<p><b>Synopsis:</b><p>Mac confronts Stella about the anonymous call she made to report finding the body of Sebastian Diakos in <A class="link" HREF="http://www.csifiles.com/episodes/newyork/season5/point_of_no_return.shtml">"Point of No Return"</a>--after he'd expressly ordered her to drop the case. She storms out of his office, leaving her badge behind, but Mac is soon calling her back, after a man's body turns up backstage at the outdoor performance of a Greek play at Chelsea University. Stella identifies him as George Kolovos--the man she and Detective Angell sent in a shipping crate to Cyprus. Mac thinks he may have returned to New York seeking revenge--and that whoever killed him saved Stella's life. At the scene, Hawkes collects trace that Adam identifies as coffee grounds. Danny reassembles pieces of plaster found at the scene to make a mold of the murder weapon, a thick, ornate dagger. Stella tells Flack to let Angell, who is on vacation, know about Kolovos's murder and then goes to talk to her mentor Professor Papakota, who reminds Stella he urged her to let the case go. Back at the lab, Lindsay shows Mac the ornate markings that the plaster picked up from the weapon, and shows him that they represent ancient Greek philosophers and poets. Hawkes carbon dates trace from the wound and tells Mac the weapon was crafted in 300 BC. Danny has the results from a print on the plaster, which matches Professor Papakota.<p>When Danny and Flack go to question the professor, they find Stella just leaving his apartment. Stella returns to the apartment with the two men in tow, but Papakota is gone--as is his passport. Stella goes back to her office and takes down a painting Papakota gave her as a gift. Looking at the back of it, she finds a stamp for the Ancient Macedon Museum and realizes it was stolen. Stella leaves, and Mac finds the torn up paper from the frame in her office--along with ink from the stamp, which allows him to piece the words together. Mac tells Danny and Adam that the painting was stolen from an exhibit Professor Papakota put together at the Met in 1977. Hawkes matches coffee grounds found at Papakota's apartment with the grounds he found at the scene. Adam gets a DNA match on both sets of grounds, leading the team to believe Papakota is their man. Flack tells Mac that Papakota is in the wind--and that Stella just purchased a ticket to Thessaloniki, Greece. In Greece, Stella goes to the house of Papakota's brother, Tasso, who tells her Papakota isn't there. She leaves her hotel address with Tasso and leaves, catching sight of Papakota. She chases him, but loses him in a museum. Mac follows Stella to Greece and together the two speak to Detective Cristos Temmas and Areti Moungri, a museum curator, who identifies the painting Stella has as one stolen from her museum. Stella insists that she had no idea it was stolen, but Temmas tells her not to leave the country.<p>Mac tells Stella that the murder weapon dates back to the time of Alexander the Great. Stella thinks Diakos, Kolovos and Papakota stumbled upon the ancient tomb. Stella apologizes to Mac and he shows her a picture of Papakota from the time of the Met exhibit--with a blonde woman who looks like Stella. Mac thinks the woman, a restoration artist from Greece who was killed in a traffic accident just after the exhibit opened, is Stella's mother. When Mac tells her he thinks Papakota is the killer, Stella insists he isn't. When he tells her about the coffee grinds, she asks him to have Danny run the DNA from the grinds against a reference sample from Papakota, thinking that he may have been reading someone else's grinds--a tradition in Greece. Danny does as she asks and eliminates Papakota as a suspect, but finds a filial match to Papakota: the killer is his brother, Tasso. Mac goes to tell Stella but finds Tasso attacking her. Mac goes after him but the man runs. Recalling the Papakotas lost their peach-tree-filled lands to the government, she and Mac isolate a pesticide that leads them to the location of the Papkotas' lands--and the tomb of Alexander. They find Papakota and Tasso with the valuables from the grave; Tasso begins to fire at Mac and then flees. Stella confronts Papakota, who says Greece stole his family's lands from him. Stella counters that he stole from her by not telling her he knew her mother. As they argue, Tasso gets off a shot that hits Papakota rather than Stella. As he dies in her arms, he admits that he loved her mother--and that he was returning the artifacts to the land. Stella drops the dagger back in the ground before she and Mac return to New York. Back at the lab, Stella reads Mac's coffee grinds--and he returns her badge.<p><b>Analysis:</b><p>The first episode penned by series star <font color=yellow>Melina Kanakaredes</font> is pretty much exactly what you'd expect from an actor given the chance to write an episode of the show he/she stars in: it focuses heavily on Kanakaredes' character, it's more far-reaching than the average episode and it ends up featuring a major revelation about Stella's past. All of that sounds good in theory: after all, fans of the <i>CSI</i> shows are always hungry to learn more about their beloved characters. The problem here is that what happens is more than a bit far-fetched, and ultimately stretches credibility beyond what the audience can reasonably be expected to swallow. It's one thing to accept that the CSIs question suspects in the course of an investigation or that they can get DNA results in a matter of minutes--those are things that simply have to happen for the story to move along at a reasonable pace, and to be driven by the main characters. It's entirely another to ask the audience to believe that Mac and Stella can jet off to Greece to investigate a case. <p><i>CSI: NY</i> enjoys delving into its characters backstories, but the results often fall short. The 333-stalker case in season four tied into a murder Mac had witnessed as a boy but was so dragged out that it lost steam. Lindsay's dark secret was rushed and since being unrealistically neatly wrapped up in <A class="link" HREF="http://www.csifiles.com/episodes/newyork/season3/sleight_out_of_hand.shtml">"Sleight Out of Hand"</a> has never been so much as alluded to again. The show's strongest venture into the past was when <A class="link" HREF="http://www.csifiles.com/episodes/newyork/season1/tanglewood.shtml">"Tanglewood"</a> teased the possibility that Danny had ties to the mob, and went on to reveal in <A class="link" HREF="http://www.csifiles.com/episodes/newyork/season2/run_silent_run_deep.shtml">"Run Silent, Run Deep"</a> that his brother Louie was in fact a Tanglewood boy...but then the show dropped the storyline completely, to the point that Louie's fate is still unknown three seasons later. <i>CSI: NY</i>'s strongest arcs--such as Shane Casey's reign of terror, Danny grappling with the death of ten-year-old Ruben Sandoval, and the taxi cab killer (up until the storyline's weak final episode)--have been driven by events in the present, or at least not the past of the show's main characters. Tying together a strong story from the present with a compelling one from the past isn't always the easiest thing to do, as this entry proves.<p><HR ALIGN="CENTER" SIZE="1" WIDTH="45%" COLOR="#007BB5"><p>To read the full reviews, please click <A HREF="http://www.csifiles.com/reviews/csi/grounds_for_deception.shtml">here</A>.<center></center>
Great review, as always. This episode didn't impress me. I was interested to see how Melina did as a writer - I don't think it was horrible, but it was too much of a departure from CSI:NY for my taste. It felt more like a movie (a la "National Treasure" or something like that), especially the fact that it was Alexander the Great's tomb and whatnot (which ended up being largely irrelevant to the plot). As a standalone film, it would be exciting and interesting - but within the canon of the show, it doesn't really fit (particularly the convenient tie-in with Stella's backstory and whatnot). Again, if this were a movie, Stella's past would work fine. The stuff with Danny and Lindsay was ridiculous. I know they had to show the kid the episode after she was born, but there HAD to be a better way to include her than this. There's stretching credibility and then there's...what happened in this episode. Sooooo ridiculous. I really hope that isn't an indication of what we can expect all next season. Overall, I wasn't impressed with the episode, but it did have its good moments (some of the stuff with Mac and Stella, the scene with Flack and Stella, etc). I'm hoping the finale tonight will be even better than I'm hoping it will be.
Great review. One point-- I remember the Professor saying that Kolovos killed Diakos in the flashback to the murder. I don't know how it's possible and I don't know why he would, but I'm pretty sure that's what he said...
Good review. Honest and balanced. As far as the episode goes I made most of my comments in the grading thread. I think the only real thing Melina accomplished with this foray into script writing is confirming that she is her own greek tragedy. I am not a huge Stella fan, but it is sad that everyone she trusts ends up either trying to kill her or dying themselves. I cracked up during the scene with Danny, Lindsay and Adam. Her calling Danny the god of virility was hilarious when you play it against the remark Danny made to Mac about the "medicinal hydraulics" that he didn't have any use for because he was two months away from fatherhood. I can't remember the title of the ep but it was the one with buzzards and the eyeball in Stella's coffee. I couldn't decide then if he was boasting because he got her pregnant or complaining about the lack of opportunity in third-trimester pregnancy. The fact that he offered it to Mac makes me think he wanted someone to get some use out of the ointment. Nuf said!
Oh man, did the ending of this arc fall flat or what? I was really looking forward to how this would all tie together; the last decent Stella arc we've gotten was the whole HIV-scare back in Season 3, which I thought was an amazing display of Kanakaredes's range and talent. This, on the other hand, was such a major let-down for me. While I did find Papakota a likable character, I couldn't help but groan as soon as they started the ol' "dying in someone's arms" bit. I will give that Kanakaredes remains a wonderful actress. I love the way she said "Oh no" when she noticed the blood on her hands after Papakota was shot. Something about it was just spot on for me.
I thought that too but thinking about it didn't Stella and Angell say that was inpossible given the time of death and when they put Kolovos in the container?