With each week, CSI NY continues to impress me for many reasons. Unlike its Miami counterpart, the stories and cases are interesting and relatively believable and the dialog crisp.
In this episode titled “Enough”, three people are found dead from gunshots. One is shot in a bar, one is found dead on the street (we see him shot while in the back seat of a car with a woman), one is shot in his apartment after what seems to be his own personal drug party. The victims are later identified ad Michael Jones, Duckins LaBranch and Luther Stockton, and Mac recognizes their names. They are drug dealers who were set to go to trial for murder the next day, and Mac had worked on the case.
When the trial opens and the three defendants are nowhere to be found, Mac (Gary Sinise) steps up to the judge and states that all three of them are dead. Outside the courthouse, ADA Natalie Greer (Heather Mazur) tells Mac there was a deal made where the three were going to rat out another dealer in exchange for lesser sentences. She refers him to Jones's lawyer, Jacob Donovan, and after pressure from Mac, he tells him the three men were going to rat out a dealer named Petrix DeRosier. But, before Mac questions DeRosier, Danny discovers that two recovered murder weapons at the scenes of the three separate shootings were the same guns the three men used in their initial crime. Later, Danny (Carmine Giovinazzo) and Flack (Eddie Cahill) question Petrix, and all he tells them is that the murders were bad for his business. When Stella (Melina Kanakaredes ) and Detective Angell (Emmanuelle Vaugier) find the vehicle Duckins was killed in (the woman with him turned out to be a hooker and she stole the car after the shooting) Stella finds the third murder weapon in the car.
While all this is going on, Adam (AJ Buckley) uncomfortably approaches Mac and seems concerned about his job. Was it “the paper airplanes or the dancing” he asks. When Mac looks befuddled at Adam's question and why Adam is acting the way he was acting, Adam tells him he’s being let go, and he shows Mac a letter stating that fact. It seems that Mac’s boss Chief Sinclair is making cuts, and Mac won’t stand for it. He argues with Sinclair over the phone and tries to think of other cuts to make like waiting six months to purchase state-of-the-art automated workstations. Stella brings him to his senses, and reminds him of the critical need for the workstations.
Back to the case. When Mac finds out that Maggie Hall (Katherine Cunningham-Eves), the woman who gave him critical information in the past to help bring charges against the three men, is called as a witness for the trial, he is concerned. He had promised Maggie that he would do all he could to avoid her having to testify. When Mac visits Maggie, he is shocked to see her face with multiple deep cuts, and she tells him that they did this to her to stop her from testifying. Maggie’s three brothers are also there, very upset with Mac that he seemed to have broken his promise.
Later, they clear Petrix DeRosier based on electronic surveillance evidence, which gives them alibis. Evidence may imply Maggie’s three brothers. It seems a logical leap that the three brothers killed the three drug dealers. But Adam, after sifting through and printing all the glass found at the bar scene, gets a print off a glass and it a match for Jacob Donovan (J.R. Cacia), Michael Jones' lawyer. Under separate questioning from Danny, Flack, and Mac, they confront the three defense lawyers with their belief that the lawyers had possession of the guns the three drug dealers used in the original crime, and the lawyers used them to kill their clients over their disgust after what they did to Maggie. Of course, they had.
As a closing note, each team member comes in to Mac’s office to tell them their vacation plans have changed and they won't be taking them, and Stella clues Mac in that a friend of a friend of a friend ( and so on) helped her to transfer the allotted vacation funds to help cover the cost of keeping Adam, at least until they can find a permanent solution to the budget problem.
This episode was very entertaining because it kept viewers guessing. It also played a bit of a creative trick when it seemed to dish up the three brothers as the logical killers. It never crossed my mind that the defense attorneys would have done it I guess maybe even defense attorneys get fed up with the scummy clients they defend. The lawyers took the law into their own hands. It’s also in stark contrast to the episode of Law & Order (“Rumble”) that aired directly opposite this episode of CSI NY, where a brother of a man killed in a street fight took the law into his and his friends own hands and caused a near riot where people were beaten and killed. The episode of Law & Order had a grittier, heavy-handed message – a person can’t dish out their own form of justice, and they go after the killers with the heaviest hand of the law. In this episode of CSI NY, though, it almost seemed like they wanted you to feel that the lawyers had good reason to do what they did, almost rationalizing it. After all, when Flack asks Mac “What if it were your sister?" Mac pauses and responds "I'd kill them.” I would have preferred a heavier hand with the attorneys in having them to pay for their crime.
I think they want the viewers to have a sense of discomfort about Adam’s job security, but I don’t see it as an issue, seeing that they seemed to recently give AJ Buckley billing in the main show credits. Still, a dose of reality is sometimes needed in the CSI universe, which sometimes doesn’t seem to mirror what happens in a real life forensics operation. Budgets can be an issue. But rest assured, I think Adam still will be the go-to guy when it comes to doing all the time consuming tedious work, and I think that every show needs to have someone on which one can dump all the dirty work no one else wants to do.
It was also nice to see the group make sacrifices to temporarily plug the budget hole and keep Adam, but how much time really could they buy? A few weeks vacation really would only buy a few weeks. That may be all the show needs to resolve the story arc.
What makes the episode really work is that we get a good mix of the detectives working together and interacting as a cohesive team. It seems that the personal drama of the previous season has been lifted a bit, and I think the show was dragged down because of it. So far, the show has dealt with personal issues with a lighter hand, and I think it makes the stories tighter and a lot more interesting.
So as far as this episode “Enough”, I think I would really like to have “more!”
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