CSI:Tarantino

Alison Graham, in this week's Radio Times, asks an interesting question concerning the Tarantino-directed CSI Finale, which was postponed following the suicide bomb attacks in London and finally showed on Tuesday this week.

I watched it, and it was the first CSI I'd seen for a while, because my tolerance for gore and children in peril (a recurring theme) is at an all-time low at the moment.

The week before, I'd recorded the replacement episodes, but deleted them when I realised they were just repeats. But as Alison Graham asks, the question is, how many of the 3 million + viewers realised they weren't the Tarantino ones?

The fact is, this finale wasn't all that. I certainly wouldn't put it up there with the best of CSI. If anything, it came across as a pastiche of someone's idea of what an episode of CSI directed by Tarantino would be like. QT did the story but wasn't credited with the script, which was full of pointless QT-tpe trivia discussions [yawn] and featured someone being buried alive [yawn]. Inevitably, insects played their part [yawn] and Gil Grissom, Insectologist, spotted what they were and correctly identified that they would only nest on a small patch of ground on map grid reference blah blah blah.

So I wasn't overly impressed. My favourite "essence of Grissom" episode is the one where he's left on his own in a hick town, investigating a death without the co-operation of the local police. They arrange for all his kit to disappear, and he just goes round a hardware store, buying every day household stuff, and cracks the case that way.

Far as I'm concerned, the big shot Hollywood movie directors and special guest stars can disappear up their own arses where they belong.