i agree with you
FedUpWithMiami 100%. it was a great episode, like i said before. The flashbacks were a piece of art if you ask me.
the young Mickey Dunn was veeery creepy, especially when he was smashing the head of that cop agaist the ground. he looked seriously insane at that moment, and i felt i was watching one of the real horror movies.
Catherine and her flashbacks, just, wow. all i have to say. they casted a great young actress to play her, and i believed it's really Catherine. what i would completely love to see in the future is this kind of flashbacks but of some other people on the team. i'd give away my right hand to see a 30 year old Grissom, lol. well, i've seen a 30 year old Billy Petersen which is absolutely yummy, but you know what i mean.
the case had its twists and turns and it actually felt a bit like Colombo, lol. WE know who the perp is, or maybe what is his technique, but the CSI's don't, and we look at the way they solve it without this extra information we have.
i completely agree with you
FedUp that CSI's had a lot harder job to figure out it was characterization than us. they had just some crappy quality pictures/videos and i don't know if i would figure it out in those circumstances. but the episode, although showed us more than CSI knew, still had its surprises.
usually when the plot is complicated, like yesterday, we tend to rate the episode lower. this time though, was different, and in the end everything was exactly explained, solved and clear.
i'm radically spoiler-free so i didn't know how the guest star is going to look like, nor did i see the promos. i completely didn't know what is the episode going to be about, but the first moment i saw the singing guy, i was asking myself "what's up with his face?". later on, i was surprised that he was the one to be the killer and that they showed us the actual moment of the crime giving away the face of the perp. but then it hit me. i remember one of the Agatha Christy's crime novels, with Hercules Poirot (i absolutely love the guy, lol), and there was one case that involved a woman-perp who tried to draw everybody's attention in one place so people would remember her if Poirot later came to ask if anybody seen her. so it was a classic criminal Agatha Christy moment right there, and the time when i saw the black woman, confirmed my suspicions, i knew what was going on.
so IMO this episode can be interpreted as a bow towards the biggest detectives of all time, Colombo and Poirot
oh and about the dental records, i don't think they keep the data longer than 20 years.