Hi! I love your meta and how beautifully you write about GSR, I would like to know what you think about this, do you think Grissom and Sara would have been good parents? Why do you think the show didn’t allowed them to have a geek baby?
hi, anon!
thank you for your kind words!
i have got a big, ol' meta that covers my thoughts on potential gsr parenthood here, if you're interested.
i also have another big, ol' meta that specifically covers my thoughts on how they would have reacted to experiencing an unplanned pregnancy during their "secret dating" phase in s5-s6 here, if you're interested in that one, as well.
the tl;dr version is that while i think grissom and sara would be kickass parents were that particular life choice one they ever decided to make together, i also don't think they would necessarily ever be likely to make that particular life choice together, just given their respective characters and backgrounds.
grissom is—prior to his retirement—highly career-driven, meaning he might not want to put his focus on parenthood rather than work. he likewise has some pretty sizeable hang-ups regarding his own capacity to nurture and be unselfish, his age, his social deficits, etc., all of which might cause him to question his potential fitness as a father.
there's a line from another show i love from a character facing down the prospect of first-time fatherhood that i can absolutely see grissom saying (in so many words): "if, for nine months, you're hearing how this is gonna change your life, and ‘you've never loved anything like this’ and ‘my god, the love!’ and ‘nothing is gonna be important anymore’—it just never felt to me like i was someone who had the capacity for those feelings. plus, you know, i-i like what's important to me. i want it to stay important. i wanna be able to do it well."
meanwhile, sara has her own considerable hang-ups regarding how she was raised, her family and personal history of mental illness, her social deficits, etc. that might cause her to feel similarly unequipped for motherhood. she is also in her twenties and thirties—i.e., prime childbearing years—very career-minded, like grissom, so she might not be inclined to step away (even temporarily) to have a kid.
maybe if grissom and sara were to experience an unplanned pregnancy at some point, they would (under very specific circumstances) consider the possibility of having a child. ditto for maybe a one-in-a-million type scenario where they encountered a kid in the system who needed fostering or adopting.
however, i think nine times out of ten, they'd opt not to have a kid—and especially not if "nature never came to bear" or if one was never put directly into their paths.
that said, since i personally find the idea of them as parents very intriguing—the issue is one that pushes a lot of fun character buttons for both of them, butting up against their hopes and fears and senses of self in some very complicated and interesting ways—i have written a big, ol' geek!baby fic, where they find themselves dealing with an unplanned pregnancy in an au version of s8.
i call it the happy accidentsverse, and if you're interested, you can read that fic series here.
as for the issue of why the show never pursued a "grissom and sara have a kid" storyline in canon, i think there are probably multiple reasons why they didn't.
more discussion after the "keep reading," if you're interested.
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to my mind, probably the biggest reason why we never saw a "grissom and sara have a kid" storyline in canon is that, particularly in the earlier seasons of the show, the showrunners tried not to focus too much on the characters' home lives.
though they would show the occasional "off the clock" scene here or there or every once in a while toss in some kind of love interest- or family-centric story beat, anthony zuiker and co. wanted the majority of the show's focus to be on the job—on the cases the csis investigated, the goings-on at the lab and in the field, the team's interactions with each other as colleagues, the team's interactions with other law enforcement professionals and people they met in connection to their cases, in the politics of the department, etc.
they were much stricter about this policy even than other procedurals of the time.
that's why we saw so little of grissom and sara's romantic relationship actually play out on screen—because tptb never intended to offer us anything more than just a small window into their personal lives outside of their careers.
and while of course grissom and sara having a kid (whether through sara getting pregnant or them deciding to foster and/or adopt) would definitely affect their working lives and could allow for some interesting storylines centered around the lab and in the field—for example, how might sara deal with the physical and emotional requirements of her incredibly demanding job while pregnant?, how might grissom and sara have to change their workaholic habits if they were to try to become foster or adoptive parents?, how might having a kid in the mix affect both grissom and sara's willingness to face the dangers inherent in their profession?, would becoming parents change the way they responded to certain cases?, etc.—that kind of storyline, just by its nature, would also probably require the show to spend more time at home with grissom and sara than the showrunners and writers ever really intended to.
narratively speaking, catherine having a school-aged kid to start out the show is one thing, while grissom and sara having a newborn or a brand new foster kid and becoming first-time parents would be something else entirely.
in catherine's case, her being a mom to an older kid from the get-go is a much more lowkey deal, not only because a kid at that age can mostly exist in an off-screen capacity except for in episodes where her presence is plot-relevant but also because it's an already-established fact.
catherine is a mother—and an experienced mother, at that—from the very first time we meet her; it's part of both her personal and professional identities from day #1. the baseline is there. there are no questions about it. no big blanks to fill in. she's already made the life-changing decisions. she's already entrenched in that role.
the same would not be true if grissom and sara were to have a kid.
because they were "first timers" (and especially because they had seemingly never aspired to parenthood previously), the show would have to answer questions with them—depict grissom and sara making the huge, life-altering decisions; reckoning with big emotions; figuring stuff out; working through their fears and hang-ups; adjusting to a monumental change in their lives; drawing together in new ways; changing and developing as characters and as a couple; establishing new patterns; etc.
the groundwork would need to be laid where the audience could see it being laid in real time, you know?
and laying that groundwork would require showing lots of private conversations between grissom and sara, trips to the ob's office or talks with the social worker, painting the nursery or putting up a swing set, making childcare arrangements, changing their lifestyle, etc.
my sense is that tptb never really wanted to go there.
that much focus on grissom and sara's home life would have been too distracting—too much of a serialized personal storyline that required attention in every episode, regardless of the "case of the day"—for their tastes.
now.
in theory, the "keep the focus on the job, not the home" rule is one tptb could have considered breaking, had they really wanted to.
after all, it was just a production choice, not actually any kind of hard and fast rule, so if they'd decided they wanted to go the "grissom and sara have a kid" route, they could have done so.
there's always the old flannery o'connor maxim: "it's always wrong of course to say that you can't do this or you can't do that in fiction. you can do anything you can get away with, but nobody has ever gotten away with much."
however, another reason why i think they never chose to go the geek!baby route, beyond the "it goes against our sense of what our show is actually about" thing, is that, frankly, within the universe of the show itself, the timing for grissom and sara was never right.
grissom and sara don't even get together as a committed couple until s5/s6, so, barring a major deviation from what is now canon, they likely could not have had a child at any point prior to 2005/2006, just to start out with.
then their relationship remains a secret until the end of s7/beginning of s8, meaning that between 2006-2007, they're definitely not looking to have a kid and probably would be pretty averse to having one even were they to experience an unplanned pregnancy, just given the potential fallout where their jobs are concerned.
they would have to "come out" as a couple, and one or both of them might end up getting fired over it.
fast forward, and between s8 and s9, sara experiences a mental health crisis that eventually culminates with her moving away from vegas for the better part of two years from 2008 to 2009 while grissom remains behind—and by the time she's stable and moves back to vegas circa 2009/2010, grissom is then living abroad, and they're only seeing each other once a month via transatlantic commute.
back in the day, when sara first turned up in s10, i know there was some internet scuttlebutt that maybe at some point it would be revealed that in-between the events of episode 09x10 "one to go" (when last we'd seen them) and episode 10x01 "family affair" (when sara returns to vegas to "temp"), grissom and sara had had a "secret honeymoon baby."
however, such a revelation was never made—timeline-wise, it would have been a tight fit anyhow, as, within the universe of the show, episode 09x10 "one to go" takes place in january '09 and episode 10x01 "family affair" takes place in september '09—and neither did grissom and sara ever have a kid at any subsequent point.
with sara living in the states and grissom not, the likelihood that they would ever decide to expand their family steadily diminished as s10, s11, and s12 rolled on, both because they were getting older and because their marriage eventually ended up on the rocks.
cue the whole divorce debacle of s13, a few solid years of misery and loneliness in the interim, and by the time grissom and sara get back together/remarried in 2015, sara is forty-four years old and probably peri- or even full-on menopausal, and she and grissom are living a nomadic seafaring lifestyle, so the likelihood of them either having a biological child or fostering/adopting is incredibly low.
again, there was some speculation among fans—based on previous comments from showrunner anthony zuiker regarding his ideas for grissom and sara's post-"immortality" life at sea—that when the reboot rolled around, we would eventually get a "in the six years since we last saw them, grissom and sara have had a kid" reveal.
no dice, though.
s1 of csi: vegas ran its course with no secret boat babies anywhere.
all of the above being the case, there just weren't even that many points during the show's run when it would have made logistical sense for grissom and sara to have children together.
they were always either in a state of having to keep their relationship a secret for the sake of their careers or else of living apart from each other, and by the time they finally got all their shit together and were living in the same place on a full-time basis, sara was nearing the end of her prime childbearing years and they were living the kind of lifestyle where fostering/adoption would be next to impossible.
narratively-speaking, parenthood just was never in the cards for them.
of course, it's worth stating, the writers could have maybe swung a geek!baby storyline in the later seasons had they wanted to if they had just made the choice to move grissom back to vegas along with sara between s10 and s15. he wouldn't even have had to appear on-screen. sara would have just needed to reference him occasionally in dialogue and be shown to take phone calls from him at times, a "i'm meeting grissom for our first ultrasound appointment" here, a "he's been at home painting the nursery all morning. he put little ladybugs up the walls" there. they could have done a whole pregnancy storyline that way, and it would have given sara something to do during seasons when she is otherwise criminally underutilized. then maybe if they were lucky, they could have gotten billy to come back for a guest spot when it came time for the baby to be born. but, alas, such a storyline would have required them to imply depth, which is something they had no idea how to do.
—which brings us to the last big reason why i think the showrunners never had grissom and sara have children:
because, ultimately, they just never felt it was right for the characters.
as stated above, both grissom and sara have plenty of reasons, both individually and as a couple, based on their backgrounds and predilections and development, why they might never choose to pursue parenthood.
while there are certain very particular scenarios were i can imagine they might set those reasons aside, overcome their hang-ups and fears, and decide to "go for it" re: having kids, i also think it would take a lot of narrative work to get them there—that thread would be something the writers would have had to really develop, requiring more than a few "acts of god" and major plot interventions to make the idea seem feasible.
they could have done it if they really wanted to.
but in the end, i think they didn't feel any compelling need.
grissom and sara have been an unconventional couple from the get-go, and their development has been circuitous and unstraightforward. there have been many setbacks for them along the way and strange turns. they've definitely not done everything "by the book."
for them to have a somewhat "untraditional" happy ending—at least by primetime, network early 00s flagship couple tv standards—makes a good amount of sense.
they're not the "white picket fence, 2.5 kids, and a dog" norman rockwell family, and i think tptb are very okay with that outcome.
they like the image of this middle-aged couple that found immense fulfillment in each other and in their shared work (whether as csis or conservationists) and never felt the need to look outside of those things in order to be happy.
that's not to say they might not have written things differently had some of the production realities of the show been different along the way—like, say jorja fox had never left the show during s8 and grissom and sara had been able to get married in vegas as planned while both still working at the lab or that billy had come back to the show with jorja between s10 and s15; maybe in those cases, they might have eventually decided to go for the geek!baby storyline after all—however, all things as they were, i think they were generally pretty comfortable with how things ended up in regards to grissom and sara remaining childless.
they had explored the notion of "csis as parents" as much as they cared to with catherine, warrick, and russell.
they didn't want to go there with grissom and sara.
and who knows? maybe there were other outside factors that influenced their decision to that end, like actor preferences or the difficulty of including infant actors in a complicated production such as theirs, etc.
suffice it to say, i think the showrunners' decision to keep grissom and sara childless was probably a multifaceted one.
the good news is, regardless of how things turned out in canon, we as fans can always play around with the geek!baby concept as much as we want to and in as many different permutations as we like.
i certainly have a lot of fun in my accidentsverse, imagining grissom and sara facing both the challenges and rewards of parenthood, and i know a lot of other fan authors who have their own takes on that idea, as well.
anyway.
rambling now.
thanks for the question! please feel welcome to send another any time.
I am doing a GSR rewatch and just noticed in Blood drops 1x07 that Catherine has a frame of mounted butterflies in her home (the same as in Grissom’s)
Do the creators ever address this, or do we think it’s just a very Grissom gift to his work wife?
(I also knew if anyone knew it would be you.)
hey, @bettielouwho!
there is never any direct discussion of how catherine comes by that particular piece of home décor either inside or outside of the show, and, unfortunately, the in-show evidence we have to make our own determinations on is scant.
i will say up front: on a doylist level, i do think the props department at csi often tended to recycle set pieces, so it's possible the shadowbox in catherine's home is actually a prop from grissom's office they moved over to fill space.
back in s1, the whole production team was still getting a feel for the characters, so they may have just gone, "well, catherine's a scientist, right? so what's something we could put in her home to indicate she is? oh, how about one of those butterfly boxes? we ordered about a dozen of them for grissom's office! we could mount one here."
however, on a more watsonian level:
from episode 01x03 "crate n' burial," we know grissom is in the habit of giving catherine's daughter lindsey birthday presents, as is nick; and, indeed, there is at this time some discussion of how it is customary for team members to "kick in" for these (lindsey) gifts.
the butterflies could therefore be a present from grissom to lindsey.
however, if not, the issue of whether or not grissom and the rest of the team also give birthday gifts to catherine herself remains unknown, as does, indeed, the answer to the question of if the team tends to celebrate the birthdays of its members with gifts as a regular custom overall.
much later in the series, during s6, sara floats the idea of grissom perhaps treating greg to an extravagant birthday "fantasy" in episode 06x22 "time of your death;" however, she does so in a highly teasing way, with no indication she is being serious.
moreover, when greg then tries to drum up support for grissom and/or the team treating him to a much more reasonably-priced birthday breakfast, catherine nevertheless still quickly shoots him down.
nowhere else in the early seasons is anyone else's birthday even mentioned, so it's hard to say whether or not team graveyard ever celebrates its members' birthdays in any way.
do they have cake in the breakroom when nick turns thirty? go out for drinks when catherine hits the big 4-0? or is their team culture (particularly during s1) such that they don't acknowledge one another's birthdays, much less formally celebrate them, much less do so with gifts? is "birthday breakfast" never actually on the table for anyone?
we're never given any direct indication one way or the other—just some small, rather ambiguous hints.
the facts no one in episode 01x08 "anonymous" seems to recognize grissom shares his birthday with paul millander's victims and in episode 02x13 "identity crisis" catherine (who by then has worked with him for 15+ years) seems only vaguely aware grissom's birthday is even in august suggest, at the very least, grissom's birthday is not one the team regularly celebrates, and particularly not with gift-giving.
and if they don't celebrate grissom's birthday, then it may also be the case they don't celebrate anyone else's (including catherine's), either.
however, it's also possible where birthday celebrations are concerned, grissom functions as the "odd man out"—i.e., due to his extremely private nature, he chooses not to make his birthday public, whereas the rest of the team (including catherine) does the opposite.
if so, then perhaps everybody else besides grissom does have regular birthday parties, complete with gifts.
of course, even given catherine seems unaware of grissom's birthday prior to s2, and even if the team doesn't customarily celebrate birthdays as a group, could it be possible grissom privately gives or has given catherine gifts for her birthday, christmas, or some other occasion?
again, the evidence is ambiguous.
from episode 04x17 "xx," we know grissom does give christmas gifts to sara seemingly yearly—and he doesn't give them to nick or hodges seemingly ever.
since grissom is discriminant in his gift-giving, we can infer there is most likely no kind of annual holiday gift exchange at the lab or among the team, or at least if there is one, grissom, again as the potential "odd man out," doesn't tend to participate.
we can also infer, based on the fact nick and hodges have not previously been aware of him giving gifts to sara prior to her making the revelation, grissom gives these gifts to sara privately, as a "just between him and her" thing.
on those grounds, we can perhaps speculate he might potentially do the same with catherine—i.e., he might privately give her birthday and/or christmas gifts or even may have at some point given her a kind of one-off gift to commemorate another occasion in the past (e.g., her being promoted to assistant supervisor or solving some kind of milestone case in her career or covering for him when he attended to some last-minute conference, etc.).
however, he also may not.
on the one hand, catherine has been his dear friend and field partner for decades, so the possibility definitely exists.
on the other, sara may simply be the exception to grissom's more general "no gifts" rule.
which wouldn't at all be unlike him, considering he always tends to give sara special treatment, even compared to catherine.
—which brings us to the end of our evidence.
based on what little we have to go on, it seems either team graveyard doesn't customarily celebrate adult team member birthdays and holidays as a group (and particularly not with regular gift-giving) OR at least that if they do, grissom tends to abstain from this custom, only making a very few quiet exceptions for himself, the one we know about for certain being sara.
never is it confirmed in canon that he gives gifts to anyone else but sara.
however, that's also not to say he doesn't or couldn't, particularly where catherine, who is his oldest friend, is concerned.
all of the above so, if you want to believe the shadowbox is a gift from grissom to catherine, then there is nothing in show canon or even "word of god" bts commentary to say it can't be—and certainly it does seem like a very "grissom" thing (and not necessarily a very "catherine" one).
of course, by the same token, since there is also nothing to specifically say the shadowbox is a gift to catherine from grissom, it's equally possible it may have come into her possession some other way (e.g., she may have taken an entomology class in college and mounted the butterflies herself or maybe another family member or friend who has an awareness of her interest in science gave it to her or maybe lindsey got it from a museum gift shop as a souvenir); it doesn't necessarily have to be a grissom thing, either.
headcanon rules here!
thanks for the question! please feel welcome to send another any time.
Hi! I have read that the GSR season 6 reveal was a surprise to Jorja Fox. Do you know/think that the relationships was a surprise to her? Do you think she and Billy “knew” their characters where in a secret relationship?
hi, anon!
so word on the street has always been that the s6 gsr reveal was a last-minute addition to episode 06x24 "way to go," not originally scripted, so it was kind of a surprise to everyone, jorja fox included.
that said, i do think that what was surprising about the scene wasn't necessarily its content but rather its placement—i.e., while it wasn't a surprise to billy and jorja that grissom and sara were already a couple, it was a surprise to them that tptb had finally decided to reveal that they were, right on the tail end of the season finale.
the reason i think that billy and jorja already knew that grissom and sara were in a relationship prior to the filming of the reveal scene in episode 06x24 “way to go” is because the original plan had been to have the reveal come much earlier in the season, during episode 06x05 “gum drops,” and things had only changed because billy had become unavailable to film the episode due to a death in his family.
by necessity, there would have had to have been some discussion leading up to the filming of episode 06x05 “gum drops” of what the nature of grissom and sara’s relationship was and how long it had been going on and what its specifics happened to be, and then once billy became unavailable and the revisions to the script were made, there would have also had to have been additional discussion on how things should be played going forward, including whether or not billy and jorja should depict grissom and sara as if they were already together.
not only does the gsr content from s6 suggest that both the writers and billy and jorja were conceiving of grissom and sara as a secret couple throughout the season—as there are many gsr scenes that only really make sense in that context—but there is also “outside of the universe of the show” evidence to indicate that such was the case, such as, for example, an interview jorja gave in january ‘06 (midway through s6), in which she both mentioned the original reveal scene cut from episode 06x05 “gum drops” AND stated that she fully believed that the gsr romantic storyline would be revisited within the course of the year, saying, "the grissom and sara storyline is not over. it will get revisited. i’m inclined to think it will be this year."
sounds to me like she's pretty certain, like she knows they’re already together and is just waiting for that information to be revealed to the viewing audience.
to much the same end: there was also another cut scene from episode 06x08 "a bullet runs through it," pt. ii that touched on the fact of grissom and sara already being together that, at the very least, made it to script, even if it was never filmed. in said scene, grissom acknowledged sara's upset over finding sofia in his office in such a way that made it fairly clear he was talking to her as his girlfriend ("you being angry at me made me feel closer to you").
all of the above being so, my thought is that what surprised billy and jorja about the inclusion of the reveal scene in episode 06x24 "way to go" wasn't necessarily the information that their characters were together (which was something they already knew) but rather that the audience was finally going to be told that such was the case.
after receiving the original script for episode 06x24 "way to go" with no reveal included, they probably assumed they were going to go into s7 with the relationship still under wraps only to be (pleasantly) surprised when director kenneth fink and writer jerry stahl pulled the bedroom scene out of nowhere.
or at least that’s my sense, anyway.
thanks for the question! please feel welcome to send another any time.
A few weeks ago, I found seasons 1-10 dvds on eBay cheap, so I've been watching in order. Just got to #2 in Season 4, and it seems as if almost all of the episodes aired out of order in this season so far. I know George and Jorja were temporarily fired at the beginning of the season, so do you think (or know) that had something to do with it, or was there some other restructuring going on, or both?
hi, @bartramcat!
so while the episodes of early s4 do indeed air out-of-order from how they were produced, it's unclear why such is the case.
production numbers for the first seven episodes show a widespread reshuffling, in terms of their airdates.
the true production order for the episodes would have gone as follows (with the numbers of the list representing the production order and episode numbers representing the airing order):
episode 04x03 "homebodies"
episode 04x01 "assume nothing"
episode 04x02 "all for our country"
episode 04x07 "invisible evidence"
episode 04x04 "feeling the heat"
episode 04x05 "fur and loathing"
episode 04x06 "jackpot"
episode 04x08 "after the show" (note that this episode is the first one where both the production number and the airing number align)
of course, it is worth pointing out that there are also two other significant "out of order" episodes that aired later on in s4, as well: episode 04x13 "suckers" was actually the 14th episode of the season produced, while episode 04x14 "paper of plastic?" was the 13th (meaning that, had they aired sequentially, episode 04x14 "paper or plastic?" would have come after episode 04x12 "butterflied," as opposed to episode 04x13 "suckers").
what’s more: in terms of their “within the universe of the show” dates, episodes 04x15 “early rollout” and 04x16 “getting off” also air out of sequence, as the former episode supposedly takes place on 02.11.04, while the latter supposedly takes place on 02.05.04, even though their production numbers do otherwise match their airing order.
unfortunately, there is no information available on why the first seven episodes of s4 all were aired out of sequence from how they were produced or why episodes 04x13 "suckers" and 04x14 "paper or plastic?" ultimately got swapped.
however, one thing we can say for certain is that this reordering didn’t have anything to do with jorja fox and george eads being fired, as that event actually postdates both the filming and the original airing of s4 altogether, having occurred in summer 2004, prior to the filming of s5.
so looking to other possibilities to explain the restructuring, then:
it may have been the case that postproduction issues necessitated the reordering—for example, maybe “homebodies” required more second unit, sfx, cgi, and/or adr work than did “assume nothing” and “all for our country,” so while it was technically produced before they were, it was ultimately aired afterward, as it may not have actually been “finished” until long after the fact. perhaps such was the case for multiple episodes throughout the early season.
it may have been the case that the production team didn’t like the pacing of the season with the original production order and so reordered the episodes in order to make the overall story (in their opinion) flow better. for example, “homebodies” is a very heavy episode, so maybe they ultimately thought better of starting out their new season on such a down note, opting to go for “assume nothing” (which is, while certainly not lighthearted, definitely more upbeat than “homebodies”) as their season premiere instead.
it may have been the case that they had always intended to air the episodes in the order they ultimately did end up airing them in; however, they just happened to film/produce the episodes out of sequence, so even though “assume nothing” was always meant to be episode 04x01, its production number ended up being 0402 when all was said and done. perhaps filming or postproduction logistics played a role in episodes being finished out of sequence. for example, if the production team didn’t secure permissions to film at a particular location right away, then perhaps they might have worked on another episode in the interim, resulting in that episode being completed first.
it may have been the case that the network forced the reorder, wanting to place “assume nothing” and “all for our country” (which are paired with each other) up front because they are relatively flashy “classic csi” ensemble pieces that play well to advertisers AND create a natural momentum into the season. (if you watch the first part of the cliffhanger, chances are you’ll also then want to watch the second, and by that point, you’re hooked!) they may have also forced some reordering with subsequent episodes, as well—for example, maybe they wanted to make sure that “fur and loathing” aired around halloween because they hoped to capitalize on the whole “animal costumes/dressing up” aspect in their advertising. (the episode originally aired on 10.30.03.) if they did force their hands this way, then it’s possible that the initial changes they made then in turn forced other changes, with the production team having to swap around various other episodes in order to make everything flow and make sense from a story perspective. if so, then it might explain why every one of the first seven episodes of the season airs out of sequence from the order in which they were originally produced. (while of course i can’t prove my conjecture, i heavily suspect that this option was the case when it came to the swapping of “suckers” and “paper or plastic?” later in the season, as i think the network probably wanted to air a somewhat more lighthearted episode on the heels of “butterflied,” rather than jumping straight from utterly depressing tragedy to utterly depressing tragedy.)
anyway, i’ve never been able to locate any official word on why so much of the season seems to have aired out of sequence from how it was produced, so, unfortunately, the above speculation is all i can offer in terms of answering your question.
i will say that i have done the experiment of watching the season in its original production order, and while doing so doesn’t necessarily make a world of difference in terms of the overall story, it does certainly alter the flavor of the early season, particularly in the way of making the gsr “rift” arc much more of a kind of thesis statement for the season right from the get-go.
thanks for the question, friend! please feel welcome to send another one any time.
What do you think Grissom’s mother thought about the divorce? What was the conversation between her and Grissom like? Do you think she had or kept contact with Sara post divorce?
hi, anon!
this question is a difficult one to answer, as canon really doesn't give us a lot to go on in order to answer it.
as i've talked about here, what little information the show gives us about betty, her relationship with her son, her relationship with her daughter-in-law, and her thoughts on their marriage is scant and even at times somewhat contradictory.
though she is mentioned occasionally during the course of the show's early seasons, most often, it is in the context of grissom's memories of her from youth rather than his current relationship with her as an adult—the one exception being in episode 03x02 "the accused is entitled," when he passes along her greetings to phillip gerard—so we can't glean much about what their dynamic may be like or even how much they may or may not be in contact.
see the above-linked post for discussion on what i've termed “the rusty asl paradox,” which calls into question just how much betty and grissom actually communicate with each other during those earlier seasons of the show.
we also don't get any information on what her relationship with sara is like once grissom and sara start dating and later get engaged and marry—to the point that we can't even be sure of when she actually learns that sara is a part of grissom's life in the first place.
(does grissom tell her right away when he and sara initially get together? once they get engaged? only after their wedding? at any points in-between?)
not until much later on are we given access to any more direct evidence as to the nature of these relationships: episode 11x13 "the two mrs. grissoms" is the only time we as viewers ever get to meet betty and observe her interactions with grissom and sara directly.
it also is the last time she is ever mentioned on the show again.
the episode begins with her expressing strong disapproval of the logistics of grissom and sara's unconventional marriage and coming down hard on sara herself and ends with her and sara seemingly both resolved to work on improving their relationship and with her agreeing to accept the weird logistics of grissom and sara's marriage (even if she doesn't understand them).
however, since we've never privy to any follow-up on these developments, it's next to impossible for us to say how she might react to the news of grissom and sara's divorce almost exactly two years later in show time.
whatever her reaction might be would probably depend on what her opinion was of sara at that point, whether or not she had ever actually come to believe in the legitimacy of grissom and sara's love for and devotion to each other during those two intervening years, how aware she was of the deterioration of their marriage prior to the divorce itself, what kinds of information she had access to with regards to the divorce and grissom's reasoning behind initiating it, whether or not she believed that grissom bore any of the blame in the situation or she only blamed sara, when she learned about the divorce (either before it happened or after the fact), her views on the sanctity of marriage and the practice of divorce itself, and what was going on in her own life at that point—if she was even still alive and cognizant to see the divorce go down*.
* fwiw, phyllis frelich, the actress who played betty, died in real life in 2014, about a year after the divorce takes place in canon.
since we literally have no clues to go on here, headcanon rules.
more thoughts on the potentialities under the “keep reading,” if you’re interested.
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so.
in the event that betty isn't in fact either incapacitated or deceased by the time the divorce takes place, then there are many potential ways she might react, depending on how one weights the variables in the equation.
if one believes that after the events of episode 11x13 "the two mrs. grissoms," betty actually makes good on her promise to try harder with sara and to respect her and grissom's marriage, then maybe there's a chance that by 2013, their relationship has significantly improved, to the point where she actually loves sara like a daughter and is in favor of grissom and sara being married.
she might even still be holding her breath for grandchildren.
in that case, it's possible that she might be very upset about the news of the divorce and that even try to prevent it from happening, trying to talk grissom (and possibly sara) out of what they’re doing.
however, if one believes that even after the events of episode 11x13 "the two mrs. grissoms," though betty perhaps applies more effort to being civil with sara, she nevertheless never develops any genuine affection for the girl (and never actually becomes any more convinced that the way grissom and sara are conducting their marriage, living across the world from each other, is valid), then maybe come 2013 her reaction might be more along the lines of "i always knew this was going to happen! i told them this ‘living on separate continents as a married couple’ nonsense would never work in the long run, and i was right."
with perhaps even a soupçon of “i always knew that sara wasn't good enough for my gilbert anyhow” thrown in for good measure.
of course, depending on when in the process she learns about the divorce, she also might be more or less understanding (or even potentially confused).
if as far as she knows, everything has been going fine between grissom and sara and then all of a sudden—out of nowhere, from her pov—grissom is calling her to say he and sara are getting (or even have gotten) divorced, her primary reaction might just be shock. but conversely, if she has been aware of some of the warning signs (e.g., knowing that they haven’t actually spoken in a while, picking up on that current of anxiety and doubt that carries through the both of them in early s13), then maybe she might be less surprised.
if, in typical grissom fashion, he tells betty little about the particulars of the divorce—what has led up to it, why it is happening, what his true feelings about the whole situation (and sara) really are—then betty might be left to draw her own conclusions, and, if so, who knows whether or not she would get anywhere close to being right in them?
for example, she might assume there’d been an affair or that maybe grissom and sara had fought about whether or not to have children or something along those lines. maybe she’d even believe that sara had been the one to initiate the split due to the “fickleness of youth” or whatever.
however, if grissom actually confides in her and tells her that it he’s the initiator and why and maybe even that he is still very much in love with sara (but firmly believes that he has an obligation to “set her free”), then betty might have a more accurate assessment of the whole situation, to the point where she might even be able to see grissom’s missteps for what they are.
“if you still love her, why not just go to her, gilbert? why are you halfway across the world on a computer call with your mother when you could be making amends to your wife? get on a plane!”
honestly, though, even if grissom does provide betty with his take on the situation, her perspective on the divorce still might be skewed, given that grissom’s own perspective is itself inaccurate. if he tells her that it seems to him that sara has grown tired of having him in her life and that he needs to do the right thing for her by severing ties and allowing her to go off without him, betty might (again, depending on her view of sara) accept that reading as truth, never knowing that in actuality sara wants nothing more than for her and grissom to be reconciled and that she would gladly give up everything she has in vegas if only grissom would provide her with any indication that he wanted her around him again.
maybe at some point, depending on what her relationship with sara was like, betty might try turning to sara for answers. if she were to, what sara said to her and in what tone would probably very much depend on the attitude of her approach itself.
if she stormed in in full mama-bear “why are you breaking my son’s heart, you little jezebel?” mode, that might get sara’s hackles up, but if it were more of a fact-finding, “why is this happening? sara, please talk to me! tell me what’s going on!” kind of mission, then maybe sara would just respond in that same heartbroken sort of “i don’t know. you’d have to ask him” way that we see when she reveals the truth about the divorce to nick, greg, and russell in episode 13x15 “forget me not.”
whether or not betty might try to intervene in the situation or encourage grissom and sara to pursue reconciliation would of course depend on many of the factors described above. on the one hand, someone as take-charge as she is might be inclined to try to insert herself in the situation, particularly if she actually did feel that grissom and sara were making a mistake. on the other, given her old-fashioned views, she might also consider that it was not her place to get in the middle of their personal business, particularly as they are both adults; she also might not feel compelled to try to save the marriage if she still disliked sara and/or felt that the marriage weren’t a good one.
maybe her main concern would just be to support her son, however she could—as much as he would let her.
a lot might also depend on her views on divorce itself.
as a staunch catholic, she might not approve of divorce, so maybe even if she didn’t like sara or think well of the marriage, she still might be against the divorce, just based on the principle of the thing.
depending on whether or not she felt anyone was to blame, she might get defensive of whomever she felt were the “wronged party.” nine times out of ten, it’d probably be grissom whom she’d champion just because he’s her son, but she’s also no-nonsense enough that if she got the impression that he’d fucked up, she might get mad at him instead and lay into him for how he was treating sara.
whether or not she keeps in contact with sara post-divorce undoubtedly depends on what their post-episode 11x13 “the two mrs. grissoms” relationship is actually like and her understanding of the divorce and its dynamics and whether or not she finds that sara is to blame. maybe, as seems to have been the case with julia holden following her and grissom’s failed relationship of yore, she continues to maintain ties with sara and treat her like family. but she could also cut off contact.
a lot would probably depend on sara’s reaction—whether or not she was still comfortable around betty (if she had ever been at all).
if they did end up stopping contact after 2013, either by betty’s choice, sara’s, or both, either in acrimony, awkwardness, or just the reality of the situation, how might they react if for some reason they ran into each other again later on?
in this post, i imagine a hypothetical scenario where maybe if grissom and sara happened to be still somewhat “legally entwined” even after the divorce, serving as each other’s de facto “in case of emergency” contacts, sara might end up being called if betty were ever sent to the hospital and grissom couldn’t be located, just because her name was still on the list.
what would they say? how would they regard each other?
to what extent betty eventually accepts the divorce after whatever her initial reaction may be is also subject to debate. if she were at first opposed to it, does she eventually make peace with the idea, or does she still harp to grissom about the colossal mistake that he made, even two years later? if she were at first in favor of it, does she eventually change her tune once she recognizes how miserable grissom is in sara’s absence?
if he never confessed it to her himself, would she be able to tell that grissom was still in love with sara, even after all was said and done? or would it be more of a mystery to her why he suddenly shipped off to sea, seeming to come around less and less?
would she have hopes that someday he would remarry?
maybe give things another go with julia?
what would her primary emotion about the whole situation be? compassion? sorrow? regret? anger? confusion? defensiveness? frustration?
who knows how she reacts when, in 2015, grissom and sara first reunite and then remarry (if she is still around by then)—if she is mortified or happy, disparaging or supportive?
frankly, there are no right or wrong answers to these questions. since the writers left the page blank, we can write pretty much any story that we want here.
there’s the potential for a story where betty, like the audience, is vehemently opposed to the divorce and can’t for the life of her wrap her head around how two such very intelligent people can be acting so foolishly. but there’s also the potential for a story where betty’s reaction to the news is to feel not necessarily happy—because of course she’d never celebrate her son going through a hardship—but at least somewhat vindicated, because she’d always considered that the marriage was a mistake and/or that sara wasn’t right for grissom, and now she had proof that she’d been right to feel that way all along.
there’s the potential for a story about a betty who gets so little information about the whole situation that it just never makes sense to her, so mostly she’s just more bewildered than anything, and the potential for one about a betty who is just quietly sad because she’d really hoped they’d prove her wrong and make the marriage work, and now they haven’t, and it just seems like such a waste, because they really did love each other.
there could be a version where betty is so eager to forget that there ever was a sara that she starts trying to line grissom up on blind dates every time he visits her or there could be one where she never tells him, but she still sends sara a birthday card every year, secretly hoping that one day, there still might be hope for a reconciliation.
it all depends on a multiplicity of factors.
personally, i don't really have a particular headcanon for this scenario because i, as a rule, straight-up ignore that the divorce ever happened, so the questions of betty's thoughts on the matter are a moot point to me. i don't really care to imagine how she may have reacted to the situation because the situation itself is something i reject.
anyway, sorry i can’t give you a more definitive answer!
thanks for the question! please feel welcome to send another any time.
I have always been curious on the possible conversations between CSI Team Graveyard when they found out about GSR after Sara's Rescue (Living Doll/Dead Doll). I have read a couple of fanfics but I am interested in your headcanon.
Do you think all of them readily accepted GSR as a couple or there is/are person/s that might blame Grissom for Sara's abduction? If Grissom isn't dating Sara, Natalie would not have kidnapped Sara.
Do you think Catherine or Brass would have been upset that Gil did not tell her/him about GSR even though they have been friends for a long time?
Will there be someone who will remember a memory that confirms GSR has been ON for a long time?
Will Team GY help in confronting Ecklie not to be stringent regarding lab policy when it comes to GSR? so Ecklie will not fire GSR...
Will Team GY found out that GSR is living together?
Will they be shocked about GSR living together?
Is there anyone in Team GY including Brass/Robins/Super Dave that have suspicions and has proven that they/he/she is/are correct?
Do you think Brass would have mentioned the interrogation scene in Butterflied (04x12), in which he will tell to Team GY as evidence of Grissom's deep love for Sara?
Do you think Catherine would have been horrified with her Lady Heather scoop to Sara during TGTBTD since she found out about GSR?
Do you Greg/Nick/Warrick will be jealous or resentful to Grissom because of GSR?
Who will pry Grissom away from Sara's hospital bed so he can get food and sleep?
Do you someone will go to GSR home to get clothes/toiletries for Sara/Grissom and make sure Hank gets a dog sitter? If yes, will this someone do a little snooping inside GSR's home?
Will anyone confront Sara for not telling them about GSR since they can't confront their Boss Grissom?
Do you think Ecklie has a prior conversation with Grissom before Ala Carte (08x02) since Grissom would need approval for his LOA to take care of Sara during her recovery?
Do you think Hodges will be full of himself telling anyone who can hear that he knew all along about GSR?
Do you have headcanon dialogue about my questions?
Sorry about my very long ASK.
I always appreciate your response
hi, @hiei29!
so in order to tackle this litany of questions, first we have to acknowledge that not only does canon not give us much information to go off of regarding the issue of “the team finding out about and reacting to news of grissom and sara's romantic relationship following sara’s abduction” but what little information it does give us is more complicating (and confounding) than helpful.
obviously, in the moment when grissom blurts out that natalie is targeting sara in order to take away “the only person [he] ever loved” as an act of retribution for the death of ernie dell, we only briefly get to see team graveyard's stunned (silent) expressions before grissom then immediately remembers the detail about forum user noturlittlebisquedoll and rushes out of the room, leaving both the team and the moment behind, after which point both the investigation and the episode move on.
from then on, there is never really a second of pause in the desperate rush to rescue sara until she's actually found and safe, so the team can't really afford to take any time to react or process the news of grissom and sara's romance, much less ask questions about its logistics or try to retroactively fit pieces of the puzzle together, until the events of episode 08x01 “dead doll” are concluded.
unfortunately, because the episode ends with sara's rescue—and even her rescue still in progress, as she has yet to arrive at the hospital at the point when the episode actually concludes—we are never then given access to the immediate aftermath (if there is any) to grissom's gsr revelation to the team, and particularly not as, within the universe of the show, there is over a four-month time jump between the events of episode 08x01 “dead doll” (which takes place, in-universe, on 05.18.07) and the events of episode 08x02 “a la cart” (which takes place, in-universe, on 10.04.07), which purposefully skips over any kind of fallout there might be during that timeframe.
however, while it might be natural for us as fans to assume that there is fallout during that four-month period of time that we simply don't have access to, the show itself then complicates this notion by what it presents in episode 08x02 “a la cart,” when sara first returns to work and we are shown our initial glimpses of how things have shaken out for team graveyard in this new “post-gsr reveal” era.
as i talk about here,
in some ways, the idea that sara is away from the lab (and grissom away with her, for the most part) for over four months seems very viable, but in others, it’s difficult to accept.
on the one hand, it does make sense that after enduring such intense physical and psychological trauma—severe dehydration; broken bones; shock; severe sunburn; numerous abrasions and lacerations to the face, hands, and arms; possibly internal injuries and organ damage; etc.; to say nothing of the ptsd—sara would not return to work for several months, and particularly not as her job is one that requires lots of stamina and dexterity to fulfill.
however, on the other hand, if over four months really do elapse between those two episodes, then sara should, by all accounts, be much farther along in her physical recovery process when she returns to the lab than what we’re shown, specifically in terms of her facial injuries...
moreover, one would think that there would have been more discussion about her and grissom’s relationship by their coworkers in the time while they were away from work than what little there seems to have been.
are we really to believe that in over four months of knowing about grissom and sara’s romance, nick and greg have never discussed the subject with each other and compared notes prior to the events of episode 08x02 “a la cart”? if so, it seems odd that they haven’t.
from a storytelling perspective, it’s understandable that the writers wanted to save some of the questions surrounding this “brave new world” of grissom and sara’s romance being a known entity to their teammates and employers to be answered at a point when the audience was actually around to hear what got said rather than just dropping us into a situation where the answers had already long been given, as doing so allowed them to play off of the anticipation and curiosity we felt in a productive way in-episode.
i mean, that moment when we first start to see sara walking toward ecklie’s office but we’re not shown her full person right away is just a fun tease, you know?
however, the fact that said questions are shown to still be lingering four plus months after the fact in show time is also, frankly, weird and does in some ways strain credulity, just in terms of human behavior.
like.
had the events of episode 08x02 “a la cart” taken place six weeks after sara’s rescue, that would’ve been one thing, but since they take place over four months later, that’s another.
by that point, it’s just odd that there seemingly hasn’t been any larger conversation among the members of team graveyard regarding grissom and sara’s romance. it’s odd that ecklie apparently hasn’t been able to pin grissom down to talk since his return to work. it’s odd that whatever disciplinary action the department is going to take against grissom and sara for their violation of lab policy hasn’t already been decided upon and implemented. it’s odd that everyone is just starting to determine how they feel about grissom and sara being a couple, as if they’d only found out about that they were one very recently.
and all that oddness makes it difficult for us as viewers to figure out how to interpret the whole situation.
there’s so much that just plain gets skipped over, falling into the time gap between those two episodes, never to be brought up again.
there’s so much that given the existence of that time gap just doesn’t really make much “real world” sense.
and even beyond what is skipped and what is nonsensical, there’s also this—i don’t know quite how to describe it—but almost outright refusal on the parts of the writers to see some of the plot hints they’d made previously through to their logical narrative conclusions, as doing so would require them to place more mainline focus on a romantic relationship than they were at that time comfortable giving.
like.
in s7, it is consistently implied that grissom and sara have good reason to fear that various teammates (including nick, warrick, and catherine) might, once they found out about it, be upset with them for lying about their relationship and/or not approve of said relationship, given the fact that they work together. however, come s8, we are never given any indication that anyone on team graveyard is at all upset to learn that grissom and sara are together and that they’ve been lying through their teeth to everyone about their entire lifestyle for the last 2+ years. there’s no sense that anyone feels at all betrayed or confused or offended or even has any professional qualms about the potential legal implications of their actions.
i mean, what grissom and sara did is something their friends could have reacted to both personally and professionally, possibly taking issue with it on the level of “we’re supposedly friends, but you guys lied about something super important for a very long time. how are we going to trust you after this?” AND/OR on the level of “you guys lied about something that affects us all professionally. your relationship status might call into question the legitimacy of cases we solved together. it could lead to overturned verdicts. lawsuits. hurt the overall reputation of the department. affect the future of our team. and you guys made us complicit in this whole mess, just by virtue of our association with you. you unilaterally decided that you were okay taking on these risks without giving us any opportunity to weigh in on that choice, let alone decide for ourselves. what right do you have to play with our work and our careers that way?”
and yet the show never got anywhere close to broaching these issues or depicting these potential reactions, despite having raised the possibility for them previously.
see, for example, in episode 07x13 “redrum,” sara and warrick’s conversation about how sara hates deceiving people and warrick hates being deceived, which obviously has some big potential gsr implications and yet is never followed up on in any way after warrick becomes aware of grissom and sara’s deception following episode 07x24 “living doll.”
in a way, it’s like the writers were saying, “grissom and sara were worried that their friends would be mad if they found out. but guess what? they weren’t! of course everyone is just happy that they’re happy. yay love! good guys would never be against love.”
—which would maybe be a fine conclusion for the storyline to have arrived at eventually; a kind of “all’s well that ends well,” “eventually everyone came around to it” kind of beat.
but the thing is, not only do we not see any exploration of any more complicated feelings about the gsr reveal play out on our screens in episode 08x02 “a la cart” or later episodes, but there’s really also no suggestion that such feelings may have existed at any point during the time gap between episodes 08x01 “dead doll” and episode 08x02 “a la cart,” either. there’s no indication that anyone ever had to “go on a journey” to arrive at the point of being okay with everything that happened.
and the fact that there isn’t is, again, given previous characterization cues, frankly, odd.
while in general, the writing of the early seasons is solid, this place is one where i personally find it weak because there was story there to be told, but the writers deliberately avoided telling it because they didn’t want to delve into something that could potentially be messy or awkward.
this is one place where they dropped the ball by not probing deep enough.
and that’s not to say it’s entirely unrealistic that the team would eventually be accepting of gsr, and especially not four months in to them having found out the truth, but it is to say that the show doesn’t even bother to justify why everyone is being so cool about the issue; it just presents it as a given that they are.
there’s really no characterization work done to show how characters who had previously expressed opinions that at least suggested that they might be opposed in principle to two of their coworkers having an illicit office romance—for example, catherine, who had always been outspokenly against the concept of “fishing off of the company pier,” or nick, who has always gotten his feelings hurt when lied to (see episode 07x13 “redrum”)—could have plausibly come around to accept grissom and sara’s coupledom by the time that the events of episode 08x02 “a la cart” are taking place.
it’s all just very much glossed over.
what we get is a complete nonreaction from the team going both backwards and forwards across the narrative line.
the storytelling just plain “doesn’t go there,” either to justify why it is that everyone is okay with what happened OR to show that maybe everyone isn’t so chill with how things were handled after all.
there’s nothing to show that it currently is or even ever that it might have been difficult for greg, who has always had a crush on sara, to come around to the idea of her being with grissom or that catherine might resent grissom for jeopardizing the integrity of the team in order to date one of their subordinates. it’s just assumed that everyone finds the situation copacetic (and that they always have) because, really, why wouldn’t they? the narrative acts as if the question doesn’t even need to be asked, let alone answered.
the subject just basically gets dropped after the events of episode 08x02 “a la cart.” from then on, it’s just accepted that grissom and sara are together and that everyone is cool with the fact that they are.
the new normal is already firmly in place, bearing no residual evidence of how it came to be that way to begin with.
so.
all of the above is to say, answering your questions is going to be difficult because there is such a dearth of discussion in canon on this topic. very little is even actually implied, and, really, we have more questions than answers.
the best we’re really going to be able to do is to wildly speculate.
with that disclaimer in place, if you’re interested in wild speculation, discussion after the “keep reading,” below.
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we’ll take your questions one at a time, okay?
do you think everyone on team graveyard readily accepts grissom and sara as a couple? is anyone upset either about them getting together or the manner in which they did so?
as per what we see in canon, it seems like everyone does accept grissom and sara as a couple—or at least we’re not shown anyone who outwardly objects—by the time the events of episode 08x02 “a la cart” are taking place.
that said, as i mentioned above, just because “blanket acceptance” is what we seem to see in canon at that point doesn’t mean a) that’s necessarily what we should see—or at least that it’s not what should be shown to us without some explanation—OR b) that things necessarily always were that way.
there is actually a lot of canonical evidence to suggest that various members of team graveyard could or even should have been upset with the news of grissom and sara’s relationship for various reasons, at least to start out with.
certainly the show itself never touches on the issue, but the possibility does exist that at least somebody—if not multiple somebodies—might’ve been upset with grissom and sara initially and we just didn’t get to see it during that four-month time gap.
as mentioned above, catherine has frequently over the years expressed her patent disapproval of workplace relationships, opining that they never work in the long term and often foment awkwardness in the workplace when they inevitably flame out (see episodes 04x12 “butterflied,” 06x03 “bite me,” and 07x23 “the good, the bad, & the dominatrix”), so it stands to reason that she at least potentially might not be thrilled with the idea that two of her coworkers had been having a romantic relationship on company time—and especially not when their doing so could possibly have ramifications for the team, their cases, and even her own career trajectory.
she also just might not understand the relationship itself as a concept.
by s7/s8, catherine and sara have finally developed a pretty good working rapport with each other and certainly get along much better than they did when sara first moved to vegas. however, that’s not to say catherine would necessarily get why grissom would choose sara for his romantic partner and/or approve of his choice.
as i talk about here,
specifically for catherine, while she has over the last few years come to respect sara a lot more than she did when sara first arrived in vegas, she has also always had this kind of view of sara as a “kid,” remaining highly aware that she’s got 10+ years of life and work experience up on her.
in all honesty, though she has come to view sara as a friend on her own terms, she’s never quite understood grissom’s attraction to sara and has only been able to rationalize it as a kind of “okay, well, he’s obviously going through a midlife crisis” deal; otherwise, it hasn’t really computed for her why someone his age might want to be with someone who’s still so incredibly young (and, in her view, oftentimes markedly immature).
while i can see paths down which catherine could eventually be persuaded to support the relationship—in the 20+ years of their friendship, never has she seen grissom so happy, and the fact that he is is worth something to her—and even to accept that her general opposition to “fishing off of the company pier” as a practice notwithstanding, gsr is somehow an “exception to the rule,” i don’t necessarily think it would be automatic for her to feel entirely at ease with the situation.
like.
yes, in episode 08x01 “dead doll,” she is going to reassure grissom of the chances of sara’s survival and play the part of the good, supportive best friend, showing up to help him find the love of his life with nothing but words of encouragement and actions of aid, and she’s definitely going to be thrilled and relieved and happy when sara is eventually rescued, but in the days and weeks afterward, might she wonder what the hell grissom was thinking in getting involved with a subordinate (and especially one fifteen years his junior)? could she possibly be pissed that grissom and sara had undermined the work of the team and the lab through their reckless behavior? might she be somewhat judgmental about their choices? feel just kind of bewildered that they of all people had ended up together? just plain not see what appeal sara would hold for grissom as a life partner, given her youth and (seeming) immaturity?
sure. certainly. no doubt.
i mean, i’m not saying she’d be actively anti-gsr or that she’d hold a grudge about what happened (and particularly not forever), but i am saying there is at least the potential with her for some more complicated feelings about the issue than what the canon narrative actually depicts.
she might have to process some things. make a conscious decision along the lines of, “you know what? i’m just gonna have to let this go because done is done. they did what they did, and now whatever happens, we’re all just gonna have to deal with it.” just take a deep breath and move onto the next thing.
i mean, it’s a real possibility that she wouldn’t just immediately be on board with this whole sea change.
the same goes for warrick, who, as mentioned above, has in the past expressed his resentment at being deceived and who might then experience at least some initial upset that grissom and sara had not only lied to him and the rest of the team but had done so for so fucking long.
while i think he’d be less perplexed at the fact of the relationship itself than catherine might be—he has a good enough read on grissom and sara both to recognize some of the more deep-seated ways that they’re compatible—he still might not feel as if grissom and sara were justified in playing roulette with everyone’s careers and the integrity of the team in the ways that they did. much as is the case in episode 07x13 “redrum,” he might be offended that they had essentially chosen to make him complicit in something that could potentially affect his future without giving him the choice to opt out.
again, that’s not to say that there’s no way he might ever forgive them or that he couldn’t eventually come around to see why they felt they had to do things in the manner that they did, but it is to say (once again) that it’s not necessarily a foregone conclusion that he might take some umbrage to the way they’d chosen to conduct themselves.
he very much could be annoyed that they’d lied and he might require an apology before he could be expected to come around to them being together as a concept.
he might be somewhat hurt that they’d felt the need to lie in the first place (i.e., “we trust you with everything. why couldn’t you have trusted us with this?”).
along those same lines, out of everyone, nick has the perhaps the greatest potential for upset about gsr.
again, looking to episode 07x13 “redrum” as a guide, we can see that nick takes it hard when his team family lies to him, not only on a professional level but also on a personal one.
he might really have a hard time understanding how grissom and sara could justify going to such extraordinary lengths to keep everyone ignorant of their living situation—it’s no small feat to hide the fact that you’re cohabitating from your team of trained observer coworkers; there’s some real and deliberate planning that would go into maintaining that kind of illusion for as long as they did—and find that it was difficult for him to trust them going forward, questioning how much he really actually knew them at all.
he might be angry that they felt they couldn’t trust the team to have their backs and keep their secret for them or at least support them in bringing the truth of their relationship to the administration.
he might start to second-guess significant moments from his history with the two of them, wondering how many of their interactions with him were really “real.”
while, again, i don’t think it’s entirely unrealistic that eventually he could come around to being okay with the whole situation—and especially after he got to see “gsr in action” and realize that grissom and sara were still basically the same grissom and sara he had always known, not significantly different as a couple than they were “individually”—he might be the member of team graveyard who needed the most time to cool off in the wake of everything; the hardest sell, as things were.
either before grissom and sara got back to work or afterward, he might end up having some kind of outburst of the “how could they/you lie to us like that, man?” variety. then afterward, he might be standoffish with them for a while, acting curt toward one or both of them when they were forced to work together.
eventually, he might end up having to hash it out with one or both of them, confronting them about the breach in trust.
like warrick, he might require an apology before he felt things were okay.
of course, canon gives us no indication that nick is at all upset by grissom and sara’s choices or that he ever was, as he is (quite literally) the first person who greets them in their public debut as a couple in episode 08x02 “a la cart” and is nothing but warm and accepting toward them when he does so.
but that’s one of those areas where i feel like the show glossed over something that maybe should have been interrogated more.
certainly, nick’s prior characterization to that point suggested that he of all people might find it especially difficult to swallow not necessarily grissom and sara’s relationship itself but definitely the way they’d gone about conducting it.
as for greg, while i don’t think he’d necessarily be shocked to learn that gsr was a thing—as i talk about here, he of everyone on the team has perhaps had the most “up close and personal” view of grissom and sara’s dynamic over the last several years, so once he actually figures out what’s what, he can probably look back in retrospect and identify a lot of previously ambiguous evidence for what it actually was—i also don’t think he would necessarily be thrilled to learn the truth that they were together, either.
while he might not be as annoyed about the principle of thing as catherine or as personally hurt about as nick, i still think the news that grissom and sara were together might kinda knock the wind out of him, just given his feelings toward sara.
as i talk about here, sara has always sort of been greg’s dream girl and while after s4/s5, he has mostly given up on ever having any actual chance with her romantically (settling comfortably into the position of being her platonic best friend), i still think it’s probably a situation where learning that she is with grissom throws him for a loop.
much like catherine talks about in episode 06x01 “bodies in motion,” the great thing about a fantasy is “the possibility that it might come true,” so having that possibility taken away “sucks.”
sara has always kind of been greg’s fantasy, so it might potentially be a bit rough on him to realize she was “off the market,” and especially in such a serious way—and particularly given the grissom of it all.
knowing that his long-time crush is in a long-term, committed relationship with their boss, whom he thinks of as a father figure, probably messes with his head on freudian levels. like. if he was having anxiety dreams about having sex with sara while grissom was watching/scrutinizing him before (see 05x16 “big middle”), one can only imagine what he’s dreaming about now.
ultimately, while i don’t think his hurt/upset would run very deep, it still might cause him to act a bit squirrelly around grissom and sara once they got back to the lab after their leave, at least at first.
as for brass’s reaction, i think of everyone he might be the most understanding.
after all, he has himself in the past had an “office affair” of his own (see episode 05x20 “hollywood brass”), so i think he’d very much get that when two people in a high-intensity job work together closely for a long period of time, sometimes sparks fly.
while he might be confused that grissom would have looked at sara as a potential romantic partner rather than as something more like a daughter figure—after all, brass and grissom are about the same age, and that’s certainly how brass thinks of sara himself—once he knew they were together, i think his reaction would be to just shrug and say, “sometimes the heart wants what the heart wants, you know?” secretly, he might even harbor a “you know what? good for them” kind of attitude, taking some comfort in the idea of two lonely people finding companionship in each other.
though he wouldn’t be ignorant of the fact that their flaunting of department policy could have potential ramifications for the team and even for the lvpd at large, i think that he’d get that people are messy, and especially when it comes to love.
so.
all of the above said, while i don’t think it’s a given that any member of team graveyard necessarily would oppose grissom and sara’s coupledom or be upset about how they’d hidden their relationship for so long, i do definitely think it’s possible that at least some of them could have done so, for the reasons previously outlined.
that said, i do also think that it’s likely that even if some of grissom and sara’s teammates did initially disapprove of their relationship or at least how they’d gone about conducting it at first, they would for the most part all eventually come around to the idea and support it in the long run, given the passage of time and their increasing exposure to the grissom and sara as a couple.
i don’t think it’s likely that this reveal would have been a “deal-breaker” for any of them when it came to their friendships with grissom and sara or their willingness to work with them going forward.
it just might be a case where maybe there was slightly more pushback at least at first than what the show allows us to see.
the whole process might have been much more dynamic than what canon seems to suggest.
does anyone on team graveyard blame grissom for sara's abduction?
personally, i somewhat doubt it.
certainly, the show never suggests that such is the case during episodes 07x24 “living doll” and 08x01 “dead doll,” but even beyond the issue of what canon does (and doesn’t) show us, i just think, from a character perspective, that it’s unlikely that they do.
while grissom—notorious self-flagellator that he is—likely does blame himself, thinking that if only he’d caught natalie sooner or hadn’t been so handsy with sara in public, sara might never have become a target, i believe that most of his and sara’s friends, if asked, would remind him that no one is ultimately responsible for natalie’s actions except for natalie.
claiming that grissom is responsible for sara’s abduction makes about as much sense as claiming that any of natalie’s other victims had brought their own murders upon themselves.
like.
while some of them were repugnant people, none of them deserved to get brutally murdered or brought their murders upon themselves; they just had the unfortunate experience of being in proximity to a serial killer and her bleach kill-trigger. it wasn’t their faults (or the faults of their friends and family members) that they got killed.
it was natalie’s.
no matter how the various members of team graveyard might feel about grissom and sara being together or their secrecy regarding their relationship, i think all of them have been doing their jobs well enough to know that both grissom and sara are victims in this case; i don’t think any of them would have hard feelings toward anyone but natalie for what had happened.
grissom was already doing everything he could to solve that case as fast as possible, and he and sara were being about as discreet about their relationship as two people could be.
after all, they’d successfully hidden it from their teammates for years.
there wasn’t really anything he or they could have done differently to change the situation, and especially not knowing what (or whom) they were really up against. the members of team graveyard are all practical enough to realize as much.
do you think catherine or brass would have been upset that grissom didn’t tell them about their relationship even though they have been friends for a long time?
as talked about above, while i do think catherine might have reason to be upset once she learns the truth about gsr, i don’t think she’d be upset for this particular reason.
imo, catherine knows grissom well enough to realize that he was probably never going to confide in her about his love life, regardless of whom he happened to be dating.
for all of the ways in which their friendship is a very close one, that topic has just always been a one-way street for them; catherine may tell grissom about her adventures and misadventures with dating (and even complain to him about her “dry spells” on occasion), but grissom is never going to do the same with her, and she knows as much. it doesn’t offend her. she gets that that’s just the way things are with him.
she might even understand that in this particular case, he perhaps felt it was important to shield her from the truth so as to insulate her from potential professional fallout in the event that said truth was discovered by their superiors.
(after all, had she known about grissom and sara’s relationship and not “turned them in,” she could have gotten in trouble with the administration just as much as them. “aiding and abetting” in this instance could be a fireable offense.)
so of all the reasons she might be pissed at him for his behavior in this situation, i honestly don’t think this one ranks very high on her list.
the same probably goes for brass.
again, having himself had an office romance in the past, brass is aware that it’s just one of those things that one keeps to themselves. the more people one tells, the more likely the secret is to get out and the more potential damage will be done once it is.
he’d probably understand grissom and sara’s reasons for keeping this particular secret to themselves.
i don’t think he’d take it too personally, knowing that they did so not out of dislike of or distrust of him, per se, but just because that’s just how “secret affairs” are typically conducted.
once they learn the truth, do any members of team graveyard recall past events that now in retrospect seem to be obvious indicators that grissom and sara have been together for a very long time?
oh, yeah, definitely!
probably everyone on the team has at least one or two “looking back now, i definitely should have known!” type memories where gsr is concerned (and even some, “wait. were they together even way back then?!” type ones, too).
i mean, the truth is, grissom and sara have never exactly been subtle about their feelings for each other—and in fact, that’s kind of the reason they’re able to “camouflage” their relationship from their teammates for so long.
it’s the type of deal where because they have always in many ways acted like a couple, no one actually noticed when they became a couple officially, but then once they were a couple officially and finally “out,” their friends could look back and go, “oooh! so that’s the reason they were acting that way.”
i mean, warrick might remember a moment like the one where grissom brings sara the veggie burger in episode 07x01 “built to kill” pt. i and go, “oh, shit, i get it now!” or, thinking about it, nick might suddenly have an epiphany about how there was probably a reason why sara seemed a bit down/distracted during the four weeks that grissom was out of town on his sabbatical last year.
i’m sure everyone can think of some flirtatious exchange or weird interaction between grissom and sara that they’ve witnessed over the years that now, upon reflection, takes on a whole new significance, given the knowledge that grissom and sara are in love (and have been for a long time).
i’m sure there is a “5 + 1” fic to be written on this topic for anyone so inclined.
would team graveyard lobby for ecklie to be lenient with grissom and sara in terms of the rules violation?
eh, i don’t really think so.
i mean, regardless of what their personal feelings on gsr might be, i think the members of team graveyard know that the lab has the policies it does re: romantic relationships between team members for a reason.
there are a lot of serious ethical issues that could arise from two members of the same criminalistics team dating each other, and particularly when one of them is a boss and one of them is a subordinate, in terms of potential for the exertion of undue influence, and the legal liability in such a situation is very real. regardless of whether or not grissom ever did pressure sara to perform her job duties in certain ways in order to please him/earn his favor, just the possibility that he could have calls into question the validity of all of the work they did together.
i mean, even without them actually being in a relationship at the time, we see a defense attorney employ this very tactic in order to discredit sara/team graveyard’s work in episode 03x02 “the accused is entitled.” nora cross also gestures toward a similar point in reboot episode 01x04 “long pig.”
so while i don’t think anyone on team graveyard is happy about things having to change, i think they all understand that the fact that they do is somewhat inevitable.
grissom and sara can’t both keep working as supervisor and subordinate as long as they’re still in a romantic relationship together, and while maybe it might’ve been possible to shift the hierarchy of the team in order to allow them to still both remain working on the same shift together had they been more proactive about reporting their relationship rather than reactive about doing so—as ecklie suggests in episode 08x02 “a la cart,” perhaps catherine could’ve become sara’s supervisor or something along those lines, had they just come forward earlier—the fact is that, ultimately, they did break the rules, and there has to be some consequence for them doing so.
honestly, they’re actually lucky that neither one of them got fired or demoted.
in the scheme of things, sara having to switch shifts is a relatively minor punishment, given both the nature of their deception and the scope of it.
for as much as their teammates might not like sara having to move to swing, i don’t think anyone would argue that ecklie is being unreasonable in making her do so. like grissom and sara themselves, they probably realize that this outcome is one that they just have to accept for what it is.
does team graveyard find out that grissom and sara are living together at the same time they learn about their relationship?
yes.
i mean, considering that grissom takes four plus months off from work to stay home and nurse sara back to health after her ordeal, there’s really no avoiding the fact of their cohabitation.
would team graveyard be shocked to learn that grissom and sara were living together?
to my mind, the most shocking revelation in this situation would just be the fact of the relationship itself, so once they knew that grissom and sara were a couple, i don’t actually think it’d be that surprising to them to also find out that they were living together.
that’s just what people in long-term, serious romantic relationships (most often) tend to do.
that said, i do think they might be a bit incredulous that grissom and sara had managed to hide their living arrangements for as long as they did.
like.
the amount of work that must have gone into them keeping up the charade that they had separate lives/residences must have been extraordinary—to the tune of them purposefully leaving the lab parking lot in different directions at the end of every shift, staggering their comings and goings from work, maintaining a separate address for sara somehow (likely still paying rent on her old place so that they could tell hr that was where she lived), hiding the fact that they had a dog for whom they shared care responsibilities together, never eating leftovers for lunch in the breakroom lest someone notice they had obviously had the same meal for dinner the day before, remaining silent when the other person answered work calls while they were at home together so that no one could recognize their voices on the other end of the line, just never slipping up and saying to each other “see you at home” when someone else was around to hear them, etc., etc., etc.
it’s not easy to pretend you don’t live with the person you live with, and especially not when you work with a bunch of trained observers whose job it is to notice details.
they would have had to be so fastidious in order to keep their secret secret, and i think that’s the thing their teammates would find shocking: not the fact of their cohabitation itself but that they managed to pull it off for two full years.
is there anyone in team graveyard (including brass, doc robbins, and/or super dave) who might have had their previous suspicions about grissom and sara’s relationship status proven correct?
mine is an unpopular opinion, but i honestly believe that prior to the events of episode 07x24 “living doll,” no one on team graveyard knows that grissom and sara are in a relationship or even has real suspicions that they are.
while at various points throughout the early seasons, some members of team graveyard might suspect that grissom and sara have feelings for each other of some kind (or that at least one or the other of them does so) and while some of them might even suppose that maybe they had some kind of prior romantic history together before sara moved to las vegas, i don’t think anyone actually realized that they were dating between 2005-2007.
for my money, here’s how things shake down:
catherine is dead convinced that grissom and sara were having a sexual relationship prior to when sara moved to vegas and that they then continued to have one for a brief period of time after she moved, as well. however, by the time the events of s7/s8 are taking place, she figures that their “thing” is ancient history, so she is completely blindsided by the revelation that they are currently together. while learning that they are a couple might seemingly lend some credence to her suspicions about grissom and sara’s past, i don’t think she was savvy enough to their “present” to be vindicated in that sense.
as i talk about here, “we don’t get much information regarding what warrick knows about gsr, except that in episode 01x20 ‘sounds of silence,’ he states that sara doesn’t like it when grissom has other women in his life—a statement which reveals that, at the very least, he is aware that sara is attracted to and possessive of grissom. in s6, warrick is part of a group that teasingly refers to grissom as ‘single boy,’ which suggests that warrick is oblivious to the fact that grissom is dating anyone at the time, let alone that grissom is dating sara (see episode 06x23 ‘bang-bang’). in s7, he witnesses grissom and sara acting coupley around each other in the ‘i got you a veggie burger’ scene in episode 07x01 ‘built to kill,’ pt. i. however, the show gives no indication that he picks up the vibe that grissom and sara are throwing down. (and, in fact, part of the joke in the scene is that warrick asks ‘where’s the love?’ without knowing that it’s right in front of him, between grissom and sara.) given warrick’s reaction to grissom’s revelation in episode 07x24 ‘living doll,’ it seems that he is probably fairly oblivious to romantic gsr prior to that point. so to sum up: warrick may have known that sara had a crush on grissom early on, but the thought that grissom and sara were in love with each other and in a committed relationship probably never crossed his mind prior to the big reveal.”
nick is straight-up clueless. he tells us so himself in episode 08x02 “a la cart.”
meanwhile, while greg suggests to nick that he was knowledgeable of gsr prior to s7, i don’t he actually was. to quote from the same post linked previously: “i’ve always been of the opinion that greg is kind of messing with nick and bending the truth when he says that he had special knowledge concerning gsr prior to episode 07x24 ‘living doll.’ he’s not lying, exactly—but he is taking what is probably his nebulous sense that something was going on between grissom and sara from 2005 to 2007 and making it sound like he had an absolute knowledge of their dating relationship during that time, even though he almost certainly didn’t. if you look at the way nick and greg’s conversation plays out, nick asks if sara ever said anything to greg about her relationship with grissom. nick asks this question knowing that grissom would be unlikely to disclose personal information about himself to anyone on the team, though sara might confide personal information about herself in someone, and especially greg, who is her best friend. nick’s question seems to take greg somewhat by surprise; greg’s body language shows uncertainty. ‘not in so many words,’ he hedges. his answer suggests that, at the very least, he has never had an actual conversation with sara about her and grissom’s love life (i.e., that sara has never actually sat him down and confided her and grissom’s secret in him), and, even more likely, that if he knew anything pre-reveal about gsr at all, it was all things he read between the lines—clues that only really make sense to him in retrospect, now that he knows the context for them. nick senses greg’s hesitation/equivocation, so he presses greg’s answer. ‘so you knew about the two of them?’ he asks, annoyed that he somehow may have missed something that greg was able to pick up on. greg shrugs—a gesture which suggests that he is again equivocating and maybe even stretching the truth. ‘yeah,’ he says awkwardly. based on greg’s responses and body language in this scene, it seems to me that greg probably didn’t know anything concrete about grissom and sara being together before grissom made his big reveal at the end of s7—he just wants nick to think that he did because he knows nick will be miffed about having been ‘kept out of the loop,’ and greg and nick never miss out on an opportunity to razz each other. sara never sat down with greg and said she was dating grissom, and greg probably didn’t know anything about gsr for certain until after grissom revealed that he is in love with sara and the truth about their relationship became public when natalie davis had sara kidnapped.”
i’m also maybe the one person in the fandom who doesn’t actually believe brass knows about gsr pre-episode 07x24 “living doll.” you can find my reasoning here.
i also don’t think either doc or super dave know just because it’s never even hinted at that they do.
so all of the above said, while i do believe that various members of team graveyard might’ve been able to say, “hey! i was right: sara has always had a crush on grissom!” or “oooh, so when i thought that one interaction between them seemed ~weird~, it was,” i don’t think any one of them can truthfully say that they believed grissom and sara were dating each other prior to the big reveal.
to me, that’s part of the whole joke of s7.
they’re all so close to the truth and yet so far.
would brass mention the interrogation scene in episode 04x12 “butterflied” to anyone else on team graveyard in order to offer proof of grissom and sara’s longstanding and deep love for each other?
personally, i don’t think so.
while he may himself realize in retrospect the significance of that particular moment, i think if he does, he also realizes just how deeply personal it is and knows it isn’t his place to talk about it “out of school.”
grissom was essentially “unburdening himself to the void,” and brass just so happened to overhear it.
grissom had no expectation that anyone in that room would understand what (or rather whom) he was really talking about.
just like he had no idea that sara had listened to him make his confession, either.
brass knows as much, and he’s discreet enough to keep what he is aware of to himself.
do you think catherine is horrified when she realizes the implications of her whole “wears the chaps” spiel speculating on grissom and heather’s possible past sexual involvement to sara in episode 07x23 “the good, the bad, & the dominatrix”?
no.
honestly, even once she learns about gsr, catherine still might believe that grissom and heather had slept together at some point in the past (just like many csi viewers do), so i don’t think, given that she is generally a fairly shameless person, that she’d feel at all bad about speculating to that end—even given that she now knows that sara is grissom’s current girlfriend.
hell, she might even think the situation was funny, in retrospect—her going on and on about grissom and (in her view) his past lover’s sex life, all while grissom’s current lover was standing there, unable to say anything a damn thing about it or even let on that she had a vested interested in the topic. kind of hilarious, no?
in catherine’s mind, it’s a fair game subject to speculate about, particularly considering that sara, as grissom’s girlfriend, probably is already aware of his sexual history anyway (at least the way she sees things).
do you greg, nick, and/or warrick are jealous or resentful toward grissom once they find out that he is with sara?
i don’t think nick or warrick ever has any kind of legitimate attraction to or romantic feelings for sara period*, so i doubt that they care about grissom dating her, at least on those grounds.
* while they may both play-flirt with sara at times (and she with them), it’s always done in a very jocular way. at least to me, i don’t think there’s ever any serious intention behind it.
however, as someone who has always had a crush on sara, greg, on the other hand, might be a little jealous and resentful, not to an extreme degree—i don’t think he wishes ill on grissom and/or grissom and sara’s relationship—but to the extent that he might wonder exactly what sara sees in grissom that she doesn’t see in him and (as discussed above) feel a little bit disappointed that his dream girl is no longer available to him.
fwiw, i do think we see at least a hint of this jealousy/resentment in play with greg’s curtness toward grissom in episode 08x08 “you kill me,” when he seems to blame grissom for “causing” sara to leave vegas in a way that no one else on the team does.
who on team graveyard pries grissom away from sara's hospital bed so he can get food and sleep?
no one.
the end of hospital visiting hours forces him to leave eventually.
does anyone on the team go to grissom and sara’s place to get clothes and toiletries for grissom and sara and make sure hank gets to the dog sitter? if yes, does this someone do any snooping inside grissom and sara's home?
i don’t think anyone does go to their house, as
no one would have needed to deal with hank, as he would’ve already been at the sitter’s at the time of sara’s abduction anyway, given that she had already left for work by then (stopping to grab a quick bite at a restaurant on her way to the lab, as per what is shown in episode 07x24 “living doll”) and grissom was already at the lab himself during that interval, as well,
and, as stated above, grissom would eventually have to go back to the condo himself anyway once visiting hours in the icu were over, at which point he could procure everything he and sara needed himself without having to direct someone else to do it.
to my mind, the first time anyone gets a glimpse of “grissom and sara’s inner sanctum” is in the deleted scene from episode 08x12 “grissom’s divine comedy,” when catherine shows up at the condo to talk to grissom about the case of the day.
certainly, her snooping behavior in that scene tells us that she’s never been to grissom and sara’s place before, and if she hasn’t, then i doubt that anyone else on the team has, either.
does anyone confront sara for not telling them about her and grissom’s relationship since they can't confront grissom as their boss?
i don’t personally think so—or at least not in an angry, aggressive kind of way.
while that’s not to say that no one potentially would have hurt feelings toward her, i tend to believe that in a lot of ways the timeline of events plus her status as the victim of a crime helps to spare her any kind of truly fraught conversations.
of course, at the moment when grissom reveals the truth to their friends about their relationship, sara is not present to be reacted at.
then, even after her initial rescue, she’s in the hospital, where her teammates only have very limited access to her, probably in much worse shape than we as viewers are even shown, for a long time hovering in critical condition and then even afterwards still banged up and busted enough that it would take a kind of truly heartless person (which of course none of her teammates are) to show up in the icu or step-down unit and chew her ass for previous duplicitous behavior.
even once she’s discharged, she’s on leave, which means she probably a bit difficult to pin down.
while other fans may (and probably do disagree), i tend to think grissom and sara don’t really invite anyone over to their place while sara is convalescing, probably for myriad reasons; in all likelihood, they just “drop off the grid.”
all said, for four plus months, no one really probably has much of a chance to give sara a piece of their minds, no matter how much they might be inclined to.
during that timespan, i’ve got to believe that a lot of the initial kneejerk reactions her teammates have to learning the news temper and eventually even dissipate as the months wear on. for however mad they may have been at her (and grissom) initially, the more time passes and life continues, the more they get over having been lied to, and especially because, at least insofar as we’re shown, there never does seem to be any real professional reckoning for grissom and sara’s actions for team graveyard—i.e., no cases of theirs ever do get overturned, no lawsuits are ever filed, nobody gets fired or demoted, and sara is the only one who ends up having to change shifts in the end—meaning that for all their fear of what might happen when “the other shoe drops,” the drop doesn’t actually ever occur. it just becomes a moot point.
ultimately, for as reckless as what grissom and sara did was, it turns into a “no harm, no foul” situation.
that so, i tend to suspect that by the time sara does finally come back to work in october, her friends have mostly moved past the point of even wanting to confront her; by then, they’re all just happy to see her alive and well (which is certainly what canon seems to depict in episode 08x02 “a la cart”). any anger or resentment there had been has long since been muted.
and especially because it’s probably difficult to feel anything but sorry for sara, considering that she is still pretty hurt, even by the time she finally does come back to the lab. it’s hard to yell at the girl with her face all cut up and her arm in a sling, you know?
while there might be some conversations along the lines of “you could have told us, you know”—i can particularly imagine this type of discussion between her and warrick or her and greg—i don’t think that when/if they happen, they are had in anger. i also think that when sara explains, at least in part, her and grissom’s side of things (“we didn’t want to drag anyone else into it. it was our thing”), her teammates accept the reasoning/intentions behind the action, even if they don’t necessarily agree.
as for whether or not anyone ever confronts grissom: i think it’s more likely that he gets confronted than sara does, even though he is the boss, both because he comes back to work earlier than she does—we’re not told how much earlier exactly, but we’re clearly shown in episode 08x02 “a la cart” that he’s already back to working cases while she’s still making arrangements to make the switch over to swing—and because, unfortunately for him, in some ways he is the less sympathetic party in this case.
i also don’t think that grissom is necessarily the kind of boss the members of team graveyard would feel too intimidated to confront. i mean, they’ve always called him out on his bullshit in the past (see, for example, their comments to him in episode 02x15 “burden of proof” or nick’s heated conversation with him in episode 04x11 “eleven angry jurors”), so it stands to reason that they’d be comfortable doing so in this situation, as well, particularly given how his actions might potentially impact them/the team/the lab.
whether or not anyone actually yells at him, i don’t know. possibly they could, but even if they don’t, i do think it’s likely that maybe his reception upon his return to the lab is a bit frosty or that someone makes at least some kind of comment to him indicating their displeasure at some point.
(my bets would be on catherine or nick.)
do ecklie and grissom have any kind of conversations regarding grissom’s leave of absence after sara’s rescue and prior to the events of episode 08x02 “a la cart”?
the show completely glosses over the logistics of grissom taking leave, but the fact is that he would have to communicate with both ecklie and catherine in order to coordinate with them while he was away to make the situation work.
based on the statements sara makes in episode 04x23 “bloodlines” indicating that she has (at that time) ten weeks’ worth of vacation on the books, we can calculate, based on her having worked at the lab for four years by that point and never having taken a vacation to date aside from maybe attending a short conference or two here or there, that the csis each likely receive between 2.5 and 3 weeks of vacation time per calendar year.
considering that by the time of sara’s abduction, grissom has worked at the lab for about twenty-two years and has seldom taken any of his pto to date, he likely has well over a years’ worth of vacation time available to him at that point to take—and, legally, if he requests to take it, the lab has to let him.
that so, i think it’s likely that he flat-out tells ecklie, “i’m not coming back to work for the next few months,” and ecklie just kind of has to deal with it.
and especially because sara was injured more or less on the job by someone on the lab’s payroll.
like.
while it wasn’t actually the lab’s fault that sara was abducted, it still would have been a bad-faith move with potentially damning pr implications to deny grissom the opportunity to stay home and tend to her.
however, even though grissom can basically take as much vacation time as he sees fit without ecklie being able to say boo about it, he still probably has to communicate with ecklie enough to hand off his cases and supervisory duties to catherine and potentially other shift supervisors—somebody from day or swing or even ecklie himself likely has to step in while grissom’s away in order to give catherine her nights off—and make sure that his team isn’t left even more in the lurch than they inevitably are, missing both him and sara for several months on end.
it also might be the case that on occasion, he would have to come back to the lab in order to prep his substitutes for upcoming trials or even to take part in said trials himself.
for as much as he’d be loath to leave sara home alone while she was recovering, i’m sure she’d be the first to tell him, “i don’t want you to let murderers walk free for my sake. please go testify in this case. you’re the only expert entomologist at the lab, and your findings are the only thing that’ll put this guy away where he belongs. i can have one of our neighbors come sit with me. i’ll be okay for a few hours without you. i promise.”
all of that so, i very strongly believe grissom probably has spoken with ecklie—and probably even regularly emailed with him and had phone conversations—prior to the events of episode 08x02 “a la cart.”
it’s just that they haven’t yet talked about the elephant in the room by then, you know?
—probably as much due to grissom’s dodging as ecklie’s own awkwardness about broaching the subject.
say what you will about ecklie, but i genuinely believe that, as he indicates in episode 08x02 “a la cart,” he takes no pleasure in administrating this particular issue. he probably doesn’t want to discuss grissom and sara’s looming disciplinary action while they’re both still away from work, particularly as he knows sara is still very much in recovery. chances are, he’s only too happy to put that conversation off until they both return to work, knowing that until then there’s really not much to be done anyway.
part of him probably wonders if they’ll even ever come back to work at all (particularly sara), especially in the immediate aftermath of the abduction. he’s probably wondering, “is this the kind of deal where what starts out as an extended leave of absence just turns into them never really coming back? am i gonna be looking for their replacements a few months from now?”
would hodges be full of himself, telling anyone who’d listen that he knew all along about gsr?
i mean, potentially.
certainly, that would be one way to write his character in this situation, and i don’t necessarily think it would be ooc to have him behave in that way.
that said, i think it’s maybe a bit more fun to imagine a more nuanced version of his behavior, where in the aftermath of sara’s rescue, everyone keeps kind of expecting him to play that “of course i knew all along” braggadocio role, but he kind of just, well, doesn’t.
imagine a scenario where the news of grissom and sara’s romance has started to spread around the lab, beyond just with the main players on team graveyard. now it’s the hot gossip. every tech and trainee and secretary is playing the “well, did you know? what tipped you off? did you see when x, y, or z thing happened between them?” game, sharing their own “close encounters of the gsr kind” stories with their friends, trying to pin down the logistics of the whole affair.
rumors are swirling—“grissom only hired her because they were an item before she moved from san francisco, you know;” “did you hear they have a secret love child? he’s eight and he already goes to harvard;” “someone told me that they got married a few years back during that time when sara got suspended;” “they’re into all kinds of bdsm and have threesomes with lady heather on the reg;” etc.—and everyone is just wildly speculating about their sex life and their home situation and which of the other members of their team actually knew about them and when.
at some point, the lab rats are all going on about it over lunch in the breakroom and hodges is uncharacteristically quiet. archie tries to get him to contribute to the conversation, but he just kind of demurs. henry even goes as far as to tease him (“he’s sitting over there all quiet and mysterious-like, just hoping we’ll ask him what he knows so that he can pretend that he knew all along”). but hodges just gets up and leaves.
while the other lab rats suppose that he’s just being a sore sport because he can’t actually to pretend to have known anything more than they did—“he was just as clueless as the rest of us”—wendy gets up and follows him and asks him to explain himself.
at first, hodges just tries to brush it off, but wendy is nothing if not persistent, so eventually she gets him to open up.
turns out that hodges is kind of shaken.
grissom is his hero, and after what happened with sara, well—
hodges just can’t get that look on grissom’s face out of his head; how haunted he looked, how small.
maybe while everyone else is treating grissom and sara’s love life like a cypher to be decoded, hodges is just worried because “if something like that happened to the woman i loved, i don’t think i could come back to work at the place that made it happen. i think i’d have to walk away.”
of course, wendy can’t promise that grissom will be back—and hodges does actually make a good point; it would be difficult to willingly return to the darkness that had almost swallowed your true love whole—but she can reassure him: “if grissom and sara do walk away, i don’t think it’ll be a sad ending.”
“no?”
“i don’t think it’s ever the wrong thing to choose love. and besides—”
“what?”
she touches over his fingers where his hands rest on the desk. “—this lab will still be in good hands.”
do i have headcanon dialogue about your questions?
i tried to pepper a little into my answers here and there, but honestly these scenarios are not ones to which i have devoted a ton of brainpower to imagining, not for any particular reason—i mean, i’m certainly not averse to this part of gsr history in the same way i am the later seasons of the show—but just because i haven’t.
i don’t really have concrete headcanons about how everyone reacts to the news—like i’ve said, i could pretty easily be convinced that certain team members have much more complicated reactions (at least initially) than what we’re shown by the point that the events of episode 08x02 “a la cart” are taking place, but i could also believe that maybe they’re all fairly quick to accept the new status quo, as long as a convincing enough rationale was provided as to why so they did—and i especially don’t have fully mapped out scenes in my head for everything that happens.
anyway.
thanks for the questions! please feel welcome to send more any time.
How do you think the Grissoms would respond if someone asks how long they have been married?
hi, anon!
i'm a nose-thumbing gsr snob who refuses to acknowledge the divorce as canon, particularly since the reboot pretty much retconned it out of existence anyhow, so personally i like to believe they can answer honestly and say, "thirteen years now."
given the fact that the divorce is never mentioned at all in the reboot and that the two references that are made to the events of “immortality” are spuriously canonical at best, it’s superlatively easy to just pretend that after grissom and sara got married in 2009, they simply stayed that way. all you have to do is imagine that sara returned to las vegas to briefly moonlight at the lab for a while in 2010, as per canon, but then went back to rejoin grissom in paris after a few months once their research grant came through (hence her reference in episode 01x01 “legacy” to not being able to be in two places at once and joining grissom in an “adventure”); from there, you can infer that they eventually moved to their seafaring lifestyle and that they’ve been sailing the oceans together, conducting their studies, ever since. you can deem everything that happened between s11 and “immortality” in canon just a bad fever dream. it’s fun and it’s free! and it makes so much more sense than anything the later seasons writers actually generated.
that said, if you are less obstinate about denying that particular plot point than i, i suppose the answer might be more along the lines of: i think they probably try to sidestep talking about the divorce too much and so word their answers carefully but not untruthfully to be something along the lines of, “oh, we first got married back in 2009”—you know, something that isn't exactly a lie but also isn't the full story in all of its complicated details, either.
as i talk about in the post linked above,
the thing is, it does make sense that even if the divorce was/is indeed a thing, the grissoms still wouldn’t mention it either between themselves or to others—a) because six years on, they’ve probably already said everything they need to say about the subject to each other, and they don’t like bringing it up between them because done is done, and they’re focused on their present and not their past; and, b) because volunteering that they’re divorced and remarried to each other probably doesn’t typically go over well for them with others, as it either leads to uncomfortable questions or unfair assumptions/judgments which they would rather avoid.
how often does one hear a woman say “i got back together with my ex” and respond “oh, yay, girl! good for you! that sounds like a wise choice”?
alternately, maybe they might just say “eleven years” and shave the two-ish years of the divorce off of the total without explaining that that’s what they were doing.
(again, it wouldn’t exactly be a lie because that’s about how long they’ve been married cumulatively.)
they might also explain that they’ve been together since 2005 and recently celebrated the seventeenth anniversary of that particular milestone. that discussion might then segue into how they’ve actually been in love with each other for coming up on twenty-five years now, punctuated by the honest statement, “i can’t believe it took us so long to figure everything out.”
in any case, unless they were talking to someone who already knew them and at least some of the vicissitudes of their relationship, i just can’t imagine they’d be eager to explain all of the messy ins and outs of their history and invite that kind of scrutiny or lurid curiosity on themselves.
no, true to form, they’d dodge and obfuscate and keep their secrets to themselves—because, really, what does it matter anyway? so what if they took a foolhardy and pointless two-and-a-half-year break in the middle of their marriage? they’ve been in love with each other the whole time anyhow, and they found their ways back to each other eventually. they’re married now, and that’s the important thing; it’s all anyone really needs to know.
thanks for the question! please feel welcome to send another any time.
From a writing perspective, why would they choose to have Grissom’s dog have the same name as her ex? I mean, that was definitely a choice. No way they just forgot lol
hi, anon!
so here's the deal with hank the dog from an outside-of-the-universe-of-the-show perspective:
the thing is, hank wasn't so much "planned for" as he was just kind of a development that happened.
the writers didn't ever decide that they wanted to give grissom (and sara) a dog.
rather, billy so hated leaving his dog bruno home during his long shooting hours on the csi set that he asked the show's producers if they could cast bruno on the show as grissom's own dog, and they said yes.
it was kind of the equivalent of a pet cameo.
as a consequence of hank being a kind of extemporaneous creation, i don't think there was really all that much lore even in existence for him to start out with.
the writers had no better idea of his background within the universe of the show than we did; all they knew was that grissom (and sara) had a dog.
that so, when bruno made his first on-screen appearance in episode 07x22 “leapin' lizards”—where he sleeps on the bed while grissom and sara watch the godzilla movie and then follows grissom out the room when he goes to work on his miniature—his character's name was never stated and no information was given about him...
originally, bruno was going to keep his own name for the show, but then one of the writers made a joke about a dog named hank, and so they ended up giving the character a new name later on in s8.
unfortunately, the writers responsible for the naming have never (insofar as i know) revealed what the joke in question actually was.
that so, whether or not the decision to recycle the name from the ex to the dog was indeed a conscious/purposeful one on their parts, i really can’t say.
while the writers of the earlier seasons of csi were generally much better than the writers of the later seasons at keeping track of show details, it’s possible that the writer(s) responsible for naming hank the dog didn’t actually remember that sara had an ex by that name as well (as, after all, five seasons had passed from the last time hank peddigrew had even been mentioned on the show by that point). they also may have just straight up never known that she did, depending on when they were hired.
fwiw, richard catalani, the credited writer for episode 08x06 “who & what” (i.e., the episode where hank’s name is first mentioned), had been writing for csi since s4. his first csi credit was for episode 04x02 “all for our country”—so he did come onto the scene a while after hank peddigrew’s exit. however, it’s unknown if he was actually the writer responsible for naming the dog or if someone else on the staff was.
anyway, if the shared name was at all a conscious/purposeful choice on the parts of the writing staff, we can only speculate as to why (as certainly the show never explores the issue in-universe).
so, speculation on possible in-universe reasons for hank the dog’s name:
maybe he was adopted and named prior to when sara started dating hank peddigrew or at least prior to when grissom learned she was dating hank peddigrew.
maybe he came with that name, and grissom didn’t change it either because he didn’t know/remember/care that it was also the name of sara’s ex OR because even if he was aware of her ex, the name was already stuck.
maybe grissom named him after hank aaron (the baseball player) or hank williams (the famous cowboy singer), either not knowing or not remembering or not caring that hank was also the name of sara’s ex.
maybe grissom purposefully named him the same thing as sara’s ex as a kind of “my dog is better than that guy” diss move.
maybe grissom purposefully blocked the name of sara’s ex from his mind (referring to him only, with derision, as “the medic” or “that guy”), to the point where he only realized long after he’d named his dog (and the name was already stuck) what he had inadvertently done.
maybe for some reason, sara named him?????????? i honestly can’t think of any reason why she’d choose to recycle the name from a character pov, particularly considering that she is aware of how jealous grissom used to be of human hank. but maybe there could be some kind of plausible in-universe reason, like an inside joke or as a “see? there’s only one hank that matters to me” kind of gesture to grissom. idk.
obviously, since the show never broached the subject, headcanon rules on this one; there is no “right answer.”
of course, all of the above said, it is probably worth noting that csi is one of the few primetime shows that is actually willing to break the “one-steve limit” rule, having two davids in its cast of characters, so the fact that it would also reuse the name hank between one human character and one canine one isn’t altogether surprising.
anyway.
sorry i can’t give you a more concrete answer!
thanks for the question! please feel welcome to send another any time.
