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Chronicling the work of the Miami-Dade crime investigators,
CSI: Miami is set against the sun, fun and tropics
of the Florida tourist haven. Leading the team is Horatio
Caine, an ex-bomb squad detective who is no stranger to confrontations
with criminals and the underworld...
I
have to admit that I wasn't really looking forward to watching
the first season of the spin-off series of CSI. And
from the opening scene of the first episode my worst
fears seemed to have been confirmed.
In
Golden Parachute the new CSI team are thrown in at
the deep end when they are the first on the scene of a crashed
plane. David Caruso's Horatio 'H' Caine just doesn't have
the same appeal or charm of William Petersen's Gil
Grissom in CSI. He is too cold and mechanical. In the
opening scene a survivor of the plane crash is found, but
resuscitation fails. "I lost him!" says the guy
trying to saving him. "It happens," says Cain, calmly.
Oh, please. Less of this macho bullshit.
Part
of the charm of the original CSI series was that the
team were there to get to the bottom of what happens? In
Golden Parachute, and a number of other episodes in this
release, the CSI team act as a group of gossip mongers, coming
up with bizarre, fabricated theories and then spending their
time trying to get the evidence to fit their story. In fact,
the clinching piece of (flimsy) evidence comes in the form
of Caine's guess work. What is all that about? In fact, Caine's
guess work starts to become down right annoying as the show
progresses. In fact, he starts to look more like Millennium's
Frank Black. Why is it that he knows everything - even in
the fields where his staff are experts, he always seems to
know more.
Sadly,
it is the character of Caine that is the root of this show's
problems. Why does he act the hard man, threatening possible
suspects? Should that really be the role of a CSI boss? Isn't
that a job for the local police force? In fact it's not until
half way through this collection that we are introduced to
Detective Puig - the first time that any real police seem
to be working on any of the CSI: Miami crimelab's cases. And,
in the episode Breathless, Caine even speaks to the
victim's family on the phone to let them know that their loved
one has died. So in Miami are we to believe that if your loved
one is killed the police won't be knocking at your door, but
instead the crimelab will call you?
While
Grissom, in CSI, lets the evidence do the talking and
stays objective, Caine constantly jumps to conclusions and
then sets about looking for the evidence to prove his crazy
theories. There is also an element of Scooby-Doo! reasoning
and the killer also gets to confess at the end of a lot of
the episodes. Sadly they never say: "And I would have
gotten away with it too if it wasn't for those meddling CSI:
Miami types!"
There
is also a very emotionally questionable episode concerning
pedophilia where a young girl is killed (Camp Fear).
While this is a touchy subject the CSI lab act totally over
the top and when the wrong guy is accused do they apologise
when they discover he had nothing to do with it? No. Also
there is some awful dialogue surrounding how recent statistics
show that an average pedophile attacks 150 victims in their
life time. If they are caught, we are told that figure drops
to 65, to which Calleigh says: "Then we can still save
85 children." To which Caine says: "Let's work for
that."
There
are a couple of episodes that stand out as being of CSI
quality, most notably Losing Face, in which Caine's
mentor (back from his bomb disposal days) is killed while
defusing a bomb. It tugs at the heart strings, but then Caine's
macho crap comes into play and almost spoils everything. Almost,
but not quite.
Sadly,
there is no personality in this series, which was one of the
main elements that made CSI work. While CSI: Miami
is entertaining, it's not a patch on its sister show.
Amber
Leigh
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