CSI: CRIME scene investigation

Season 5 - Episode 24 - Grave Danger

Teleplay by Anthony E. Zuiker, Carol Mendelsohn, and Naren Shankar, based on a story by Quentin Tarantino.
Directed by Quentin Tarantino

It begins with a flip of a coin. Nick Stokes (George Eads) and Warrick Brown (Gary Dourdan) are up. Warrick wins the toss to get the strip bar call, and Nick gets the trash crime scene – a pile of entrails has been found in an alley just off the Strip. It’s the bottom of the barrel kind of call – just one CSI, one uniform, and some yellow tape.

Stokes rolls on the scene, and he is the first to arrive, save for the officer who called it in, and they are still waiting on the coroner as Nick begins to track the evidence. The patrolman, feeling queasy, turns his back for one minute, and that’s when Nick vanishes.

Even prickly department head Conrad Ecklie (Marc Vann) has no problem with both the daytime and graveyard shifts reuniting, because this time, it’s personal. Grissom (William Peterson), Catherine (Marg Helgenberger) and Warrick scour the alley, and soon determine that Nick was deliberately lured there. Further, they realize the trap was set by a madman who would have been happy to grab up any one of them. The realization sinks in – but for the toss of a coin, it could have been any one of them.

 The team presses forward, with precious little to go on. Dr. Robbins (Robert David Hall) discovers that the entrails belong to a dog, proving there was a method to the kidnapper’s madness. While Sara (Jorja Fox) processes the additional evidence found at the scene, and Greg (Eric Szmanda) combs all of Nick’s cases for someone with a grudge, Warrick looks at surveillance footage to try and determine what kind of vehicle the perpetrator used.

Then the kidnapper makes his first move. He sends a request for a million dollar ransom by courier, and the demand is packaged with a USB flash drive, which directs the CSIs to a web link, and a live camera feed. What they see stuns them: the madman has buried Nick alive in a Plexiglas coffin, with just 12 hours of air left, some glow sticks, a tape recorder, and his loaded service revolver. They can see him, but he has no idea that they can see and hear him.

Once Nick and the team hear the kidnapper’s message on the tape recorder, he panics, and all they can do is watch as the horror of his situation sinks in. Because they are able to control a light switch in the coffin, Warrick can only watch in horror as Nick, clearly desperate, reaches for his gun and pulls the trigger.

But he has no intention of blowing his brains out. Nick had figured out what the team hadn’t: every time the light in the coffin flicked on so they could see Nick, it was cutting off a fan that was supplementing his air supply. When Nick makes the connection, he fires at the light and extinguishes it, which keeps the fan on, buying himself some precious time. But what Nick doesn’t know is he has just put a hole the coffin, and now there is no barrier between him and an advancing army of hungry fire ants.

 Meanwhile, Catherine knows that it is her responsibility to inform Nick’s parents, Judge Roger Stokes (guest star Andrew Prine) and his wife Jillian (guest star Lois Chiles), that their son has been abducted. They have managed to gather some money, but can come nowhere close to the kidnapper’s demand. And since the department will not bargain with criminals, Catherine is left with no alternative. She tells Grissom she is going to her father, casino magnate Sam Braun (Scott Wilson) to borrow the ransom, and this time even Grissom is willing to break protocol to save Nick. To protect Catherine, he insists on removing her from the equation by telling the higher-ups that the money was given to the department anonymously. And he also insists on making the drop himself.

The web feed directs him to an abandoned warehouse, where he is greeted by the same voice they heard on the tape recorder, and Grissom finds himself face-to-face with a madman, with only a million dollars between them. Walter Gordon (John Saxon) suspects the cash has been booby trapped, to which Grissom replies: “Normally, you’d be a hundred percent right, but this time, you’re a hundred percent wrong. We want Nick back, no tricks.”

“How much does Nick Stokes mean to you?” Walter Gordon asks. “Tell me what you feel when you see him in that coffin…How do you feel, knowing there’s nothing you can do to get him out of that hell? Helpless? Useless? Impotent? Well, welcome to my world.” And with that, Water Gordon opens his jacket to reveal he has strapped himself with powerful explosives. “You might want to step back a little,” he says, and then detonates the bomb. He and the ransom are blown away, along with the answer Grissom needed most: Where is Nick buried, and do they have enough time to find him?