Grave Danger

Summary

The separated graveyard-shift team join together after one of their own is kidnapped from a crime scene and held for a million dollar ransom by a mysterious and vengeful assailant. However, it soon appears that the kidnapping may be about more than the ransom.

Plot

Volume 1

The show opens with Nick Stokes driving down The Strip at night, listening to Bob Neuwirth's "Lucky Too" on the radio. He pulls over at a car park and a uniformed officer leads him to the "body": a set of intestines coiled in an alley. When the officer walks off to be sick, Nick wanders down the alley and spots a styrofoam coffee cup, already in an evidence bag. As he crouches down to photograph it, he is snatched from behind and a cloth is clamped over his face.

Twenty-five minutes later, police officers and CSIs swarm the scene. Conrad Ecklie, Assistant Director of the Crime Lab, arrives and assures Grissom and Catherine that "the crime lab only has one case tonight." As they search the scene, they find Nick's stab vest, camera and kit lying on the ground. They see the bagged coffee cup and realize that Nick did not bag it. The scene cuts to earlier that night: Grissom and Sara are reviewing a past homicide case, Greg and Hodges are playing a Dukes of Hazzard board game and Nick and Warrick toss a coin to choose assignments: an assault at a strip club or a "trash run" at the intersection of Flamingo and Koval. Nick loses and Warrick leaves for the club, gloating.

Back to the present, police scent dogs track the smell of Nick's vest to an empty parking space on a side street. Warrick notices a void in the fallen rain and takes measurements. With the help of the lab technicians and a dispatch officer, Warrick determines the getaway vehicle to be a Ford Expedition and tracks its escape route on the traffic camera video tapes. Doc Robbins determines that the entrails belong to a dog.

A cut scene shows the kidnapper (as yet unidentified) placing an unconscious Nick in a Plexiglas coffin, throwing in his loaded service pistol, a set of glow sticks—one already lit—and a dictaphone. The coffin lid closes and earth is shoveled on top of it. Grissom and the team review: there was no trace on the coffee cup or the evidence bag, although there was ether on a white fiber present on Nick's stab vest. In the corridor, Hodges grapples with a delivery man, who had just delivered a package marked "RE: Stokes". Grissom hurries into the layout room, carrying the package.

The scene cuts to the coffin. Nick wakes up and knocks his head on the coffin lid. He checks the magazine of his pistol and cocks it. He listens to the dictaphone tape. A taunting voice speaks:

Volume 2

After the prime suspect blows himself up, Grissom and the team must continue to find Nick using the evidence they have managed to put together. Greg and Warrick tap into the Expedition's trip computer to narrow down a search radius, Catherine collects up Sam's money and Sara finds the kidnapper's amputated thumb, but on returning to the lab she cannot match the print.

Inside the coffin, Nick realizes that every time the CSIs click the "Watch" button, the fan supplying him with air switches off as its power supply is diverted to power the lights. He starts to rage at the unseen viewers for switching on the light. In the AV lab, Warrick watches as Nick suddenly becomes still and plugs his ears with chewing gum. As Nick draws his gun and racks the slide, Warrick leaps to his feet, urging Nick not to fire. In the box, Nick turns the gun away from his own head and shoots out the light by his feet. Warrick yells at the screen until Nick snaps one of the spare glow sticks and can be seen moving around inside the coffin. Grissom enters and comments that "at least Nick's keeping it together."

Meanwhile, Mia and Sara are in the DNA lab; Mia ran the DNA from the thumb through CODIS and found a partial match to Kelly Gordon, the kidnapper's daughter, who was convicted three years previously of accessory to murder. Grissom looks up the file, and sees that the homicide took place at 625 Viking Circle—where the messenger picked up the package containing the USB key. On the evidence log, they note a styrofoam cup, which contained Kelly's DNA and sealed her conviction. Brass and Sara have her brought to interrogation, and ask her if she knows where Nick is being held. Kelly, bitter because she is being abused by her cellmate, expresses her hope that Nick dies, but also reveals that she used to work in horticulture.

At the crime scene, Warrick loses his temper at Greg due to the lack of progress, and kicks a bucket of liquid at him. When Catherine leaves to talk to Warrick, Greg notices that the liquid is sinking into the ground in some places on the floor, and the team frantically begin to dig. Inside the box, Nick hears cracking noises; thinking it to be a rescue effort, he starts to belt out "Lucky Too", the song which he sang in the car at the start of the episode. However, when the CSIs open the box that they found, they find that it is only a prototype, containing a dead dog. Nick looks around inside his coffin and realizes that the cracking noises are the result of his shooting earlier; the box is breaking apart.

Critical analysis

Reception

When first screened in the US, this episode was number one on the Nielsen ratings with an average of 30.05 million viewers, although as the viewing figures grew throughout the show, it hit a high of 35.15 million. This meant it had twice as many people watching it as its nearest competition, The Apprentice.

In 2009, TV Guide ranked this episode #47 on its list of the 100 Greatest Episodes.

Comparison

Nick's situation echoes that of The Bride, played by Uma Thurman, in the Tarantino film Kill Bill: Volume 2; both are buried alive. In the original broadcast, the two episodes were entitled Volume 1 and Volume 2, mimicking the nomenclature of the Kill Bill films. An exchange between Walter Gordon and Grissom also paraphrases a line from the movie (italics indicate the shared dialogue):

Gordon: You're telling me there's a million dollars in there? Along with some cute little booby traps? Which is it, a tracer, a dye pack?

Grissom: Normally you'd be 100 percent right, but this time you're 100 percent wrong.

Visually, the episodes have been referred to as "Tarantino-esque...really attentive to detail" by Gary Dourdan, who plays Warrick. His co-star Marg Helgenberger opined that "his [Tarantino's] filmmaking style lends itself really well to CSI... there's an enormous amount of close-ups, and it's a very visual show".

Some elements of the episode, such as the pile of intestines that lures Nick to the alley, Walter Gordon's suicide and the black-and-white autopsy scene which Nick imagines when he is trapped in the coffin have been likened to the viscera of Kill Bill and other Tarantino films, and Nick's hallucination of Al Robbins and David Phillips conducting his autopsy is also similar to Tarantino's cinematography in the same film. The use of nonlinear storytelling at the beginning of the episode (going forwards in time to the search for Nick, back to the early evening and so on) also mimics Kill Bill volumes 1 and 2, which present various elements of the story in a nonlinear order over two films.

"Crate 'n Burial" is a season 1 episode of CSI which bears many resemblances in terms of plot, to "Grave Danger". For example, the kidnapper buries his victim, a businessman's wife, underground in the Nevada desert and demands $2 million for her safe return, on a short deadline of 3 hours. However, the culprit in "Crate 'n Burial" is after the money, not revenge, and the victim (Laura Garas) was initially an accomplice in a staged kidnapping. One scene from "Grave Danger" in particular, of Nick hammering on the lid of the coffin and screaming after he hears the dictaphone message, echoes a scene from the earlier episode, wherein the victim wakes up in a box, flicks on a lighter, and seeing her predicament, starts to scream wildly.

Awards

Tarantino was nominated for the 2005 Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Directing for a Drama Series.

Arc significance

This episode concludes the breakup of the team, ordered by Supervisor Conrad Ecklie. Ecklie initiated the dissolution as retribution against Grissom for allegedly mishandling an older case in the episode "Mea Culpa". Ecklie assigned Nick and Warrick to Catherine and Greg and Sara to Grissom. Upon Nick's placement on an ambulance, Grissom defiantly tells Ecklie, "I want my guys back!", to which Ecklie reluctantly agrees.

This episode also introduced viewers to Undersheriff Jeffrey McKeen (Conor O'Farrell).

Home media releases

"Grave Danger" was already included as a double volume episode on the Season 5 DVD, then was offered as its own DVD broken up as a 2-parter just as on the original Season 5 boxset. It is now on Blu-ray/DVD combination in the original, complete film format in which it was originally broadcast minus the memorial dedication to Frank Gorshin who had died the day before the episode premiered on television.