As with most seasons, things start off with a bang. The first episode, "Countermeasures," features Battlestar Galactica alum Callum Keith Rennie as a crazed serial killer on the loose. With CSI Boa Vista and Horatio recovering from near-death experiences, the team is undermanned and possibly outgunned. It’s not clear if the show’s creators knew going into this season that it was in fact the finale, but in hindsight, it would be easy to see this episode as a signal that Horatio is running out of steam. There are plenty of hard moments this season, including several episodes like "At Risk," "Crowned," and "Look Who’s Taunting" that deal with violence against women and children. This feels a bit more like CSI: NY than sunny Miami, but there are also typical episodes like "Stiff" and "Sinner Takes All" that cover the more exotic sides of life. The former looks at the murder of a male prostitute, while the latter covers big-money gambling, and both will feel very familiar to fans of CSI: Miami.
As you might expect, character development is minimal, and there’s very little attempt to provide a clean ending for all the show’s mainstays. This suggests more than anything else that CSI: Miami: The Final Season wasn’t exactly planned around an arc to conclude the show’s entire run. One occasionally gets the impression that these are the leftover episodes, especially when the team is looking into supernatural killers or tracking down a hundred kids left behind by a murder victim. On some level, we get that this is the kind of filler CSI puts in place to bolster the main plot points, but CSI: Miami: The Final Season doesn’t really have those anchors. With some up-in-the-air items by the season’s end and at least one of the CSIs making plans that seem to go against the grain for her future on the force, we aren’t sure how to feel. It’s an abbreviated season anyway, but for fans it provides 19 more ways to enjoy the Miami team’s exploits.
A healthy mix of special features round out the collection, giving more context to several episodes and providing deleted scenes, plus a gag reel. It’s hard to believe that this is the last time we’ll comment on Horatio and the bunch in Miami, but CSI: Miami: The Final Season stands as the last hurrah, and the first of the highly successful CSI shows to fall off the radar. After 10 years, crime in the tropical heat will never be the same for CSI fans, and we’ll have to get our "Won’t Get Fooled Again" kick elsewhere.
