It'd be cute if it didn't look so obviously staged. "Oh, look!" Everyone showed up to pay tribute to the Antichrist, er, see the baby! Every knee to her shall bow, er, I mean, isn't she cute? And they all came together in the big, pink lab minivan. And they're artfully arranged, so that everyone is visible."
It would also be better if Danny didn't look like he was sitting for a session at the Olan Mills portrait studio after going on a Diazepam bender.
I do think it's sweet that Uncle Don brought a present. Baby's first pepper spray. Awwww!
Cute or not, this show has strayed so far afield from its original premise that is unrecognizable and certainly doesn't deserve its charter as a CSI show. It's deep into Grey's Anatomy territory and has shown little interest in crime-solving the past two seasons. Hawkes had faded so far into the background as to teeter on the brink of utter irrelevance, and Adam and Sid veer between invisible and excessively prominent. Flack, who had a promising, family-related storyline early on, has disappeared the last few episodes, though by all rights, he should return to prominence by 525-6. Should being the operative word, no doubt, as Dunbrook's threat to Mac in "PPM" set the finale up to be all about Mac and his unbecoming and bewildering vendetta against Dunbrook, whose only crime to this point has been to be a sleazy, self-aggrandizing publisher who makes more money than noble Mac. Flack's anguish will be shunted to one three-minute scene, and then it will be back to Macness as usual. Yay.
Don 't even get me started on Lenkov's tortured spin on Danny's ever-changing family background. His immediate family is connected to the crime world, but his extended family is in law enforcement? What is this, a Poison song?
Your Daddy sells crack, but your Mama's on foot patrol.
Maybe it's different in Lenkov's world, but in mine, extended family doesn't have much influence on your daily life. They're the gawky third cousins and pot-bellied uncles you see once a year at the family reunion. They're "family" insofar as they share your genetic tree, but there isn't a deep psychological bond that would influence the experiences that ultimately inform your future choices. They're the poor sods who choose the most inconvenient time in the world to die, and you spend most of the funeral and wake trying to remember if Uncle Bob was the one that got caught with that goat in '86. Or maybe that was Uncle Pete.
As such, it's incredibly cheap and lazy to dress that up as "coming from a family of cops" for the purposes of a single episode. That's manufacturing emotional resonance, and doing it badly, I might add. Someone else should've said those lines. Angell, maybe. It would've given her depth and added a natural emotional resonance to the finale. But the PTB were determined to play with their Danny woobie and have Lindsay stand by her man by whining down Hawkes, and so they did a shitty--and probably temporary--retcon to accommodate what sounded good at the time. And when the fans who watch with more than the gooey eye of their panty cyclops pointed out the shoddy workmanship, they seized on the extended family excuse, spackle on a crater.
I don't want Flack to die, but I almost wish the events of the season finale would cause him to quit and run a bistro in Queens so I wouldn't be compelled to keep watching.
I was extremely relieved to see the wedding didn't take long and I don't wanna see Montana Jr. becoming the main focus of the whole episode. Yeah, she's the first CSI baby and Horatio will send her tiny pink shades from Miami, but do we really to see the whole birth process? Seeing the CSI family around the happy parents is already bad enough *buys bigger bucket just in case*
