CBS’ ‘CSI’ season 15, episode 12 review: Is Dean McDermott’s Garth a killer?

Last week on “CSI” we not only didn’t get a holiday special like many other crimes shows have given us these past few weeks, but we also didn’t get any movement at all on any of our main characters storylines. Nothing on Russell and Jared Briscoe and ever since Julie decided to out being someone’s girlfriend with a man named Mark that whole storyline has completely disappeared like it never happened. So are we going to learn any more about these stories on tonight’s all new episode?

The case of the week involves a girl named Abbey who witnesses a homeless man get shot by her ex-boyfriend, Slade (who’s a troublemaker) when he tries to rob them. When the police show up she asks for Sarah and it turns out that Sarah worked on a case involving Abbey many years back: When Abbey was five her father shot her whole family and turned the gun on himself and she was the only survivor. The shooting of the homeless man triggers something in Abbey’s memory about what happened ten years previous…. and it’s that her father wasn’t the person who killed her family.

At first Sarah isn’t sure if what Abbey remembers is a real memory, but the more she looks into the evidence she realizes that someone else may have been the killer and not her father. When Sarah goes to reopen the case, Russell puts up a barrier, saying that there’s not enough evidence to reopen the file (especially since she already has 12 open files on her plate already). After a convincing argument, Russell agrees to let her look into it, but reminds her that it will ruffle a few feathers around the office and lab since it may suggest that other people did their jobs wrong.

We had a nice little guest spot from Dean McDermott who played a man named Garth – a registered sex offender who is a suspect in the Abbey family killing when they learned that Abbey’s sister is Garth’s daughter. Turns out he wasn’t the killer, just an angry father that wanted access to his daughter. The killer ended up being 2 men from a hunting club: One of the men wanted to rape the wife and they followed them up to their camp site, but didn’t realize that they had kids and things went very wrong when the wife fought back.

We were not only thankful that tonight’s episode had a heavy dose of Sarah (and we learned a lot more about her father, mother and life as a child), but also for the fact that it was a new episode. During this last week before the New Year rolls around there’s hardly anything new to watch, but due to all the football delays “CSI” had to endure we are still getting some new episodes during a dead TV time and we appreciate that. Episode Grade: B-

What did you think of tonight’s episode of “CSI: Las Vegas”? Let us know.