even mean?) and that she was very harsh to him in return. She fears that that will have been their last conversation, and she can’t do anything to help her fiancee. “You want to help? Do your job,” says Sonya. So Penny starts thinking: “The chemical was concentrated on his right hand, so he must have pushed the canister of nerve agent away from Max.” They take a sample of the nerve agent from Chris’s hand. If they can identify it, maybe finding out who made it will tell us who kidnapped Max.
At the end of the series of tunnels, Truman and his goons shove Dr. Roby into a room. “You said you know how to encode a message on DNA better than I do,” Truman says. That makes her useful, so he won’t kill her yet. “Tell your boss I’ll need chemicals X, Y, and Z,” she says. “Who’s my boss?” he answers. “Truman Thomas,” says Roby. So the guy in the grey suit isn’t Truman Thomas. And based on his mocking laugh in response, he’s not working for Thomas either.
Josh and Raj-x find the conveniently dropped needle, and on the spot invent some chemical method of tracking it through the tunnels. I guess the K9 team is on its lunch break.
In the meantime, Finado and Willows begin analyzing the bomb that failed to go off. They have to figure out how to dismantle it safely so they can analyze the inside and try to figure out who made it.
Sonya has cornered Truman’s assistant in the gym. She’s not cooperative and won’t let her talk to Truman, because she believes in him and his vision for the future. But eventually she also admits that she has no idea where he is: he always answers my calls, and he hasn’t for some time. So clearly Not-Truman-Thomas has killed or done away with Truman Thomas to use his synthetic DNA project for nefarious purposes.
Back to the tunnels, where captions reveal Raj-x’s name is Rajan. She and Josh are still tracking the footsteps belonging to the bad guy, while the K-9 team are in the Bahamas. They find a car with blood on it and a dead guy in the back. Let me guess…
The autopsy people (henceforth Morgue Guy and Morgue Girl) find Thomas was shot by a 9mm. And that he got a “de-aging stem cell transplant”. They also find a hair in Truman’s mouth. But the blood that was all over the truck wasn’t his; it’s Valerie Hammond’s, the missing person from the Previously.
Not-Truman-Thomas (whose actor I also recognize, and can’t quite place) gloats over how much he knows about Dr. Roby.2 Most of it she lets slide – bits about her relationship to her work and to her colleagues – but eventually he says that he knows she’s fallen in love with somebody named Dean. “How do you know his name?” she says, idiotically confirming what he’s saying instead of playing it cool.
But never mind that. Either you are good enough to perform cutting-edge science that exceeds the best that Thomas’s massive biotech company had to offer…
… or I’ll kill you because you’re of no use to me.
A woman on crutches, who I’ve seen earlier in the episode but can’t recall where, comes into Penny’s office in the CSI base. They have some brief relationship talk about Jack and Chris and I’m not following it at all, but it’s cut short by a ding: The lab results have come back, and the substance affecting Chris is “soman”, made by the Nazis in World War II. Much more dangerous than sarin gas, and very few people can make it.
Meanwhile, Mustache Guy and Catherine are testing bombs. They figure out which detonator can be disconnected safely and take the bomb apart. She mentions that it smells like motor oil, and this gives him inspiration: he needs to call Randy to use the QTOF (whatever that is). She’s surprised: “Randy will do you a favor after you put maggots in his blender?” “Nah, I told him Folsom did that.”
Morgue Guy comes into Penny’s office to ask what she’s up to. She’s analyzing the hair they gave her to see what kind of tap water its owner drank, which will tell her what city they’re from.
Still following the tracks (because the K-9 team is on strike to demand fewer working hours) Josh and Rajan find a door, and Rajan calls for backup, through which I learn her first name is Allie. They burst in: it’s the secondary lab where Not-Truman-Thomas took Max, but nobody’s there.
Now all three trails of evidence converge: Randy tells Mustache Guy that the C4 in the bombs was military grade, coming from somewhere in Southeast Asia or the Middle East; it is the same type that was used in an attack on a US embassy by Saudi spies; the tap water in the hair sample comes from Riyadh; and Rajan finds a candy wrapper on the floor of the written in Arabic. There’s something about how they thought they were up against an AI until now and they now realize they aren’t, which I don’t understand.
The main characters helpfully recap the plot now that all the facts are known: the deaths (Chris Roland, Valeri Hammond, Robert Cuevas) happened because the Saudi Arabian government was stealing tech from Thomas’s company, and those people either found out or were no-longer-useful pawns of the Saudis. And the robot they have sitting in the CSI office, that came from Thomas’s company, has a bug in it – which is how Not-Truman-Thomas knew everything about Max’s personal life and how he knew to move her.
Penny scans the robot and finds the bug. It uses a very low-tech type of transmission that broadcasts a narrow signal requiring line-of-sight. So they’re looking for a Saudi safehouse that can see directly into their office. There are too many possibilities! Conveniently, though, Mustache Guy comes in just then and says the bomb failed to go off because of chlorine corrosion, so they’re looking for a place with a pool. Cross-referencing that with something I didn’t catch leaves only one possibility.
They go to the hotel in question and lament that it didn’t agree to shut down without a warrant.
Meanwhile, in her hotel room, Dr. Roby has finished her work. So Not-Truman-Thomas pulls out his gun, ready to shoot her. But she’s secretly prepared DNA that has, encoded in it, the names of her captors and other identifying information about him! And she injects herself with it! “Go on,” she says. “Shoot me!”
So she punches him and runs out of the room, something she could’ve tried at any point in the last half hour of screentime but didn’t.
Down by the pool, the CSI people are wandering about the pool area, using the stealth tactics in which all lab techs are trained:
Josh spots the guy with the overpronated right foot (I haven’t mentioned it in the notes so far, but it’s part of how they tracked him through the tunnels), and chases after him. Conveniently they run into where Not-Truman-Thomas has caught up to Dr. Roby. Josh bursts around the corner, and Not-Truman-Thomas turns to confront the new threat. There’s a gunshot, but obviously it wasn’t Josh that got shot: Not-Truman-Thomas is taken down by Josh’s backup, who came around the corner right behind him.
Later, in Chris’s hospital room, Penny proposes to Jack. (Wasn’t she engaged-not-engaged to Chris? Jack says she’s being ridiculous: “We’re already engaged,” he says. (What?) Penny’s response: “Chris was right”. Aha! The penny drops, no pun intended. When Penny had said earlier that “Chris said our engagement was fake,” she meant “me and Jack’s engagement”, not “me and Chris’s engagement”. Apparently in response to this news, Chris wakes up.
In the denouement: Dr. Roby is invited to dinner by Dean. And she reinstates Josh, which is something he mentioned offhand earlier in the episode; there’s a bit of ribbing between him and Rajan is still his supervisor.
Unresolved questions
Will there be diplomatic consequences between the US and Saudi Arabia?
What is the connection between the AI robots and the synthetic DNA? What did Thomas want to actually do with it, and what did Saudi Arabia want to actually do with it?
What actual developments in AI did Thomas innovate?
What was the significance of the “de-aging stem cell transplant”?
Why did Not-Truman-Thomas initially refuse to use the atropine on Max, insisting she do it herself?
Since when do Saudi spies attack US embassies?
Ratings
Story: 3/10. A convoluted plot with numerous holes in it. Just a few examples:
Given how dangerous they said the nerve agent was, Chris should’ve been dead long before anyone else reached the room, and probably Dr. Roby as well.
The idea that a lab tech at a CSI office – even the best tech in the country – can surpass, using substandard equipment in a non-sterile environment, the efforts of the entire biotechnology wing of a major high-tech company is just laughable. And if she can do it, then the technology can’t be so advanced and rare and valuable that foreign governments are willing to kill for it.
The narrow, line-of-sight transmitter in the robot can only work if the bad guys placed it the CSI office themselves and oriented it carefully; even then, given how far the receiver was, the first person to jostle it should’ve moved it out of alignment and ended the spying.
And so on. The NCIS: Hawai’i finale had some of the same plot points but put in the extra effort to make it make sense.
Writing: 7/10. Fewer clichés in the dialogue than usual for the genre. And the way they started the team down three parallel evidence tracks leading to the same destination was a nifty piece of writing. There was of course the usual problem of the main characters doing everything, including things way outside their fields. (I don’t know what their fields are, but I don’t need to; Penny is a hair analysis expert and a nerve gas expert and a radio frequency expert? Mustache Guy is an expert in both medicine and bomb blast patterns?)
Production: 8/10. I liked the stylistic elements in how evidence was presented to the viewers: holograms of people walking and animations of blast patterns and the like. The writing of the three converging evidence tracks, which I praised above, would not have had the desired effect if not for excellent pacing and directing in that part of the episode (and in general – I never felt bored). The performances were okay; since there wasn’t much for the actors to sink their teeth into, I have little room to judge.
Characterization: 2/10. Josh is gung-ho. Chris is unconscious. Penny is panicky. Mustache Guy has a mustache. That is the full extent to which I got to know any of the characters in this episode. And although Not-Truman-Thomas gave me a full psychological dossier on Dr. Roby, reciting it like that doesn’t exactly qualify as “getting to know a character”.
Clarity: 4/10. I followed along with the beats of the plot well enough, but through the end I have no idea what the Saudi spies’ plans and motivations were, what the technology could be used for, what mistakes they had made that Dr. Roby fixed, etc.
Closure: 3/10. Little to no closure; there was no attempt to go out with a bang. While they did wrap up the story arc about Truman Thomas’s company, that’s clearly only been going on for a few episodes. Nothing particularly interesting happened with any of the characters and there was very little in the sense of a long-term climax to the plot. It’s clear they didn’t know the show was ending.
Do I want to watch the series now?
It passes the time well enough, and the special effects make it entertaining for the eyes. But too little attention is paid to plot and characters; it’s junk food television, and I’d prefer something more substantial.
Added after the review: Turns out I recognized her from Spider-Man: No Way Home.
Added after the review: Turns out I know him from Warehouse 13.