Blink

If you watch this back-to-back with an episode from season 13, you are basically watching two completly different shows, the atmosphere, sets and general tone are unrecogniseable to what the show became later.

This early episode has a brooding intensity and cinematography which I can only compare to Blade Runner or Manhunter (1986) and I love its atmosphere.

The dialogue is minimal but direct, intelligent and effective. The incidental score is mesmerising. The whole episode is a work of art with a dream-like quality, and the plot is a disturbingly adult story which could be the plot for an entire horror film in the vein of Silence Of The Lambs or Se7en.

When I first saw this I was awestruck by how darkly different it was to Las Vegas and Miami, both of which I saw before this.

Unfortunately, in later series, the show as a whole fell into the cliched predictable and self-referential soap opera melodrama that also eventually afflicted the original CSI (although not Miami quite to the same extent)

But I still go back to enjoy this episode now and again, and think about what could have been if it had continued in this style.

This was an excellent "opening episode," a real thinking person's show in which "Mac," with the help of his team, had to really dig deep to try to figure this one out.

It involves "Locked In Syndrome" in which some sadistic, twisted and intelligent person was "experimenting" on women with the goal of "locking themselves into their own body," making them, in effect, coma-like. His first two experiments failed, leading to the CSI team finding two dead bodies. When they find one barely alive, they try to piece it all together. It doesn't help Mac that he's going several days without sleep.

On the DVD, this was the second episode, but it's really the season-opener. The first one, technically, was on CSI-Miami earlier in the year where a case in Miami led to New York City and we meet the New York City CSI team. This episode, aired in September, was the official opener for the 2004 season.

Watched all the CSIs when they started but in the intervening years have rather lost track of which episode fits where, apart from some obviously being later than others based on cast changes.

So I was a bit surprised to find that this one is the first (apart from the Miami Crossover) because it is full of confidence. The characters are introduced & information about them seamlessly distributed through the main, intriguing (horrible) plot without seeming forced.

All the CSI series started off well. They were at their best when they resisted having the characters' private lives become parts of the plot. Unfortunately, they all gave in eventually, so we had Mac's love life, Danny's love life, and elsewhere Grissom's & H's all ending up influencing the shows, and not for the best.

Reviewing the first episode of a show is all ways hard. There is a lot that is expected of a first episode. I like when shows do introduce characters but that is not the only focus of the episode. This episode show does this great.