#fcebl

[addictedtostorytelling]

[onlyexplorer]

'End of the Storybook'; Massey's return gives Saskatchewan Rattlers a win

‘End of the Storybook’; Massey’s return gives Saskatchewan Rattlers a win

Breadcrumb Links local sports Basketball “I’m pretty happy that we had the chance to close our home stand with a win. It’s a great place here. All year they have been very, very, very supportive.” Author of the article: Darren Zary • Star Phoenix of Saskatoon Saskatchewan Rattlers goaltender Devonte Bandoo drives the ball under pressure from Guelph Nighthawks forward AJ Hess during fCEBL…

[addictedtostorytelling]

the way she just immediately goes after him, no hesitation she's his person and she knows it

[addictedtostorytelling]

gil grissom + 💔💔💔

[addictedtostorytelling]

Hi! Thank you for answering my questions. I hope this "ask" finds you well. I just finished CSI S15 and I would like to know your opinion on these issues:

Why is Sara Sidle so angry? I have seen her spiraling with alcohol, depressed on her love for Boss G and anger about everything in general on S4 & S8 but the angry Sara on S15 is vicious and violent. Assaulting suspects on PD hallways, shouting during interrogation, slamming her hand on the interrogation table... Seriously, Sara Sidle is scary, way out of line and borderline unprofessional. The Angry Sara on the earlier CSI seasons are usually cause by Domestic Violence but the Angry Sara on S15, I can't explain the motivation. It's confusing.

And Greg Sanders is so dull. What happened to the rock and roll head banging, Las Vegas History lovin' Lab Tech turned CSI? His hair used to be so distinct and lively but on S15, his hair is dull and parted sideways. He looks so sad. Like life as CSI has sucked all the fun out of him.

(no complains about Pancho Nicky though 😁)

And every CSI is moonlighting as Lab Techs. No more Gun-expert Bobby, Tech Savvy Archie and Finger Print Reader Mandy/Jackie...now all lab tech duties are divided to Hodges, Henry and the CSI.

Also, I would like to comment on the writers of CSI S15. They are lazy. One case in an episode then a serial killer arc for the entire season. The tangents and possible explanation why a person is a viable suspect is confusing. Whatever happened to the 2 cases per episode concept? That concept worked with high ratings for so many years/seasons so why change it? Now, all CSI worked in 1 case per episode, it seems they are passing tasks with each other that they can do themselves. No wonder it ended on a low rating. I cannot see/feel the magic of CSI anymore. The episodes looks tired and dragging.

I am very sorry for the rant but I stopped watching when Gil Grissom left in S9E10. After multiple watching of CSI Vegas, CSI S01 to S9E10 and CSI Immortality, I finally got the courage to watch all episodes after GG left starting S15. Gosh, my disappointment and frustration were so high that I had to go back and rewatch all GSR scenes on CSI Vegas so I can remind myself that Sara Sidle is not angry and so beautifully in love with her hubby Gil Grissom.

I finished S15 but I am afraid of all the disappointment and frustration I will feel on S14. Still, I will push through so I can say I have watched all CSI Episodes from S01 to S15.

Again, apologies for the rant.

hi, @hiei29!

i’m gonna put my answers under the “keep reading” so as not to poison anyone’s dash, okay?

warning: this post is extremely critical of the writing in the later seasons of the show and especially of the characterization in those seasons. if you are a fan of those seasons, you probably shouldn’t read this post, as it contains a literal salt mine of negativity regarding them.

__

so, uh, i make no secret of the fact that i hate the later seasons of csi with all the salt that is in me, finding them to be some of the worst-written and most disappointing television i have ever watched, a downgrade in every possible way from the early seasons of the show.

there is literally nothing about them i find enjoyable, and i refuse to rewatch them because to me they are so contemptible.

i am afraid to say, but i think you'll discover (since you're watching in reverse chronological order) that things are only going to get worse for you as you delve now into s14 and then s13, which is the absolute nadir of the series and by far the hardest season to watch as a gsr/sara sidle fan.

anyway.

to answer some of your questions, i will first direct you to several posts that cover a lot of the same topics:

this one talks about the poor writing and multiplicity of storytelling problems in the later seasons of the show, explaining why they came about from an outside-of-the-story world perspective. though a lot of the post relates specifically to s10 (and the clumsy way the writers wield ray langston as a character), the same concepts also apply throughout s11-s15, as well.

this one was written after the end of s15 but before news of the show's cancellation had come out and so is in some ways out of date, but it does outline many of the general problems with csi's writing during that late-game era, including its eschewing of character development, how only working on a single case per episode reduced many of the characters to "glorified lab tech" and/or "courier" status (as you describe above), its over-reliance on spectacle, its lack of serialization/continuity, etc.

this one explains in more detail the shift from the traditional a plot/b plot narrative format into the "one case per episode" one and what this move's effects on the show were overall.

this one talks about how greg's characterization and development were first flattened and then dropped in the later seasons of the show, while this one explains how he got stuck in an interminable holding pattern as part of a never-fully-resolved love triangle with him, morgan, and hodges, which ultimately contributed to his "unfinished" feeling as a character at the end of the series.

as for the topic of sara and her anger in the late series:

that issue is one that has its roots in many of the other issues discussed above.

as new writers came onto the show and, steered by their generally poor writing instincts, made the mistake of focusing their attentions on introducing and highlighting the newer characters (first langston, then russell, finn, and morgan) rather than dividing their attentions equally among the whole cast, they neglected the old characters, essentially relegating them to minor character status. though by all rights, once grissom and catherine had left the show, nick, sara, and greg should have moved to center stage just by virtue of their seniority and how invested the audience was in them, they were largely ignored.

nick got the most development out of the trio post-s12 (when catherine left the show and russell, finn, and morgan replaced her), which is perhaps why you find yourself the least disappointed with his characterization out of anyone's, though even he featured far less prominently and received less development than he should have.

in the meanwhile, sara and greg's development completely fell by the wayside.

while greg's "benching" happened in the wake of the failed love triangle storyline of s12 (as described in the post above), sara's came about following her s13 divorce, after which she never really was given another personal storyline again.

though they would both occasionally be the subject of individual "focus episodes" (e.g., see episode 14x16 "killer moves" for greg or episode 15x12 "dead woods" for sara), any and all development they underwent was consigned to those episodes only; all emotional changes, lessons learned or unlearned, progress/regression, etc. they experienced lasted just until the end credits rolled and then was summarily forgotten about going forward, as if it had never happened to begin with. neither one of them had any kinds of serialized arcs to speak of for the last several seasons of the show.

but here's the thing: not only did they not get any character development in the last several seasons of the show, but their characters themselves were also flattened, reduced down to be caricatures of their former selves.

the new writers who came onto the show following the 2008 writers' strike and later (see the first post linked above) hadn't done their homework. none of them read the show bible or really got a feel for the old characters; they knew them only in a very superficial way.

frankly, all of the characters of the later seasons, both old and new, have the same standard base personality: a very one-note, sitcom-esque “quirky smartness” with a uniform sense of humor, uniform approach to problem solving, uniform professional skillset, and uniform “good guy-ness,” which results in them all tending to speak and act mostly the same across scenes, to the point of interchangeability.

seriously: in 80% of the scenes in the later seasons, you could swap out any one character for any other and the tone, timbre, and outcome of the scene would not be altered at all. there’s no perceptible difference between how sara talks and how finn does, how greg would approach an issue versus how nick would, etc.; they’d all make the same quips and take the same actions across the majority of all scenes. 

the writers then tacked on maybe one or two “extra” character traits to each character* in order to “distinguish” them from one another (so that russell becomes base personality + hippie dad, finn becomes base personality + maneater, hodges becomes base personality + self-important weirdo, etc.) and considered their characterization work done, making no further efforts to develop or change anyone over time.

* except for morgan, who is literally just the base personality and nothing else. i mean, seriously, aside from being “nice,” what even is she? how would one describe her? she has no distinguishing characteristics.

compare this very stock characterization in the later seasons to the rich characterization of the early ones: in s1-s8 of the original series, each main character has a very distinctive personality, worldview, and even diction. greg never would or even could have approached solving a problem in the same way that grissom would/could, nick’s dialogue didn’t sound the same across the board as warrick’s, etc. even grissom and sara, who were the two most similar characters, in terms of the basic temperaments, intelligence levels, ways of speaking and comporting themselves, etc., weren’t 1:1 the same as each other; they had enough that varied between them so as not to be mistakable for each other. the main cast felt like six different people, not six versions of the same person. and the storytelling was so much better and more compelling for it! even just on an emotional level, there was so much more dynamism and room for multiple reactions. not everyone was going to bust out the exact same quip at the exact same time, you know?

but whereas the new characters were never anything but this base personality + [insert the one individual characteristic they may or may not possess here], meaning that for as boring as they may be, there’s nothing really to mourn with them in terms of “lost potential,” with the old characters, this adherence to the stock formula is something far more devastating, as in order to make them fit the mold, the writers had to strip them of so much of their former characterizations, divesting them of all of the intricacies that had been part of them throughout the early seasons of the show, leaving them shadows of their former selves.

nick became “standard later seasons personality” plus

nice 

texan

traumatized but we’re not quite sure how/in what ways/to what degree and aren’t consistent about depicting him as such

sara became “standard later seasons personality” plus

uncool/nerdy

sarcastic

angry

greg became “standard later seasons personality” plus

has a crush on morgan??????

(that’s really his only “distinguishing” character trait in the last several seasons.)

and all of them shifted from being dramatic characters who had occasional comedic beats to being comedic characters who had occasional dramatic ones. it was like they had been transposed into a sitcom world, despite the very macabre nature of what their procedural was all about; i call it the “ncis-ification of csi.”

it was as if never having watched the early seasons of the show themselves (or only having watched a few episodes here and there), the later seasons writers turned to the wikipedia character summaries for nick, sara, and greg and then based their entire depictions of the characters going forward on what they found in those few paragraphs of description.

there was no nuance or multivalence to how they handled the characters at all, no sense of recourse to their past developments, no sense of history with them, certainly no development going forward, etc.

so.

for as much as i hate the later seasons for what they did to gsr, i hate them even more for what they did to sara sidle, taking the most wonderfully complex, interesting, realistic, subtle, dynamic, well-wrought character i’d ever had the pleasure of watching on tv and turning her into what was essentially just “angry girl, version 1.0,” totally generic in every way.

i still remember my first time watching the scene in episode 15x12 “dead woods” in which sara stalks abby’s boyfriend slade down the hall at pd, runs him up against the wall, and threatens him. while my first reaction was to full-body cringe because, holy god, that was embarrassingly badly written!, my second reaction was to feel heartbreak, because what i was seeing was such a bastardization of my favorite character that she was almost unrecognizable to me, and it was such a shame.

it was like the writers were vaguely aware of older scenes like the one in episode 01x10 “sex, lies, & larvae,” where sara gets in scott shelton’s face, and wanted to replicate them, but they had no idea what would actually make sara tick or what her mechanics were. 

theirs was just a bad impression of “sara being triggered,” lacking all understanding of her inner emotional world.

and that’s how sara is throughout the later seasons: most often, just the standard base personality, but with occasional flashes of intense and largely unexplained anger thrown in.

and, i mean—

had they wanted to, they maybe could’ve been more deliberate about depicting sara’s anger, making it an actual plot point that after the divorce, she started to be much more hair-trigger and prone to outbursts, constantly simmering with a low current of frustration that sometimes ignited into full-on flares of fiery temper in cases where she was provoked.

they could’ve shown nick and greg worrying about how on-edge she seemed and maybe even herself fretting over her inability to control herself.

they eventually could’ve written something about how the truth was, she found it easier to be angry at the world than to feel her actual, underlying emotion, i.e., heartbreak over losing the love of her life—because at least the anger was somewhat “empowering,” whereas the heartbreak just made her feel small, helpless, hopeless, and vulnerable, and particularly since she feared it might be unending.

because how could she ever be happy again without grissom?   

at some point, they could’ve had the storyline come to a head, maybe with sara crossing a line with a suspect or even one of her team members, being confronted about it (or even faced with suspension) and then breaking down, finally admitting just how hurt she was, maybe going into anger management or therapy or at least just giving voice to her feelings for once.

like.

it wouldn’t have been a storyline i would have favored for her, but it could have been a thing if the writers had wanted to make it one.

it could have been some actual storywork.

but of course it wasn’t.

they never made anything of it.

there was never any sense that the writing of sara as angry was at all purposeful or that it had anything to do with events from her past, either from her childhood or more recently with the divorce.

in the later seasons writers’ incompetent hands, “angry sara” was always just a haphazard thing, something they did with her when the case-of-the-week called for it or when they didn’t know what to do with her otherwise.

never was it delved into.

never was it treated as the problem it was.

since in their minds, sara was just an angry person—ignoring all of her post-episode 05x13 “nesting dolls” development in the earlier seasons of the show—there was no reason to question or probe or explore her anger; it was just a given, something they could fall back on whenever they needed a quick and easy way to ratchet up the emotional tension in a particular episode.

the reason you find yourself unable to explain the motivations behind sara’s anger in s15 is because there aren’t any.

unlike gil grissom, the writers of that season are unwilling to ask what’s made sara so angry. they don’t ever go there, and neither do they want to.

they have no intention to ever look beneath the surface with her.

so they just don’t.

i wish i could tell you that there’s something to look forward to with s14, but there really isn’t. the writing is just as bad and the characterization is just as nonexistent as is the case with s15. sara is certainly just as wasted.

anyway.

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

[addictedtostorytelling]

[addictedtostorytelling]

What do you think about this quote. It’s from season 4 and pre nesting dolls and Sara’s past reveal. Catherine: your father ever tell you you were pretty? Did he ever tell you you were smart?

hi, anon!

i think that since, outside of the universe of the show, when the line was written, the writers didn't yet know sara's backstory in full, they likely meant her answers ("i guess... yeah... *head nod*") to be more straightforward ones: i.e., yes, sara's father did occasionally praise her beauty, but he probably even more consistently praised her intelligence, so sara didn't doubt that one day she'd be successful.

however, inside of the universe of the show, in light of the later revelation of sara's backstory in s5, i've always thought that the way jorja fox plays sara's answer bespeaks some discomfort on her part, at least regarding the "pretty" part and the part where she nods her head in response to catherine asserting she probably always knew she'd be successful; she acts just a little bit shifty and noncommittal about what she's saying and implying, not meeting catherine's eyes, the tone of her voice suggesting a degree of uncertainty and/or hesitation.

that so, if one were so inclined, i think that one could—and, certainly, i do—read the line as sara lying, or at least bending (or omitting) some of the truth.

fwiw, while i think sara is probably lying about the "pretty" and "successful" parts of her answer, i think she's telling the truth when she says her father did at least occasionally tell her she was smart—because that part she says more confidently ("yeah")—albeit, even there, there may be some context for her answer that goes unsaid (more on that possibility below).

she's not about to tell catherine anything about what her father was really like or reveal the fact that she had plenty of reasons to doubt that she'd even survive in life, let alone be successful, so she gives the answer she thinks will end the conversation quickest rather than the one that is actually true.

now.

whether or not one believes jorja fox purposefully inflected sara's answer with that element of dubiousness—while sara's backstory certainly hadn't been concretized or fleshed out at this point, both the writers and jorja fox did nevertheless have some idea, and had since s1, that sara's past involved abuse and that her father was the likely culprit, given that she had always been shown to be so consistently triggered by ipv cases, so it's not outside of the realm of possibility that jorja fox (knowing sara as well as she does) purposefully inflected her performance to reflect some valence of uncertainty on sara's part—or that it's just a consequence of the line itself ("i guess" is a phrase that, just by its nature, never sounds particularly sure) is a matter of personal interpretation.

it's also a matter of personal interpretation how one views the nature of sara's lie, if one does in fact believe she's lying*.

* admittedly, even in light of the fact that sara's father was canonically abusive (at least toward her mother, if not also toward her), there is still the possibility that he may have at times praised both her looks and her smarts, nevertheless.

is she full-on saying the opposite of what is true—i.e., claiming he praised her beauty when in reality he was insulting of her looks (i.e., called her ugly)? or is she bending the truth (which is that even though he may have once or twice called her pretty and multiple times called her smart, the fact that he did so ultimately mattered way less than the fact of his abuse in terms of shaping sara's views on whether or not she might ever be successful in life)? or is she only "lying by omission" (i.e., while he never insulted her, he also never praised her; he was just distant and didn't really comment on her appearance one way or the other)?

it's also worth noting that sara, of course, provides no context for any of the parts of her answer, so even though she cops to her father telling her she was smart, she doesn't explain how often or in what circumstances he did so—which means that even though she answers in the affirmative, it still may be the case that his comments on her intelligence were less than laudatory (i.e., there's a big difference between being told, in a complimentary way, "honey, you're so smart! you can be anything you want when you grow up!" and being told, in a derogatory way, "you've always been too damn smart for your own good").

there's also something to be said for the fact that in situations of abuse, even if an abuser is technically being complimentary, what they say may not land as compliment for the person they're complimenting because actions ultimately speak louder than words. ditto for the fact that whatever compliments they give may later be undone by insults.

if your father tells you you're pretty and smart once or twice but then curses you out or insults you a hundred times, the scales are ultimately going to be tipped more toward the negative than the positive, in terms of your self-views.

hell, even if he is more often complimentary than insulting, if the compliments all come across as disingenuous but the insults all seem like they're truly meant, then you'll probably take the insults to heart more than the compliments, ratios notwithstanding.

anyway, suffice it to say that while on a surface level, sara's responses to catherine's questions here may seem not to mesh with what we later learn about her childhood, i think there is a lens through which one can view her answers as still accounting for her family history of abuse.

to me, what we see here is catherine asking sara, "did your father ever tell you you were pretty?... did he ever tell you you were smart?" and then asserting "so it probably never occurred to you that you wouldn't be successful" and assuming that sara's answers to those questions are going to be resounding yeses and that her response to the assertion will be a resounding no, it never did.

however, what she gets instead is a classic sara "i don't talk about my past" dodge, with sara giving an answer to the first question which allows for plausible deniability, an answer to the second question that comes without any sort of context, and a nonanswer to the assertion (i.e., that little head bob essentially communicates, "well, that's what you would think, wouldn't you?" much more so than it does, "no, i never for a second doubted i would be successful"). since catherine is ultimately much more interested in making the point she wants to make—which is that julie waters, who had only ever been valued for her physical beauty, was vulnerable in a way that sara probably can't relate to, so sara shouldn't judge her too harshly—than she is in sara's answers in themselves, sara's evasions and obfuscations end up flying with her.

anyway, long story long, point is: i think that if one is so inclined, one can very much read sara's backstory into this scene if one wants to, even if it hadn't technically been written yet at the time when said scene was being filmed; jorja fox's acting choices make it possible to do so retroactively.

also, this point is neither here nor there, but i’ve always thought it was slightly ooc for catherine to make the assumption that a woman’s confidence would come primarily from her father’s views of her when she is herself a confident woman who grew up without a father. (i mean, technically sam was in her life when she was a little girl, but she didn’t realize he was her father back then.) to me, it would have been much more natural for her to say something more along the lines of, “when you were growing up, did anyone ever tell you you were pretty? how about smart?” leaving the “father” part out of the equation altogether. 

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

[addictedtostorytelling]

What are your thoughts on Sara’s family history storyline in the last seasons of CSI? They didn’t seem canon to me, especially when Sara was thinking that her dad wasn’t as violent as she thought and that part of it might have been her mom’s fault. And that she was being a little more open about it, like when she had that conversation with DB early on and with Greg.

hi, anon!

short answer is that i’m with you: i don’t think the way sara’s backstory is presented in the later seasons of csi really makes sense.

longer—much, much saltier—answer after the “keep reading,” if you’re interested.

warning: i’m pretty negative about the writing decisions of the later seasons of csi and sara’s characterization in them here, so if you’re a fan of the later seasons or sara’s storylines in them, you’ll probably want to steer clear of this post.

__

there is never any question in the earlier seasons of the show which one of sara's parents was the physical abuser.

while sara’s mother did kill her father, prior to episode 15x12 “dead woods,” there is no indication that the violence between them was ever “equal opportunity” before the murder—and, quite to the contrary, there is every indication that her father was the sole perpetrator, based on context clues.

even though sara never says "my father was a wife beater" on screen in those exact words, her strong reactions to husband-on-wife ipv cases (like in episodes 01x10 "sex, lies, & larvae," 05x13 "nesting dolls," and 08x07 "goodbye & good luck"), plus how triggering she finds domineering and aggressive men to be, plus the context for her experiencing auditory flashbacks in episode 05x13 "nesting dolls" (which is specific to her discussing and observing evidence from husband-on-wife ipv cases), plus the story of her father’s murder at the hands of her mother just in general all assert that such was very much the case.

it's woven into the fabric of sara's character and the way she approaches her job and her relationships with men and her basic personality.

it absolutely could not be clearer if it had been explicitly stated.

and for fifteen seasons, we're never given any reason to doubt what we've been shown about sara in this regard.

"sara's father was violent against her mother (and until her mother murdered her father, that violence was very much a one-way street)" is 1000%, unequivocal, unimpeachable show canon.

that so, the decision to retcon this through-line come s15 for the sake of—what?—making sara have a slightly more personal connection to the case de jour is not only indefensible from a writing perspective but an insult to sara as a character.

sara may have been a child when her mother killed her father, but she was fully aware of what was going on in her home prior to that point and she knew which parent was the instigator of the violence.

that's not to say that her mother's mental illness didn't play any role in the sidle family dynamics or never came to bear in her mother and father’s interactions, because certainly it would have.

certainly it did.

however, that is to say that if sara spent her whole life sure that her father was the physical abuser, she sure as hell knew what she was talking about.

she watched him lay hands on her mother.

she heard the screaming, yelling fights.

she sat bedside at the hospital while her mother got stitches in her cheek and her father bald-faced lied to the nurses: “she just ran into the car door again. she’s so clumsy, etc.”

she was there to personally witness what happened between her parents, and there's no real ambiguity in what she saw.

while as an adult, she might have a somewhat more nuanced understanding of how much strain her mother’s (presumably untreated) mental illness and her parents’ joint struggles with addiction undoubtedly placed on their relationship than she did when she was a child, that doesn’t change the facts of the relationship itself.

she was never wrong about her dad.

the unscrupulous writers of the later seasons just wrote her to be because, as @bartramcat once succinctly framed things, they wrote "only for the episode."

they didn't care about the larger show narrative.

they didn't care about character history.

they didn't even have a good sense of who the characters—and especially the "og" characters they had inherited from the show's original writing staff—were or how they'd behave in any given situation.

they ignored fifteen years of precedent for the sake of a one-off storyline, and their decision to do so was absolutely the wrong one.

they came up with the idea for episode 15x12 "dead woods" and let their love for the concept—that sara helps a foster child with whom she apparently has a personal relationship learn that despite what had long been thought, her father didn't actually kill her family, and in the process sara reckons with her own family history of violence—prevail over any other storytelling concerns, in so doing undermining fifteen years of well-established character history and weakening sara’s origin story, diluting its strength and clarity.

to make the violence in the sidle home “equal opportunity” almost a decade after episode 05x13 “nesting dolls” told us that it wasn’t unnecessarily muddles what had previously been one of most evocative and memorable character backgrounds on the show.

and for what? why? cui bono?

it’s not as if there’s ever any more said about the subject after episode 15x12 “dead woods” takes place.

it’s not as if this retcon was necessary or purposeful in any larger sense.

hell, it wasn’t even necessary or purposeful in the episode in question! 

to have connected abby’s experience to sara’s WITHOUT nerfing sara’s backstory would have been very easy to do.

they could have just had sara say “abby gets to rewrite her story, and i don’t. her father wasn’t a monster, but mine sure as hell was” and left it at that.

and honestly, to me, it would have been a more powerful and provocative storytelling choice to do things that way—to allow sara help abby redeem her father while knowing she could never do the same for her own.

to go off on a tangent a bit, the last two seasons of csi in particular are, overall, highly uncomfortable with tragedy, to the point where even in episodes that should ostensibly be dark and depressing given their subject matter (such as episode 14x12 “keep calm & carry on”), the writers weirdly and stubbornly insist on inflecting the action with comedy and don’t allow any kind of bad feelings to linger for too long. while in the early seasons of the show, csi was a drama with occasional comedic elements or episodes, in its last few seasons, csi became a comedy with occasional dramatic elements and episodes. to my mind, this abrupt genre shift very much plays into the writers’ decision to retcon sara’s backstory in episode 15x12 “dead woods,” as they seemingly just can’t allow the episode to end on a down note; they just compulsively ameliorate and oversimply EVERYTHING, not allowing there to be any jagged edges or messiness (a problem which is then compounded by the whole “writing only to the episode” issue, as they always have to resolve every problem neatly within the hour with no intention to revisit said problems or continue the character development at any future points).

so.

given that this retcon runs counter to everything we ever know about sara’s family history prior to s15, and given that it was decided upon by writers whose general grasp on sara’s character is tenuous at best—girl feels ooc from s12 on, ngl—and given that it’s something that has no bearing on her story going forward and is never remarked upon again in any meaningful way, my response is

like.

okay, later seasons csi writers, you want to pretend like even though everything the show has ever told us about sara’s family history points to her father being the physical abuser and her mother being the victim (at least until her mother snapped and killed her father), that’s not actually the case, and sara somehow magically knows this now, thirty-five years after the fact, because—?

yeah.

i’m not going to accept that.

that’s bullshit.

you don’t get to come in and change the rules fifteen years on.

though not explicitly stated, it’s basically been canon that sara’s father was abusive since episode 01x07 “blood drops.”

you guys just never did your homework with this character, and it shows.

as for the notion of sara opening up more about her background to people in the later seasons, my feelings are similar:

i think it’s lazy writing that shows what a poor grasp the later seasons’ writers have on her character overall.

while i can rationalize sara talking to greg at least somewhat, as at that point in the series, he has already been made aware of at least some facets of her backstory due to the case details of the wynard murder in episode 13x15 “forget me not” (meaning that “the cat’s already out of the bag” with him in some ways), the conversation she has with db in episode 12x21 “dune & gloom” makes no goddamn sense to me.

that she would volunteer information about her mother’s mental illness to someone she had only met just a few months ago flies in the face of her prior characterization.

after all, this is the same girl who took seven years to tell the man she loved anything about her backstory at all and even then only did so with prompting! this is the same girl who never in fifteen years ever told catherine or warrick or nick or greg anything about her past of her own volition, even though she considered them family!

while you might say, “but aj, maybe her willingness to talk to db in that instance is just reflective of her growth as a character!,” i don’t buy it—not when she’s still so tightlipped about her past with everyone else, not when she still won’t speak openly about her family life even years later.

even by the days of the reboot, she’s still only willing to speak publicly about her childhood in vague terms and highly selectively (see reboot episode 01x04 “long pig”). it’s not like she’s ever voluble in talking about her past or even particularly comfortable providing details about it to anyone but grissom.

i mean, hell, greg remarks in episode 15x12 “dead woods” that even in light of him already knowing some of her backstory due to the wynard case, he and sara still “have never really talked about what happened with [her] dad,” which suggests that she hasn’t really filled in any blanks for him about her childhood in the two years since the events of episode 13x15 “forget me not” originally took place.

she’s just never an open book about that stuff.

that so, it’s weird that she would open up to db, and especially at such an early point in their relationship (and at a time in her life when she’s not actively looking for new confidantes, as she already has a confidante in grissom).

the whole thing just feels very “to the left” of her characterization.

so, yeah, i’m right there with you, anon: i don’t find the way sara’s backstory is handled in the later seasons of the original show at all believable.

it just doesn’t track with her previously established tendencies and history, and there’s no real narrative work put in to show wherein the difference lies. 

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

[addictedtostorytelling]

What is your opinion on Sam Braun? I think Catherine should have cut him off completely.

speaking from an outside-of-the-universe-of-the-show perspective, i actually enjoy catherine and sam's interactions a lot.

i like that their relationship is complicated and messy, with catherine feeling, on the one hand, loyal to sam because he is her father but, on the other hand, disgusted by him because he is a murderer.

the way that their relationship plays out seems real to me. for example, i fully believe that part of catherine always sensed, even before she knew for sure, that sam was her biological father. i also fully believe that even though sam never claimed catherine or married her mother, he did realize she was his kid and looked out for her throughout her life (see episode 07x09 "living legend"). the implied depth of their relationship is there, as far as i’m concerned; catherine and sam read like two people who have known each other for catherine's whole life and who have a lot of different emotional threads tangled up between them.

even outside of the narrative itself, on an acting level, marg helgenberger and scott wilson play off of each other well; scenes like the ones where sam forces catherine to beg him for nicky's ransom money in episode 05x25 "grave danger" pt. ii and where catherine calls sam a "thug in thousand-dollar shoes"—great line, by the way—and he slaps her across the face in episode 07x02 "built to kill" pt. ii are especially electric.

the writers get a lot of good mileage using sam’s criminality as a narrative conflict for catherine to face. having to navigate between her personal relationship with her father and her professional integrity thrusts catherine into moral hard places, forcing her to make difficult decisions in both her professional life and her personal one (and particularly when sam is actively dating her mother). 

and that’s just the crux of good writing: presenting your character with an impossible choice and not allowing her to avoid choosing.

when it comes down to it, catherine doesn’t always do the right thing where sam is concerned—she tests his dna; she cashes his check; she takes his ransom money; she continues to have a relationship with him even after she knows with some certainty that he is a killer.

and that’s just plain interesting.

given that catherine is a character who doesn’t have many long-term romances (and especially not ones that are given a lot of screen time over the course of the series), her father-daughter relationship with sam turns out to be one of her most prominent and dynamic relationships on the show.

so, all in all, i’m a fan.

but that’s speaking from an outside-of-the-universe-of-the-show perspective.

inside of the universe of the show, sam is bad news, and catherine would absolutely be better off if she cut him out of her life. 

not only is he a bad guy in the sense that he occasionally kills people who cross him (or at least pays other people to do so), but he is also bad for catherine personally, in that he frequently puts her in positions that compromise her career, at times emotionally manipulates her, and even gets physically abusive with her once in a while.

while he does gift her a lot of money (enough so that she can, as a single mother, afford to send lindsey to a posh private school come s3), just being connected to him places both her and lindsey in danger, making them targets for his enemies (as is the case in s7 in episodes 07x01 and 07x02 “built to kill” pts. i and ii).

though i don’t doubt that sam does, in his own way, love catherine, he also is a selfish enough person that he can’t seem to place her well-being above his own; he is willing to let her (and lindsey) get hurt if it suits him, and he isn’t ever particularly apologetic when catherine gets caught in the crosshairs of his business dealings. to him, it’s all just the price of running the town.

from a character perspective, i can understand why catherine has a difficult time severing ties with sam, even after some of their more unpleasant encounters, as he does in many ways provide for her and there is a genuine emotional connection between them. 

however, i also know that if i were catherine’s friend and she asked me what i thought of sam and her relationship with him, i’d tell her that i didn’t like the way he treated her and that she would do well to steer clear of him—which are things i think that catherine already knows for herself on a logical level but which she might not be able to reconcile with emotionally. 

had sam not died suddenly at the start of s7, who knows how long catherine might have continued to maintain her relationship with him or if she ever would have reached a point when she said, “you know what? i’m done giving you second chances. you’ve killed enough people, and i’m out”?

anyway.

that’s my take.

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

[addictedtostorytelling]

Omg. Okay okay so a (another) kind of follow-up to the "wife gets full name privileges" thing do you think Sara pulls the "GILBERT ARTHUR GRISSOM!!!" thing?

hey, @coping-via-clint-eastwood​!

i have no way to substantiate this take at all—just rolling with 100% headcanon here—but, for a couple of reasons, i don’t think that sara actually does “full-name” grissom when she’s angry at him.

explanation after the “keep reading.”

_________

the first reason why i think she doesn’t is that, as per what we see on the show, she tends to use “gilbert” in a highly particular context with him—specifically to denote affection and flirtation, almost in the same way that one might use a more general endearment like “dear” or “babe”—and i don’t think it would be natural for her to cross her “this name is what i call you when i’m feeling fond” and “this name is what i call you when i’m feeling annoyed” wires. 

whereas both “grissom” and “gil” are more neutral names and could be used regardless of how she were feeling toward him, “gilbert” seems to be reserved for moments when she is especially sweet on him, and i suspect that she’d probably like to keep things that way as much as possible.

she wouldn’t want the harsh vibes associated with her special “golly, i’m super in love with you” name for him, you know?

the second reason why i think she doesn’t is because while she will sometimes yell to grissom in circumstances when suspects and cases upset her (such as in episode 01x10 “sex, lies, & larvae”), she doesn’t typically yell at grissom for his own sake in situations when she is actually upset with him specifically.

sara avoids yelling at grissom when she’s angry at him because she has a legitimate hang-up about that kind of behavior between spouses due to her family history. because her parents constantly yelled at each other as part of their escalating abuse cycle—enough so that she specifically recalls that they did as she is revealing her backstory to grissom for the first time in episode 05x13 “nesting dolls” (“the fights, the yelling, the trips to the hospital; i thought it was the way that everybody lived”)—she doesn’t want to fall into those same patterns with her own husband.   

it’s just not something she’s comfortable with or is ever liable to do. 

rather than yell at grissom or even raise her voice at him, she instead tends to get snarky, terse, and/or passive-aggressive. her volume remains low, though her words themselves will turn sharp. 

(we see examples of this behavior from her in episodes 01x10 “sex, lies, & larvae;” 01x16 “too tough to die;” 02x15 “burden of proof;” 05x13 “nesting dolls;” 08x07 “goodbye & good luck;” and even in the series finale.) 

in any case, given that i don’t think she’s likely to yell at grissom in order to communicate her upset to him and that “full-naming” is usually done within the context of yelling, i just don’t see her going that route if she and grissom were ever in conflict. more likely, she would stick to just “gil” said at a conversational volume but inflected with a biting edge.       

of course, she might also opt to call him just “grissom” if she were angry, as doing so would emphasize that she were distancing herself from him (given that in their personal interactions, she typically calls him “gil” or “gilbert,” with “grissom” being reserved for his less intimate acquaintances).

now, all of the above said, while i can’t imagine sara yelling grissom’s full name at times when she is actually angry with him, i can see her occasionally using it flirtatiously—as in, “why, gilbert arthur grissom, you’ve certainly outdone yourself this time” or “yes, gilbert arthur grissom, i would love to take a walk with you this afternoon.” 

i can also see her maybe using it to indicate mock-upset—for example, “gilbert arthur grissom, tell me you did not just drink the last of the coffee”—spoken in a teasing tone (so that he would know she wasn’t really angry).

she also might potentially use it to get his attention if he were caught up in his thoughts.

—but that’s just my personal sense of things.

like i said up top, i can’t really substantiate what i’m thinking. these are just the usage parameters i would personally abide by if i were writing a fic, you know? 

really, to each their own headcanon on this one.

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

[addictedtostorytelling]

Hi! In 7.14, Sara looked pretty distraught while she and Brass interrogated Jesse, who killed his mom after she put him up for adoption. Do you think the case kind of… had an effect on her? Jesse was in the system and obviously went through trauma due to his mother. It might be a stretch but do you think it was one of the episodes that built up towards her departure in the future (and her eventually kinda patching things up with her mom)?

hi, anon!

this experience is one that i think she definitely reflects back on once she does decide to leave vegas and reunite with her mom.

that said, i believe it's probably more of a justification for than a catalyst of her decision.

here’s how i figure:

certainly, this case affects sara strongly in the moment, as do most cases involving current or former foster children, and especially those with strained relationships with their biological parents.

whenever sara looks at a current/former foster child who is either the victim or perpetrator of a violent crime, she probably thinks, "there but for the grace of god go i."

in particular, jesse's line from the end of the episode probably hits a little too close to home for her: "don't tell me i have a mother, because i don't. i never did. and i never will."

sara definitely knows that feeling, not in the sense of being abandoned since infancy, like jesse was, but rather in the sense that even though she lived with laura during her early years, laura was never really a mother to her in terms of providing for her needs and making her feel cared for and safe; she had too many issues to really parent sara in the way that sara so desperately craved.

i also think sara can relate to jesse with regards to his dual love and hatred for his mother, which is something she talks about at the end of episode 05x21 "committed" within the context of adam trent; while she would never be violent toward laura in the same ways that jesse is and adam wants to be toward their mothers, she understands what it's like to feel such conflicted emotions for one's parent(s).

on the one hand, sara retains a lot of rage for her mother, who was supposed to nurture and shield her when she was young and helpless but failed to (and indeed eventually herself became a major source of pain in sara’s life). on the other hand, even after so many years and so many disappointments, there is still some part of her that would give anything to have her mother swoop in and embrace her and tell her everything will be all right.

she gets the self-loathing that comes from this kind of internal conflict, as well as the disturbing thought patterns.

honestly, that's what probably fucks her up the most in this situation: her awareness that even though she would never take the same actions jesse has, she can understand why he did what he did.

—and that's where i think her distraught look comes in.

it's triggering for her, coming into contact with fractured parent-child relationships in general, but especially in this case, where she feels empathy for the killer.

his parting words haunt her, as in many ways she sees herself in him.

so.

all of the above said, i don't know if after the initial gut-punch wears off she thinks about this case much in the weeks and months that follow, but i do imagine that while she's on the plane to san francisco a year later, she probably hears jesse's words echoing in her mind and ponders whether or not it's going to be possible for her to move past her trauma and "have a mother" in a way he never could.

while this case may not be “the straw that breaks the camel’s back” in terms of actually getting her to leave vegas and go see her mother in the first place, it’s likely something that she looks back on retroactively and thinks, “this is just another example of why i need to address these issues in my life once and for all. i don’t want to be this way anymore. i don’t want to have to carry these kinds of thoughts and feelings around with me forever.”

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

[addictedtostorytelling]

Hi Anon! I have spent hours reading through your meta. It’s amazing and I hope it’s archived forever. On a separate note, I’ve been rewatching the series during quarantine. I thought the scenes with Brenda in blood drops were a huge hint at Sara’s backstory. I would love your take on how early you think the producers knew what Sara’s history was actually going to be. I love to think they told Jorja early on and kept up out of the loop until season 5.

hey, anon!

thank you for your kind words! i’m glad you enjoy my metas. ❤ 

regarding sara’s backstory, i just so happen to have an old meta on that exact subject posted here, if you’re interested.

the tl;dr summary is that the production team at csi actually didn’t have sara’s backstory planned from the start. 

while prior to s5 the writers seem to have had some nebulous sense that at some point in sara’s life she’d witnessed and/or experienced abuse, they hadn’t yet worked out the details: whom had been abused and in what context, sara’s relationships with the people involved, whether or not sara herself had actually been abused, at what time in her life the abuse took place, etc. 

though sara was consistently depicted as being triggered by abuse cases (or even cases where women and children were the victims of any kind of interpersonal violence) as early as s1, whatever her actual trigger was wasn’t yet known by the production team. 

tellingly, sara’s oldest cbs character biographies (which are no longer available online in their original form but are quoted on sites like this one) mention nothing about her now-canonical traumatic past and instead tell a rather quaint story about sara being a precocious and high-strung kid raised by lax ex-hippie parents who ran a bed & breakfast in norcal. 

they make no reference to any abuse in the sidle home, sara’s father’s murder at the hands of her mother, sara’s time in foster care, etc. 

as many of these biographies date back to s1, we can see that these story elements weren’t in existence (or at least weren’t formalized) at the time of her character’s creation.  

furthermore, both csi staff writer josh berman and producer ann donahue have talked about how episode 01x10 “sex, lies, & larvae” was one of the earliest points at which the production team really discussed sara’s potential backstory and history with abuse. 

berman said he knew as he wrote the episode that something had probably happened in sara’s past to cause her to have such strong emotional reactions to abuse cases (though he wasn’t yet sure what that “something” was or if that “something” would ever be explored in the maintext of the show), and donahue added that, at the time, her thinking on the matter was that sara had probably had a hippie mother who had had some abusive boyfriends during sara’s childhood.

however, as stated, it wasn’t until s5 that the specifics of the story we now know really started to crystallize.

that said, the fact that episode 01x07 “blood drops” predates the invention of sara’s official backstory doesn’t mean it can’t still be viewed as foreshadowing concerning sara’s past. brenda does absolutely serve as an analog for sara and their stories do absolutely parallel each other. 

my suspicion has always been that the csi writers actually based sara’s story on brenda’s story—that in trying to decide what they wanted to say in particular about sara’s previously mysterious history with abuse, they looked back over the entire series to that point and specifically at episodes that brought sara into contact with abuse victims and survivors and said, “there’s the opportunity for a potential tie-in here. let’s take it.”

in any case, i’m right there with you in finding that episode and storyline especially relevant to sara and helpful for understanding her character. even if the “foreshadowing” was unintentional at first, it works seamlessly in retrospect, and sara behaves exactly as she ought to in that situation, given what we now know about her backstory as presently constituted.

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

[addictedtostorytelling]

[addictedtostorytelling]

my favorite csi episodes (continued): 04x18 "bad to the bone" (19/25)

grissom and the team investigate when a small man beats a much larger man to death with his bare fists and later dies under unusual circumstances while in police custody. they soon uncover evidence that he may have killed before.