A complete archive of The Medium is Not Enough’s reviews of TV programmes since 2005
US TV
Review: CSI: Miami 8×1
In the US: Mondays, 10/9c , CBS
In the UK: Oh, the usual places. You know, Five, Five USA, Living – them lot
CSI: Miami, as we all know, is science fiction. It’s set in a distant future, where impossible science allows us to solve improbable, futuristic crimes with undreamt of techniques, and where a robot called Caruso (aka the Carusobot) is allowed to run a crack crime fighting team of scientist-cops.
Yet for the opening episode of this eighth season of CSI: Miami, in which the (not very) brain damaged scientist-cop Eric Delko is close to death and begins to hallucinate, we find ourselves cast backwards in time to the dim and distant past of 1997 where we discover how this crime-fighting team was assembled and the most important fact of all – how the Carusobot got its Shades of Justice.
It’s a strange world, this 1997. Strange, in the sense that it’s exactly how the real world is in 2009. Suddenly, the technology’s the same as our technology, the crimes are the same as our crimes, police officers work in police stations that actually look like normal police stations, and there are procedures that almost correspond to normal police procedures. How can this be? Is CSI: Miami really set in some alternative reality where 1997 is our 2009, and our 2009 is 2021? It’s a hard one to fathom.
But the strangest thing of all is this: in 1997, the Carusobot was still able to act like a real person.
