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| Miami, We Have a Problem | |
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| Season | 8 |
| Number | 15 |
| Writer | Brian L. Davidson |
| Director | Sam Hill |
| Original Airdate | February 8,. 2010 |
| Navigation | |
| Previous Episode: In the Wind | |
| Next Episode: L.A. | |
Miami, We Have a Problem is the fifteenth episode in season eight of CSI: Miami.
Synopsis
A dead body falls from the sky, and the team discovers that he had been a passenger on a private commercial space flight.
Plot
A carjacking in progress is interrupted when a man’s dead body falls on the car, crashing through the windshield. The CSIs quickly determine he crashed through the trees above, rather than falling from them, and the case gets more perplexing when Calleigh determines he was falling at terminal velocity–120 mph, meaning he fell from at least 2000 feet. She suspects he might have been a stowaway on a plane, but her theory is shot when air traffic control reports that only one helicopter was in the vicinity at the time the body fell. Calleigh and Ryan track down the helicopter and question its owner, Beau Lendell, who says he doesn’t recognize the victim when shown his picture. When Horatio and Ryan ask him why the helicopter was in the air without a flight plan, Beau says he thinks someone took it for an unauthorized ride, and claims he wasn’t the one piloting it. Horatio and Ryan examine the helicopter, and Ryan finds knuckle imprints on one of the seats. Back at the morgue, Dr. Loman has some shocking news: the victim’s blood cells indicate he was in zero gravity at the time of his death, suggesting he died in outer space. Jesse contacts NASA, but all of their astronauts are accounted for, causing him to turn to a private space tours company based in Miami: Prime Mover Aerospace. The owner of the company, Keith Palmer, recognizes the victim as Sam Gardner, a participant in the last ten-day tour into space. Palmer shows Horatio and Ryan the Lear jet he uses to take people into space, and Ryan notices a bullet-sized hole in the plane’s hull, which Palmer tells him was the result of micro-meteor damage. Horatio asks Palmer who else was on the flight with Sam, but he claims the passenger list is confidential.
Back at the lab, Calleigh shows Sam’s wife, Janet, a video that Sam made for her from the trip. Janet, bitter that her husband spent two million dollars on the extravagant trip, doesn’t want to see it, so the CSIs use the video to identify the other passengers: movie star Dominic Cross, and Beau Lendell, the helicopter pilot they questioned earlier. Dr. Loman is finally able to determine a cause of death: explosive decompression. The coroner tells Horatio that somehow Sam got out of the shuttle and into space. The CSIs question the three men who went up into space with Sam: Dominic claims he was sick and sleeping at the time, while Palmer asserts the airlock alarm came on—and that Sam had accidentally locked himself in the chamber and opened the airlock. Beau admits he pilots all of Prime Mover Aerospace’s trips, and claims that what happened to Sam was an accident. He took Sam’s body up in his helicopter and was going to dispose of him over the Atlantic—until a flock of gulls hit his helicopter and Sam’s body was thrown from it. Horatio tells Palmer the shuttle is now his crime lab, and sends Jesse and Calleigh to go over the ship. The two CSIs quickly discover the airlock can’t be opened from inside the chamber, invalidating Palmer’s story about Sam opening the airlock doors from inside the chamber. Calleigh lifts a print from the control pad in the main cabin, and it proves a match to Dominic. Dominic claims Sam was wearing an EVA suit to protect him from space, and that he locked himself in the airlock and insisted he wanted to be let out. Dominic reluctantly opened the airlock and Sam went outside—but apparently something was wrong with his suit. Calleigh decides to hold him for negligent homicide.
Horatio and Walter go over the EVA suit Sam was supposedly wearing at the time of his death, but they find no radiation on it—inconsistent with Dominic’s claims that he was wearing it when he was launched into space. Horatio and Walter discover a blood stain on the suit, and a looking at it under the black light reveals further splatter. Horatio and Walter head over to the shuttle, finding blood splatter all over the main cabin. Horatio sends Jesse and Walter up in a plane to recreate the zero gravity conditions aboard the shuttle to determine what weapon could have been used to create the blood splatter, while Ryan examines the hole in the ship caused by the meteor and discovers that it hit the air tank… and that the air would have been drained out of the shuttle in twelve minutes. Up in the air, Jesse and Walter try fruitlessly to recreate the pattern using a dummy, until Jesse thinks to fire his gun, which causes him to slam back into the wall but does create the splatter pattern. Though they can’t recover the bullet that hit Sam, the CSIs line up the three men to examine them and find a bruise on Beau’s lower back. Horatio puts it together—there were only three EVA suits, and four men on the shuttle. The three men turned on Sam: Beau shot him, Dominic opened the airlock and Palmer closed it again once Sam was dead, insisting they needed to bring four people back. Calleigh sits with Sam’s wife Janet and shows her Sam’s final message to her, in which he tells her he loves her and wants nothing more than to come home to her.
Cast
Main Cast
- David Caruso as Horatio Caine
- Emily Procter as Calleigh Duquesne
- Jonathan Togo as Ryan Wolfe
- Rex Linn as Frank Tripp
- Eva LaRue as Natalia Boa Vista
- Eddie Cibrian as Jesse Cardoza
- Omar Benson Miller as Walter Simmons
Guest Cast
- Christian Clemenson as Tom Loman
- Christopher Redman as Michael Travers
- Flex Alexander as Beau Lendell
- Ted King as Sam Gardner
- Clare Carey as Janet Gardner
- Thad Luckinbill as Dominic Cross
- David Chisum as Keith Palmer
- Giancarlo Carmona as Neal
- Dilshad Vadsaria as Jody
- Mike Foy as Kurt
- Granville Ames as Ross