- Primum Non Nocere (First, Do Not Harm) aka The Shippy Hockey Ep, 03/01/2002

- Burden of Proof Off-Beat Review

- Cool Change/ I-15 Murders Post Ep Thoughs.

-Beauty of Life by Chiang Shun (Chinese, Big5 needed)

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 Did you ever hear of something called "skates"?

     Still soaking in the cheer of victory for Canada's hockey glories in Salt Lake, I was very happy, hysterically, to see the opening teaser started by some action-packed and blood splattering violence on ice; yeah, and, murder...(slight OT: I was thinking about watching "Men with Brooms" this morning. It's strange how the mind changed the taste just hours later, eh?)

 (The following plot was so overwhelmingly shocking I may had the wrong memory of when the first commercial cut in. If you have a heart condition like our vic-of-the-week and also happened to be a Sara/Gris shipper, please be careful.) 

     Here came our trio: Cat, Grissom, and Brass. They managed to "walk" to the vic, whose blood was now frozen in the ice. Cat walked gracefully on ice (maybe it's the heels), although the effect of slippery ice slowed her down; Brass was a little bit awkward on ice, and Grissom --- watching him on ice was like watching short-track speed skating: expecting SLIP, FALL, and ROLLER DERBY, only without high speed and tide body suit. "HELLO??? HAD ANYBODY HEARD OF SOMETHING CALLED 'SKATES' PREVIOUSLY?" But it was a short distance, so the potential hazard was over, at least for now. Anyway, the standard crime scene 101 lines finished and Grissom delivered his intelligent post-murder-pre-autopsy comment, "It's a murder," he said. (Cut into the commercial. I think. I can't really remember now.) My dear reader, you will forgive for my memory block after this point till the next moment I am going to write about. 

 DID HE JUST SAY WHAT I THINK HE SAID?

  Sara : You just don't like sports. 

  Grissom : I like baseball. 

  Sara : Baseball. That figures. All the stats. 

  Grissom : It's a beautiful sport. 

  Sara : Since when have you cared about beauty? 

  Grissom : Since I met you.

   I thought I was about to pass out. Did Grissom just say what I think he just said? Did he? The next ice-combing scene was as surreal as it could ever get, and I was not sure whether I was under the influences of hockey fever and Joey's confession to Rachel in "Friends" just 30 minutes earlier. The fact that they were both on ice kind of chilled me out. Well, there were definitely no Sale-Pelletier love story on ice, but ain't they cute together? Or maybe the whole thing was just a hallucination because I had too much coffee today? 

  And there was the ice-maker and the broken tooth. And then, wow, 

Catherine in boy's locker room! 

  All by herself! I thought it was a clever touch for the writers to put her in this situation, and definitely another Marg Helgenberger moments worth an Emmy.

  Return our favorite pair-on-ice, Sidle and Grissom. After some classical Sara-Grissom student-teacher exchange, they started to melt the ice. The exchange was perfectly usual as what we've been seeing since "Cool Change", sneakily I picked up the signal that something's never the same anymore. 

  Sara measured the ice pile and estimated "without calculus" the time which would take it to melt. Oh yeah, Sara's expertise in PHYSICS and MATH (in this case, Thermodynamics and some nasty partial differential  heat equations, which she just claimed not to used, that I'd been battling with all morning!) were finally recognized on CSI! Cheer for physics geeks like me! Last time Grissom and Sara watched pig decomposed, and this time they waited for ice to melt. Forensic Investigators in love, aw... 

 If I Had A Drinking Game...

 If I ever thought I had enough dose of ship-ness for one month, I was wrong.  When Warrick walked into the Jazz lunge, oh oh, here came the trouble. The singer girl pretty much conclude my wildest dream about being a jazz singer in a bar, and the formula for TV," looks were always deceiving", especially for beautiful women. Although the way Warrick starred at the singer girl was totally cliche ("You're too good to be true, I can't take my eyes off from you, you're like heaven to touch, I wanna hold you so much..."yep, that's Warrick's theme song now!), I was pleased to see Warrick gone shippy. Had I played the shipper drinking game tonight, I would had been dosed off before the next commercial break!  The "since I met you" would have poured one whole bottle of Molson Canadian right down, and the Warrick romance plot would have me poured another one.  Then the next morning I would wake up with a sever hangover and a delightful, fantastic dream of Grissom admitted his love to Sara and Warrick went shippy. 

 Testosterone, Cave, Plant, Men, and Women

 Grissom and the Doc's little exchange about sports, violence, modern society and testosterone was very intriguing, especially right after the 'beauty' conversation.  After the 'beauty' hysteria, my "READ BETWEEN THE LINES" function was on full alert, and, oh my, William Petersen IS the finest men on earth. (OT, OT!). I found that Grissom's expression was extremely musing when he talked about "working out the testosterones". It seemed that Grissom was somehow recognizing his human nature, the competitive, testosterone-driven side (because everybody loves hockey? what about curling? OT,OT!). The shockwave of the "since I met you" still resonated at this moment, and the Unresolved Sexual Tension had been maximized to the highest peak of the series' 1.5 year history; everything he said spelled 'sex'.

 Sex. When Grissom and Catherine went through the vic's house, the storyline inevitably went down the road. First Catherine commented on the apartment as a 'cave'. Grissom replied that it was clean. Catherine then responded, out of her instinct, that there was no living things in the room, a plant, or something human. Notice the use of the plant. Last time Grissom sent Sara a living plant (There was no doubt it worked.), and here Catherine mentioned it. It was an interesting coincident that we had seen Sara's apartment in You've Got Male --- a cold lonely place filled with mail-order catalogues, and no creatures, not even dead butterflies. Sara was living in a cave until the plant (= Grissom?) came along. With the "pucks, bucks and chicks" comment and the Jane sleeping around with every men on the hockey team, it hit me ---- 

  It was a cavemen/animal analogy. Males fight and compete, driven by testosterones and urges for reproduction, while females 'screen' (em, sleep around maybe?) for 'husband materials' to look after offspring, and have some fun with bad boys at the same time. Modern society ensure that everybody has sufficient food and warm clothes, so natural instincts have to be acted out on different channels under the rules of civilized world, such as, like Grissom said, sports. It is something like "the living plant" and "appreciation of beauty" that distinguish human from animals.  The plant (= beauty= Sara?) means life, something belongs to nature as well, like affections to one and another, yet does no harms. Primum Non Nocere (first, does no harm) is the title of this episode, and the episode everywhere says "does no harm". The beauty of affections come in forms of Sara and Grissom's witty exchange on poetry and science, or Warrick Brown's piano music. However civilization does have its own shadows, and the irony lays right in the title (Primum Non Nocere). The doctor was supposed to save and heal the live of his team, but he murdered the vic because of an unfaithful girl. A girl who could produce such beautiful music could also be a manipulative, heartless murderer. Maybe harming others is the one of the natures of mankind, but there are other great traits as well. Do no Harm.

 Modern Day Love Stories

  A great script should work out like this, like peeling union, and everything's related somehow. Except for continuity problems, I believe that writers always choose their words carefully. Everything is a symbol --- to contrast, echo, and bring seemingly unrelated events together. Warrick's shippy (and extremely beautiful!) subplot seemed to be unrelated to Grissom's hockey ring, but both of them told a tale about modern day love stories, on the ice and off the ice, primitive and classy, no matter how twisted these were; at the end, only truth and honesty shone. 

 I know that there is too much shippy-ness for one night, not to ignoring the recent chain of shippy moments in previous episodes.  I could not help but picturing a trailer on CBS probably a year later or so: " He is her mentor...she is his best friend... after two years, It's the moment you've been waiting for... (Shawn Mullin's Lullaby music)" or something like "A dazzling beauty and also a murder suspect. What would Warrick do with her?" 

I found it too soon after I had gotten used to Mulder/Scully dynamics all through my teen years. It will be up to the way the writers handle it, and I hope they do well because UST is like flame, running out of fuel quickly. 

 Say "Goodbye" to Greg

 This was the first time ever that anybody, ever said goodbye to Greggo before leaving the lab. Surprisingly, Grissom initiated it. Where did I got the impression that Grissom didn't like Greggo? Yet, Griss did not say goodbye to Greg, he asked Sara to say goodbye to Greg. Unknowing Greg's crush on her, Sara felt weird, but did it anyway. If Grissom had already picked up the signal of Greg's crush, then, Sara must be the ONLY person in CSI who did not know about Greg's puppy love. If Grissom really had feelings for Sara, why would him want Sara, particularly, to say goodbye to Greg, when he himself didn't even say goodbye? This little gesture suggested that, maybe the "beauty" and "since I met you" thing was not what we thought it was. Maybe it was a father-daughter thing. Maybe it was a compliment to a close friend who he almost lost. Maybe it was just a compliment, he did not really mean the way we wanted it to mean. Maybe. Just maybe.... a major set-back to tonight's shippy-ness.

It was a nice episode, and, although it was way too shippy, I liked it very much.. ;) please leave your feedback on the guestbook. 

Evie, March 1st, 2002