CSI Files
Captain
<p><b>Synopsis:</b><p>Catherine and Nick investigate the death of Sprig Grenigier, who dove to her death from the apartment she shared with her fiancé. Was it suicide or murder? Nick notices she received a call just before her death which is traced to a pay phone across the street from Sprig's apartment. Though they determine she was happy with her fiancé, the CSIs discover Sprig was trying to lose weight, and that she'd filed for unemployment after losing her job as a bank teller. She had been accused of stealing ten grand from the bank when she changed a customer's fifty dollar bills for a hundred hundred dollar bills rather than one dollar bills. To the bank, it looked like a scam Sprig was in on, but the her fiancé tells the CSIs she had no memory of what happened. The CSIs discover another bank teller who was similarly scammed and Catherine finds a connection: both women were seeing the same hypnotist to deal with various problems in their lives. Catherine and Nick pay a visit to the hypnotist, Viviana Conway, and witness how powerful her brand of hypnotism is. Catherine decides to compare the picture of the man who received the ten thousand dollars at each bank from security footage with Viviana's picture and get a match. The woman disguised herself as a man, went into the banks, gave the women hypnotic cues and stole the money. When Sprig figured out what Viviana had done, Viviana called her and gave her the cue for her honeymoon: to imagine herself in a bikini jumping into the ocean. Sprig did just that, only instead of the ocean she leapt from her balcony onto a bus full of people.<p>A woman is found beaten to death in an alley; the CSIs identify her as Paula Bonfilio and speak with her college-aged son, Scott, who tells them his mother gambled away his college money. He says she'd called him at 10pm the night of her murder after to say she'd be gone for the night. He also mentions she was with her two-year-old, Lexie. The CSIs launch a search for the girl while Archie studies video of Paula gambling at the Tangiers. He notices her with a man with glasses and then traces her to Pete's Pawn shop. The CSIs manage to locate Paula's car with a prostitute and find Lexie at a children's play center. The team recovers prints on Paula's car and traces them to Leon Slocomb--the man with glasses from the surveillance footage at the Tangiers. Leon admits to roughing Paula up and taking her car and kid to scare her into paying her gambling debts, but insists he left her alive. The CSIs uncover a surprising suspect when they catch Scott Bonfilio cashing in a $500 chip Paula won the night of her murder. Scott confesses to Grissom that Paula was his lover, not his mother, and Lexie was their child. At age 15, Scott ran off with Paula, his guidance counselor at school, but was dismayed to see their relationship deteriorate once he came of age and she turned to gambling for thrills. When she called him after lost the car and Lexie, he beat her in a rage. He believes Lexie is better off.<p>Greg calls Sara, still in town after Warrick's funeral, to the hospital where Tom Adler has just pulled the plug on his wife Pam, who had been in a coma for either years following a brutal beating and rape--a case Sara worked. Tom claims Tony Thorpe, the man who raped his wife, send him a note claiming he'd raped her again and was going to keep at it. Hoping to protect his wife, Tom pulled the plug rather than letting his wife suffer any more indignities. When Sara investigates, his story doesn't hold up: Thorpe is in a wheelchair, incapable of raping Tom's wife. Sara confronts Tom, and he admits that he just couldn't take it anymore--Pam was gone, and he was the only one suffering. Sara wonders why he couldn't just tell the hospital staff that, and Tom admits he was ashamed. The ordeal enforces Sara's belief that this life is no longer for her and she packs up and leaves both Las Vegas and Grissom behind.<p><b>Analysis:</b><p>There really isn't anything remotely happy about "The Happy Place." The team is still reeling from Warrick's death, all three cases they're investigating are depressing and Sara and Grissom's relationship disintegrates before the audience's eyes. To be fair, <A class="link" HREF="http://www.csifiles.com/episodes/csi/season9/for_warrick.shtml">"For Warrick"</a> isn't the kind of episode that can be followed up with a light-hearted turn. Warrick's loss isn't something that either the team or the audience will get over quickly, so following up the season opener with a comedic entry probably would have felt off. But "The Happy Place" is pretty grim: a woman about to get married plunges to her death after losing her job, a young man kills the mother of his daughter in a rage and Sara is confronted with an old case when the husband of a rape victim pulls the plug on her.<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/the_happy_place.shtml">here</A>.<center></center>
