The first episode, "Dead Doll," starts out just where Season Seven left off, with Sara Sidle (Jorja Fox) pinned under a flipped car out in the desert, with a deadly thunderstorm on the way destined to drown her. The team is frantically trying to find her since they know that she was placed there by the Miniature Killer from last season, Natalie Davis (Jessica Collins), as an act of revenge since she blames Gil Grissom (William Petersen) for the suicide of her foster father, Ernie Dell. Natalie won't give up any info, but Sara manages to free herself and is found, dehydrated and dying in the desert, but she is saved. However, this brush with death dredges up all sorts of emotion in Sara, causing her to question her career, but not her relationship with Grissom, which has come under department scrutiny.
Later on in the season, two characters return from a previous season, Marlon and Hannah West, the brother and sister team who managed to get away with murder. Once again, brilliant and manipulative 12-year-old Hannah, now in grad school, messes with Sara's mind during the investigation. The tragic outcome of this episode drives Sara to abandon the team and Grissom, leaving with little explanation other than she simply needs to get away from the continual death surrounding her career. Watching Sara walk away was a very difficult episode for this veteran CSI fan, but nothing could prepare me for the events that take place during the season finale.
One long-running story arc throughout the season has to do with a mobster named Lou Gedda who runs a popular strip club and keeps Al Capone's barber chair in his office to strap foes in and torture them. Warrick Brown (Gary Dourdan) crosses paths with him in a case and finds himself in a world of trouble, both personally and professionally. Warrick becomes convinced that Gedda has a mole in the department and tries to obtain info from a stripper who he later sleeps with. Unfortunately, she turns up with her throat cut and in Warrick's car. As Warrick's divorce finalizes and he fights a prescription drug addiction, things spiral out of control. Eventually, he gets too close to the truth and it costs him his life in the season's heartbreaking finale.
Since Season Eight has so many dark and dreary continuing plotlines, they mix things up with a good dose of humor, thank God. There are episodes about murder on the set of a porn horror; alien-looking green blood; bull riding and illegal bull sperm trafficking; and also an episode spoofing the old Roseanne show. Probably my favorite humorous episode is called "You Kill Me" where the lab rats, led by Hodges (Wallace Langham), mentally act out murder scenarios while the core team is away. Little do they know that Hodges is actually testing out a board game he is creating and using them as, er, lab rats. It's very funny and they break through the 4th wall often, to hilarious effect. There's even a featurette on the making of this episode that was really entertaining.
Obviously, this season was focused a lot on Warrick, Sara and Grissom, but Catherine Willows (Marg Helgenberger), Nick Stokes (George Eads), Greg Sanders (Eric Szmanda) and Captain Jim Brass (Paul Guilfoyle) show up just as often, just not taking center stage as much. There are a number of special features including a nice sized deleted scene, a featurette on director William Friedkin (The Exorcist), a long-time friend of William Petersen's and the one who directed the episode surrounding Gedda and Warrick. There's one on Sara Sidle's departure and how it affected the other members of the group, plus several others, all of which are enjoyable. The driest of the group is one on Grissom's favorite subject, bugs and how they relate to decomposition. The special feature I was most pleased to see was a bonus episode of Without a Trace called "Where & Why", which was the continuation of a CSI episode surrounding a missing child called "Who & What." When this show aired, I had DVR'd it, but didn't realize that the story kept going on Without a Trace, so I never saw the conclusion. I am very pleased that Paramount included this wrap-up on the DVD release, so I could finally see what happened.
If you are a fan of CSI, I am preaching to the choir. You are already going to buy this. But if you aren't a collector, but merely a fan who may have missed some episodes, this season is can't-miss stuff. Go rent or buy it today.
