It's Bad Luck - Tarantino's CSI: Episodes 20 Years Later

I have been bored with television in a way that feels almost embarrassing to admit. Shoresy is off season, and I’m watching it so often for my dissertation and I’m just not stimulated by anything network right now. I’m just bored. Not bored the way you are when nothing is on, but bored in the deeper sense, the way you get when you realize you've been watching something for forty minutes and couldn't tell anyone what happened, because nothing did, really, except that characters explained their feelings to each other because writers now write for shortened attention spans. I loved Jury Duty, the Company Retreat special, specifically, precisely because of how much invisible labor was underneath it. The planning, the contingency, and the hundreds of small decisions that had to be made before a single frame was shot. That kind of craft is its own argument. It tells you someone cared.

So I went back to the original CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, from the beginning, and I am shocked by the complexity of the structure and the details that writer’s made to come up with something that could easily be made today. The show premiered over 25 years ago and honestly, it holds up and should be something that television today should aspire to.

The show runs on a two-crime structure that is easy to dismiss as formulaic, but is actually doing something smarter than it looks. The stories are complex, rarely identical, sometimes hokey, but they inform each other contextually - dealing with government issues to petty crime to bigger conversations about society and how things work. And the show refuses to explain this to you with episodes ending with no real answer, no solution, and a sense that justice is served, but it feels wrong. There is no scene where someone draws the connection out loud to solve the whole thing in the middle of the story, no moment of expository generosity toward a viewer who might have been distracted. If you look away, you miss it. That is a genuine commitment to television as a visual medium, and it is rarer than it sounds these days. Contemporary television has largely made its peace with distracted watching, with the idea that you might be on your phone, that the important information will be repeated. Early CSI did not wait. You waited for a commercial break to get your snacks or use the bathroom, and that 2 minute break was the only relief you had. 

What the show is also doing, quietly and consistently, is defining its characters almost entirely through their work. Gil Grissom is not a man we understand through his relationships, we get facets of his life - his lip reading, his bug collection, his love of rollercoasters. He is a man we understand through how he looks at a crime scene, what he notices, what he dismisses, and the connections he makes. That turns out to be enough. It produces a richer characterization than most of the shows that replaced it, shows where everyone's psychology is constantly being narrated at the audience because the writers no longer trust our idiot brains to make connections. The visual storytelling of early CSI assumes a viewer who is paying attention and wholly involved, and it rewards them for doing so.

All of this is context for why the Season 5 finale is regarded as the finest episodes in the whole series.

"Grave Danger" is a two-part episode directed by Quentin Tarantino, who had become a fan of the show while filming Kill Bill in Beijing, watching it every Sunday evening. Word of his enthusiasm reached the production team, who invited him to direct an episode. Once he began working on set, the material expanded beyond a single hour into a feature-length two-part finale. Tarantino said he wanted the episode to feel "in some way like a 'CSI' movie," and he was ultimately nominated for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Directing for a Drama Series for his work on it. The night it aired in May 2005, it drew an average of 35.15 million viewers and was later ranked by TV Guide as number 47 on its list of the 100 greatest episodes of television. 

The plot is almost deranged in its simplicity. Nick Stokes, the CSI with the Texan Drawl, is kidnapped from a crime scene after investigating a report of human remains in an alleyway, and he wakes up buried alive in a glass coffin. A ransom of one million dollars is demanded, which Grissom delivers to the kidnapper after Catherine Willows goes to her father to ask for the money. The kidnapper, Walter Gordon, blows himself up before the team can learn the location of Nick's trap, leaving the CSIs with no leads and a countdown. The coffin is wired with a bomb set to detonate the moment Nick exits and then fire ants get in. The episode follows the team's increasingly desperate attempts to find him using nothing but their investigative skill, luck, and each other. 

Tarantino structures it with his signature nonlinear sleight of hand, cutting forward to the search for Nick and then back to earlier that evening, moving in labeled chapters. In its original broadcast, the two parts were titled Volume 1 and Volume 2, directly echoing the naming of Kill Bill. The glass coffin is borrowed almost directly from Kill Bill Vol. 2, in which Uma Thurman's character, the Bride, is buried alive. A black-and-white hallucination sequence in which Nick imagines himself receiving an autopsy with his ribs cracked open by a chainsaw was considered too graphic for network television in color and filmed in monochrome to satisfy broadcast standards. The trunk shots, the close-ups, the use of Johnny Cash and garage rock on the soundtrack, and the cameos from Hollywood veterans like Tony Curtis and Frank Gorshin, to whom the episode was dedicated after he died two days before it aired, all bear the director's signature without ever feeling like a vanity project. As Gary Dourdan, who plays Warrick Brown on the series, put it, the episodes are "Tarantino-esque, really attentive to detail," and his co-star Marg Helgenberger added that Tarantino's filmmaking style lends itself well to the show because "there's an enormous amount of close-ups, and it's a very visual show." Tarantino did not push his style onto CSI so much as locate the version of his style that was already inherently in it.

But the thing I keep returning to is not Nick, while this storyline stays with the character for a long time after the episode. It is the women around Nick.

He is the one in the coffin. His survival is the engine of the whole episode, and the ticking clock of his air supply is what generates the tension. And yet the episode's emotional register, the place where the feeling actually lives, is largely carried by the women at its edges. His mother appears on screen, blank as she watches her baby boy via the live feed, helpless as the light reflects from the screen into her glassy eyes. Catherine spends the episode in increasingly desperate motion, trying to assemble the ransom money through connections that will cost her something to call in, burning through goodwill and making promises the show suggests she may not be able to keep. Even the very beginning, Grissom is testing a blood splatter analysis where we smashcut to two women, twins, being shot in the head after their terrfied screams are heard in a recreation - foreshadowing for what’s to come. The women are not the subject of the story. But they are its texture, its feeling, and the place where the audience is meant to locate its own distress. Nick suffers inside the coffin, but the audience suffers through the women watching from outside.

This is not unique to this episode. It is, once you see it, a recurring structure in Tarantino's work. Women's suffering functions as a foundational layer of a story even when women are not its protagonist. The Bride in Kill Bill is the rare exception, the woman at the center, but she spends a significant portion of the narrative buried, unconscious, or recovering from damage done to her body. Shosanna in Inglourious Basterds is the forefront of the film's apex and dies in the process, her plan succeeding only posthumously. The female characters in Tarantino's films are frequently the site of the story's most intense emotional and physical violence, used to generate stakes or sympathy or feeling for stories that are, structurally, about the men moving through them. "Grave Danger" is a particularly clean example because the central victim is explicitly male and the emotional surrogates are explicitly female.

I didn’t have a precise framework for thinking about this until I read Claire Dederer's Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma, which is a book about exactly the adjacent problem: what you do with art you love when the person who made it has done real harm. Dederer is interested in the question not as a political position, but as a personal experience to be lived through. She loves Lolita. She loves certain Woody Allen films. She has to figure out what to do with that love, and she is honest enough to admit that there is no clean answer. Her argument, well a part of it, is that the damage travels with the work. Maintaining the concept that art exists in a vacuum is a lie that ultimately costs you honesty, and is not meant to diminish the art itself, but instead, exist alongside it. 

The Tarantino case is more complicated, which is part of what makes it worth sitting with. In a 2018 interview with the New York Times, Uma Thurman described in detail what happened on the set of Kill Bill. She had been told by a stunt person that the car she was to drive for a scene was not in good condition, and she expressed hesitation. Tarantino urged her on, telling that the car was fine, and that if she did not hit forty miles per hour, her hair would not blow correctly and he would make her do it again. She drove it, the seat was not properly secured, and she crashed into a tree and was injured. She had been trying to obtain footage of the crash for years, footage that Miramax had declined to release to her. Tarantino told Deadline that securing the footage was a "herculean task" he ultimately undertook, and called the accident one of the biggest regrets of his life. Thurman also described two other incidents from the same production. During filming of a scene in which Michael Madsen's character spits on her, Tarantino acted himself, later defending this on the grounds that he could better control the result as director. 

The Diane Kruger situation is similar in nature. During the filming of Inglourious Basterds, Kruger's character Bridget von Hammersmark is strangled to death by Hans Landa, played by Christoph Waltz. Tarantino decided that Waltz could not perform the strangulation convincingly for the close-up, and asked Kruger's permission to do it himself, telling her he needed to briefly cut off her air to get the vascular response in her face that the scene required. She agreed. When Thurman's account became public in 2018 and the Kruger scene was brought into the conversation, Kruger released a statement on Instagram saying that her experience with Tarantino had been "pure joy," that he had treated her with "utter respect," and that she stood with Thurman and with the broader movement without contradicting her own account of events. Two women, the same director, genuinely different experiences. This does not resolve anything. I think that is precisely the point.

What Dederer's framework offers is not solution but a way of staying honest inside the contradiction. The damage travels. You can love "Grave Danger" and you should also be able to say clearly what surrounds it. The episode is formally extraordinary. The nonlinear structure, the performance George Eads gives almost entirely without dialogue, the way Tarantino uses the glass coffin to make Nick's entrapment visible rather than imagined, and the management of tension over two hours without a conventional second-act break, these things are real. The love for storytelling is real and clear. 

And the pattern in the work is also real. The women at the edges of "Grave Danger," suffering loudly so that the audience has somewhere to put their feeling,s while the man at the center suffers quietly, are doing the emotional labour the episode requires. Whether Tarantino was conscious of this as a choice or whether it is simply the shape his stories naturally take, it is there. The same structure, more or less, that his actresses have described experiencing off-screen: their discomfort and their pain in service of something that is ultimately not about them.

Dederer does not say you cannot love the work. She says you cannot love it and also pretend. She says the stain travels, and that the minimum you owe is to carry it with you, to not set it down for the sake of a cleaner experience.

Early CSI taught me something about what it means to be a visual medium: that looking away has a cost, that the information is there in the scene if you are willing to stay with it. I have been trying to apply the same concept here. To watch clearly and not look away from the craft, which is real, and not look away from the cost, which is also real, and which was paid, as it so often is, by women.