Season 8, Episode 13: A Thousand Days on Earth

It comes as no surprise that case is an intense one for Catherine personally--she's a mother of a daughter herself. She personalizes the case in every way she can, eschewing the route "Jane Doe" or "Baby Jane" moniker for unidentified female victims in favor of "Baby Cordelia," taken from the name of the street where the child was found. In a show where murder occurs on such a regular basis, Catherine choosing a more personalized name for the child signifies an immediate investment in the case, both on Catherine's part and the viewers'.

Catherine gets snippy with Hodges when he mentions the girl's beauty, but it's clearly a gut reaction on her part. Catherine knows any mother would be devastated and is bristling at Hodges' implication that the girl's beauty somehow makes the tragedy a greater one. There's a bit of feminist resentment in there, too, no doubt--why is it that the first thing Hodges notices about the girl is her beauty? Her blonde hair and curls turn out to be a disguise of sorts, proving Catherine's point that her appearance is not the most important thing about her, and doesn't make her death any more or less tragic.

In her determination to catch the person who killed the child, Catherine erroneously pursues Dean James, the boyfriend of the loquacious Nora O'Toole, whose prints are on the box Inez is found in. James, whose real name is actually Leo Finley, turns out to have a record, and though he explains it away, Catherine comes down hard on him, suspecting him of killing Inez. This isn't unusual for the CSIs to do--how many times have we seen them question a suspect and continue to doubt the person even once he or she come up with a reasonable and convincing story for how DNA or prints have linked him or her to the crime? It's routine and what we've come to expect from the investigators.

But this time, it has consequences. Leo turns out to be innocent, but in the process of the investigation, he's lost both his girlfriend and in his job. He angrily confronts Catherine in an underground parking structure, accusing her of ruining his life. But--and this was a brilliant and judicious choice by the writers--rather than doing something cliche like attacking her or threatening her life, Leo tells Catherine that he's contemplating suicide and that if he does, his blood will be on her hands. Guest star James Jay Paulson is wonderfully intense in this scene, unhinged but not deranged. His threat is a cold and calculating one, and it's effective.

For her part, Catherine defends her actions, saying that she was just doing her job, but Marg Helgenberger subtly conveys how shaken Catherine is. And it leaves the audience to wonder if she did in fact cross the line. Despite Leo's perfectly reasonable explanation as to why he has a record as a sex offender and his insistence that he didn't kill Inez, Catherine still rakes him across the coals for concealing his identity and vows to tell his girlfriend and his employer about his true identity. Was that really her place? It's clear that in this moment--when she realizes she's ruined the life of an innocent man--that she's wondering the exact same thing.

Review provided by CSI Files.