CSI: Miami: Power Trip

CSI: Miami could get really, really dark during its ten year run. “Power Trip” is an example of that. The episode opens up with a woman attacked while at her car, making herself vulnerable when she accidentally drops her keys to the ground. A serial killer who dilates the eyes to blind them, uses jumper cables applied to that woman’s hand to electrocute her while shining a flashlight in her face. So Horatio Cane and his CSI team are called to her crime scene, believing that this case might just be related to a suspect in a previous murder (that wasn’t an electrocution, a year prior but the eyes were dilated). A third victim, Jessica (Shanna Collins), didn’t suffer an electrocution, upset with Horatio for the police not taking her report of her attack seriously; Horatio, though, wasn’t even involved in that, telling Jessica he would indeed take her past report and investigate it. A homicide detective, Reggie Mastow (Malik Yoba), was the police officer who took Jessica’s report, never investigating it because there wasn’t enough available in terms of evidence to purse a proper case…this decision haunts Reggie, and he takes it upon himself to pursue the suspect of the year old murder, Dr. Max Paulson (James Urbaniak), despite being assigned desk duty, with Horatio warning him to stay out of the investigation. The more Reggie resists “standing back”, the deeper he sinks into darkness, with Horatio finding him at the home of Jessica and her boyfriend, Dennis Chilton (Jamie Thomas King). Prior to that, Reggie had roughed up Paulson (a punch results in a pulled hair root he later plants on a body so that Paulson is fingered for the murder!), resulting in Horatio taking his badge and gun. This episode gets darker and darker as it continues until a cop goes too far, becoming the very murderer he took an oath to protect others against, and someone close to Jessica turns out to be the real killer, with the suspicious Paulson actually innocent! This episode features a very suspenseful scene that involves Calleigh in an elevator with Reggie, as Reggie gets really intense about how the CSIs in their “white labcoats” don’t know what it’s like to have to get their hands dirty, even stopping the elevator before it reaches the car parking…Calleigh is left on edge from this conversation, seeing Reggie in a more sinister light. Horatio dealt a complicated situation with Reggie gone rogue is at the heart of this episode’s melodrama, left heartbroken by his decision to take the law into his own hands, and make a critical mistake that will cost him everything. The real killer, when Paulson is brought into interrogation time and again, is rather “wait, whaaaat?”, with Jessica left reeling from the results once a new latent fingerprint match procedure Horatio gets Delko to follow through on is the smoking gun. These twists can really unveil quite a sick mind in the middle of very bad behavior. A hanging suicide in prison just bookends a really disturbing piece of work. 3/5