The SmarK TV Rant for CSI Miami: Season 3, Episode 2
“Pro Per”
– Originally aired September 27, 2004
“You little cracker, I’ve about had it with your menstrual act!”
– Detective Frank Tripp, getting cooler by the episode.
The Setup
A drive-by shooting interrupts a very exclusive party at the beachfront home of a nebulously-employed “entrepreneur”, but only ends up killing a party guest instead of the intended target. Horatio is so upset by the proceedings that he takes off his glasses and puts them back on again within the first minute on-screen!
The Investigation
H’s first potential eyewitness is the 8-year old son of the victim, as the Coast Guard run down the escape boat, but only find a dumbass wigger driving it, decidedly not the guy who did the hit. But while the driver is a dead end, there’s fingerprints and evidence to be had on the boat, so it’s not a total loss. The first CSI Shot is spraying a Q-Tip to find gunshot residue. Oooo. What next, someone goes to take a leak and they have a CGI closeup of the piss in Matrix-cam? Anyway, the kid picks out the shooter via mugshots, and when the intended victim names his former business parter, B-Slick, as the shooter, it appears to be a slam-dunk case 10 minutes into the show. Ah, but there’s a twist, as Mr. Slick wants to defend himself in court, having read lots of legal texts while jailed the last time. He starts pushing his way into the lab for his “right” to see the evidence, and when that doesn’t work, he subpoenas Calleigh and basically gets her to admit that there’s no way to match the bullets found on the beach with the gun found on the boat. OUCH. As homeboy rips apart the CSI team legally, H goes over the boat with a fine-toothed comb, this time finding blood spatter, and thus discovering that someone else was driving the boat and is probably dead right about now. Another CSI Shot of H examining the gun of the intended victim. However, Slick uses his powers of evil to have the star witness killed, thus leaving the little kid as the only one. Justifiably paranoid now, H sends the kid home with Det. Salas, thus fulfilling her only purpose in being there for that episode. So back to the boat H goes as the case falls apart, and now the fingerprints there show that our wigger friend actually dumped a dead body while he was making off with the death boat, thus prompting the above quote from Frank Tripp. The dead body is the REAL driver, and the blood on B-Slick’s clothes implicate him as the killer. Slick, meanwhile, tries to have Salas and the kid killed in another drive-by, but it fails, even as all his legal wrangling and technicalities leave the case dismissed and thus himself a free man. However, armed with a new murder charge for the DRIVER now, H puts him away for good this time. Score one for the good guys, because B-Slick was really grating on my nerves by the end, and I guess that was the intention.
The Good
– I liked the almost Law & Order-like dynamic of this episode, as the killer never bothered to fashion an alibi or deny his involvement, but rather focused his efforts on using legal loopholes to escape. And it almost worked, if not for those meddling CSIs.
– Recurring cop Frank Tripp is so much more effective in this role than glamour model Sofia Milos, and they should go with him from now on and dump her from the credits.
– Horatio protecting a kid is when he’s at his most effective and intense, and the character works best that way.
The Not-So-Good
– This was less of a “find the real killer with science” deal than a “evade courtroom loopholes in time to nail the guy” deal, and it doesn’t generally work when CSI goes outside of its usual area like that. This time it did, but I hope they don’t keep doing it.
Final Sunglass Count: H dons or removes his glasses 5 times on-camera in this one, and 2 more times a scene changes and so do the state of his glasses.
