So, coworkers of mine can’t watch CSI because the bad science got to them a long time ago. I could suspend disbelief and still enjoy it for what it was.

Until this week. It was like the writers of CSI:Miami took over, without the shots of women in bikinis to distract the viewer from the badness.

We had an image pulled off a VCR that was magically sharpened, the fingerprint software with the shiny flashy prints, the gratuitous homage to the Matrix, a GPS that couldn’t say where Grissom was (unless you think “COSTA RICA” is reasonable geolocation information), the crazy “never investigate in daylight” flashlight searches…

This one had it all.

But the worst, the WORST of it was the central part of the show, where they figure out who the killer was. See, the killer was in a lecture hall, listening to the old killer-master. And see, the killer-master must have made eye contact with the killer, so they replayed the tapes and WALKED AROUND THE LECTURE HALL figuring out where the killer-master was looking.

Only one problem here. The killer-master was IN JAIL, over a WEBCAM. EVEN IF he had the ability to see the audience (highly unlikely), he would have been looking at a computer monitor. It would have no bearing on where his projected image would be looking in meatspace.

In the past, the badness of CSI (at least the Vegas version) was limited to the “magic machine” type of bad science. PCR results that came back in minutes, image processing software, flashy fingerprint matchers, that sort of thing. This episode crossed the line, where the badness was no longer limited to glossing over the details. In this episode, it was blatantly false data. It’s like the writers were on the plausible science train and stood up to say “Right, enough of this, this is were we step off.”

To recap:

  • Magic machines: wrong, but ok.
  • Bad fundamentals: wrong, never ok.