Review: CSI:Cyber

[dropcap]I[/dropcap]n these dark days, in which we have lost both the brooding pleasantries of Mac Taylor and the crap punnery and ever-on-off sunglasses of Horatio Caine and are now facing an uncertain future for the Vegas Crime Lab under the watch of Ted Danson and his square chin of justice, where can the casual viewer turn for their serialized crime fix? Is the franchise’s newest offering, CSI: Cyber, the answer to this question? Well, probably not.

The series follows the FBI’s cybercrime division, which has the power to take the lead in any case that has a cyber-element (read: some form of electronic appliance is used). In the first episode, a baby is kidnapped, and the team takes charge because some foreign voices that shouldn’t be there are heard over the baby monitor. Dr. Avery Ryan (Patricia Arquette, of Medium and Boyhood fame) begs her boss to let her get involved, doing such technical things as changing a baby’s nappy and Sherlock scanning people’s faces.

As in all CSIs, she has a team to back her up. Taking the sidekick role is James Van Der Beek (Dawson, from Dawson’s Creek) as Elijah Mundo, an everyman type with a stupid name who is easily the most likeable guy on screen. Her boss, Simon Sifter, is played by the normally excellent Peter MacNicol, but he doesn’t really have a lot to work with here. Completing the team is former black hat hacker Brody Nelson (the sort of douche you’d find in any club), Daniel Krumitz (a fat Seth Rogan who plays to every nerd stereotype ever) and Raven Ramirez (token gothic outsider hacker – think Lisbeth Salander, but not as good). Joining the team later will be retired FBI agent Nick Dalton (Luke Perry – make of that what you will), who apparently had to leave the team following a classified falling out, so expect that to be a point of conflict.

In real life, because cybercrime is fundamentally really boring – people stealing a penny from a billion bank accounts, for example – this means the normal sort of cases you’d see on CSI, but less interesting

The second episode has a case is which a rollercoaster safety mechanism has been overrode, leading to two cars crashing and killing many people. The team figure out (somehow – there is a copious amount of tech exposition that I didn’t really understand, struggling as I do with Word) that it is the work of some gore porn fan, trying to impress others, and stop him from crashing a subway train.

Two issues are apparent – firstly, anyone with a long memory can recall that Gil Grissom and his team investigated a rollercoaster homicide in 2004, and it was much more interesting then because we had a cast of suspects and actual evidence to follow. This ties into the problem with cybercrime – it is impossible to guess who is responsible for the crime as we don’t have a pool of suspects – in the end, the culprit is always some person operating from a laptop at home that we never see until the team track their IP address or something and find them in the last five minutes. As much as Dawson and Medium seem to investigate, the audience at home can’t really join in in the same manner as the other CSIs. I know where I am with a knife – I can’t keep up with the technobabble.

Now maybe I’m just fairly stupid and this stuff is really easy to comprehend, but it doesn’t change the fact that the addition of technological elements has rendered the audience participation aspect minimal. It’s a bit of a shame, as Medium first appeared in an episode of CSI that set a really good template. A casino owner’s wife was killed, and it was linked to a woman whose likeness was stolen and converted into some sort of digital prostitute – the murder was enhanced by the technological aspect, but not reliant on it to be solved. This is a model that I’d like the series to follow, but I think it’s rather unlikely, rendering this new CSI the least interesting yet. Maybe techie people will be able to get more out of it, but for the general public, this show may not be one to follow avidly. My suggestion is to dip into the old episodes as you fancy – they are always on. Well, I suppose Channel 5 has to get up to something.