A pain in my sawdust.
My inner fangirl is sitting on the side of the road in the middle of the desert, rocking back and forth with her head in her hands.
Roughly two months ago the first few details of the CSI finale leaked out. They indicated that the Miniature Killer, who has featured heavily this season, would go after one of the CSIs. Specifically, my girlfriend. This version of the story, we were told, was a standalone ep, and my girlfriend's fate would be resolved by the end of it. A week or two after that, the ending changed to become a cliffhanger. We already knew that my girlfriend was getting her beautiful self tasered, but now she was going to have to spend the summer under a car as well. Woeful, but doable. And keep this timeline in mind: the major change to the script--from standalone to cliffhanger--was known amongst the internet kiddlies WELL BEFORE shooting for the finale had begun.
Then the fit hit the shan. CBS smacked down the spoiler site where this info was being posted, and the CSI spoilers went off-line for a while. The section came back up shortly thereafter, but sans any of the direct info that had been posted before. We were left to speculate amongst ourselves, and no radically new info has been out since before this all happened.
Meanwhile, while the spoiler queens were fending off network attack lawyers, rumors started proliferating that my girlfriend was holding out on filming the finale. The reasons, cited in such reputable publications as Star Magazine and The New York Post, were that her contract was up (known to be true), that she was in negotiations to come back for the eighth [and likely final] season (also known to be true), and that her character was slated to die because CBS didn't want to pay her what she was asking (this is where it gets really, really murky and, to me, much less credible). "Anonymous sources" stated that the finale had to be rewritten to a cliffhanger to accommodate my girlfriend's unwillingness to shoot her death scene. And that this rewrite, as well as some major reshoots to account for it, all took place AFTER filming had begun.
So my rational self was all like, "Well, some jerkweed at Star has got his facts mixed up with his spin, and now the rumor mill is going. I'll ignore it because I already knew there was going to be a cliffhanger, and the laws of TV storytelling state that she will live."
Most of the scenes I had already read in the spoilers before the smackdown were there. The biggest changes to them were that the dialogue and pacing had been cleaned up as the script went through production. But they were there.
However, something very important was missing for a good chunk of the ep: my girlfriend. She appeared at the beginning, working on the first crime scene with Grissom (a second "dear" on the year!). Then she appeared in two flashbacks--or, rather, the same flashback shown twice (the hotness!)--that established the Miniature Killer's motivation for targeting her specifically. But, the scene in which she is abducted, wherein we were originally supposed to see her tasered and taken, was cut to a shot of the MK in the background saying my girlfriend's name as my girlfriend's hand was seen in the foreground opening her car trunk. And the scene at the end wherein we were originally slated to see my girlfriend struggling to breathe while trapped under that damnable car and waiting for someone to come save her was shot in such a way that you couldn't actually see her face.
So each of those scenes easily could have been shot with doubles/stand-ins. Which plays into the idea that my girlfriend really was holding out filming, indicating that it might be much less likely she is coming back. Except, why would she hold out filming if, by the time they started shooting, the cliffhanger that we saw had already been scripted, which it totally had? What I know happened doesn't match what I've heard happened or what this ep suggested could have happened.
And so my inner fangirl rocks on the side of a desert road, head in hands, staring at my girlfriend's alleged hand clawing at the mud.
My rational self is screaming herself hoarse that it's just as likely that TPTB cut the ep in such a way as to fuck around with the fandom folks who were reading sections of script months ahead of time. And besides, remember the laws of cliffhangers! Characters left on the brink of death never die. Or, okay, sometimes they die, but then they come back to life; but this is Sara Sidle we're talking about here, not Fox Mulder!
My inner fangirl desperately hopes that's the case. She wants to get to September (or, like, tomorrow, if The Early Show thing goes off and God smiles on us and gives us news about the contract) and feel totally manipulated. She wants to feel used. She wants to feel shamed that she could have let those crack monkey TPTBs get the better of her. (All fangirls have a lot of the M in them.) My rational self needs to triumph here because I don't think my inner fangirl can take the alternative.
Roughly two months ago the first few details of the CSI finale leaked out. They indicated that the Miniature Killer, who has featured heavily this season, would go after one of the CSIs. Specifically, my girlfriend. This version of the story, we were told, was a standalone ep, and my girlfriend's fate would be resolved by the end of it. A week or two after that, the ending changed to become a cliffhanger. We already knew that my girlfriend was getting her beautiful self tasered, but now she was going to have to spend the summer under a car as well. Woeful, but doable. And keep this timeline in mind: the major change to the script--from standalone to cliffhanger--was known amongst the internet kiddlies WELL BEFORE shooting for the finale had begun.
Then the fit hit the shan. CBS smacked down the spoiler site where this info was being posted, and the CSI spoilers went off-line for a while. The section came back up shortly thereafter, but sans any of the direct info that had been posted before. We were left to speculate amongst ourselves, and no radically new info has been out since before this all happened.
Meanwhile, while the spoiler queens were fending off network attack lawyers, rumors started proliferating that my girlfriend was holding out on filming the finale. The reasons, cited in such reputable publications as Star Magazine and The New York Post, were that her contract was up (known to be true), that she was in negotiations to come back for the eighth [and likely final] season (also known to be true), and that her character was slated to die because CBS didn't want to pay her what she was asking (this is where it gets really, really murky and, to me, much less credible). "Anonymous sources" stated that the finale had to be rewritten to a cliffhanger to accommodate my girlfriend's unwillingness to shoot her death scene. And that this rewrite, as well as some major reshoots to account for it, all took place AFTER filming had begun.
So my rational self was all like, "Well, some jerkweed at Star has got his facts mixed up with his spin, and now the rumor mill is going. I'll ignore it because I already knew there was going to be a cliffhanger, and the laws of TV storytelling state that she will live."
Most of the scenes I had already read in the spoilers before the smackdown were there. The biggest changes to them were that the dialogue and pacing had been cleaned up as the script went through production. But they were there.
However, something very important was missing for a good chunk of the ep: my girlfriend. She appeared at the beginning, working on the first crime scene with Grissom (a second "dear" on the year!). Then she appeared in two flashbacks--or, rather, the same flashback shown twice (the hotness!)--that established the Miniature Killer's motivation for targeting her specifically. But, the scene in which she is abducted, wherein we were originally supposed to see her tasered and taken, was cut to a shot of the MK in the background saying my girlfriend's name as my girlfriend's hand was seen in the foreground opening her car trunk. And the scene at the end wherein we were originally slated to see my girlfriend struggling to breathe while trapped under that damnable car and waiting for someone to come save her was shot in such a way that you couldn't actually see her face.
So each of those scenes easily could have been shot with doubles/stand-ins. Which plays into the idea that my girlfriend really was holding out filming, indicating that it might be much less likely she is coming back. Except, why would she hold out filming if, by the time they started shooting, the cliffhanger that we saw had already been scripted, which it totally had? What I know happened doesn't match what I've heard happened or what this ep suggested could have happened.
And so my inner fangirl rocks on the side of a desert road, head in hands, staring at my girlfriend's alleged hand clawing at the mud.
My rational self is screaming herself hoarse that it's just as likely that TPTB cut the ep in such a way as to fuck around with the fandom folks who were reading sections of script months ahead of time. And besides, remember the laws of cliffhangers! Characters left on the brink of death never die. Or, okay, sometimes they die, but then they come back to life; but this is Sara Sidle we're talking about here, not Fox Mulder!
My inner fangirl desperately hopes that's the case. She wants to get to September (or, like, tomorrow, if The Early Show thing goes off and God smiles on us and gives us news about the contract) and feel totally manipulated. She wants to feel used. She wants to feel shamed that she could have let those crack monkey TPTBs get the better of her. (All fangirls have a lot of the M in them.) My rational self needs to triumph here because I don't think my inner fangirl can take the alternative.