CSI: Miami (Episode 72, Crime Wave)



When I saw the promo for this week’s episode of CSI: Miami I couldn’t resist recording it. A tidal wave! Miami gets hit by a tidal wave! Having lived through the fun that is the threat of four different hurricanes, nothing says “escapist TV” like a whole new kind of natural disaster hitting Florida.


The one police department that spends more on hairstyling than equipment.

The special 90 minute (!?) episode opens with news voiceovers informing us that oceanographers are warning that a tidal wave, or tsunami, is going to strike Dade County. Cue shots of crowded highways and lines for gasoline. We cut to the parking lot of a hardware store. A fat man is waking back to his car, when he suddenly has trouble breathing. As he falls to his knees someone walk up to him and plunges a sharp tool into his forehead. This is witnessed by a woman carrying groceries, and the unseen assailant kills her too. Oranges roll out of her grocery bag, a potent metaphor for life – and death – in Florida.

The CSI people, led by Horatio (David Caruso), investigate. I’d try to differentiate the other characters, but I don’t see the point. None of the actors do anything other than recite the terse, unrealistic dialogue with all the enthusiasm I usually associate with bad video game voice work. These actors aren’t just phoning in their performances, or faxing them in, but sending them by courier. A very stiff and uninterested courier. I really can't blame the actors, the dialogue is awful.

The CSI people find a series of clues at the scene of the fat man’s death. He was buying some very specific hardware supplies, left at the scene of death. He had a large caliber machine gun shell in his trunk. And there is dog hair on his car seat. The CSI guys canvass the nearby hardware stores that are still open and find Riddick, a shifty man who has bought the exact same items. Horatio arrests Riddick, on the strength of the hardware purchases and the fact that Riddick has recently stepped on an orange, like the ones at the crime scene. Yep, that’s incriminating. It’s not like oranges grow on trees down here.

After performing the autopsy on the fat man Horatio comes up with theory. Riddick was planning some sort of big bank heist. The fat man was in on it, but the fact that he had “apnea” made him too unreliable so Riddick killed him. Intelligent readers may notice a few small problems with this theory. First of all, the writers of this episode are mixing some of symptoms of the sleep disorder apnea with some from narcolepsy. Secondly, if you’re on the verge of committing a major heist you don’t kill your associates in public, no matter how unreliable they are. That’s just going to draw unwanted police attention to you. And yet, it’s later proven that Horatio is 100% correct.

Thanks to our bleeding heart liberal criminal justice system Riddick goes free on bail. What is this country coming to when you can’t hold a man in jail for a capital felony on the basis of nondescript hardware purchases and some orange pulp on his shoes?

Horatio tracks the dog hair to a greyhound track, and finds a mock-up of a window that the bank robber were using for practice. The CSI guys run the size of the window through some sort of database and come up with the exact bank the robbers are going to hit. Huh? There’s a centralized database of bank window sizes? Who inputs that information? What use could it possibly be to anyone, except the lazy writers of bad forensics dramas?

Horatio and the token Hispanic CSI guy drive to the bank and find the robbery in progress. They shoot the two robbers in the lobby, and then see the tidal wave coming. Everyone takes cover in a bank vault as the wave, portrayed in a shot stolen from The Day After Tomorrow (2004), crashes over the city. Despite the wave apparently being more than 20 feet tall when it reached as far inland as the bank, there is very little damage to the city and no one is killed. Throughout the rest of the episode we don’t see a single emergency vehicle, nor is there any evidence that power has been disrupted.

Too make a long story short, Horatio discovers that the bank robbery was staged to cover the robbery of a vault full of gold on the second floor of the bank building. Because the gold was too heavy to move easily, Riddick came up with the idea of waiting until a tidal wave was coming, pretending to rob the bank while busting into the upstairs vault and putting the gold in a floating container that will get swept out to sea by rising water. If that isn’t insane enough it turns out that his original plan was to do this trick with a hurricane. Expertise on hurricanes was provided by his girlfriend, a professor of oceanography who was in denial about her boyfriend’s homicidal tendencies. 

The absurdities of this scenario, and indeed the rest of the episode, are far too numerous to list here. Most obviously, no professor of oceanography can predict when and where hurricanes are going to hit, and the idea that you would design a crime based on a direct storm hit is ludicrous. Even if you know a storm (or tidal wave) was going to hit, the chances that the water would reach the second floor of a building any distance inland are infinitesimally small – and seeing as how the plan required being in the building when the water hit, a storm swell large enough to reach that floor would surely kill the robbers and destroy the building anyway.  There’s also the rather disturbing way that the characters seem to talk about the four hurricanes of earlier this summer hitting “Florida,” yet always implying that all four hit Miami as well. Note to the writers of CSI: Miami: Florida is a big state, and Dade County wasn’t hit very hard this year.

I haven’t even mentioned the subplot (by the end of the sentence this will be a pun), probably tacked on to pad the running time that extra half hour, about an illegal burial in a cemetery. Like some sort of retarded Nancy Drew mystery, the case ends up being solved by finding a sample of dirt in the murderer’s car that matches the cemetery. Could any forensic clue be anymore cliché?

At the end of the episode Horatio decides to moralize. Horatio is sickened by Riddick's attempts to profit from a natural disaster and rails at the naive professor, "Florida has had enough, frankly." You know what, Horatio? So have I.

Posted: Thu - November 11, 2004 at      

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