CSI Season 12 Episode 8 - Ménage à trois

This week "CSI" came out with guns a blazing: Three cases, several twists, and packing excitement the show hasn't had in some time.We started off following three murders: A rich entrepreneur found pummeled to death in his birthday cake, a gang member burned to death in a ring of tires, and an old lady slashed to death in her hotel room.

It's unusual for the show to tackle three cases at once, unless they all are somehow connected. It wasn't much of a surprise then that once two of them were linked the third would soon follow, but it was the how that really put the proof in the pudding.After some digging, all three cases were found to be eerily similar to cold cases that each current victim had originally been a suspect in. As all three had been killed in the same exact manner that they had killed somebody else years ago, it looked to be a retribution killer out to settle karmic debt.

The suspects didn't really have any connecting thread aside from that, but once evidence from one of the original crime scenes, that just so happened to have been checked out of the lab and never returned, turned up at one of the new scenes, everybody's eyes were looking inward. Only somebody within the department would have had access to check the evidence out.The trace led them to Stan Richardson(Michael Massee), a recently retired cop. While on the unit, Richardson was a favorite of the other officers, a good drinking buddy who always lent an ear, especially after difficult cases. Now it looked like he was out playing vigilante Batman to make sure those cases finally got some justice.

In the first twist, the team found Richardson, a bedridden cancer patient who was physically incapable of having killed anybody, let alone leave his room. The team needed to try to figure out who he little helper was, the one presumably doing the killing while Richardson pulled the strings from his bedside. In a very well done, shocking, and actually somewhat saddening twist, it turned out that long time officer Sam Vega(Geoffrey Rivas) had been helping Richardson take care of the loose ends.

The team caught up to Vega as he was about to drown another person on Richardson's cold case hit list. Vega refused to drop his weapon, aimed to shoot at the arriving officers, who shot and killed him.

Always sad to see a recurring character die, but even more important was the effect it had on Brass (Paul Guilfoyle. Brass has bent the rules here and there over the years, and we've seen him struggle when the system failed him before. But this week raised some good questions that there aren't easy answers to: What can/should cops or investigators do if they know they have the killer but the legal system, or a skittish DA, won't prosecute? Richardson, and Vega, took matters into their own hands, and while I'm not advocating it, it is wearing on Brass to see criminals escape due to the nitty-gritty of the political and legal landscape. And this time it came with the additional weight of losing a fellow officer.

Synopsis - Best episode of the season? Too soon to tell, but it knocked the socks off of everything we've seen so far. Sure, it didn't do anything to advance Catherine's (Marg Helgenberger) leaving arc, which should be kicking into high gear anytime now, but it was classic and hard hitting "CSI," and that's what got me into the show in the first place. For the first time in a long time, a job very well done.