CSI Files
Captain
<p><b>Synopsis:</b><p>Mac and Stella are enjoying a cup of coffee outside while Mac tells Stella about Ella McBride (last seen in <A class="link" HREF="http://www.csifiles.com/episodes/newyork/season5/forbidden_fruit.shtml">"Forbidden Fruit"</a>) when a turkey buzzard drops a human eyeball in Stella's coffee! The team gets a lead on the eyeball's owner when Sid discovers an implantable contact with an ID on it stating it belongs to John Pollock. Flack and Stella go to the man's apartment and find the rest of his body in a flowerbed. Danny and Mac arrive to process the apartment, where Danny finds a wedding picture in a frame with blood on it and a tube of Sildenafil Prilocaine, a Viagra-like topical ointment. In the morgue, Sid determines Pollock died two days ago, but he isn't able to determine COD because some parts of the man are missing. Danny finds female DNA on both the frame and the ointment but doesn't find a match in AFIS. Pollock's wife, Flora, and her brother Enrico Palmero, come into the station. Flora is shocked her husband, an internet entrepreneur, is dead. She tells Mac she was on a trip to Atlantic City with her girlfriends but returned as soon as she heard about her husband's death. As gently as possible, Mac asks if she married Pollock for a green card, but Flora insists she loved her husband. Her alibi checks out, and her prints don't match the ones found on the picture frame. After learning the turkey buzzards are endangered and tagged and tracked by a wildlife conservation agency, Adam and Danny hunt down the birds and recover a key missing piece of Pollock's body: his stomach. Sid examines the organ and finds Pollock had an advanced ulcer, meaning a single punch could have caused the ulcer to rupture and flood his system with antacids, killing him. Hawkes and Danny turn back to the photo frame, and Hawkes suggests running the prints on the photo and topical ointment through the physician's database. They find a match to a Dr. Charlotte Rydel, a sex therapist. She admits Pollock was a patient of hers, but denies hurting him. She tells Danny and Hawkes that she went to Pollock's apartment and fought with him after three of his checks bounced, but insists she did nothing but yell at him--and throw the picture frame at his head. After Mac tells Stella he's sure of Flora's innocence, the two have a heart to heart about Ella McBride, and Stella cautions him about getting too close to her.<p>Adam discovers a motion-activated camera in a clock radio Danny discovered at Pollock's apartment and recovers footage that reveals a man with spikes coming out of his head in the apartment around the time of the murder. Lindsay has discovered a letter she found in Pollock's clothes from a law firm threatening legal action against Pollock is a fake, and managed to trace the printer it came from to Quentin Oswego--who happens to be the owner of the apartment building Pollock lived in. Danny and Flack find Oswego presiding over a female boxing match, and they pull the man aside to question him. He tells them he was angry about Pollock getting a deal for the apartment under rent control and reluctantly admits to being in the apartment to sabotage it, but denies touching--or even running into--Pollock. Flack arrests him on the fraud charge over the fake letter, but he appears to be a dead end. Enrico Palermo makes a frantic 911 call--his sister has been attacked! Stella and Flack meet them in the hospital and find Flora gravely injured. Stella asks for sex assault kit on Flora, and also asks for a DNA sample from Enrico after she notices blood on his hands. Hawkes and Danny find no signs of forced entry at the Pollocks' apartment, while Lindsay listens to the 911-call and hears Quentin in the background pounding on the door, yelling at Enrico about him not being on the lease. Adam goes back to older footage on the camera and finds Enrico and Flora arguing--after he tries to kiss her. Hawkes comes back with the results from the sex assault kit: Enrico is the one who raped Flora. DNA proves they were in fact not related. Flack arrests Enrico, who tries to run, and along with Stella lays out their case: Enrico and Flora were running a con on Pollock. Flora married him for his money but when she fell in love with him, Enrico was left out in the cold. Pollock caught them on tape and tried to send Enrico packing, only to have the man attack him and kill him. Enrico buried Pollock's body in the flowerbed on the roof of the apartment, but the turkey buzzards made sure Pollock did not go undiscovered. After the case is closed, Mac decides to pay a visit to Ella in the halfway house where she's been staying following her suicide attempt, offering her hope--and a helping hand. He takes her for coffee, and she tells him the latest urban legend she's heard, about an eyeball landing in a woman's cup of coffee.<p><b>Analysis:</b><p>A funnier than usual script helps elevate the latest installment of <i>CSI: New York</i>, penned by freelancers <font color=yellow>Rusty Cundieff</font> and <font color=yellow>Floyd Byars</font>. Quips from the characters are plentiful in this episode, especially from everyone's favorite funnyman, Don Flack, who can't resist taking a few shots after the eyeball lands in Stella's coffee. "I prefer cream myself," he notes as Mac fishes the eyeball out of the coffee. When he and Stella go to Pollock's apartment to see if they can find his body, Flack frets that the man might be alive and just missing an eyeball. "I don't think I'm ready for that," he deadpans. In addition to providing dark humor for the show, Flack is often the representative of the audience. Unlike the CSIs, he's not making giant leaps from small clues or removing eyeballs from coffee cups without batting an eye. Flack's a layman when it comes to the science, so his reactions often mirror the audience's. And, of course, it's impossible to go wrong by giving <font color=yellow>Eddie Cahill</font> comedic material: he always delivers those snarky lines perfectly.<p>There's an awful lot of convenient tracking devices here, from the ID tag on the implanted contact to the GPS trackers on the birds to the camera in the clock in Pollock's apartment. I suppose the surfeit of technological monitoring devices could be seen as a commentary on the way personal privacy is rapidly becoming a thing of the past, but much of the time they feel awfully convenient. Individually, they're believable if cutting edge--that conservation society sure must be well funded to be able to afford to put tracking devices on birds--but all three together feel awfully convenient. The same is true of the "laser printer fingerprints" apparently mandated for the last twenty years by the government that lead the CSIs to the one printer in all of Manhattan that the fake legal notice was printed on. I realize that sometimes these conveniences are necessary to move the stories along so that they don't get totally bogged down in the details, but sometimes too many of them are crammed into one episode.<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/no_good_deed.shtml">here</A>.<center></center>
