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Warning: there will be spoilers for the CSI episodes already shown on five so far in this article.
What on earth has happened to CSI: Crime Scene Investigation? The fourth episode into the new series on five, and CSI has dramatically jumped the shark. I had my suspicions after the end of the previous series, where Sara and Grissom were shown sharing an intimate moment in a hotel room (good grief, crack-monkeys* writers – they might be drawn to each other, but getting them together is a terrible idea), but things have gone from bad to worse.
There was a time when CSI was slick, compelling and quirky. Its team of gorgeous oddballs were science geeks who just happened to look like supermodels, but who had obsessions with entomology and the Discovery channel and were barely able to form functioning human relationships. But now there are signs of a creeping decline into CSI: Stupid territory.
Chief among the betrayals in this series is what they have done to Gil Grissom. Once an introverted, intelligent, compassionate man who seemed more comfortable with his collection of insects than with people (unless they were deaf, little people or dominatrixes), Gil is showing signs of Horatio Caine syndrome and morphing into a pompous, judgemental, moralising blowhard. Grissom was the man who could be counted on to not to judge the more freakish aspects of Vegas culture the CSI team ran up against every week. The more of an outsider a suspect was, the more Gil identified with them, treated them as people and refused to give a knee-jerk response. But now we are subjected to scenes like the one in the second episode of the current series, where Gil suggests that a man whose wife may or may not have killed herself could be prosecuted for assisting a suicide. The Grissom they have built up over the previous series as compassionate man who refuses to make up his mind until all the evidence has been gathered and analysed would never have suggested something so brutal.
Once resolutely about the science and the evidence, CSI has cast all that out and replaced it with shallow stupidity. The second episode, where the dead bodies in the morgue sat up and talked to each other in between a quartet of thin stories about their respective demises, cavalierly cast out CSI’s former devotion to the physical evidence. Was it supposed to be whimsical? Moving? If so, it failed spectacularly. Seeing the dead bodies sitting up and talking to each other broke the real-world (if an incredibly well-funded and glamorous real world) feel on which CSI has always relied. It changed the rules.
No, now it’s all about the CSIs. So far Greg, Catherine and her daughter Lindsey have all been victims of crimes, and we’re barely into the first half of the season.
In the first (double) episode, Catherine was drugged in a club and woke up in a strange motel room. Suspecting she had been raped, she performed her own rape kit, something we saw in wince-inducing detail. It transpired that she had been drugged and her daughter kidnapped for leverage over her father, Sam Braun, an old Vegas-style casino boss. At the end of the episode, Sam (a long-running character, whose prickly and morally confusing relationship with Catherine has always been interesting) was shot and killed. The death of a major character was squished into five minutes at the end of the show and has barely been referred to since. They may be setting Catherine up for a major breakdown, but there’s no sign of it yet, and some of the questions a regular viewer would want answered (does Catherine inherit Sam’s casino empire?) have been completely ignored.
Next, in the fourth episode, Greg became the victim of Kevin Federline and his gang (da kidz aren’t all right), who were happy slapping (called “fanny smacking” in the show – dear god…) unsuspecting Vegas tourists for kicks. Greg, trying to stop out a down-home cowboy type from being beaten to death, got kicked around the set for no discernable reason, except to liven up an otherwise thinly-plotted episode. The show had no shades of grey – Grissom even compared da kidz to a “swarm” in order to plot their movements. Equating criminals with animals (Federline played a character called “Pig Man” and wore a pig mask) is about as reactionary as it comes.
Nick’s character has always been an interesting take on a type of masculinity. Square-jawed, Texan, conventionally handsome, in another show he would be the all-American hero. In earlier seasons of CSI he has consistently been shown to be vulnerable – crying (and not in a macho way – in a really scared way) when a gun was drawn on him, being kidnapped and buried alive in the Tarantino-directed finale of season five, and having been molested as a child. Nick more often finds himself the damsel-in-distress of CSI than any of the female characters. He has also been presented as empathetic.
Nicky held at gunpoint:
So when Greg was beaten, it was entirely out of character for Nick to hit one of the kids who were taunting the CSIs as they worked the scene, but yet again the writers threw years of character development out of the window to show some reactionary, “justified” brute force.
Tonight’s episode (Double Cross) was an unholy mess. A pregnant singer crucified in a church. A suspiciously silent priest and a garrulous car salesman. Andi from Dawson’s Creek in a minor role as a nun. Turns out the priest, the car salesman and the singer were old high school friends. The singer and the priest had been a couple back in the day, and the car salesman had been sleeping with the singer since the priest threw her over for God.
The story meandered along, stretched out by Brass’s sudden inability to perform even a perfunctory interrogation. Finally the old friend, the car dealer, confessed to killing the singer. She was leaving him for the priest. So what gets through to this stone killer, so cold that he is able to crucify the woman he supposedly loves? The baby she is carrying is his. This is enough to break the man down and he begins to cry. The important thing is he killed his own baby. Not that he killed the woman he loved, the one he had been friends with from childhood, in an appallingly cruel way. No, it was the foetus baby that got him. Well, thanks, CSI, for that reminder that adult women are less important than babies. At the end, the killer told the priest that he should have been man enough to come to him as a friend and tell him that he and the singer were planning to marry. Man enough. Once upon a time CSI would have made it clear how deluded a killer was who said that kind of thing. In the new, reactionary CSI, it passes without comment.
Sadly, I think it’s time to close the curtains on CSI. Once darkly funny, conventional yet subversive, all about the science and cracking good entertainment, it has lost the things that made it special. The evidence is in and the conclusion can now be reached – CSI is guilty of becoming just another blowhard cop show.
*With apologies to Demian at TWoP.
Filed under: Television | 2 Comments
I turned over to ITV1 tonight, unusually for me, because I wanted to watch the Tonight programme’s edition on anorexia and the pro-ana sites on the internet.
Unfortunately the programme spent a mere 23 minutes on anorexia, choosing to cut it short for an update of their programme on whether your council tax band had been wrongly calculated. It was a shame, as the stories of the young women with anorexia and the parents of those who had died were moving and saddening, and this programme marked the start of national eating disorders awareness week.
According to beat, the new name for the Eating Disorders Association, anorexia is the third leading cause of death amongst teenagers after car accidents and suicides. It’s the deadliest form of mental illness. And it seems that the healthcare system is failing anorexic patients, with far too many healthcare practitioners writing signs of anorexia off as “fad diets” or part of growing up. It is hard to find places for young anorexics in specialist eating disorder units, but these are the places where they are most likely to get the help they need.
It’s easy to forget that there are growing numbers of young men who suffer from eating disorders too, and that they receive even less recognition and treatment than young women – doctors who fail to recognise the symptoms of eating disorders in young women are even less likely to find them in young men.
Eating disorders like anorexia and bulimia are serious mental illnesses, and deserve to be treated with the same seriousness as physical illnesses. The victims are disproportionately young people whose lives are ruined, shortened or ended by their illness. More specialist help is needed and it is needed now. If you can, make a donation to beat today.
Filed under: Beauty myth, Body issues, NHS | 4 Comments
I should have posted this on Thursday, but didn’t have time. So it’s a bit out of date now…
I just can’t keep away from the Mail this week. It burns my eyes, and yet I can’t not look.
The paper of choice for homophobes, petty racists and MRAs today has no fewer than two stories involving false allegations of rape.
The first of these is regarding a woman, Abigail Gibson, who alleged four different claims of rape and was sentenced to two years. Note how the headline refers to her as a “church minister’s daughter” – yes, ladies, our fathers still own us even when we’re 22.
Continue reading ‘False allegations of rape not as common as the Mail would have you believe’
Filed under: Feminism, Mailwatch, Media, The law | 3 Comments
Mailwatch: why would I need facts when I have unsupported assertions and my son’s swimming team?
I don’t know why I ever look at the Daily Mail’s web site (I tell myself it’s so I know what the enemy’s thinking, but I think it’s actually more like a sore spot that you just can’t stop poking even though you know it’ll hurt). Yet somehow I can’t help myself. In a change from what Catherine Bennett once brilliantly called “its ‘Is being a woman fatal?’ speciality”, the Mail changes focus slightly to how boys are oppressed by the school curriculum. Jill Parkin writes in today’s Mail about how “feminised” schools are failing boys and, like a moth drawn to the flame, I find myself compelled to read it.
Taking as her starting point the (*cough*) universal experience of her son’s team losing a swimming competition, Parkin goes on to suggest that schools are rigged to benefit girls and quash boys’ natural instincts. Any article that begins with an anecdote about the writer’s child is obviously going to be scientifically rigorous and well argued, so I had high hopes for this one.
Filed under: Biological determinism/Evo-psych, Education, Mailwatch, Media | Leave a Comment
Sad news from Pandagon – the fabulous Amanda will be cutting back her blogging at the site. The good news is that Pam’s still there and some excellent guest bloggers will be helping out – there are already some excellent posts that are well worth reading. Amanda’s going to join John Edwards’ campaign team as blog-mistress extraordinaire. As a UK citizen I don’t yet feel that I know enough about the US candidates for the Democratic nomination to know whether this is a good or bad thing for Amanda, but it can only be good news for Edwards, who now has one of the most talented writers in the blogosphere on his team. I hope us Pandagon-junkies aren’t deprived of her coruscating anger, flashing wit and all-round intelligence for too long.
Filed under: Blogging, Feminism | Leave a Comment
I love The Killers and am very excited that my boyfriend gave me tickets to see them in London in February. So here’s When You Were Young from their new album for you (yes, it really is supposed to be silent at first):
Filed under: Uncategorized | Leave a Comment
Midnight blogging: feast of Eden
I’m sure that’s not the first time anyone’s used that title… So I’m doing battle (in a very restrained way – everyone’s generally being very polite and reasonable, apart from the man who referred to “broom stick riders”) with the commenters on the Dawn Patrol about Dawn’s post on Zoe William’s article in the Guardian (still with me?).
To be clear, this is nowhere near Zoe’s finest work – it feels like she was phoning it in and any article that contains a libellous assertion is clearly poorly-researched. Part of me doesn’t think it’s worth defending. But Dawn’s take on it was unfair, and given that she was having a go at Zoe for not having done her research, the least she could do was represent the article properly. She made it All About Dawn and castigated Zoe for not having read her book. However, Zoe was writing about the phenomenon of women writers advocating female chastity generally – not just about Dawn. There’s no reason why she should have read Dawn’s book. And I take issue with any posting having a go at someone for not having read their sources when the author herself doesn’t seem to have read the article in any depth (I’m slightly ashamed by how many times I’ve read Dawn’s post today, but hey, at least I read it thoroughly).
Dawn writes:
Yes, to look at these two women, you would never know that one of them believes that sex has the power to be a transcendent experience, filled with both joy and pleasure, while the other reduces it to a drab transaction of commodities, as soulful as brushing one’s teeth.
Read the article. Nowhere does Zoe reduce sex to a “drab transaction”. Just because you don’t agree that “sex can be an act of equality” doesn’t make it a transaction.
Dawn also says Zoe wants to silence those who advocate chastity. That’s just not true. She says the idea should be “dispatched really fast”, but that is referring to the lack of any evidence to support the idea men and women have different needs when it comes to sex when social conditioning is taken out of the mix.
So, the moral of this story is… if you’re in a glass house, don’t start hefting that stone…
Filed under: Feminism, Media | 3 Comments
The Coke Zero ad is back, and every bit as stupid as before.
I honestly thought they’d pulled this advert showcasing a collection of tossers discussing why things in life don’t come without downsides while marching along the street like a scene from Booze Britain (except with soft drinks instead of WKD). Naturally one of them is “girlfriends… without the five year plan”. Because all men are commitment-phobes who are terrified of any kind of relationship that lasts longer than a week, and all women are desperate to trap men into marriage.
I guess if you’re aiming the advert at men who are so scared of failure to conform to blokeish stereotypes that they won’t drink a can of Coke with the word “Diet” in the name, maybe this is the kind of crap you need to get their attention. But for men whose aspirations in life go beyond a nylon suit and getting trolleyed every Saturday night with their mates before going home to collapse drunkenly on their “missus”, this isn’t going to appeal to them.
You know the worst thing? The canteen at work only stocks Coke Zero. And it tastes crap compared to Diet Coke.
Filed under: Television | Leave a Comment
Just as I was thinking “Someone should do something about this” about juries in rape trials, it turns out that somebody was. Reforms to rape trials were in the pipeline. Note that word: were.
Judges are opposing the reforms, saying they are too complex, according to the Guardian:
But the judges have rejected all the principal proposals, which include:
- A new statutory definition of capacity to consent to sexual intercourse, which would clarify when a woman can be considered too drunk to make the decision.
- The use of expert witnesses in court to help dispel “rape myths” and inform the jury how rape victims are likely to act. Although this routinely happens in the US, judges here believe their use would cause delays and prove expensive, unnecessary and “inappropriate”.
- Showing videotaped interviews with victims filmed when they first go to the police. Ministers said this would bring home to jurors the victims’ distress. But the judges are concerned that this would be too emotive and not help establish the truth of the allegations. They argue that some people are particularly good at faking distress. [my emphasis]
The judges are apparently urging ministers to have faith in the common sense of jurors. Well, we’ve just had an excellent demonstration of why that just doesn’t work.
Filed under: Crime, Feminism, The law | Leave a Comment
Why I am pro-choice
So today is Blog for Choice day, and the good people at Bush v. Choice are asking us to blog about why we are pro-choice. Although reproductive rights are not under the same amount of pressure in the UK as they are in the US, the religious right are on the rise here as well, and we cannot take our hard-won rights for granted.
So, why am I pro-choice? I am pro-choice because I believe that women alone should have rights over their own bodies. I am pro-choice because too many women have been hurt, injured, held back, shamed, kept in abusive situations and denied by the refusal of the right to choose. I am pro-choice because giving women the right to control their fertility gives them the keys to the world.
I’m pro-choice because women should have the freedoms men take for granted when it comes to sex, work and life. I’m pro-choice because sex is a great and wonderful thing and no one should be ashamed or scared to desire it when, in the 21st century, sex can be safe and easy and happy.
I’m pro-choice because I’m pro-family, and I believe that families should be made up of people who want to be together, not be forced into a lifetime of misery by shotgun marriages for shame of what the neighbours will say. I’m pro-choice because children should be wanted children with parents who can care for them properly.
I’m pro-choice because those who aren’t fear, depise and mistrust women and would force them to give birth as a punishment for failure to conform to their narrow and obsolete morals. I’m pro-choice because I have a voice and a mind and I do not want my choices to be made for me by anyone but me. I’m pro-choice because things go wrong, birth control fails, people make mistakes, women and children are raped and abused, people simply cannot look after a child, and they should not be forced to.
I’m pro-choice because having a child should never be a punishment.
I’m pro-choice because when there are no choices women resort to coathangers and gin to try to find a choice. I’m pro-choice because when there are no choices, too many women bleed to death on dirty tables simply for seeking that choice. I’m pro-choice because when there are no choices women are tied to men who have abused them in all kinds of ways. I’m pro-choice because women will always seek to choose, and they should be able to choose safely and not be judged. I’m pro-choice because when there are no choices women are enslaved.
I’m pro-choice because I believe in women. I believe in their intelligence, their strength, their ability to make the right decision for themselves. For this, and so many other reasons, I am pro-choice.
Filed under: Anti-choice, Feminism, Reproductive rights | 2 Comments
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