WTF! Not just one but four Horatio Caines in a crime lab doing girly science stuff! What can be going on? He hasn't stepped foot in a lab full of chemicals in seven seasons - and CSI: Miami has only been on for six. How can this be? Well, it was continuity week this week and as well as bringing back a whole load of old plot threads and guest characters, they've clearly decided to remind us all that David Caruso can face other inanimate objects square on - and that Horatio's supposed to have a degree in chemistry or something normally only fit for liberal nerds, not real conservative American heroes.
Actually quite an interesting episode this week I thought, not just for that cartload of continuity, but for having the most obviously deconstructable feminist/anti-feminist sub-text featuring ex-Showgirls star Elizabeth Berkley.
Behold evil! The arch-nemesis of Horatio Caine has returned. And she must be punished because she is a woman who transgresses.
Horatio Caine, arbiter of justice, is pretty much the conservative ideal. A civil servant who stands by innocent victims - but not slightly less innocent victims - who does all he can to make sure bad people die at the hands of justice (except when it's personal because then revenge killings are fine).
So who should be the arch nemesis of Horatio? Why, a surgically enhanced (evil), independent (evil) woman (evil) of loose morals (evil) who is all of these things, but even worse, is a mother as well! She's above the law. She forces the enforcer of patriarchy to stick to the law himself and even uses it against him - when, of course, as we all know, men (well except for those liberals) should be able to decide what's right for themselves without being judged for their actions.
It's quite clever to essentially create a villain that touches all those conservative trigger spots to have the viewer hating her so that the Bad Woman can be punished. As I said before, they might write completely bonkers plots, but they really know what they're doing.
April 4, 2008 | Reply
[this is good] I like EVIL women. Two bad actors trying to upstage each other.