#05x22

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as i've talked about elsewhere, grissom is pretty much the king of compartmentalization. his predilection for order (see episode 02x07 "caged") isn't just an external organizational thing for him; it's a manifestation of how his brain works.

he just naturally partitions everything in his life into separated categories—work vs. home, professional vs. personal, public vs. private, intimate vs. superficial, intellectual vs. emotional, etc., etc.—and is very comfortable operating that way, even though many of the people in his life, including and especially catherine, find his m.o. in this regard not only inscrutable but also unfeasible, arguing no one, including him, can or should be so clinical about everything all the time, and, furthermore, not everything in the world can be so easily and cleanly sorted as he might like; there are inevitably situations where the lines blur.

for a long time, grissom lives in defiance of these criticisms: despite everyone telling him he shouldn't be able to do so and neither should he want to, he has no trouble keeping every aspect of his life sorted into its proper mental "box" (see episode 09x05 "leave out all the rest"), and he feels really safe within his system.

but as i talk about here, eventually, compartmentalizing starts to become more difficult for him, specifically as he develops personal relationships which challenge some of those categorical constructs he had always so rigidly enforced before.

for example, while catherine is initially just his field partner, eventually she also becomes a close enough friend to him she starts to be someone he sees outside of work in a social capacity (see episode 02x15 "burden of proof") and someone he cares about for reasons having nothing to do with their exceptional joint solve rate. though before, he had never really allowed himself to cross those "professional acquaintance vs. personal friend" wires, now he finds he can't help but do so; when he stumbles upon her crying in the locker room because she's had another blowout fight with eddie, he just automatically goes to console her, rather than refusing to engage. his care for her as a person as opposed to just a coworker compels him to, in spite of himself. and so he finds that formerly clear line between professional vs. personal is much more permeable with her than he might like to admit.

and the same goes with his other team members, to varying degrees.

brass, warrick, nick—none of them are just simply one thing to him. they're not just coworkers but friends and even, eventually, family; colleagues with whom he shares professional responsibilities and over whom he sometimes even has managerial power, yes, but also loved ones he cares for in ways which have no basis in department policy. there's so much more bleed-over than he's comfortable acknowledging, and, the longer he works with his team, the harder it becomes for him to pretend everything in his life is still clean and quantifiable.

still, for my money, he is at least able to maintain that ruse to a certain degree until 1998.

until the forensic academy conference.

until sara.

as i talk about in the post linked above:

sara is the game-changer for him. he takes one look at the girl with the ponytail sitting on the front row at his lecture, and he is just gone. whereas he has been able to downplay his feelings regarding his team members and avoid thinking too much about the implications of his relationships with them, with sara, he can’t do so. he is instantly in love with her, and she doesn’t just chip away at the shell around his heart—she completely cracks through it. sara is the messiest of messy human beings—full of contradictions and complexities and irrational feelings, the kind of person who causes grissom to have to make impossible choices and be honest with himself in a way he has never been before—and yet grissom can’t help but love her and care about her and want her in his life. around her, his rationality goes out the window. logic tells him he should go nowhere near her. and yet he’s drawn to her, in spite of himself. and so he ignores his better judgment. he starts this relationship with her in san francisco, and it’s beautiful to him but also terrifying because he’s never allowed himself to feel so deeply about anyone or anything before. the only way he can justify what he’s doing is to compartmentalize it: as long as he can keep sara in her “san francisco box,” separate from his life and work in vegas, he can cope. carrying on that way minimizes potential damages; it keeps thing cleaner and relatively safe [or so he tells himself]. but that tactic only works for about two years—because, as stated above, when it comes to sara, grissom can’t seem to make himself play by his own rules. so when holly gribbs gets shot and grissom needs someone to investigate warrick? he asks sara to come to vegas—into his sphere, onto his turf—in order to run point. and once he has sara in his “vegas box”? he can’t bear to send her back to san francisco. so he asks her to stay. and that’s really where things start to snowball for him. because once grissom brings the girl who cracked through the shell around his heart to vegas, she continues to work at what she started in san francisco—and before he knows what’s happening, she’s not the only one at the job; all the people in his little collective are working to do the same thing. so just right away we see grissom making these senseless, messy, human choices: he brings the girl he loves onto his team; he lets his right hand take over a case she has no business running; and he bails his vegas kid out of trouble. s1 is just this long run in which grissom tells himself, “this far and no further,” drawing these kind of arbitrary emotional boundaries, only to then immediately overstep them. he gets invested in his cases, his people, their struggles. like ecklie later says in s5, he gets attached to people and tries to fix their problems. he rationalizes his behavior by telling himself he needs his team members around him because they are great scientists: i.e., because they allow him to do what he does and to run the night shift with a certain level of excellence. but as time goes on, he’s just faced with more and more examples where his rationalization is just blatantly untrue: where the reason why he overlooks nick sleeping with a call girl isn’t because nick is such a gifted criminalist but because he loves nick like a son; and where he isn’t killing himself to solve a case with sara only because it’s their job to do so but also because he’s in love with her, and he knows it will make her sad if they don’t get justice for the victim, and he just can’t stand to see her hurting. catherine runs personal dna tests at the lab, and warrick slips up with his gambling, and it’s not the fact they’re professionally irreplaceable which matters to him—it’s the fact they’re his friends, his people, his family, and he can’t lose them. recognizing that kind of human neediness in himself scares grissom because for as bad as it is to start out alone and end up alone, it’s even worse to at some point have people and then lose them.

because this erosion of his compartments is so scary to grissom, it's a process he resists—which is why we see so much "two steps forward, one step back" with him in the early seasons of the show, not only with regards to how much social intimacy he is willing to allow between himself and his team members but in his relationship with sara.

at the crux of his characterization, there has always been a war between his head and his heart, and certainly such is the case when it comes to how he navigates his personal relationships and again, in particular, his romance with sara.

which brings us back to the topic at hand.

in s1, we get this really clear example of a grissom who is still strongly resisting the slippage he is already by that early point beginning to experience between his professional and personal lives.

it comes in episode 01x04 "pledging mr. johnson," when he and catherine work a murder case involving an element of adultery and, due to her personal experiences with eddie, she has a difficult time detaching emotionally, eventually going so far as to compromise the investigation due to her sympathy for the victim's husband.

grissom gets after catherine for this breach of etiquette, reminding her, "we're scientists, not psychiatrists," arguing it isn't their job to concern themselves with the emotions of the surviving spouse.

catherine shoots back, "we bring ourselves to our cases. we can't help it," and goes on to accuse grissom of having no personal relationships, living alone "in [his] hermetically-sealed condo," with no chance any of his home life "will slop over into a case" because he has no home life to speak of.

while her words strike more of a blow to grissom than she probably realizes, grissom nevertheless doesn't fight back but instead concedes: "you're right. i am deficient in a lot of ways."

however, he defends, the one mistake he'll never make is "screw[ing] up one of [his] cases with personal stuff."

on that point, he is adamant.

now.

one could argue, even at that early point in the game, his declaration is not without some hypocrisy—as he has already allowed his personal feelings for both catherine and warrick to influence how he's handled the investigation into the gribbs case in ways which are, objectively speaking, neither entirely prudent nor wholly professional.

and, honestly, grissom himself isn't ignorant of this fact.

rather, he's keenly aware of it.

he knows he's broken some of his own rules—and fairly egregiously—of late, and, frankly, he's uncomfortable knowing he has, hence why he takes such a hardline stance here: he's not just trying to put catherine in her place but himself.

he's trying to remind himself he can't allow the care he feels for his team members to cloud his professional judgment and blur those lines, especially considering he is now the team leader. he needs to reset and go back to maintaining those boundaries in the same rigid manner he did before or else the wheels will come off team graveyard really quickly.

it is, we should note, no coincidence he is experiencing this cognitive dissonance just a few weeks after sara has moved to vegas and busted his compartmentalization system all to hell, of course.

and, at this point, he still has some hope he can return to his previous standards of conduct.

he believes if he just refocuses, he can course correct and go back to maintaining a sufficient degree of separation between the personal and the professional in his life—never mind the question of how he can make this correction, given he is nevertheless patently unwilling to alter much less step back from his personal relationships with the same people who keep prompting him to challenge his personal rules for himself to begin with.

it's very much a situation where he wants to have his cake and eat it, too, and he doesn't realize how impractical that proposition actually is.

he's being unrealistic, but he's in denial about how much so.

now.

fast-forward five years to episode 05x22 "weeping willows" and the grillows conversation you mention.

to me, it is a direct callback to the grillows conversation from episode 01x04 "pledging mr. johnson."

however, in this case, there is one major difference in play: the grissom of s5, unlike his s1 counterpart, is on the verge of giving up on his denial.

whether one believes he is already, by this point, in a committed romantic relationship with sara or is just on the brink of one, the fact is, he has already had his big "i realize i care more about sara's well-being than i do about anything else (including doing what's best for myself career-wise)" epiphany back in episode 05x13 "nesting dolls."

there's been a sea change between him and sara—one she will refer to some sixteen years later, when talking to nora cross in reboot episode 01x04 "long pig," when she explains how after grissom's visit to her apartment during her suspension, he is "just there for her" going forward, indicating he has already by mid-s5 made the decision to "throw in his lot" with her, for better or worse.

there has been, ever since then, a building of momentum between them, hurtling them toward the inevitable consummation of their vegas relationship—and he's not been unaware of it.

so, again, whether one believes they've already started sleeping together by the events of episode 05x22 "weeping willows" or that event is just around the corner for him, it's on his mind.

he suddenly either has or is about to have an intimate relationship with the woman he is in love with—a relationship which by its nature (forbidden by departmental policy and potentially damaging to his professional reputation as it is) will result in him making the same lab-compromising kinds of decisions he used to chastise catherine for.

of course, the truth is, his feelings for sara have always inflected his work much more than he would care to admit, ever since she moved to vegas. but pre-getting together, he could at least pretend to himself he was maintaining some modicum of "separation between church and state" re: his feelings for her vs. his professional obligations, whereas nowadays, since she is his girlfriend or is soon to be so, he very much cannot.

and he is especially cognizant of how emotionally compromised he is given the events of episode 05x21 "committed," which, within the universe of the show, literally take place the day before the events of episode 05x22 "weeping willows."

as i talk about here,

[throughout the episode, grissom] seems to be in a mood, particularly where it concerns catherine “allowing” her personal life to complicate her investigation into adam novak.   the way i read things, since he and sara have been sleeping together for a couple of weeks, and especially in the aftermath of the events of episode 05x21 “committed,” where sara’s life was briefly in jeopardy, he’s starting to fully, unavoidably realize just how enmeshed the personal and professional spheres of his life have become.   while he has no desire to back off from seeing sara, he is nevertheless reckoning with and reeling from the implications of their secret relationship.   had she been seriously hurt by adam trent, grissom can only imagine what he might’ve done and how everything might’ve played out.   his whole life has suddenly become a very precarious balancing act, and he’s keenly aware of the fact it has, given what happened just a few hours previously at the mental hospital.   that so, he ends up taking some of his frustration out on catherine, chiding her for “muddying the waters” between her private life and her work at the lab in a way which very much bespeaks his own anxieties.   @bartramcat​ has written a brilliant meta explaining where grissom may be coming from in this episode with his criticisms of catherine’s actions, in light of his recent relationship with sara.  to quote in part from it here:   the terms he chides her with are quite interesting. upon learning about her interactions with adam novak, he tells her she has to recuse herself. then when she says she did nothing wrong: “we all live in glass houses, catherine. you gotta be careful where you take your shower.” the fact grissom includes himself as living in a glass house, i.e., actually having a personal life which could be open to scrutiny, is perhaps telling. and the whole shower thing is downright strange coming from grissom. if i were catherine, i might have wondered when the last time he showered in someone else’s shower… although i think her first thought would have been lady heather, not sara sidle... at the end of the episode, [grissom] is still angry with [catherine]... he says: “i guess that’s why i don’t go out.” and, really, if he and sara have been sexually involved... at that point... then it’s true: he/they don’t go out. their relationship is the epitome of privacy, even after everyone knows about it 2 years later.    i very much view this as a case of “methinks [the supervisor] doth protest too much,” where [once again, as in episode 01x04 "pledging mr. johnson,"] what grissom says to catherine has more to do with himself and his own situation with sara than it does with catherine, per se. he’s wrestling with the fact, for the first time in his life, he has something he’s willing to go “all in” for—something which could potentially complicate his safe, perfectly-ordered existence. he’s already in so deep, and he knows he is. but the strange thing—the scary thing—is he finds himself weirdly okay with this level of commitment. he knows in his heart of hearts he’s willing to “go there” for sara. he is willing to put everything on the line for her. of course, the crucial detail here is whereas in the past, this kind of epiphany might have scared him so much he retreated from her (see his behavior toward her post-episode 04x12 “butterflied” in s4), by this point, he goes with it. yes, he’s scared, and, no, he’s not about to shout their relationship from the rooftops and fuck up their work situation, but he’s also not about to go running off.   he’s going to lean in, not out.

it's not an easy realization for him to come to—hence his shortness with catherine.

and, of course, he also still has to cover his own ass. it's not like he can admit to catherine, "well, i've actually had some time to think about it, and ever since i started dating sara, i get what you mean about how we can't help but allow our personal feelings to inflect how we investigate our cases and make our professional lives messy," you know? for as long as his and sara's relationship has to remain a secret, he still has to pretend to hold his old views, even if he now realizes how unfeasible they are.

as for sara's (brief) scene with catherine, i read her behavior there less as being nervy and more as her being chatty—which, honestly, is strange, given she so very recently had a near-death experience at the hands of adam trent.

all the same, i do think her behavior in this scene ties back to her (new) relationship with grissom.

here's how i figure:

sara's typical m.o. when she's experiencing cptsd episodes is to either become sullen and withdrawn (see, for example, her behavior in episode 08x07 "goodbye & good luck") or else to be really high-strung and frenetic (see, for example, her behavior when grissom assigns her to care for brenda collins in episode 01x07 "blood drops").

but here, though she doesn't seem particularly emotive, she's also definitely not taciturn, either, and neither is she manic. she also doesn't strike me as being nervous/trying to cover anything up with what she's saying.

she's just talking the way one does with a coworker—and, in this case in particular, taking the opportunity, as a younger woman, to seek the expertise of a slightly older woman on what could be an issue of minor sexual harassment, essentially saying, "hey, this thing happened to me (and it made me kinda uncomfortable). do you think it's a big deal? was this guy in a position of power over my case hitting on me?" she's trying to see what catherine thinks as someone who's probably "been there" herself.

it's just, unfortunately for sara, catherine is distracted and frazzled by her own situation, so she's not biting.

her "i thought judges were supposed to be colorblind" quip is really a non-answer to sara's implied question—which sara duly understands as the soft "i don't really want to engage with what you're saying, kid" letdown it is.

of course, it's worth noting, from a doylist perspective, sara is not the focus of this scene/this episode, whereas catherine is, so the writers probably weren't prioritzing her characterization during her and catherine's conversation anyhow. what sara says about the judge is meant to reinforce the episode's theme, which is "women experience much more misogyny (and on so many more fronts) than men could ever possibly imagine," rather than to necessarily reveal anything about her interior world within the context of her larger s5 story arc or even just in light of the previous episode's events. she is very much in the role of a minor character here, so any inferences we might draw about her from a watsonian standpoint are ones we'll by necessity have to extrapolate.

now.

dating episodes within the universe of the show is an inexact science, as the writers aren't always either consistent with or realistic about indicating when the episodes take place.

we know episode 05x21 "committed" takes place in-universe between 04.26 and 04.27.05, as is indicated by the dates on the time log grissom procures from the psychiatric jail ward.

there are then no internal indications of the date presented in episode 05x22 "weeping willows."

however, by process of elimination, we can infer episode 05x22 "weeping willows" has to take place the very next day on 04.28.05 because, per the radar log from episode 05x23 "iced," that episode itself takes place on 04.29.05, meaning 04.28.05 is the only sequential slot when episode 05x22 "weeping willows" could fit on the season timeline.

unfortunately, while scanning things this way makes for a consistent chronology, it also has the (presumably) unintended consequence of showing sara bounce back perhaps unrealistically quickly from the events of episode 05x21 "committed": baby girl gets held at shiv-point and almost killed, and she's right as rain less than 24 hours later, fishing to see what catherine thinks about her getting hit on by the judge.

of course, quibble with the timeline on this one though we may, the fact remains, her expeditious recovery is canonical, which leaves us with the question of how it comes about.

how does she go from being as traumatized as she is at the end of episode 05x21 "committed" to being as placid as she in her sole scene in episode 05x22 "weeping willows"?

the show never spells the answer out, but i think there is an implication: the answer is, simply, "grissom."

whether one believes it happens for the first time in episode 05x21 "committed"—fwiw, neither 04.26 nor 04.27.05 were sundays, per sara's statement to ecklie in episode 08x02 "a la carte"—or has already been happening for a while, i think there is a strong implication, however unspoken, after her traumatic day at the psychiatric jail ward, sara goes home with the man who loves her, and he shows her so much tlc she's able to cope with what happened to her and recuperate much more quickly than she would had she been left to her own devices.

—it would certainly explain how chill she seems in episode 05x22 "weeping willows."

while confused about the judge's actions, she's certainly not doom-spiraling over her highly recent near-death experience with adam trent. and it's not like she's masking. she seems genuinely unperturbed.

and, of course, by the time the events of episode 05x23 "iced" roll around—which, again, canonically take place within the universe of the show only two days after the events of episode 05x21 "committed"—she's even noticeably happy, clowning around with greg, beaming at grissom, cracking jokes about their case, etc.

so, again, i'm just drawing my own inferences here, but how i read her and grissom's really disparate behavior in this episode is basically down these lines:

ever since the events of episode 05x13 "nesting dolls," grissom has been reckoning with something which we as viewers have known to be true of him for a long time but which he has been resisting admitting about himself for years, which is, namely, he is much more prone to listening to his heart than his head when it comes to the people he cares about. he is just as liable to let his emotions cloud his judgment on his cases and inflect his managerial decisions as anyone else might be—and especially where sara is concerned.

seeing her with that shiv pressed against the throbbing vein in her neck either shortly before or after their official getting-together really draws into sharp relief for him just how incapable he is of looking at anything having to do with her objectively.

he can't keep anything having to do with her in boxes.

his feelings just overflow.

his barriers break down.

so, yes, he'll try to keep his relationship with her under wraps for as long as possible so he can still enjoy both working and being in a relationship with her simultaneously, but if someone were to figure out what was what, he also wouldn't fight it. not anymore. he's to the point where he's ready to let the messiness happen—where he honestly can't help but do so.

and it's frightening to him to arrive at that realization—not in a way which will make him flee the relationship but just in the sense of being fully honest with himself about it.

which is why he is so critical of catherine: because she is committing the same offense he's committing.

and hers is even a lesser version of the thing.

she just got involved with a rando at a bar.

he is in a full-on romantic relationship with his years-younger subordinate—a girl he hired himself, whose yearly evaluations he's responsible for, and whom he regularly works cases with.

everything he says to catherine about having an obligation to recuse herself and living in a glass house is 10x more applicable to him than to her.

and he knows as much.

and, yet, he's not going to change course.

not this time.

hence the final line of the episode:

"is it a crime to want a little human contact?" catherine asks.

"i guess that's why i don't go out," grissom says, which sounds like an answer but isn't one.

he doesn't say it either is a crime or it isn't to want human connection (which is something he, after years of forbearance, is finally allowing himself to pursue); he just says he doesn't himself go out—seemingly reminding himself it's in his and sara's best interests to remain as discreet in their relationship as possible, despite the fact they will perhaps inevitably someday be discovered.

meanwhile, while grissom is reckoning with that huge paradigm shift, trying to come to terms with what it means for him to now be willing to prioritize his relationship with sara over what is safest and most prudent for himself, sara is living in a much happier emotional moment.

yes, she just suffered a serious trauma working the trent case, which triggered her in about a dozen different ways and even put her life in danger. however, for the first time in her life, she also had the experience of not having to face down that trauma alone.

grissom showed up for her.

he was sweet to her on the ward and careful about her needs ("if you want, i can have somebody take your place"), and then he—most likely—took her home after work and made love to her and held her and made sure she felt safe and supported in a way no one else in her life ever has before.

and with that tlc from him on top of all the prelude to it—again, whether one believes their relationship has been consummated prior to episode 05x21 "committed" or not, it's not in debate he's already been more present in her life and emotionally "there for her" since the events of episode 05x13 "nesting dolls"—baby girl's honestly feeling pretty good.

that man is willing to go to bat for her, and it means more to her than she can say.

she's never been as scared of the potential consequences as he has been when it comes to the prospect of them being together, so she doesn't have to do that same kind of wrestling with herself as he does. she's much more of a pragmatist; whatever happens happens, and the only thing she really cares about in all of it is them being together.

so what she says to catherine here isn't a fear response. it's actually evidence of her drawing strength from her and grissom's new relationship.

she's capable of talking about what happed with the judge because she's not stressing out about what happened with adam trent. she's taken these whirlwind 48 hours in stride.

grissom's already seen to her needs.

she's on an upswing.

—or at least i interpret the gsr in this episode down those lines.

of course, ymmv.