#08x08 you kill me

[addictedtostorytelling]

hi aj! still on my rewatch (slowly but surely) and i reached 9.01. i noticed that when grissom hears on the police radio that warrick was shot he was actually buying a traveller magazine and wonder if he had been thinking of joining sara then. do you think that he would have reached that point even if they hadn’t lost warrick? i feel like his death is the first trigger to grissom deciding to retire. thanks so much for all your patience in answering these! have a great week 🤍

hi, rewatch anon!

good to hear from you again!

so i have a much longer, more detailed post outlining what i think grissom's state of mind re: following sara is between s8 and s9 which you can read here, if you're interested.

but the tl; dr version is that i think while the grissom of episode 09x01 "for warrick" may well have sara on the brain when he picks up the traveller magazine—he may be thinking of her travels and/or be considering going to visit her wherever she is and/or be mulling going on a vacation with her—for my money, he is not yet consciously considering leaving vegas to be with her (or at least not on a permanent basis) for two main reasons.

the first reason why he isn't ready to follow sara during s8 is because he feels that maybe her having some time away from him is "for the best."

as i talk about in this post,

remember: [in s8,] sara has just walked out on him, and for as much as her reasons for doing so have everything to do with her mental health and nothing to do with a lack of love for or desire to hurt him, the bottom line is that her decision isn’t one made in a vacuum; regardless of her intentions, her leaving (and especially so abruptly) does cause him pain and stoke his fears that he doesn’t fulfill her needs. he is left wondering if she could have stayed were he a better partner to her—more attentive, more experienced in love, less “in his own head.” those emotional wounds and self-doubts carry with him the whole time she’s gone, and they definitely figure in to why he doesn’t immediately go chasing after her.

his (flawed) inference is that if he had been providing sara with everything she needed from him emotionally, she wouldn't ever have left las vegas to begin with, so maybe it's best if he—and all of his emotional obtuseness—steer clear of her for the time being while she figures things out and seeks the support she needs elsewhere.

the last thing he wants in the world is to get in the way of her recovery, you know?

his second reason also ties in with the first:

he isn't prepared to follow sara yet because he is somewhat hopeful there ultimately is no need for him to do so.

because he and sara are still in regular phone contact at that time (see episodes 08x08 "you kill me" and 08x12 "grissom's divine comedy"), he has some sense that sara is not completely cut off from him and their life together in vegas; he feels as if that door is still open, at least a crack, and he is as optimistic as a realist/pessimist like him can be that she will eventually walk through it and return to him, once she has sufficiently recovered her mental health.

his plan is to honor her wishes by staying in vegas himself, giving her the time and space she needs to pursue healing, patiently waiting until she is ready to finally return home to him.

though of course he does have fears that maybe she might decide to stay away permanently—after all, it wouldn't be grissom if he didn't struggle to believe in his own lovability—between his own fears regarding his "unworthiness" and his cautious hopes that sara just needs to recalibrate before she is ready to come back to him, he remains firmly planted in vegas for the six months she is away (between november '07 and may '08).

the way i see things, it isn't until after sara's second departure from vegas in s9 that he really starts to consider following her into "the great unknown," not only because he has a sense that, at that point, her absence from sin city is more permanent but also because, as you mention, by then he is himself becoming burnt out on his job and bears some deep wounds from warrick's death which also contribute to his readiness to leave.

as i talk about here,

[by s9,] grissom is a man on the brink.  ever since sara left vegas in s8, grissom has missed her terribly and been struggling with depression. the lab, which was once his safe place, his “well-ordered kingdom” in an otherwise chaotic world, has become increasingly strange and unwelcoming to him, and particularly as the team has changed, with sara’s departure (which sparked the beginning of the end), warrick’s death (which has been, in itself, another huge and devastating blow), and riley’s addition (which has proven to grissom that things will never be the same again as they were before).   add in the extra heartbreak of sara returning briefly to vegas for warrick’s funeral, spending four months in town, and then suddenly leaving again without even saying goodbye—plus the fact that grissom feels as if he may have truly lost her this time around, given his unwillingness to follow her into the unknown—and you’ve got a grissom who is one step away from completely falling apart.  whereas he once took satisfaction and even comfort in his job, nowadays the cases he investigates horrify and disturb him. he’s lost his appetite. he’s having nightmares. he can barely sleep. barely think. one of the worst parts to all of this is that he is without his usual support system: normally, when he needs comfort, encouragement, and understanding, he turns to sara, but he can’t do that now, not with her gone. what’s more: he is almost haunted by sara’s absence. she was at the heart of both his work and his home life. she was his partner, his right hand, his roommate, his confidante, his support system,his best friend, his lover, his spouse, and his whole world. every place he goes reminds him of her in some way, from their condo (which now feels impossibly empty in her absence), to the lab, to different places around the city where they’ve investigated crimes. hell, he can’t even sleep without dreaming about her—about how he’s lost her. she’s everywhere to him and yet nowhere, and he can’t seem to focus on anything aside from the terrible ache in his chest from missing her so much. that’s the mental space that grissom is in going into episode 09x05 “leave out all the rest”—and then the episode starts with sara finally contacting him, after so many months of radio silence, only to break up with him via video email, telling him not to worry about her anymore and acting like what they’ve had is ~over, even though, for him, it very much isn’t. that is the final blow—the thing that pushes him to the absolute brink of his ability to cope.

so, ultimately, it isn't just one factor that brings grissom to the point where he is ready to leave town but rather a concatenation of them.

outside of missing sara, he is also becoming increasingly horrified by the human depravity he witnesses night in and night out on his job (see, for example, his reaction to the case in episode 09x06 "say uncle") and increasingly unsatisfied with the changes to his work life and team (including the losses of both sara and warrick and the addition of riley adams to the graveyard shift).

warrick's death likewise weighs on him.

heavily.

as i talk about here,

obviously, when warrick dies, it’s devastating for grissom, not only because he holds warrick in his arms as it happens but because he loved warrick so deeply. for as much as grissom’s s9 depression is a product of him missing and being heartbroken over sara, it also is a product of his grief over warrick—and i honestly think that had warrick not died at that time, grissom probably would have taken longer to decide to leave the lab than he does in canon; warrick’s death just shuts the door on that chapter of his life in a very final kind of way. he never truly gets over it.

between all of the above stressors, grissom eventually finds that not only is he willing to leave las vegas but he's ready to.

in the past, clinging to his job had always been "enough" for him, but now he finds he does not take the same pleasure in his work as he formerly did and he needs more—a change of scene and venue, new endeavors in which to invest himself, and, most importantly, human connection; specifically, with the love of his life, sara.

as stated above, i do think that had warrick not died at the start of s9, grissom may have taken longer to eventually reach that breaking point, not only because then sara would not have returned to vegas at the start of s9 only to leave again, shattering grissom's illusions that she might eventually come home for good in the process, but also because he wouldn't have been half as miserable at the lab in that case as he ultimately became in canon.

had warrick still been around, he could have probably mollified himself for somewhat longer; kept convincing himself, "i don't need to come to her. she'll eventually come back to me. everything'll be fine. i just need to keep my head down and do my work in the meanwhile—"

that said, i do believe that grissom still would have ultimately arrived at a point where the center could not hold—where it became apparent to him that he just couldn't be satisfied living his life without sara (even for the sake of his work).

even before grissom was ready to follow her in s8, he was still uncomfortable in her absence and longed to be near her again, and that discomfort and longing only would have grown the longer that she stayed away.

though i can't say exactly when, i am sure there would have someday (probably sooner rather than later) come a time when grissom couldn't stand to live apart from his one true love anymore, even if warrick hadn't died.

so if she hadn't been willing to come home to him*, then he would have eventually gone out to her.

* and who knows? maybe if warrick hadn't died, sara might have eventually come back to vegas of her own volition (to stay) once she was ready. after all, she does eventually move back there and even resume working at the lab come s10, so obviously that development isn't outside of the realm of possibility for her.

anyway.

those are my takes.

thanks for the questions! please feel welcome to send more any time.

[monstermoviedean]

this is getting freed because i was thinking about dean preparing cas' body for the pyre in 13x01 and how he doesn't say anything. and i can absolutely understand why - too overwhelmed by grief, can't speak it, tendency to stop speaking when under extreme stress. i've always thought it made sense. but today i thought about this scene compared to dean speaking to sam's body in 02x22. and i wondered. because i do believe that dean stops speaking sometimes, and i do believe his grief here was extreme, and also? that 02x22 speech works for me. it's one of the best moments of the show to me. i wouldn't trade it for anything.

and so i started thinking about other moments where dabb has (or hasn't) written a character speaking to their deepest and most painful emotions. i thought about dean smashing up the bunker library in 09x10 over kevin's death - no dialogue in that scene, just music. 10x09 when dean kills the traffickers - cut to black, no discussion. 10x22 - dean doesn't get to react to charlie's death except with anger at those who caused it. at no point does he get to acknowledge how important she was to him. and then the destiel fight scene...well. there are some emotions on cas' side, but it's mostly about how cas feels about the mark and dean's ability to fight it. compare to the 08x17 crypt scene, where we see cas' emotions as he fights against naomi and dean's emotions as he tries to get cas to remember. we don't get similar insight in 10x22. it's just dean doing bad because of the mark and cas asking him not to because that would be hard for cas to watch.

season 12 struck me for its brevity in emotional dialogue. it's almost terse. see mary saying goodbye and dean and sam trying to stop her in 12x09:

(there's no real follow-up on this because the episode ends)

and then multiple times in 12x23, including the big brotherly moment of the episode where they think they're about to die together:

crowley and cas' deaths:

and last but not least, mary's goodbye:

there's just...not a lot said in any of them. and that was supposed to be the permanent end for crowley, at least (i'm assuming they knew cas and mary would be brought back).

is this a comprehensive list? no. are there exceptions? sure! the "talk to me" scene in 08x08 has genuine emotion, even if i think it has the subtlety of an oversized rubber mallet being dropped on the viewers' heads. but i looked through all dabb's solo episodes through season 12 and i just have a hard time finding emotion, real emotion. i think there are ways he gets around writing that emotion. and i miss it.

consider this: a lot of dean's silent scenes work because jensen is an excellent actor, particularly when it comes to his expressions and communication emotion without speaking. imagine any of those silent scenes with someone who isn't an excellent actor. not naming names but. you know. they wouldn't work. they wouldn't be brilliant. we would be asking why the writers aren't writing.

i feel like dabb avoids or writes himself out of really strong emotional moments (reactions to kevin's death and reactions to charlie's death were the first to come to mind). in 10x22 alone, we could have had stronger reactions from both winchesters plus cas and rowena, sam reacting to losing crowley, cas reacting to losing dean, dean reacting to anything he did. and we get none of that. because instead we need to see backstory on poor baby nerd cyrus styne so we feel sad when dean shoots him.

[enbyboiwonder]

CSI Challenge | Day 6: Scene that made you fall in love with your favorite character

Every time Hodges acts like a giant dork, every time he lets down his abrasive anti-charisma wall and lets us see him be soft, I fall a little bit more in love with him.

[destieldisaster]

08x08 - Hunteri Heroici

MotW: doctor robbing banks by using the cartoon effect one of his patients accidentally has on the world around him

Any Cas? Yesssss

His heart literally jumped out of his chest

Of course Garth has a safe-house boat 😊

"What's the word, Cas?" "It's a shortened version of my name." Cas you make me so damn happy

The smile on his face when he says he's gonna become a hunter 💙💙💙

Of course he can't sit in the front

"There are no narcotics in that man's system. His molecules are all wrong."

He can smell that he had a bladder infection :')

Be nice to Cas, he's new to this, you can't expect him to scope out the specifics of a whole-ass affair on his first case as a hunter

CAS BEING BAD COP

"So we're looking for some sort of insect-rabbit hybrid?" CAS :')

"The bird represents God and coyote is man, endlessly chasing the devine yet never able to catch him. It's hilarious." :')

Cas going through Dean's stuff!

Dean, you KNOW Cas doesn't sleep

"I'll watch over you" i'm just remembering that meta about how Cas did watch over Dean in purgatory and he doesn't understand why Dean is pretending like that's not okay now and that is honestly exactly how the scene reads and I am losing my miiiind

An actual anvil :')

Cas lifting the anvil

"Your father.. beautiful handwriting" and again thinking of the meta because that's the only nice thing he can say about J*hn!!!! Because he's on team Fuck J*hn Winchester!!!!

He's "friggin' thrilled" that Cas is back 😊

Oh damn, that's a pretty heavy 'no'

"Talk to me" 😭😭😭

"I'm afraid I might kill myself" i'm sobbing sweetheart nooo

God and Dean's look. He understands and I hate it

OKAY, enough pain, back to plot

It's an AoE spell :')

"Wabbit season." "I don't think you pronounced that correctly." 💙💙💙

The woman isn't wrong, Cas is very pretty

"I'll interrogate the cat"

Heyyyy, it's Don E from iZombie! Except with hair!

Cas had almost cracked the cat! I do believe he can talk to cats honestly

Yeah, I can't watch that scene without thinking of the blooper where he's just lying on the ground it's too funny

Damn, that's a lot of cake splatter

Good job Cas!

"Guy eats his Wheaties" :')

CAS PUT THEM INTO HIS MIND

The 'BANG' gun :')

"And you idiot bring a gun to a gag fight" this shooooow

Oh no, Cas hearing Sam's speech about how running away will destroy everything 😭

Damn, dude's seriously powerful

Cas being allowed to ride shotgun!

Oh god, more Naomi

Cas staying there to watch over him because he doesn't know what to do..

Wait what? Amelia's husband wasn't dead? But he got out of her bed when he went to Dean in 8x01, right?

[addictedtostorytelling]

hi aj! I was checking your meta page (it’s so good by the way) and I was wondering if you have some kind of masterpost where you talk about actual dates for certain episodes. I was mainly wondering how much time passed between Sara leaving in season 8, then returning, then leaving again, then Grissom leaving, then Sara coming back in season 10 lol but it’s honestly something that I think about whenever I watch any episode, regarding how much time has passed from a bigger event until then. Sorry if you’ve answered something like this before! Thanks so much for taking the time to answer this too!

hi, anon!

i don't have a masterpost with the full timeline anywhere for two main reasons: 1) because the timeline isn't in a format that is really conducive to tumblr. it's a big, sprawling, unwieldly excel sheet with many contingencies and notes and whatnot (just because the csi timeline is a mess and nothing is as straightforward as it ought to be, unfortunately); and 2) because it's still a work in progress with lots of blanks in it.

that said, i am always happy to answer timeline questions and supply the dates i do have on request!

re: your question:

sara leaves vegas not long after midnight on 11.16.07 (see episode 08x07 "goodbye & good luck");

she is then away from vegas for almost exactly six months. for at least part of this time, she is reportedly in san francisco visiting her mother (see episode 08x08 "you kill me").

sara returns to vegas on the morning of 05.18.08 (see episode 09x01 "for warrick"), catching a direct flight immediately upon hearing news of warrick's death.

sara remains in vegas for a little over four months thereafter, during which time she lives at her and grissom's condo but doesn't resume working at the lab. it is unclear what she does to occupy her time while grissom is at work during this interval.

sara leaves vegas again on 09.27.08 (see episode 09x02 "the happy place") and eventually joins a sea shepherd expedition (see episode 09x05 "leave out all the rest"), which ultimately takes her to costa rica.

grissom reunites with sara in costa rica sometime in early january 2009 (see episode 09x10 "one to go"). sadly, episode 09x10 "one to go" is one of the episodes i've never been able to find a solid date for.

after their rainforest reunion, grissom and sara spend eight months living together—during which time they marry and move to france—until 09.24.09 (see episode 10x01 "family affair"), when sara returns to vegas to "moonlight" at the crime lab while she and grissom await some sort of research grant that they apparently never do end up getting.

thanks for the question! please feel welcome to send another any time.

[addictedtostorytelling]

Hello, I love your interpretations and I would like to know if you think that Grissom (when he talks to Cath) really thinks that Sara is happy when she leaves 08x08 without him. They are soulmaters , maybe he thinks about it at work, but grissom thinks she's happy without him?

hi, anon!

thank you for your kind words. <3

re: your question:

so it's not that grissom thinks sara is happy during the events of episode 08x08 "you kill me"—it's that he thinks that in time, she could be.

like.

make no mistake: not only had grissom already somewhat suspected that sara was not faring well even prior to the events of episode 08x07 "goodbye & good luck," but when she gives him that heartbreaking kiss and flees out of the lab in tears, he knows she's in crisis, a notion which is then undoubtedly even further confirmed to him once he reads her letter and is later able to speak to her on the phone and hear the anguish in her voice—one imagines she is probably crying pretty hard the first time she talks to him in the aftermath of her exit—as she apologizes to him for leaving and expresses fears of her own brokenness.

i mean.

for as emotionally obtuse as grissom can sometimes be, he can't miss all of those unmistakable signposts.

he knows his girl is in distress during the events of episode 08x07 "goodbye & good luck" and probably still is so even a week later, by the time the events of episode 08x08 "you kill me" are taking place.

he knows she's miserable.

he realizes she is in the midst of a major depressive episode and is likely suffering from ptsd in the wake of her abduction.

so it's not that he thinks she is at that moment happy.

rather, the reason why he says what he does to catherine is because he is holding out hope that even though sara is not happy at the moment, maybe in the future she can be again, and he is willing to do whatever is necessary—including for the moment keeping his distance from her—in order to make her so.

and here's where things get messy.

as i talk about in this post, during sara's s8 absence, there is a part of grissom that remains optimistic that if sara just takes some time away from the lab/vegas to clear her head, she will eventually recover enough that she will be able to return and resume living "the beautiful life" with him.

the facts that she is still in contact with him and is adamant that she still loves him and that her distress is nothing that he has caused all give him good reason to hope that maybe given some time and (temporary) distance, she'll be able to "get right."

he knows she has been through a lot not only over the last few months but throughout the course of her entire life.

maybe, he thinks, if she just steps back for a moment and gives herself a chance to heal—visiting her mother in san francisco and doing whatever else it is she needs to do—she'll be able to process that trauma in a way that she never has before. and, of course, he wishes he could be there to help her do so, but as she has explicitly told him she wants/needs to take these measures on her own, he is willing to respect her decision and stay in vegas while she's off processing things. he loves her enough to give her that latitude, if that's what she needs from him.

but, of course, the tricky thing is is that there is also another part of grissom—the fearful, pessimistic, self-loathing part—that can't help but worry that maybe the reason why sara needed to leave vegas (and him) in the first place was because he had already failed her so badly, and she knew she could never get better as long as he was around.

he has always carried this deep-seated, terrible concern within him that at some point sara might realize his inadequacies and eventually choose to cut ties with him, and he can't help but fear that maybe that time has finally come.

after all, doesn't everybody always tell him he's bad at the emotional stuff?

maybe if he had been a better, more supportive partner, she never would have sunk so deep into the depths of this depression to begin with. maybe even if she doesn't consciously realize as much yet, there is some subconscious part of her that recognizes that he cannot offer her the kind of emotional grounding she needs in order to work through her trauma. maybe he is too much of the world of darkness, and what she needs is light.

for as much as he wants to believe that she will just take a few weeks or months off from vegas, recuperate, and then return to resume their happy life together, he also can't help but wonder if maybe "life with him" and "happiness" are two things that will ultimately prove to be mutually exclusive for her.

and so he remains torn.

on the one hand, he feels as if maybe the door is still open for sara to return to him and for them to live happily ever after together. on the other hand, he feels as if maybe she'll never be happy as long as he is in the picture.

while when sara is present, her comportment around him is enough to convince him that she is actually very happy with him—i mean, just look at the way she lights up for him!—once she is gone, his doubts start to creep in, and his low self-esteem compels him to question whether or not she was actually so satisfied with him after all.

certainly, he doesn't want it to be true that sara cannot be happy while sharing a life with him.

but he also cannot help but worry that maybe such is the case.

and if it is, here is the heartbreaking thing: he's willing to let her go because he cares more about her happiness than he does about his own.

like.

he knows he can never be happy living a life without her, but if for whatever reason she cannot be happy living a life with him, then he will choose her happiness over his own, no question.

for those of you keeping track at home, this line of reasoning is the same one that eventually leads him to divorce her in s13, despite the fact that the last thing in the world he actually wants is to sever their ties.

so all of the above is to say that grissom doesn't think that sara at the moment is happy being away from him or even that her being away from him is necessarily requisite to her eventual happiness.

he just thinks that maybe it could be.

and if it is, then he is willing to allow her to walk away from him and pursue that happiness however she needs to, even if it means he will be miserable forever in her wake.

while of course he would prefer if they could be happy together—that's what he more than anything wants—he realizes that that outcome may not be possible. and if not, he'll accept whatever decisions she makes.

because that's the bottom line, just like he says: he just wants her to be happy, no matter what that happiness looks like, no matter how it's achieved, regardless of what it may mean for him personally.

of course, the ironic thing is, the whole time grissom is thinking along these lines, sara is over on her side thinking the exact same kinds of things with regards to him.

of course, the even more ironic thing is that the thing that would make both of them happiest is just being together, and if they would just talk to each other, they'd probably realize as much sooner rather than later.

dummies.

i mean, literally geniuses, but also dummies.

thanks for the question! please feel welcome to send another any time.

[enbyboiwonder]

CSI Challenge | Day 5: Favorite side character

I know I don’t talk about him much (or at all), but tbh I adore Bobby Dawson.

[enbyboiwonder]

CSI Challenge | Day 20: Favorite scene in the morgue

08.08 You Kill Me: Super Dave “dying” to report that there is “no sign of sexual trauma.”

[enbyboiwonder]

Bobby Dawson in 08.08 You Kill Me (for @frozenmemories1987)

[enbyboiwonder]

Wendy: Gun guys shoot people.

Mandy: Gun guys don't shoot people. People shoot people!

Hodges: Actually, bullets shoot people, shot from guns which are usually in the hands of gun guys.

[addictedtostorytelling]

Could you please make a list of the most comforting and/or funniest CSI episodes?

hey, @coping-via-clint-eastwood​!

these episodes are just my personal choices; your mileage may vary.

obviously, i tend to skew toward episodes with gsr in them. i also don’t mind the occasional serious note in my comfort episodes.

1. episode 02x05 "scuba doobie-doo" (comfort)

cases: scuba diver up a tree, missing body at the apartment complex

this is episode has some comedy, some romance, and some interesting problem-solving and deduction. the cases involved aren’t too heavy—or at least aren’t presented in a heavy way—and the stakes are relatively low all around. all in all, just good, classic csi with some excellent gsr, including the famous “chalk” face-touching scene. one of those episodes that reminds me why i love this show so much.

2. episode 02x16 "primum non nocere" (comfort)

cases: hockey homicide, overdosed musician

while the case nick and warrick investigate is, admittedly, a bit on the somber side, overall, i would still call this a comfort episode. obviously, the high point here is the gsr (“since i met you”), but there’s also some great friendship moments between nick and warrick, sara and greg, and grissom and catherine. the cases de jour are both interesting, and there’s excellent dialogue throughout. one of those episodes i find myself returning to again and again. 

3. episode 05x23 "iced" (comfort)

cases: asphyxiated co-eds, missing corpse, crop circle killing

a good, mostly lighthearted episode with three interesting cases. while grissom is scarce, the other team members all get chances to shine, as does ecklie in one of his more likable and comical turns. sara and greg blowing up a dorm room toilet together is memorable, as is grissom teasing ecklie about his (rusty) field skills. low drama, high cute factor all around. a good episode to watch when you’re looking for something entertaining and generally upbeat.

4. 06x21 "rashomama" (humor)

cases: mother-of-the-groom mob hit, grand theft auto (victim: nick stokes)

my favorite comedy episode of the series—and honestly just one of my favorite episodes period. it’s got it all: hilarious guest stars, delightful running gags (“you’d think she’d know better than to wear white on the bride’s big day”), memorable visuals, inspired character work, etc. while each csi’s version of events is funny in its own way, greg’s is a standout. there’s also a smattering of gsr if you know where to look. csi at its comedic best. can’t recommend it highly enough.   

5. 07x20 "lab rats" (humor)

cases: rehashing the saga of the miniature killer, grissom and doc vs. the rat

this episode takes the minor characters of csi and makes them the main characters for a day to excellent results. not only do hodges and his crew of lab rats have a delightful repartee, but there are also top tier tongue-in-cheek moments and fun hijinks throughout. you can really tell that the actors, both main and minor cast, had a blast filming this one. hands down one of my favorite clips episodes of any show ever—and especially because it actually advances the plot.   

6. 07x21 "ending happy" (humor)

case: the multiple homicides of happy morales

another one of my favorite comedy episodes and favorite episodes overall. shout out to some of the funniest guest stars in csi history and to a premise that doesn’t take itself too seriously at all. in addition to being laugh-out-loud funny in places (“do i look like paula abdul to you?”), there’s also some peak gsr romance. i’ve been watching this episode for years, and it still makes me smile every time.

7. 08x08 "you kill me" (humor)

a well-needed palate cleanser after the sorrow that is episode 08x07 “goodbye & good luck,” this episode takes its cues from episode 07x20 “lab rats” before it. once again, the interactions between hodges and his fellow techs delight, as do the many fourth wall-breaking meta moments we see as they play their game.

hope you enjoy!

thanks for the question! feel welcome to send another any time.

[addictedtostorytelling]

steffie2801 asks: i didnt get the feeling that grissom was oblivious to whats going with sara [in episode 08x07 “goodbye & good luck”], i find it more troubling how he is behaving after she was gone. i have now read multiple metas of yours and all of them always basically say that sara his the love of his life, the only woman he has ever loved and will ever love. so why doesn’t he care about her abscence in the episodes after 08x07? she left without showing that she will ever come back and grissom is just ok with this? he continues as if nothing happend, he is just happy. he even agrees with hodgens when he tells him that grissom didnt want to give up his puzzles but sara wanted to so they had to part ways. And not that he just does not care about sara breaking up with him and letting her leave in season 8 in season9 he is repeating it, basically pushing her away and telling her to leave through the case they are working. Is this how a man would behave if he truly loves his woman?

hey, @steffie2801!

my interpretation of grissom’s behavior after sara leaves las vegas is different than yours.

i don’t at all see him being okay—much less “happy”—with sara being gone or not caring about her absence. 

to the contrary, in my view, in almost every episode of late s8, there is clear evidence showing how much he misses her and how conflicted he is regarding their current predicament, and early s9 is one long slog of heartbreak and confusion until finally he overcomes his doubts and follows her to costa rica.

while there are many reasons why grissom doesn’t initially follow after sara until the middle of s9—including his desire to honor her wishes and respect her boundaries, his personal insecurities and fear of rejection, his sense of responsibility to the lab, etc.—none of them have anything to do with him being apathetic to her absence.

to me, the grissom of late s8 and early s9 is one who is clearly heartbroken but doesn’t know what to do to help himself. though he very much wants to be with sara, he sees no clear path to her—or at least no clear path which doesn’t also pose an extreme risk to his sense of personal security and well-being. 

for a long time, his fears conquer him, true, and he is unable to pursue sara for fear of losing out on her in the end. 

however, ultimately, his love overcomes his fears, and he decides he is ready to make the changes necessary to leave his old life behind and go to sara after all.

in the end, that he delayed in going to sara does nothing to diminish the fact that he wanted to be with her all along.

“the course of true love never did run smooth” and all that.

more explanation after the “keep reading,” if you’re interested.

__________

let’s take your points one at a time, okay?

how come grissom doesn’t seem to care about sara’s absence after she departs vegas in episode 08x07 “goodbye & good luck”? why does he seem so okay or even happy with her gone?

while it’s true that grissom doesn’t immediately leave vegas to follow sara off into the great unknown, i disagree strongly with the notion that he “doesn’t seem to care” about her absence. 

in almost every episode of late s8, there is some evidence, either textual or subtextual, which points to how much he misses and yearns for her.

for a more detailed discussion of these evidences, i’ll direct you to my s8 gsr shipper’s guide.

however, to review them in brief here:   

episode 08x07 “goodbye & good luck” (11.16.07): leaving grissom with nothing but a kiss and goodbye letter, sara flees las vegas without telling him where she is going. in her letter, she avers that though she will love him forever, she cannot remain in his city. though she does not state that she will never return to las vegas, her farewell does have a sense of finality, suggesting that she perhaps means to break up with grissom, not due to lack of love but because she is “setting him free” on account of their future being uncertain.

episode 08x08 “you kill me” (11.21.07): within the next five days in show time, grissom has reestablished phone contact with sara. he knows that she is in san francisco visiting her mother. he also knows that her wishes are that he not go after her. despite his coworkers advising him to do otherwise, he chooses to honor her wishes, both because he believes that doing so will make her happy AND because he is himself unprepared to leave behind the certainty of his life in las vegas to follow sara into the great unknown. in terms of his mood, he resists various attempts his teammates make to cheer him and generally seems morose until he eventually allows himself to be temporarily distracted by hodges’s murder mystery game. when hodges states that while sara was ready to leave the lab, grissom himself is not, grissom agrees with this assessment; however, this is something of an oversimplification of the matter on his part. (i’ll discuss this point in more detail later on in this analysis.) 

episode 08x09 “cockroaches” (approx. early 12.07): in this episode, grissom confronts warrick for allowing his divorce to negatively impact his job performance, and warrick admits that his relationship troubles have “taken the wind out of [his] sails” and left him feeling disconnected. while grissom never mentions sara by name during this scene, his nonverbal cues demonstrate that he relates to warrick’s feelings more than he cares to acknowledge, and his terse response to warrick’s admission—“you’ve got your work. don’t screw that up”—reveals his maladaptive coping mechanism of choice (i.e., throwing himself into his job even more so than usual).

episode 08x10 “lying down with the dogs” (approx. mid 12.07): there are no references to sara or grissom’s relationship with her, either direct or indirect, in this episode. however, it’s worth noting that grissom is clearly tense and weighed down throughout the course of the gedda investigation, and his patience for warrick’s refusal to back off of the case is extraordinarily low by his standards. he is not a happy man here at all.

episode 08x11 “bull” (approx. 01.10.08): grissom’s feelings for sara are one of the major—if underlying—themes of this episode. when nick quips about how poetry can help one make sense of his girl leaving him, grissom attests that it can indeed be helpful in that regard, speaking from personal experience. (as we’ll see in the next episode, grissom has seemingly been reading shakespeare sonnets in order to process his feelings about sara.) throughout the episode, grissom proceeds to identify himself with the cowboy/victim and sara with the cowboy/victim’s beloved. at the end of the investigation when he reads the cowboy/victim’s poem, he apparently finds the words personally resonant. if we interpret the poem through a gsr lens, we can infer that while grissom is willing to allow sara to “run free,” as is her nature, he desperately hopes that one day she might return to him, and that when she does, he will be enough for her (as her “cowboy in the sun”).

episode 08x12 “grissom’s divine comedy” (04.03.08): by now, we’ve had a bit of a time jump within the universe of the show, going from january to april. at this point, sara has been absent from vegas for four and a half months. however, time has not erased her from grissom’s life, as this episode is replete with evidence that she still occupies a very prominent place in his thoughts and heart and, indeed, that he is even still in contact with her. for one thing, he paraphrases sara at one point. for another thing, when deputy district attorney maddy klein makes a somewhat wry quip about how grissom is the only man who’s never let her down, which, according to her, means that he’s either “a classic enabler or [her] soulmate,” grissom pulls a face that implies he is deeply uncomfortable with the insinuation she has made, even if it is jocular in nature. he knows who his soulmate is, and maddy isn’t her. for yet another thing, throughout the episode, grissom has his shakespeare collection sitting on his coffee table, obviously recently read from; given his comments in the previous episode and our knowledge that he associates sara with shakespeare sonnets (see episode 07x22 “leapin’ lizards”), we can infer that he has been reading from the volume while processing his feelings about her absence. additionally, while extracanonical, the famous deleted scene from this episode confirms that despite having moved out, sara is still very much an “absent presence” at grissom’s condo, with her clothing in the closet, her green plants on the window sill, and photos of her everywhere. of course, the real pièce de résistance to this episode, gsr-wise, is that while grissom spends most of the investigation sick and in poor spirits, when he finally gets home after the case has been closed, he receives a phone call and immediately perks up, smiling and lying back on the couch, seemingly ready to have a long conversation with the person on the other end of the line; while this person is never explicitly identified, the fact that the shakespeare collection is prominently framed within the scene coupled with the grissom-as-dante metaphor which prevails throughout the episode heavily implies that the caller is sara (i.e., the beatrice to grissom’s dante). from this ending, we learn that grissom is seemingly in at least somewhat regular contact with sara at this point, and that when he does talk to her, he does so happily. to my mind, this represents a change in the status quo from december/january, when grissom was more visibly tense and morose; now that some time has passed and he and sara have reestablished more regular contact, grissom seems more secure and less upset. it is perhaps possible that at this point, he even has some hope that once sara “gets herself right,” she’ll return to vegas. however, this hopeful period is probably only temporary for him, as the more time wears on, the less likely it seems that sara will ever come home after all.

episodes 08x13 “a thousand days on earth” to 08x16 “two and a half deaths” (approx. early 04.08 to early 05.08): during this span, there aren’t as many direct references to sara or hints about grissom’s feelings regarding her and their relationship. while there are some lighthearted moments for him (and in particular episode 08x16 “two and half deaths” casts him and brass in a screwball comedy situation), there are also plenty of times when he appears pensive and “down” (such as during the events of episode 08x13 “a thousand days on earth,” which is an incredibly depressing episode all around). however, while the show itself doesn’t place much focus on sara and/or gsr during this period—likely because the writers were trying to move on in the wake of jorja fox’s departure—i still see evidence that grissom has sara on his mind, such as in episode 08x15 “the theory of everything,” when grissom explains string theory to the team, a concept he almost certainly either initially learned about or at least had rhapsodized to him by sara, who is a physicist by training.                 

from here, we get into the events of episodes 08x17 “for gedda” and 09x01 “for warrick,” which take place on 05.17.08 and 05.18.08, respectively. 

at this point, sara returns to vegas, almost six months to the day after her original departure. she ends up staying in sin city for four months, until 09.27.08, after which time she takes leave again.

we’ll discuss the intricacies of grissom’s response to sara in s9 in more detail below, but suffice it to say that his misery in her absence is even more prominently addressed here than it was throughout s8.

so.

just looking at s8, after sara leaves vegas in episode 08x07 “goodbye & good luck,” grissom’s feelings regarding her and her absence play a noticeable role in about half of the remaining episodes throughout the rest of the season. while grissom remains functional during this time and experiences some occasional upswings (seemingly contingent upon how much contact he has with sara and how optimistic he is regarding their relationship overall), he is not depicted as being particularly “happy,” and, indeed, in at least six out of ten episodes is depicted as being notably tense, melancholy, depressed, wistful, morose, and/or angry.

though the scripts don’t always explicitly link his bad moods to sara’s absence, there are ample context clues to suggest that such is the case—and especially given that we do have one concrete example where talking to sara on the phone is enough to immediately improve his low spirits.

just in terms of the eye test, i would say that in general throughout the season, grissom appears to be more often either morose or just a baseline “eh” than genuinely happy; seldom do we see him being playful, jokey, or wily in the way that he is when he’s really feeling good.

to me, there’s lots of evidence (both main text and sub) which shows that grissom consistently thinks about sara while she’s gone, misses her, and, indeed, suffers for her absence. from paraphrasing little sara-isms to reading poetry to cope with her being gone, he has her on his mind and in his heart. he’s processing his feelings and trying to decide how to go forward.

which brings us to our next point.

is grissom okay with the idea that sara might never come back to vegas? why doesn’t he go after her until mid-s9?

first off, we should acknowledge that s8 and s9 represent two different situations.

when sara initially leaves vegas in s8, she does so without knowing to where she is going or what exactly she intends to do while she is gone. she has no definite plans to return to vegas and so she bids farewell to grissom, fully aware that they may never see each other again. though her initial impulse is seemingly to “set him free” (out of a sense of fairness to him), as discussed in the timeline above, they do eventually reestablish somewhat regular phone contact with each other at some point, and so their relationship enters a state of flux, wherein they are neither officially broken up nor officially together, both still in love with each other but also uncertain as to what their future holds. 

during this time, grissom rides a roller coaster of emotions, ranging from worry for sara to confusion over the state of their relationship to longing for her to return to fear that she will not to doubt concerning his own “worthiness” of her to feelings of rejection and abandonment to hope to hopelessness and everything in-between—and, above all, love. 

for six months, he waits, not knowing when he might ever see sara again and torn between his desire to be with her and his fears that he will not be able to keep her in the long run anyway.

while his stated reasons for not going after her are that he is honoring her wishes and that he is unready to himself leave the lab, and these stated reasons are both certainly in play, the truth is very much more complex.

it’s not just that he refrains from going after her because she’s told him she doesn’t want him to; it’s that he fears that if he does go after her, she won’t want him in the long run. 

likewise, it’s not only that he’s a workaholic who can’t bring himself to leave his job in order to chase his dream girl; it’s that he is also deathly afraid that leaving his job to chase his dream girl will result in him ending up with nothing.

in his heart of hearts, he hopes that maybe sara will someday return to him of her own volition, proving that she wants him in the long term after all. 

but in the meantime, until he has some proof that his deep-seated longing is fully and enthusiastically reciprocated, he can’t bring himself to put everything on the line and go to her; though he loves her deeply, he is too afraid to take the risk.

in s9, things are different.

during the events of episode 09x01 “for warrick,” sara returns to vegas upon hearing the sad news of warrick’s death. she ends up staying in sin city for four months, between may and september ‘08.

during these four months, she lives with grissom and shares a life with him again. however, she also never puts down roots—refusing to take back her old job at the lab or make any future plans, always keeping one eye on the horizon, carrying with her a nervous kind of energy.

while grissom welcomes her back and probably (at least for a time) has hope that her return could be a permanent one, he eventually takes note of her skittishness and intuits that she will likely leave again at some point.

this sense that her stay in vegas is only temporary places them in flux yet again—while they are cohabiting and spending time together, going through the motions of a relationship, they have no traction with which to move forward; they are always just waiting for the proverbial other shoe to drop.

the longer sara lingers, the more anxious they both become, until eventually they confront the issue during the events of episode 09x02 “the happy place” and sara makes the harrowing decision to once again leave vegas—this time almost certainly (or so she and tptb at the network believe for the moment) never to return.

this go around, she makes her exit without even telling grissom goodbye or giving him any clues as to her whereabouts, meaning that he cannot follow her even if he wants to.

for two and half months after leaving town, sara is incommunicado, and grissom has no idea where she is or what she’s doing. despite having essentially asked sara to take this course of action, he hates having her gone and struggles to cope in her absence. then, she sends him a video email, effectively breaking off their engagement and “setting him free” to seek bliss where he will. 

while she views this action as an act of mercy and, indeed, a fulfillment of the request grissom made to her during the events of episode 09x02 “the happy place,” it turns out that grissom is even more miserable having this “closure” than he was previously without it.

distraught, he sinks into a deep depression, losing interest in his work, having no appetite, and barely sleeping. eventually, he seeks the counsel of heather kessler, who is often a better diviner of his emotions than he can be for himself, and she poses the problem to him plainly: the time has come for him to make a decision once and for all; he must choose either fear or love, staying in his comfort zone or going into the great unknown to pursue the girl he loves.

as we know, he eventually chooses the latter options, giving up his job at the lab and comfortable vegas existence to fly to costa rica and reunite with sara in the jungle.

while these two periods of absence for sara in s8 and s9 certainly mirror each other, it is important to note that in the first case, grissom and sara’s relationship status is far more open to interpretation, and it is far less certain whether sara is gone for good or if she might possibly return to vegas someday (at least within the universe of show); whereas in the second, grissom and sara do eventually officially break up and it is almost certain (or so everyone supposes at the time) that sara will never come home again. 

the difference between these two scenarios is the difference between a door that is half-opened and a door that is all the way closed and locked. 

this is why there is a change in timbre between grissom’s behavior in s8 vs. his behavior in s9: because in the one case he has some hope but in the other he is mostly hopeless.

however, that’s not to say that even in s8, grissom doesn’t miss sara and want to be with her—because he does.       

in the case of s8, there are various reasons why grissom doesn’t “go after” sara, none of which has anything to do with a lack of love for her. 

for one thing, she’s told him not to follow her, and he’s trying to respect her wishes.

that sara seemingly tells grissom that she doesn’t want him to join her in san francisco (as per what grissom reports to catherine in episode 08x08 “you kill me”) suggests that grissom has either already offered to join her and she declined him OR that she anticipated that he might try to join her and she headed him off at the pass. 

in either case, she’s expressed her desire that he stay put, and he’s respecting her boundaries.

and that’s not altogether a bad thing—even though, in this case, there is probably some part of sara that secretly hopes that grissom will fly to her side anyway, her express wishes be damned.

of course, sara’s prohibition against him going after her isn’t the only reason why grissom remains in nevada.

for another thing, for as much as he loves her, he’s also grappling with a deep-seated fear of the unknown and his age-old insecurities regarding his own lovability in the long term.

he is torn between his desire to chase what he wants and his feeling that if he does so, he will end up losing everything he needs.

his dilemma is not a small one.

remember: at this point, sara has not given any indication that she will ever return to las vegas, so if grissom leaves to go after her, then there is some possibility that that chapter of his life will close forever. 

without knowing if he’ll ever be back, let alone when, he’ll be giving up his job and regular contact with the rest of his lab family. he’ll be walking away from everything he’s built for himself over the last 20+ years. his comfortable, familiar existence, where he has routines and regular haunts and a sense of purpose, will end. for the first time in decades, he’ll not know what he’s doing or where he’s going, except that he’ll be following sara.

—and, honestly, were he guaranteed that making such a grand sacrifice would result in them being together forever and living happily ever after, i think he’d make it in a heartbeat.

but there’s the rub:

he isn’t guaranteed that all will end well.

from his perspective, there is a big chance that if he walks away from his life in las vegas in order to get the girl, sacrificing everything for love, he’ll end up losing out not only on the job, the sense of control, the stability, etc. but also on the girl herself.

grissom, as always, struggles with incredibly low self-esteem and feels that he is patently unlovable. while he knows that sara has loved him in the past and professes to still love him now, he fears that she may not love him forever, and especially not if he can do nothing to help her heal from the traumas that caused her to flee vegas in the first place.

he feels like even if he does leave his job, his comfort zone, and everything he knows behind in order to chase after sara, there is a good chance that he won’t be “enough” for her, and eventually she’ll leave him, meaning that he will, ultimately, lose everything. 

to return to a notion introduced previously, that’s why he clings to the lab and his “puzzles” so hard—not because he loves them more than sara but because they’re a sure thing, a security blanket, and he’s afraid of what might happen if he gives them up to be with someone who may not want him around forever.

when he tells hodges that he isn’t ready to leave the lab, he’s not just talking about being unwilling to retire. what he isn’t fully saying but is absolutely feeling is that he isn’t ready to walk away from something certain for a life of uncertainty and that he doesn’t want to have to find out who he is outside of the “safety bubble” of his job.

sara is to a point where, though she has been as much of a workaholic as grissom, she is now prepared to find out who she is beyond her identity as a criminalist, beyond her place in the lab hierarchy, without that old crutch of work-work-work, but not so for grissom.

not yet.

he’s still too worried that once all of his professional attainments are stripped away and he can no longer define himself in terms of his career, he’ll be found lacking.

he’s a superb criminalist, but he may not be much of a man.

what if he follows sara into the great unknown only for her to find him inadequate? 

what if he leaves everything behind only for her to leave him (again)?   

remember: sara has just walked out on him, and for as much as her reasons for doing so have everything to do with her mental health and nothing to do with a lack of love for or desire to hurt him, the bottom line is that her decision isn’t one made in a vacuum; regardless of her intentions, her leaving (and especially so abruptly) does cause him pain and stoke his fears that he doesn’t fulfill her needs. he is left wondering if she could have stayed were he a better partner to her—more attentive, more experienced in love, less “in his own head.” those emotional wounds and self-doubts carry with him the whole time she’s gone, and they definitely figure in to why he doesn’t immediately go chasing after her.

couple this uncertainty with the nebulous state of his and sara’s relationship during this period—even if sara intends to break up with grissom when she first leaves vegas, they quickly reestablish phone contact and have some kind of undefined romantic, long-distance ~thing~ going on by the end of the season (see episode 08x12 “grissom’s divine comedy”)—and you end up with grissom remaining in vegas after sara leaves:

a) because he believes she doesn’t want him to follow her; b) because he fears that if he does follow her, he risks losing everything he’s ever cared about, including her, and that is a risk he’s not yet emotionally prepared to take; and c) because he and sara are stuck in a strange “holding pattern,” wherein they find themselves living in separate states with no idea of when they might ever be (physically) together again but still are deeply in love with each other and having at least semiregular contact, neither fully broken up nor fully together, waiting without knowing exactly for what.

while grissom may rationalize that he stays because he doesn’t want to leave the short-staffed graveyard shift high and dry and/or because he isn’t ready to retire yet, and while these rationalizations may to some extent be true, the underlying truth is that he’s scared, and when he’s scared, his m.o. is to hesitate.

neither option (either staying or going) feels entirely safe to him here, but at least staying is familiar to him.

that so, he lives his life between mid-november ‘07 and mid-may ‘08 in a state of arrested development. he doesn’t go to sara, but he also doesn’t shut the door on her. he pines. he yearns. he suffers in her absence. but he also buries himself in his work, downplays his upset to his remaining coworkers, and tries to carry on as if all will end well because he doesn’t know how to do anything else.

secretly, he wishes that the situation will somehow resolves itself—that sara will someday return to sin city so that they can pick up where they left off.

—which brings us to s9, when warrick dies, and suddenly grissom’s wish comes true, albeit not in the way that he wants it to.

as stated above, when sara returns to vegas, stays for four months, and then abruptly leaves again, the whole situation is very different than the one in s8, as this time around, she (at least for a while) takes the decision to follow her or not out of grissom’s hands.

whereas before she simply told him not to pursue her, in this instance, she doesn’t even give him the option, as she neglects to inform him of where she’s going and cuts off all contact between them between late september and early december ‘08.

only after she sends her video break-up email does grissom learn any clues as to where she is and how he could find her.

and even then, it likely takes him some detective work in order to do so; he probably has to use some csi tricks to track down her ip address and cross-check it with known locations of sea shepherd ships in the south atlantic and then hunt down the organization’s itinerary so he can determine where she is currently, etc., etc., etc.

so in s8, grissom doesn’t go after sara for numerous reasons though largely out of fear, and in s9, he doesn’t go after her both because he is still afraid AND because he doesn’t have the means to.

while he accepts that she has left vegas (and that doing so is her prerogative) and is aware that she may never come back, what he isn’t okay with is the idea that he will never see her again. he is therefore better able to cope with her absence during s8, when he still has some hope that she may eventually return to be with him, than he does in s9, when he feels he truly may have lost her forever.

it is both the threat of really losing her forever and his mounting misery in her prolonged absence which prompt him to realize that he must go after her and inspire him to overcome his fears—eventually, he realizes that he’s more afraid of being without her forever than he is of anything else.

if grissom is still in love with sara and wants to be with her, then why does he seemingly “push her away” and use a case to suggest that she leave again during early s9?

for as much as grissom is relieved to have sara back when she returns to vegas at the start of s9, he is also anxious. 

since she has already left him once, he knows that it is possible that she could leave him again—and the longer she stays in town without fully settling in, the more he starts to fear that such will be the case. 

she never returns to work at the lab. she never makes promises that she’ll stick around. she always seems to have one foot halfway out the door, and the fact that she does worries grissom in the worst kind of way.

as i talk about in this post,

when sara leaves grissom for the first time back in 2007, she does so messily: she writes him a note in which she tells him she’ll love him forever but expresses doubt that they will ever see each other again. after that, she is just gone for a while, and grissom doesn’t know if they’ll ever resume contact. but then she starts calling him. and then she does come back, when warrick dies midway through 2008. for four months after that, they play the “will we or won’t we?” game; she stays in vegas but always seems to be on the verge of leaving again. grissom doesn’t know what is going on or what to expect or what to do.

that’s why when she finally leaves again in september 2008, it is almost a relief to grissom—because after months of uncertainty, he finally has an answer.

it’s just that, eventually, he determines it is an answer he can’t live with, which is why he goes after her, come january 2009.

that’s why they eventually get into that (veiled) argument during the events of episode 09x02 “the happy place”: because grissom can’t stand the uncertainty anymore; because he feels as if he and sara are stuck, with her unwilling to return to vegas on a permanent basis and him unwilling to leave, and yet he recognizes that he isn’t strong enough to do anything to “unstick them” himself. 

if he could have sara back with him and know that she would stay forever, that’s the option that he’d choose, hands down; that would be his heart’s desire. 

but since she can’t bring herself to commit to living in sin city full time—and since he, in his view, isn’t “enough” to make her want to stay—then he needs her to be the strong one and impose some definition on their situation; he needs her to say “it’s over” and finally allow them both some closure. 

it’s not the option that he wants, and god knows it will break his heart, but it’s the only viable option that he feels that he’s left with.

it’s the reality he knows he must accept.

and when he voices these needs, sara ultimately agrees with him.

she leaves vegas for a second time, and, finally, a few months later, she officially breaks up with him via a video email message.

she does so thinking she’s being kind to him.

of course, though neither one of them anticipates it, what actually ends up happening is that he tells her he needs out, she acquiesces, and then he immediately comes to the realization that “out” was the last thing in the world he actually wanted.

being with her without actually being with her was causing him pain, so he thought he would be better off if she cut their ties. but he couldn’t have been more wrong, as his obvious depression throughout the rest of s9 shows.

finally: why does grissom behave in the way he does if he truly loves sara?

grissom’s story arc throughout the course of the show revolves around him overcoming his fear of rejection in order to form connections—to some extent with the team but even more especially with sara.

time and time again, we see him afraid to take risks to be with her because he fears that if he does so, he’ll end up losing everything. such is the case in the early seasons of the show, when he is reluctant to acknowledge the true depth of his feelings for her, let alone to act on them, both due to professional anxieties and personal ones; and such is also the case during s8 and s9, when he is torn between wanting to go after her after she leaves vegas but afraid that if he does so he’ll end up bereft of both her and everything that he’s ever cared about otherwise.

however, though he sometimes takes a very long time to come around, he always eventually does so—and to me, that’s the real evidence of his love for her, right there.

yes, he hesitates. yes, he delays. yes, he frets. yes, he fears.

but he also loves, and in the end, his love always wins out.

after four and a half years of runaround, he does start dating her.

over a year after she first leaves town, he finally follows her into the unknown.

after the divorce, he keeps his distance for far too long, but ultimately he does come back.

it’s the angels he heeds in the end that tell us where his heart truly lies in regards to her.

so though he does initially remain in vegas and throw himself into his work, his doing so should not be mistaken for a sign that he is apathetic about sara or ambivalent toward their relationship. 

he loves her. he just doesn’t always know how to navigate that love or negotiate it in the face of his fears, is all. figuring out a course often takes him a while, and especially in complicated situations such as this one.

of course, having said all of the above, if you don’t see evidence that grissom loves sara even though he initially delays in “going after her” during s8 and s9, i don’t know that anything i can write will convince you. 

i just know that personally, grissom’s behavior during this period only really makes sense to me in terms of him loving sara so much but being so scared to lose her.

anyway, thanks for the questions! feel welcome to send more any time.

[addictedtostorytelling]

Hey! So I have a Sara question, of course. Can you guess how long Sara stayed “with her mom” after leaving LV? I was wondering if you have conjecture surrounding that time I.e how that may have helped her following the events of her kidnapping. I just wonder because I would expect that to bring back bad memories, especially.

hey, anon!

so in terms of the timetable, i can offer you a window. 

within the universe of the show: 

sara first leaves las vegas on 11.16.07 (see episode 08x07 “goodbye and good luck”);

grissom reveals that sara is visiting her mother on approximately 11.21.07 (see episode 08x08 “you kill me”);

throughout the remainder of s8, we see sporadic confirmation that grissom continues to have phone contact with sara (see episode 08x12 “grissom’s divine comedy”);

however, we do not get any further word on sara’s whereabouts until s9, at which point she returns to las vegas for warrick’s funeral on 05.18.08 (see episode 09x01 “for warrick”);

she lingers in las vegas with grissom for just over four months before leaving sin city for a second time on 09.27.08 (see episode 09x02 “the happy place”);

by december 2008, she has joined the crew of a sea shepherd bound for costa rica (see episode 09x05 “leave out all the rest”). 

based on those dates, we can say that the window for sara’s visit to see her mother in san francisco falls between about 11.17.07 to 05.17.08---which gives us exactly six months of not-fully-accounted-for time to work with.

save for grissom’s lone revealing statement about the laura visit in episode 08x08 “you kill me,” the show tells us next to nothing about how sara actually spends said six months.

while she may potentially remain in san francisco with laura for that full window, we cannot say for certain that she does so. 

indeed, when she finally returns to the lab during the events of episode 09x01 “for warrick,” she doesn’t confirm from where exactly she is returning; all she says is that she “caught the first flight out.” her flight’s point of departure isn’t mentioned.

could be san francisco.

could be someplace else.

of course, even if sara does remain in san francisco for the duration of the six months, she may not spend the entirety of that time in laura’s company. one can easily imagine a scenario where she makes an initial visit to her mother for just a few days or weeks before settling into other activities around the bay area.

one wonders: does she pick up any work while she is away? if not, how does she support herself? is she burning through her savings? after being kidnapped on the job, does she have a worker’s comp settlement that she’s living off of? where is she staying? is she crashing with old friends or checked into an extended stay hotel or does she rent an apartment where she pays by the month? after all, with laura living at a psychiatric care facility, sara doesn’t have the luxury of “staying with mom,” even if seeing laura is the object of her san francisco visit.  

without any further canon confirmation, how long sara’s visit with laura actually lasts is really anyone’s guess. the visit could be anywhere between just a few days up to six full months in duration.

i personally favor the idea of a shorter visit.

if you’re interested, i’ll discuss my reasoning and attempt to answer your other questions after the “keep reading.”

____________

all right.

so we know there’s the six month window between november 2007 and may 2008 when sara may potentially be visiting her mother.

the questions are: 

does sara remain in san francisco for the full six months?

if so, does she visit laura for that whole time? 

if not, what does she do instead?

if she goes elsewhere, where does she go?

we can’t answer the first question definitively, though since we’re never told that sara is anywhere aside from in san francisco during this time, i am personally inclined to believe that she remains there.

furthermore, i think that the fact that sara gets to vegas so quickly after hearing the news of warrick’s death suggests that she is someplace adjacent to sin city, and fly time from the sfia to mccarran is only about an hour and fifteen minutes direct.

as for the second question, as stated above, i tend to think that sara doesn’t visit laura for the full six months that she is in san francisco---and that, in fact, her actual visit with laura is on the shorter side, just a few days in a row or a week altogether at most.

the first reason why i say so is based on simple logistics:

sara’s access to laura is limited.

we never learn whether laura is incarcerated or at a psychiatric care facility during the time when she’s still living in san francisco. 

(when she moves to vegas in s13, she is in a psychiatric care facility, so maybe she has been in one all along. however, that she has served her time and subsequently been released from prison into a care facility is also a possibility.)

in any case, whether she is incarcerated or in a care facility while in san francisco, sara can’t stay overnight with her in the same way grissom can stay overnight when visiting betty. sara isn’t going home to sleep in a childhood bedroom; she is checking in at a visitor’s desk, donning a name tag, perhaps getting patted down and walking through a metal detector, and spending supervised time in her mother’s company, probably only for a few hours here and there, possibly separated from her by bulletproof glass. the arrangement cannot be a comfortable one and likely doesn’t allow for visiting which extends beyond a few days in a row, if multiple consecutive visits are even permitted.

during this period, there isn’t going to be much expectation for privacy; there are always going to be guards or attendants or nurses around. there’s also going to be some kind of schedule laura has to adhere to; she’s not going to be able to just sit with sara and talk for uninterrupted hours on end.

the situation simply isn’t conducive to a leisurely extended visit. 

the second reason why i think the visit is a short one has to do with sara’s activities in s9. 

as our timeline above notes, when sara returns to vegas in the wake of warrick’s death, she ends up staying with grissom for four months, between may and september 2008. after departing vegas again, she eventually ends up aboard a sea shepherd, from which she contacts grissom in december 2008.

my sense---and this is just a gut reaction---is that a sara who is still busy sorting things out with her mother and being heavily involved in her care in san francisco won’t be one who will swing into vegas for a funeral and end up staying for four full months before turning around and shipping out with ocean peace almost immediately thereafter.

i mean, of course she travels to vegas the second she hears the horrible news that warrick has died---that part is a given---and of course she stays for the funeral---because that part is a given, too. but if there were still loose ends needing to be tied up with laura, i just don’t see her lingering in vegas for so long. the fact that she stays all through the summer and into the fall, falling back into a life with grissom, suggests that she doesn’t abruptly leave her mother, as there seems to be no expectation for her to return to san francisco.

my conjecture is that whatever business she had with laura is already long concluded by the time the events of episode 09x01 “for warrick” take place.

---which brings me to my third “short visit” reason, namely the “business with laura” itself.

we know from the contents of sara’s letter to grissom in episode 08x07 “goodbye and good luck” that she leaves vegas for the purpose of “burying the ghosts” that have followed her ever since her father’s death.

going back to the place where she grew up and seeking out the one person who can perhaps answer some of her questions about everything that happened all of those years ago makes sense.

but the move is also a risky one.

as sara explains in episode 05x21 “committed,” her feelings about her mother are extremely conflicted. on the one hand, she does still love her. on the other hand, she hates her perhaps equally as much, and, in her darkest moments, considers that perhaps things would have been better for everyone had laura died in prison.

while laura may be able to explain some of the hows and whys of sara’s childhood traumas to her, there is also a strong possibility that whatever she tells sara could actually make things worse for sara overall.

we never find out how the visit goes---whether laura is able to provide sara with any kind of understanding and catharsis or their reunion is a bust.

my personal sense is that it’s a mixed bag.

the laura sidle we meet in s13, while certainly not a soulless monster, is also not someone who is in a position to help sara recover from her childhood traumas. she is still entrenched in her own battles with mental health issues and alcoholism---still liable to say and do things that will poke at sara’s old wounds, bringing about harm rather than healing. she is sometimes lucid and sometimes not and not consistently sober.

to suppose that sara, in the depths of her s8 depression and cptsd, filled with equal parts love and hate for her mother, having had little to no access to the woman between childhood and this moment of adult crisis, finds the comfort, clarity, absolution, atonement, or even straightforward candor she seeks in laura’s jail cell or care facility is probably overly optimistic.

i can imagine sara going to laura, desperate for some kind of answers, hoping to gain adult perspective on the situation that might help her to fill in the gaps of her memories and better understand her lot in life. 

i just don’t know that what she learned would entirely appease her.

like so many things in life, the situation between sara and her mother is a complicated one.

looking at laura is likely sobering and maybe even frightening for her. their conversations probably dredge up complex feelings. being around someone she hasn’t really seen since childhood---this great and terrible figure from her past, reduced to a small and broken old woman, at all times half-in and half-out---has to be strange for her. she may find herself unable to express the feelings of rage and sorrow that she had originally planned to unleash laura’s way. she may have the sense that the person she has for so long equally loved and hated isn’t there anymore.

and maybe there could still be some good to the visiting. maybe she could develop a sense of pity for her mother. more compassion for herself.

but, ultimately, my take is that, whatever happens, sara isn’t fully able to bury her ghosts with this visit---not on laura’s word; not under whatever she finds at that jail or care facility.

i doubt the conversations are as meaningful as she might want them to be. i doubt laura is as forthcoming as would be necessary to achieve any real closure. 

and, in a scenario like this one, i don’t see sara hanging around. 

she probably stays long enough to realize that laura isn’t capable of giving her what she needs---then maybe a few extra days to make sure that laura is being treated decently---and then goes off to expend her energies elsewhere. 

what exactly she does instead, i don’t know. 

as mentioned above, sara’s financial situation and living arrangements while she is in san francisco remain unknown to us. before leaving vegas, she seems burnt out on work, so perhaps she does take the full six months off. however, that she might find a job outside of criminalistics---something less emotionally punishing---is also a possibility.

maybe she goes to therapy. maybe she attends a spiritual retreat. maybe she goes back to berkeley to work in theoretical physics, like she did for her master’s degree. maybe she just lives a quiet life.

maybe she even sees her mother a few more times after the initial visit is over.

whatever the case, whatever she does for those six months is something that she can apparently walk away from in a trice---because that’s exactly what she does when she gets word of warrick’s death. whatever her housing and work situation, she has no qualms about dropping everything to go back to vegas for four months. 

as for how her experiences in san francisco help her to process the trauma of her kidnapping, i honestly think that just getting away from vegas---and specifically out of the desert---is good for her. in the wake of her kidnapping, the landscape of the mojave is probably more triggering to her than she realizes, so just being somewhere that doesn’t look or feel like the same place where she almost died likely allows her limbic system to calm down (and not misconstrue everything as “fight or flight” all of the time).

frankly, not working the night or swing shifts at the crime lab probably also does her a world of good. less nightmare fodder. better sleep patterns. more sunlight. more human contact. 

with specific regards to her time spent with laura, like i said, i don’t know that it is especially healing---but i do think it is motivating, at least in a way.

since she didn’t get a “wholesale answer” from laura, sara is compelled to keep seeking answers elsewhere. to me, her recovery process is a very gradual one---and she certainly doesn’t return to vegas at the start of s9 completely “better.” making peace with her past is a years-long endeavor. 

going to see laura is an early step, but not the be-all and end-all.

anyway, i’ve gone on a while here, so i’ll wrap things up.

thank you so much for the question! please feel welcome to send another any time. 

[addictedtostorytelling]

I was just watching 7x01 and in the end of the episode when Nick and Catherine go to a club, Nick asks Catherine if Grissom will show. Everytime I watch this scene always crack me up. Just imagine Nick inviting Grissom to a club! I think everybody would be crazy if Grissom went and especially if Sara was there too. Dammit CSI writers!

hey, @royal-lover!

so between that line and nick asking grissom to join him for breakfast at frank’s in episode 08x08 “you kill me,” i’d like to imagine that nick asks grissom to socialize with him many, many times over the years.

something fic-ish under the “keep reading,” if you’re interested.

____________

once nick starts at the lab, he invites grissom out for beers after the first case they work together, because, after all, that’s just being polite, per texas manners---and, plus, he’s heard a lot about this famous but mysterious “bug man,” and he is eager to get his own read on the guy. 

(and, yeah, yeah, okay, he’ll cop: even though he’s only worked at the lvpd crime lab for a week so far, he already has a very deep-seated need to impress the most senior csi on his team, and he knows a couple of rounds on him couldn’t hurt anything in that regard.) 

grissom is polite enough in declining, or at least is not blatantly rude, so nick doesn’t really recognize that he’s probably more likely to win big at one of the strip casinos than he is to get grissom to accept his invitation---

---at least until catherine and warrick practically laugh him out of the break room after he tells them about the exchange.

“it’s never gonna happen, man,” warrick discourages him through chuckles.

“never?”

catherine smirks and claps him on the shoulder. “don’t take it personally, cowboy.”

still, nick keeps the faith.

his mother has always told him that a warm smile and firm handshake will get him far in life, so he doesn’t give up on inviting grissom to socialize. 

the invitations are innocuous at first---“wanna head to the bar?,” “join me at the diner, hoss?,” “i was gonna try out that new coffee shop. you in?”---but after declination after declination on grissom’s part, nick starts to up the ante. 

undeterred, he tempts grissom with tickets to sporting events and concerts, tries to get him to join in on short camping trips in the desert, and even offers to set him up with his landlady so they can go on a double date. 

in each instance, grissom refuses what nick’s offering, sometimes placidly, sometimes showing his annoyance.

despite grissom’s long streak of refusals, nick still isn’t dissuaded from asking and even diversifies his menu of temptations to include tours through museum exhibits, weekend trips to attend forensic conferences, and, on one occasion, the chance to go bungee jumping.

(“i got a coupon, man. it’d be wild!”)

though he is aware that some of his invitations are---how to put it?---avant-garde, nick still makes every one in earnest, sincerely hoping that grissom will finally, at some point, say yes. 

of course, his teammates seem to think he’s making jokes at their boss’s expense. whenever he is within earshot of nick asking, warrick rolls his eyes. catherine shakes her head and looks to the ceiling for deliverance. brass flat-out asks him if he’s nuts.

then sara joins the team, and the one time she witnesses nick hassling grissom to meet up with him after work---“hey, man, there’s a pool party at the wynn. heard the dallas cowboys cheerleading squad is gonna make an appearance. i’d love a wingman”---she gets weirdly huffy. 

grissom himself merely leaves the room without a word, no more or less perturbed than usual, but after he’s gone, sara glares daggers. 

“you are such a---,” she snarls in nick’s direction, but she never finishes her sentence; just slams her locker shut and stalks away. 

nick figures her reaction has more to do with her feminist sensibilities than with him teasing grissom, per se. 

after all, she is very tightly wound.

in any case, as nick starts to experience some traumas and himself becomes more uptight---nothing like a couple of near-death experiences to make a guy reevaluate the way he is living---he eases off from these more unusual invitations fairly naturally, as if he were taking his foot off the gas. 

he doesn’t altogether give up on asking, but he does change tacks. 

now it’s more the occasional “hey, rough shift, huh? i was thinking about maybe seeing a movie to unwind. wouldn’t mind some company” than anything more daring or unconventional. 

while grissom never does say yes, there are times when he gives nick these long looks, almost like he’s seeing him for the first time. 

“see you tomorrow, nicky,” he says, and there is a gentle note in his voice, even as he gestures for nick to shut the door on his way out.

and for a long time, that’s the long and short of the matter: nick asks, not because he’s trying to be a wise-ass but because sometimes he thinks that maybe, despite his reputation for being antisocial, grissom perhaps understands the loneliness that comes with this job better than anyone, and he doesn’t want to be remiss in reaching out. 

by now, he realizes that grissom will never accept any invitation, but somehow he feels that asking is the right thing to do, never mind that grissom will always turn him down. the very act of issuing the invitation is about decreasing the isolation in the universe; reminding grissom that he has people, if he needs them. 

and maybe it’s a little bit about nick reminding himself of that point, too.

in any case, nick doesn’t take grissom’s perpetual refusals personally. sure, if grissom actually did show up to something nick had invited him to, nick would be thrilled---shocked, to be sure, but also ecstatic. still, he doesn’t require that particular kind of validation to know that grissom is connected to him, not anymore; all of the times grissom has been there for him over the years, whether to save his life, have his back with the administration, or teach him how to be a better criminalist, mean more than grissom accepting any invitation to socialize off of the clock ever could.

besides, nick is well-enough acquainted with grissom by now to understand that bar crawls and backyard bbqs aren’t his bag. the man has a personal bubble bigger than dallas, and that’s all right. if he wants to keep to himself after hours, he has every right to, and nick won’t think any less of him because he does.

(of course, nick has to admit, he is curious. what does grissom get up to after shift? how does he fill his free time? is there any invitation in the world someone could offer him that he would actually accept?) 

and so nick keeps on making invitations while never once expecting grissom to say yes.

of course, it figures that grissom would decide to “pull back the curtain” just as nick became resigned to never knowing what lies on the other side.

the acquiescence happens after the team learns that grissom and sara are dating, not right away---and, in fact, not for many, many months afterward.

there’s a long while when both of them are absent from the lab, sara recuperating from her ordeal in the desert, and grissom taking care of her. then, grissom comes back to work, a few shifts here and there, and finally on a more regular basis. a few days later, sara returns to the lab, too.

honestly, the idea that grissom has any kind of personal life, much less one involving sara, takes a long while for nick to compute. 

and maybe that’s why grissom’s more-equivocal-than-usual answer doesn’t really register with him when he offhandedly offers an invitation for grissom to join him and whomever else from the team wants to participate in a day at the go-kart track.

“so, uh, rick, greg, and i were gonna head back over there and get some racin’ on. cath said she might try and make it, too. might see if i can’t drum up some more interest around the lab. maybe ask doc robbins, super dave? brass? and, uh, of course, you’re welcome to come, if you’d like.”

“uh, we’ll see.”

in their usual parlance, grissom often declines nick’s invitations with silence, sometimes a polite no thank you, and occasionally a less-than-polite goodnight, nick, said in a terse voice. this rare and singular we’ll see, spoken softly, should therefore catch nick’s ear as different.

but somehow, it doesn’t.

in the nine years that nick has known grissom, the man has never once accepted one of nick’s personal invitations to do anything not related to work. 

so to say that nick is surprised when he first spots grissom coming over to the racetrack, dressed in his civvies, looking so weirdly pedestrian and like just another one of the hoi polloi, would be an understatement.

and to say that nick doesn’t almost jump out of his skin when he notes, milliseconds later, that grissom isn’t coming over alone but with sara on his arm would be an outright lie.

he almost crashes his go-kart in his hurry to drive over to greet them.

and when sara cajoles grissom into joining the race---even after nick himself has failed to do so---it’s all nick can do to keep himself from overshooting the track.

somehow, the whole outing feels like a personal victory; after nearly a decade, he finally got grissom to step outside of the lab and do something fun with him, and to do so openly with his girlfriend in tow, no less.

in nick’s mind, that’s mission accomplished.

he couldn’t really hope for anything more, which is why the possibility that grissom will accept more invitations in the future doesn’t even really occur to him.

nick still makes the invitations, of course---by now, the asking is essentially reflexive---but he has no inkling, let alone expectation, that grissom will agree to any of them. their afternoon spent go-karting seemed so much like a one-time deal, like the culmination of a long project. could there really be anything more? he doesn’t dare to imagine.

that’s why he truly doesn’t think twice when he mentions to grissom that he and warrick are going to take greg out to a new club in celebration of him having solved his seventy-fifth case. the “you should come” leaves his lips thoughtlessly, no sooner said than forgotten.

two hours later, he may as well have never even said the words at all, as far as his memory is concerned. he’s sucking down his third frisco sour---and, okay, so the drinking isn’t exactly helping his memory much, either---crammed shoulder to shoulder into a booth with greg on one side of him and warrick on the other and two girls on the outside of them. he and warrick are talking up the blonde to their left when suddenly greg starts tapping his right arm.

“hey! hey!”

“hey, watch it, g!”

“it’s grissom!”

“huh?”

“it’s grissom! he’s here! look!”

between the booze and the throbbing bass of the music, the name almost doesn’t register for nick. he has to reach in the depths of his mind, and then once he has the id, he still can’t process what greg is saying; the words almost seem like gibberish. grissom who? grissom where? what’s going on? he stupidly follows greg’s pointing, peering out over the dance floor toward the entrance to the club.

and sweet jesus.

there, in his tucked-in shirt and dockers, with his hands jammed in his pockets, standing awkwardly under the colored strobe lights, is gil grissom, in the flesh.

he rocks back and forth in place, eyes combing over the crowds, searching, his expression purse-lipped and curious.

nick’s immediate reaction is to check his cell phone, wondering if maybe grissom has been trying to get a hold of them for a call-out.

but no.

he hasn’t missed any calls.

grissom isn’t here to summon them for work.

this is a social visit.

hot damn.

in truth, nick still doesn’t fully believe what he’s seeing until they have claimed grissom from off of the dance floor, retrieving him back to their booth; only as he sits pressed in elbow-to-elbow against the man does he fully realize that what is happening is real. his boss, the “bug man,” is here with him at a club, not so they can work a case, but because he wants to hang out.

“so, uh, it’s great you could come,” nick shouts over the pulse of the music.

grissom nods, seeming dazed by all of the lights and sounds. he’s slow to answer. “yeah, uh, you know, with sara working swing now, she said i should, uh, try and get out sometimes.” he seems almost embarrassed.

“so you came to the club?” greg is incredulous.

grissom shrugs. “i worked a double-homicide here once.”

warrick reaches over nick to prod his shoulder. “hey, man, what you drinking?”

in the next hour, nick learns three new things about his boss: first, that grissom likes bourbon; second, that he can hold his bourbon well; and, third, that he has a surprising repertoire of bar tricks.

grissom is in the process of captivating an audience comprised of nick, greg, and a few club girls who have sauntered over of their own volition with a riddle involving three matchsticks and a matchbox.

(warrick is on the dance floor with the blonde from before, doing his best to shake his divorce blues.) 

“if i light the horizontal match on fire, which of the two vertical matches do you think will burn first? left or right?” grissom asks.

nick is so busy considering if there is any possible scientific principle that might answer the riddle that he doesn’t notice that someone else has come upon their convocation, emerging from the dance floor and perching behind grissom’s seat at the booth.

he only becomes aware of this new person’s presence when she speaks.

“i know the answer.”

sara.

she leans over grissom and pecks a quick kiss to his temple---the first time nick has ever seen any kind of pda between them, even though their relationship has been public for months now.

“hey, sara!”

“hey! come on in! did you see warrick is---?”

“yeah, he told me you guys were over here.”

grissom initially reacts with shock at having been sneaked up on but quickly recovers when he registers who’s done the sneaking. a smile curls his lips. “no fair spoiling the experiment when you already know the results,” he warns.

“okay, okay,” sara says, miming like she’s zipping her lips before coming around to sit down by him in the booth.

she stays long enough to see the end of the trick---the horizontal match leaps away from the two vertical matches and burns up without catching either one of them on fire---and then tells grissom that they’d better get home. 

her prompting puts an informal end to the party; nick realizes he probably ought to sober up and get some sleep before the start of his next shift, and greg says the same. as greg braves the dance floor to ask warrick if he’s staying or leaving, grissom magnanimously offers to pick up the bar tab, claiming that since he’s the supervisor, lauding greg’s achievement is technically his responsibility.

“thanks, man,” nick tells him, feeling even more so than he did after the go-karting excursion like he has experienced some sort of triumph.

while grissom pays up and greg and warrick collect their jackets from the coat room, nick and sara stand outside on the curb, nick awaiting his taxi, sara awaiting grissom. it’s a cold night for vegas, and they sway against the brisk air, breathing in visible spates.

“thanks for giving him the nudge,” nick says, bumping his hip up against hers.

sara frowns, not following. “what?”

“thanks for telling grissom he should come out with us,” nick tries again. “it was cool that he showed up. think it meant a lot to greg. and, i mean, who knew that he was so fun to hang out with?”

“um, okay, for one thing, i knew he was fun to hang out with---”

“yeah, yeah, okay, lover girl---”

“---and, for another thing, i didn’t tell him he should come out with you guys. i actually didn’t even know about this whole, uh, club deal until after he was already here.”

“but he said you told him he should come.”

sara laughs and shakes her head. “what i told him was that he should find something to do while i’m at work or sleeping---‘cause, you know, opposite schedules now---and i was thinking that he’d play chess at the park or something. i had no clue he’d end up out at a club with you guys.”

in many ways, these last few months have felt like a long string of surprises for nick, where grissom is concerned. he has learned more about grissom’s personal life since last may than he had ever learned about it cumulatively before, and each revelation has somehow been more shocking to him than the last. finding out that grissom had a girlfriend was just the beginning; then came learning that that girlfriend was sara and then seeing them together for the first time. there was the racetrack, sara’s switch to swing shift, and, finally, today, grissom unexpectedly showing up to the club.

frankly, nick didn’t suppose that anything would ever top the sight of grissom bathed in strobes, sipping ezra brooks, teaching greg how to jump a match---

---but somehow knowing that grissom accepted this invitation without sara’s encouragement, of his own volition, is the best and least expected revelation so far.

a grin spreads over nick’s face and remains there until grissom exits the club, coming up to him and sara on the sidewalk.

“you ready?” grissom asks, and when sara nods, they start to walk away from nick, headed to wherever she has her car parked. 

“hey, thanks! see ya later!” nick calls after them, and, then, because he can’t help himself. “we should do this again soon! you free on friday? i’m buying this time! hey, boss, what you say?”

and maybe it’s only the bourbon, but grissom actually cracks a smile for once. he doesn’t answer with words, just shakes his head before wrapping his arm around sara and, with her, taking his leave.

nick shouts as he retreats, feeling warm despite the cold.

“hey, i’ll take that as a maybe!”

he can always ask again.

[addictedtostorytelling]

After reading your latest chapters (which was probably the best part of my week/month and I cant wait time read the next ones no matter how long i have to wait), I was interested in your take/opinion on when Sara would’ve told Greg (or anyone else, if she has) about her childhood. And if so, do you think it was pre-divorce, post-? basically any context behind such discussion. Thanks!

hey, anon!

thank you so much for your kind words! i’m so glad you enjoyed the new chapter and that it made your week/month! it means a lot that you have stuck with the story, even though the updates have been incredibly slow in coming.

my short answer to your question is that i think greg probably learns about sara’s past for the first time during the events of episode 13x15 “forget me not,” as does everyone else on the team. however, i don’t think either he or they learn much besides the basic information brought up during the wynard case—namely, that when sara was a child, her mother killed her father and she spent time in foster care. individually, sara may tell greg somewhat more during the events of episode 15x12 “dead woods,” though my gut sense is that she doesn’t ever fully confide in him or anyone else, just because she still struggles with her deep-seated fear of rejection (and especially in the aftermath of her and grissom’s divorce).

my long answer is after the “keep reading,” if you’re interested.

___

canonically, we don’t ever get to see sara tell anyone the full story about her family except for grissom—and, if we’re being technical, we don’t even really get to “see” her tell him, either; the scene skips over her recounting and picks up in the aftermath.

of course, lack of “tell” scenes notwithstanding, we know that in s12 sara admits to russell that her mother is mentally ill/paranoid (see episode 12x21 “dune and gloom”) and that by the time the events of episode 15x12 “dead woods” take place, greg is already peripherally aware that her mother killed her father and that she spent time in foster care.

so tracking who knows what chronologically, here’s what i can come up with:

in episode 05x01 “viva las vegas,” sara mentions, as she is gearing up to make her confession to grissom, that she has never told “anyone” about her family before. she then doesn’t actually end up telling anyone until episode 05x13 “nesting dolls,” when she confides in grissom the full story: the domestic abuse, the mental illness, the alcoholism, the murder, the foster care, her self-destructive tendencies as an adult, etc.

that sara is still playing her secrets close to the chest with everyone but grissom at least throughout the rest of s5 is implied, as we see when greg asks her if she wants to talk in episode 05x14 “unbearable,” and she gently declines his offer, and in episode 05x21 “committed,” when grissom appears to be the only team member out of himself, brass, sofia, and greg who is aware that the case they are investigating is triggering for her.

evidence about who knows and when is even scanter going forward, though that sara doesn’t speak freely with the team about her firsthand knowledge of the foster care system as they’re investigating the dell case throughout s7 (even though the information would be relevant) may—if we squint a bit—hint that grissom is still the only one who is in the know concerning her past.

doing yet more squinting, we may be able to argue that since greg blames sara’s s8 departure from las vegas on grissom—see episode 08x08 “you kill me,” when he is curt to grissom in the hall—he is still, to that point, likely unaware of her deeper childhood issues and ptsd.

sara remains away from las vegas through the tail end of s8, returns for a four-month stint during the beginning of s9, and then abruptly departs again and remains away until the beginning of s10. during this span of time, she probably doesn’t tell anyone else about her past, just because she isn’t really around and/or in contact with them much.

to me, that’s where the trail of canonical evidence runs cold.

our window for when sara tells greg (and any other team members) her story is therefore most likely between s10 and s15.

my gut feeling, which i have no way to substantiate, is that for as long as she is with grissom, sara does not confide in anyone else—though whereas before she tells him, she actively represses her past (and even at times purposefully misleads others in order to keep them from learning the truth), afterward she is not so much actively repressing as she is simply feeling comfortable with where she stands and unmotivated to seek out other confidantes.

having just one person who knows her history, who loves her and accepts her no matter what, is enough to make sara feel secure. when she works a triggering case or has a bad day, she can go home and talk to him. she likely doesn’t feel compelled to bring others in on the secret.  

but then come s13, she loses grissom—not just as a husband but also as the one person in the world who knows all there is to know about her. she no longer has that listening ear or crying shoulder. she no longer has that assurance that she is still lovable despite her “broken pieces.”

of course, sara’s divorce from grissom coincides with the murder of taylor wynard and ronald basderic framing sara for that murder. since the case involves sara’s mother and also details from sara’s father’s murder at the hands of her mother, my best guess is that greg learns about sara’s past during the course of the investigation.

and he probably isn’t the only one.

frankly, since the whole team investigates the case, it is reasonable to believe that, from this point forward, greg, nick, russell, finn, and morgan are all aware that sara’s mother is in a mental institution and that her mother killed her father, as said information comes out as the case unfolds. 

(remember: basderic stabs wynard seven times to emulate the manner in which sara’s mother killed her father, having gleaned this information from sara’s mother by visiting her in her care facility.)

given the other monumental revelation about sara’s personal life that comes out during the course of this investigation (i.e., that grissom and sara have gotten divorced), it is possible that no one really follows up with her concerning what they have learned regarding her childhood. 

it is easy to imagine that the notes, including any personal testimony sara herself may provide on the matter, get tucked into the case file, and no one dares to pick up the conversation again later—not when there are other, more current issues to be concerned about; not when sara is already dealing with so much and struggling so mightily. 

after the initial chaos surrounding the case dies down, her family history may very well never become a topic of conversation around the lab again, and particularly if she doesn’t initiate the discussion herself.

in episode 15x12 “dead woods,” greg mentions that, despite their years of friendship, he and sara “have never really talked about what happened with [her] dad” and starts to ask her for more information before they’re interrupted by a phone call.

if no one in fact questions sara concerning her family situation in the aftermath of the wynard case, then we can perhaps take greg’s comments in this episode literally: i.e., he and sara have actually never talked about what happened with her dad. it’s not a conversation that they’ve engaged in with each other. all he knows, he knows because of basderic, and what he knows isn’t much.

at the end of episode 15x12 “dead woods,” greg and sara again discuss sidle family dynamics, though mostly in the context of sara questioning her mother’s “battered woman” defense. it is possible that between the earlier scene and the later one, sara does indeed fill in more of the blanks for greg, though it’s also possible that she never does.  

i tend to lean more toward the second option, as one of sara’s most consistent character traits throughout the series is that she habitually masks her pain and keeps her issues to herself. while she does become somewhat more forthcoming as time goes on, she never fully surmounts that old impulse to say “i’m fine” even when she isn’t. though there are probably many times after the divorce when she misses having someone to confide in, i wouldn’t be surprised if she never becomes entirely comfortable talking to her teammates openly about her past, even once she knows that they already know at least the basics.

her conversation with greg in episode 15x12 “dead woods” is likely the closest she comes to openly discussing the issue, but even then i don’t really see her describing the fights and trips to the hospital in the same way she once did with grissom.

—because of grissom, in fact.

honestly, for as much progress as she makes in telling grissom the full story that first time around in s5, i think that having her “secret keeper” abandon her causes her to be wary of ever making herself so vulnerable with anyone again. had the wynard case not dragged her family history out into the light where everybody could see it, she might never have chosen to confide anything about it to her teammates of her own volition. and even after the wynard case, i doubt she is eager to fill in the blanks for them; she probably already feels exposed, just given the little they know already.

i can see her perhaps dropping a snippet of information here or there (akin to how she tells russell very sparing information about her mother’s mental illness all the way back in s12), but i can’t imagine her sitting down and going through the whole story in all its violent, gut-wrenching details.

that she focuses more on the few positive aspects of her family life when talking to greg at the end of episode 15x12 “dead woods” is telling to me. it suggests that she’s staying in the realm of what’s “safe,” not delving too deeply into the gorier aspects of what happened.

one might hope that in the wake of the divorce, sara would go to therapy and discuss her childhood with her therapist, but the show doesn’t really indicate that such is the case. she may just be in the habit of keeping her trauma to herself (again) until she finally reunites with grissom in the series finale and so gets her “secret keeper” back.

baby girl should still go to therapy.

like.

anyway, for what it’s worth, that’s my conjecture. like i said, there’s not really a way to substantiate it. it’s just what makes sense to me. 

thanks for the question, and thank you again for your kind words about my fic! please feel welcome to write in again any time.

[addictedtostorytelling]

my favorite csi episodes (continued): 08x08 "you kill me" (25/25)

hodges invites wendy, henry, mandy, and archie to solve a series of bizarre, hypothetical murder scenarios which all take place in the lab, claiming the activity is a thought experiment. however, unbeknownst to them, he has ulterior motives. meanwhile, grissom fields questions, awkwardness, and unsolicited advice from his coworkers regarding sara's recent departure from las vegas.