<p><b>Synopsis:</b><p>Derek Powell, the defense attorney introduced in <A class="link" HREF="http://www.csifiles.com/episodes/miami/season7/presumed_guilty.shtml">"Presumed Guilty"</a> is hosting a yacht party with his fiancée, Nadine Alcott. He and his guests invite two speedboaters, Jack and Abby, aboard, only to have the pair turn on them and rob them at gunpoint. While the guests are lined up along the edge of the yacht, a shot rings out and Derek is horrified to look over and see Nadine has been shot. She dies in his arms. When the CSIs arrive, Horatio has them process the guests for GSR. He tells Derek he thinks the robbers had help. The coastguard spots the boat and Natalia and Ryan rush off to the location, discovering a man named Ken Vogel repainting it. He claims to work for the Parks & Recreation division, and says he found the boat abandoned. Natalia and Ryan discover a bag filled with the stolen jewelry from the yacht, but Vogel insists it was on board when he found the boat. When pressed, he admits to wanting to turn around the boat and sell it, but denies any involvement in the robbery-murder. Derek tells Calleigh and Tripp that Vogel wasn't the man who robbed the yacht. Calleigh points out that Derek's laptop is now the only item still missing, and wonders if the robbery was targeting Derek specifically. Horatio approaches Delko in the lab to tell him that the city has revoked his protection detail, making Eric once again vulnerable to any attempt Alexander Sherova, the Russian Mafioso Eric investigated after learning the man was in fact his father, might make on his life. Calleigh is able to trace the laptop to a coffee shop, where Abby and Jack are found by Ryan. Both deny murdering Nadine--they claim that after the robbery there were so many cops around they had to ditch the jewelry, and they fled with only the laptop. Yelina Salas approaches Gregor Kasparov pretending to be a hit woman inquiring about the woman who was hired to kill Delko--and failed. Kasparov sizes Yelina up and hires her for the job. Yelina covertly meets up with Horatio, giving him a notebook with information about Sherova in it--and telling him she's been hired to kill Delko. Horatio finds Sherova and brings him to Delko. Delko tells Sherova that he's his father, and asks the man how he could have abandoned his mother. Sherova maintains he owes Delko nothing and the younger man punches him in frustration, knocking out one of Sherova's teeth. Sherova walks off, leaving Delko disappointed.<p>In the morgue, Dr. Price shows Calleigh the object that killed Nadine, which Calleigh recognizes as a projectile from an underwater assault rifle. Horatio tells Derek that Nadine was the target; the robbery was just a distraction. Derek claims Nadine didn't have any enemies, and bristles when Horatio suggests he might have had her killed over their very public prenuptial dispute. Horatio sends Delko on a dive to see if the shooter left anything behind. He discovers a sophisticated scuba tank tangled in a fishing net that nearly takes Delko down as well. Delko brings the tank back to Natalia in the lab, only to be interrupted when immigration officers come in to arrest him, claiming they've learned Delko is not a U.S. citizen. Over Natalia's protests, Delko is taken away. Natalia recovers DNA in the tank linking it to Ken Vogel but tells lab tech Michael Travers that because the evidence was collected by a CSI whose citizenship is being called into question, the evidence might be inadmissible. Calleigh visits Delko in jail to bolster his spirits. Wondering how immigration got the information on Delko, Horatio turns to Derek's laptop and discovers Delko's Cuban birth certificate on it. Horatio confronts Derek, who admits he was gathering evidence to discredit Horatio's team during their investigation of his client, Kevin Sheridan. Horatio questions Ken Vogel, noticing the man is showing signs of decompression sickness. He wants to know who hired him to kill Nadine, but Vogel insists that he doesn't know the man's name--he just took the cash from him in exchange for the job. He does recall that the man was vocal about Derek, claiming he defended murderers and "took my whole heart." Horatio relays the information to Derek, who thinks the killer is Paul Garland, the father of Lindsay Garland, who was killed by Derek's client Kevin Sheridan.<p>Tripp brings in Paul Garland, who tells Natalia he didn't pay someone to kill Derek's fiancee. He points out the evidence Delko collected will be discounted because of his citizenship status, and Natalia realizes he was the one who pulled Delko's birth certificate off Derek's computer and got Delko arrested. Paul maintains he simply learned to manipulate the information he has to his advantage--a skill he picked up from watching his daughter's murder trial. He turns to Derek in the mirror, saying he took the thing Derek loved most and got away with it. He asks the defense attorney how it feels. Yelina tells Horatio she's done some digging into Alexander Sherova's past and has discovered he didn't exist before 1960--she can't find any legal documents or a birth certificate for him. Calleigh and Horatio use Sherova's tooth to find an isotope that indicates where the tooth developed. The isotope is unique not to Russia but to New Mexico. Horatio confronts Sherova, telling him that he knows he was born in New Mexico and is an American citizen. Sherova tells Horatio he was in Cuba just prior to the Bay of Pigs in the early 60s, and that after the incident the CIA threw him over--so he in turn rejected his American citizenship and reinvented himself as a Russian. Horatio persuades Sherova to come forward and reveal his citizenship so that Delko will be released--and have his status as an American citizen confirmed. Derek makes a case for getting the evidence Delko collected admitted in court, while a happy Calleigh meets a now free Eric at the jail. The two embrace and kiss, and he goes home with her. As Paul Garland is led away, Derek tells Horatio that he doesn't want to defend criminals anymore. Horatio points out that the county is always in need of prosecutors. When Derek asks Horatio about the loss of his wife, Horatio tells him that "you don't get over it, and you never will."<p><b>Analysis:</b><p>Like its predecessor, "Presumed Guilty," "Sink or Swim" is yet another gripping, twist-filled episode of <i>CSI: Miami</i> featuring <font color=yellow>Sean Combs</font>'s surprisingly sympathetic Derek Powell. Derek's arc over the two episodes shows him transitioning from an arrogant defense attorney to an earnest, somewhat disillusioned do-gooder, going so far as to defend the character of Eric Delko, a man whose reputation he once would have gladly tarnished, in court. A bit hasty over the course of two episodes? Perhaps, but then, the man did realize his wealthy client was a murderer and a kidnapper, and also lost his fiancée. Certainly the latter is something that would lead a man to reevaluate his life. Indeed, I found it quite gratifying that despite Horatio's suggestions that perhaps Derek had Nadine killed, Derek turned out to be completely innocent of any direct involvement in her death. His indirect involvement--in defending Kevin Sheridan and in digging up Delko's birth certificate--led to her murder and to her killer nearly walking free. No doubt Derek registered this, and it factored into his decision to give up practicing law as a defense attorney.<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/sink_or_swim.shtml">here</A>.<center></center>
Great review, as usual. I wasn't a fan of this episode - Diddy didn't thrill me in the last episode, and he didn't thrill me much more in this one. (As a random note, I wish they'd played the two episodes in consecutive weeks instead of having repeats in between - I'd forgotten some of what happened in the last episode.) He's not a character totally without merit, but I didn't think he was all that great. I'm pretty meh about him. If he doesn't come back, that'll be fine with me. And I thought the scene where he was talking about Eric at the end was especially corny. I would have liked to see more Ryan - I felt like he was barely there, although the scenes he had were pretty good. Hopefully they'll make up for it by having him - and Natalia - play more prominent roles in later episodes. (I liked when Natalia jumped to Eric's defense, by the way.) The whole thing with Eric's citizenship was too neatly fixed. Good thing his mom slept with the fake Russian guy who was really American so that the whole thing was just a 'scare', so to speak. "Eric's not American!...Haha, I got you, yes he is." It's probably because I've lost all patience with romantic relationships on these shows, but I didn't really care about the stuff with Eric and Calleigh. I'm glad they stopped dancing around it, and I think the foundation is there - the stuff with them in this episode might have been cute if I was into it. Well, it was cute, but I might have enjoyed it more if I was interested in their relationship. As it is, I'd rather see other stuff in place of those scenes (of course, this show is bad about wasting time with a whole lot of nothing - like people staring at each other during Horatio's dramatic silences - when that time could be put to better use). But mostly I'm just jealous because I want Calleigh all to myself. So overall, it was a decent episode, but Miami isn't my favorite and I don't feel as invested in the characters as I do with New York - so that makes some of the stuff less interesting to me.
Great read,as usual It was one of the better episode and I have to say that I was pleasantly suprised with Diddy. I`m not a natalia fan but I did like the way she stood up for Eric. it is nice to say that there are no hard feelings between them after they broke up. It shows a level of maturity which is good. It is nice to see that they finally took the next step in the relationship between Eric and Calleigh. These 2 have been through a lot together and it has always been in the shadow that they would end up( midnight tiptoe must be jumping with joy now,:lol
I have to agree with the first poster, I wasn't a big fan of this episode. It wasn't bad, but it didn't have anything that lit a fire under me either. I wasn't thrilled to see P. Diddy again. I'm sorry but the man's acting bores me to tears. I couldn't take Eric's risk of deportation seriously because there were so many loopholes in that particular plot it was laughable. And as most people know, i'm not a big fan of main characters getting together romantically after several seasons of them not being together. Because by that point it throws off the dynamic of the show. I won't deny that Eric and Calleigh have chemistry and they do look cute together. But now we're going to have to deal with little moments between them all the time which will drag us away from the cases they are working on. That was one of the reasons I was not a big fan of Gil and Sara in CSI, besides the fact that I felt they had no chemisrty, it was because the relationship was jaring to the episodes. You would have the case proceeding as normal, and then we would suddenly stop, drag the audience out of the case to have a romantic moment between Gil and Sara, and then we were thrown back into the case again. The scenes never really fit in with the episodes. Of course that's just my opinion. Though, truthfully, most of the time writers get about one good season out of a romantic couple before the audience gets bored with them. I'd hate to see that happen to Eric and Calleigh, but once their together, then what? The tension is gone, so all you have is a few sappy moments. The only thing that keeps the audiences interest is the chance that they break up, and then the actual break up. The only reason is didn't happen to Gil and Sara is because they both left the show. Anyhoo, gonna get off my soapbox now.