CSI Files
Captain
<p><b>Synopsis:</b><p>As hit man Ronny DeSoto takes an assignment, Mac Taylor meets Talmadge Neville, newly released from an eighteen month prison sentence for vehicular manslaughter, as he gets off the prison bus. Mac tells Neville that he's convinced Neville wasn't driving the car that struck and killed Maris Donovan when she was riding her bike. Neville puts off the CSI, insisting he wouldn't have gone to Rikers for eighteen months if he hadn't been responsible for the girl's death. Mac recalls processing the scene with Stella and finding a cell phone with a half-finished text message on the floor. He tells Flack that he recalls Neville rubbing his right shoulder after the accident, indicating he was in the passenger seat and not the driver's seat. The orientation of his thumbprint on the seatbelt release and the cell phone landing on the floor rather than the seat of the car corroborate Mac's suspicions. Neville refuses to budge on his story, noting that he was a struggling single father who wouldn't have thrown everything away for someone else.<p>While Mac uses his day off to pursue the truth behind the Donovan case, Lindsay returns from Montana and promptly goes into labor. A nervous Danny meets her at the hospital. When Mac goes to see them, he catches sight of Neville's daughter, Karita, a surgeon at the hospital. Suddenly Mac realizes who Neville was protecting, and he confides his suspicions to Stella. Stella turns the screws on the young woman, but Karita refuses to admit she was in the car. Mac asks Sid to pull the autopsy report on Maris for him to see if there was evidence that someone performed life-saving measures on her just after the accident, and Sid confirms that some of her injuries are consistent with that conjecture. He also tells Mac that someone pulled the autopsy records a week earlier, but he doesn't have any information of who might have accessed them. Mac pays a visit to Katharine Donovan, Maris's bereaved mother, and tells her he's reopening the case, sharing his suspicions about Karita with her. Flack and several officers go to Neville's apartment, but the man isn't there. Flack finds a white bike pedal wrapped in a copy of Maris Donovan's autopsy report. When Hawkes sees Adam examining the pedal, which has been painted white, he recognizes it as a ghost rider--a bike painted entirely in white to memorialize a rider killed in an accident.<p>Flack and Stella are surprised when hit man Ronny DeSoto walks into the precinct and tells them he was hired to kill Neville--and then the person who hired him changed the hit to Karita. He tells them he doesn't kill women or children, and that the person who hired him--a woman in her 40s--is probably desperate enough to carry out the hit herself. The prints on the pictures of Neville and Karita DeSoto turns over to them match the prints on Maris Donovan's autopsy report found at Neville's apartment. Unable to find either Neville or Karita, Mac goes back to Katharine Donovan, telling her he knows she hired DeSoto. She tells him she's still grief-stricken after two years, and he shares with her that his wife died in 9/11. Rather than arresting her, Mac offers her compassion--so long as she doesn't harm Neville or his daughter. Karita shows up at the police station and confesses she was indeed driving the car, but her father insisted on taking the rap, fearing that the accident would ruin her future. Neville, too, pays a visit at the precinct, asking for the bike pedal and returning it to Maris's memorial. At the hospital, Lindsay gives birth to a baby girl, and, surrounded by the team, she and Danny ask Mac to be their baby's godfather. The CSI leader happily accepts.<p><b>Analysis:</b><p>Mac relentlessly pursues a case only to find out compassion occasionally trumps blind justice in this excellent entry of <i>CSI: NY</i>. The conclusion is all the more surprising because it's Mac, he of the unshakeable beliefs and sometimes frustratingly dogged adherence to the letter of law. Mac isn't one to see the shades of grey in situations--he doesn't even seem to consider that, when Talmadge Neville persists in his denials despite Mac presenting evidence to the contrary, that the man might be protecting someone out of love and not fear. His first thought is that an overzealous teamster got behind the wheel in order to shake down Neville. That Mac never considers Neville might be protecting one of his children until Mac is literally confronted with the woman's name ringing over the loudspeakers at the hospital where two of his CSIs are about to become parents emphasizes just how much Mac is <i>not</i> a parent. Anyone with a child would have likely immediately suspected Neville was protecting one of his own.<p>Parenthood and what it means to love unconditionally as a parent is at the forefront of the hour, which is fitting in an episode which features two CSIs becoming parents for the first time. Neville is willing to take responsibility for the death of Maris Donovan and go to jail for the tragic accident rather than have his daughter Karita face the consequences. Katharine Donovan is devastated by the loss her daughter, to the point that she's willing to hire a hit man to kill the person she believes is responsible for the girl's death. Veteran actors <font color=yellow>Charles S. Dutton</font> and <font color=yellow>Mare Winningham</font> are very good as the tormented parents and both are incredibly sympathetic. Neville maintains the debt to society has been paid while Katharine doesn't ever think the loss of her daughter can be compensated for, though she makes an attempt to go about things biblically, hiring a hit man to kill Neville hoping in her grief to assuage the pain she feels from Maris's death. Both believe they are doing what's best for their children in the face of a terrible tragedy.<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/greater_good.shtml">here</A>.<center></center>
