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Sunday 21 October 2012

CSI:Miami 10.14 "Last Straw" Review

 A stray horse runs in front of a car.  Ryan (Jonathan Togo) is at the scene and Calleigh (Emily Procter) arrives when Ryan is trying to calm the horse down.  The saddle has blood on it.  Calleigh asks for a mint from him to calm the horse down. Proving she's a horse whisperer, also as she's spent time around horses as in a previous Miami ep.  The blood is all around the ropes and this leads Ryan to find a dead woman near the fence.  Horatio (David Caruso) arrives at the CS and they find she was hung with a lunge line.  Horatio knows she suffered and now the killer will also suffer.  This being Horatio's usual line now.

Horatio and Natalia (Eva La Rue) arrive at the ranch to see the owner, Joanna (Bo Derek).  The Vic was Cassidy (Candace Moon) and she boarded her horse here.  Elle (Jill Flint) her daughter takes care of the clients.  Elle doesn't know her personally or so she says and Natalia finds the lunge line.  ME Tom (Christian Clemenson) finds she was knocked out before she was hung and there are signs of sexual intercourse.  As Delko (Adam Rodriguez) finds a condom wrapper in the stable.  ME Tom also finds a hair on her leg, when analyzed reveals Mickey Quint (Travis Van Winkle).

He and Cassidy met at the stables and she liked it rough he tells Natalia.  He's also got a conviction for statutory rape.  Natalia tells him he's not here cos of the 'kink' but cos of the murder.  He was the last one to see her alive.

Natalia and Calleigh run forensics and Calleigh wants to check the rope,  Cassidy wore a sorority necklace, Phi, Gamma, Alpha.  Sam (Taylor Cole) and Ryan return to the stables and Ryan finds a half eaten burger outside.  She finds finds a bloody rock.  Ryan warns her of the snake which turns out to be the horse's crop.  Sam laughs at him and word has gotten to her about Ryan's reaction to the horse from earlier on.  The crop has the initials 'RP' which belong to Rachel Patrella (Tiffany Dupont).

Walter (Omar Miller) and Calleigh check out the sorority house and finds Rachel instructing girls on how to drink with a straw.  She lost her crop and wasn't at the stable until later on, she's going through a divorce, her husband being Mickey.  Mickey has an alibi but Horatio thinks he could have hired someone to kill her, as could have Rachel.  She claims not to have liked Cassidy.  They find Elle was also at the sorority ten years ago.  Elle didn't look like the type to fit in there.

Elle used to be picked on and made an object of humiliation and ridicule in front of the other girls.  Cassidy was president and her best friend was Rachel.  Elle admits to wishing Cassidy was dead, but only in her dreams.  Rachel attends a spa and gets into a tanning chamber.  Where someone turns up the UV and cuts off her oxygen supply, locking her in beforehand.  Ryan and Walter think she was cooked to death, but ME Tom corrects them, she died of lack of oxygen which is explained by her blue fingers.  The machine had duct tape around it so no oxygen could enter it.

The owner, Liam Flynn (Michael Lombardi) has an arrest record and is more worried about losing business.  He was arrested for locking the sorority girls in their dorm and setting off the fire alarm.  He hated them since they forced Elle to break up with him and in flashback you can see the humiliation she underwent.  Elle came to him to apologize for breaking up with him, but he's not interested since he's moved on.  Why did she apologize now.  He thinks it's perhaps cos they had a ten year reunion recently.

Horatio and Walter return to the stable and Elle tells them about Liam but also she probably wanted to be part of the sorority even more.  Walter notices duct tape and she also has a bicycle but the lock is missing.  Elle is arrested and her mother tells her she'll be okay.  Her father Dan (James Eckhouse) arrives in an airport van and he promises to help her.  Horatio thinks he won't.

Joanna tells Calleigh about being in the sorority.  She was in the same one and thus she was a legacy.  They talk about the necklace found on Cassidy and she wouldn't wear one out horse riding.  It belongs to Elle.  She explains how Elle was humiliated and made fun of everytime the girls came to the stable.  Calleigh suggests the horse would have been brushed and Natalia finds some DNA on the brush after Ryan and Sam retrieve it.  This time Ryan works his magic on the horse feeding it a mint to calm it down, whilst Sam collects the evidence.

The DNA matches a male and Elle's father is questioned.  He tells them his flight landed at noon but in actual fact he arrived earlier.  The airport van was for show and he confesses his anger at Elle's treatment.  Elle calls Horatio to tell him she's nothing left to live for.  Strangely it's Horatio who rushes to the stable and the one what she calls.  Cos traffic was a breeze and he gets there in time to save her from killing herself by hanging herself.  Horatio suggests she should start over.  Wonder how many times he should have said that to himself.  If he didn't he should have.

Ironically at the start Horatio says that they're going to make the killer suffer as much as Cassidy.  In reality, Cassidy was the one who made others suffer and though hanging is not justification for all the hurt that she caused, remember the saying; "hangin's too good" but she did deserve the same kind of humiliation she made Elle suffer.  Once a bully, always a bully.  It is hard to believer why Elle stuck it out at that sorority other than the legacy aspect of it, she could have left there anytime, instead of putting herself through that torture.  To add insult to injury, the humiliation didn't end there but continued on and Elle had to live through that again.

As for the suffering, her father killed Cassidy and Rachel for her, what was the point of ending it all now, when he had already done the deed.  What a waste of his life, if Elle hadn't survived.  It would have been all for nothing, even if it wasn't the right thing to do. Thus the killer did suffer too at the torment his daughter underwent.

Calleigh showing once again how proficient she is with horses as this upside sees her get out of the lab more and get a bigger role.  Naturally, Calleigh would be the one to tell everyone about Ryan's handling of the horse.  No mention this episode of Ryan and his attraction to Sam or about the bracelet she was given by Delko.  Calleigh went horse riding in 7.13 And They're Offed.  Also once again it's Delko who finds some evidence in the stables.  Calleigh found evidence of drugs under the horse's bridle.  Here she noticed the blood on the ropes.  In 7.13 Calleigh's love of horses was revealed.

In the film I Still Know What You Did Last Summer, one of the girls, Julie, was locked in a tanning chamber by a fisherman.


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