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In Season 9 of original CSI, when Grissom tells Catherine that he's leaving CSI and Catherine responds "I knew before you knew," what do you think she meant by this? Also, if there wasn't a cut in that scene, do you think the conversation would have continued and where would it have gone?Thanks for your amazing interpretation of the GSR over the years!!
hi, anon!
thank you for your kind words! iām glad you enjoy my stuff.
so the tl;dr version is that catherine means that she knew that grissom was going to leave las vegas and go after sara even before he was consciously aware of the fact that he was going to do so; she had sensed the sea change in him long prior to when he gathered the courage to acknowledge it for himself.
longer explanation after theĀ ākeep reading,ā if youāre interested.
__
so.
in the wake of warrick's death and sara's second departure from vegas at the start of s9, grissom is, frankly, not well.
as i talk about here,
basically, grissom is a man on the brink.Ā
ever since sara left vegas in s8, grissom has missed her terribly and been struggling with depression. the lab, which was once his safe place, his āwell-ordered kingdomā in an otherwise chaotic world, has become increasingly strange and unwelcoming to him, and particularly as the team has changed, with saraās departure (which sparked the beginning of the end), warrickās death (which has been, in itself, another huge and devastating blow), and rileyās addition (which has proven to grissom that things will never be the same again as they were before).Ā
add in the extra heartbreak of sara returning briefly to vegas for warrickās funeral, spending four months in town, and then suddenly leaving again without even saying goodbyeāplus the fact that grissom feels as if he may have truly lost her this time around, given his unwillingness to follow her into the unknownāand youāve got a grissom who is one step away from completely falling apart.Ā
whereas he once took satisfaction and even comfort in his job, nowadays the cases he investigates horrify and disturb him. heās lost his appetite. heās having nightmares. he can barely sleep. barely think.
one of the worst parts to all of this is that he is without his usual support system: normally, when he needs comfort, encouragement, and understanding, he turns to sara, but he canāt do that now, not with her gone.
whatās more: he is almost haunted by saraās absence. she was at the heart of both his work and his home life. she was his partner, his right hand, his roommate, his confidante, his support system, his best friend, his lover, his spouse, and his whole world. every place he goes reminds him of her in some way, from their condo (which now feels impossibly empty in her absence), to the lab, to different places around the city where theyāve investigated crimes. hell, he canāt even sleep without dreaming about herāabout how heās lost her. sheās everywhere to him and yet nowhere, and he canāt seem to focus on anything aside from the terrible ache in his chest from missing her so much.
but hereās the thing: for as miserable as grissom is at this point, he is also too paralyzed by his fears to do anything to help himself or even really to acknowledge that anything actuallyĀ could be done to help.
he is the proverbial deer in headlights, frozen in the middle of the highway, unable to either run back the way he came or continue forward.
as i talk about in this post,
he is torn between his desire to chase what he wants and his feeling that if he does so, he will end up losing everything he needs.
his dilemma is not a small one.
remember: at this point, sara has not given any indication that she will ever return to las vegas, so if grissom leaves to go after her, then there is some possibility that that chapter of his life will close forever.
without knowing if heāll ever be back, let alone when, heāll be giving up his job and regular contact with the rest of his lab family. heāll be walking away from everything heās built for himself over the last 20+ years. his comfortable, familiar existence, where he has routines and regular haunts and a sense of purpose, will end. for the first time in decades, heāll not know what heās doing or where heās going, except that heāll be following sara.
āand, honestly, were he guaranteed that making such a grand sacrifice would result in them being together forever and living happily ever after, i think heād make it in a heartbeat.
but thereās the rub:
he isnāt guaranteed that all will end well.
from his perspective, there is a big chance that if he walks away from his life in las vegas in order to get the girl, sacrificing everything for love, heāll end up losing out not only on the job, the sense of control, the stability, etc. but also on the girl herself.
grissom, as always, struggles with incredibly low self-esteem and feels that he is patently unlovable. while he knows that sara has loved him in the past and professes to still love him now, he fears that she may not love him forever, and especially not if he can do nothing to help her heal from the traumas that caused her to flee vegas in the first place.
he feels like even if he does leave his job, his comfort zone, and everything he knows behind in order to chase after sara, there is a good chance that he wonāt be āenoughā for her, and eventually sheāll leave him, meaning that he will, ultimately, lose everything.
... thatās why he clings to the lab and his āpuzzlesā so hardānot because he loves them more than sara but because theyāre a sure thing, a security blanket, and heās afraid of what might happen if he gives them up to be with someone who may not want him around forever.
when he tells hodges that he isnāt ready to leave the lab, heās not just talking about being unwilling to retire. what he isnāt fully saying but is absolutely feeling is that he isnāt ready to walk away from something certain for a life of uncertainty and that he doesnāt want to have to find out who he is outside of the āsafety bubbleā of his job.
sara is to a point where, though she has been as much of a workaholic as grissom, she is now prepared to find out who she is beyond her identity as a criminalist, beyond her place in the lab hierarchy, without that old crutch of work-work-work, but not so for grissom.
not yet.
heās still too worried that once all of his professional attainments are stripped away and he can no longer define himself in terms of his career, heāll be found lacking.
heās a superb criminalist, but he may not be much of a man.
what if he follows sara into the great unknown only for her to find him inadequate?
what if he leaves everything behind only for her to leave him (again)? Ā
remember: sara has just walked out on him, and for as much as her reasons for doing so have everything to do with her mental health and nothing to do with a lack of love for him or a desire to hurt him, the bottom line is that her decision isnāt one made in a vacuum; regardless of her intentions, her leaving (and especially so abruptly) does cause him pain and stoke his fears that he doesnāt fulfill her needs. he is left wondering if she could have stayed were he a better partner to herāmore attentive, more experienced in love, less āin his own head.ā those emotional wounds and self-doubts carry with him the whole time sheās gone, and they definitely figure in to why he doesnāt immediately go chasing after her.
couple this uncertainty with the nebulous state of his and saraās relationship during this period... and you end up with grissom remaining in vegas after sara leaves:
a) because he believes she doesnāt want him to follow her;
b) because he fears that if he does follow her, he risks losing everything heās ever cared about, including her, and that is a risk heās not yet emotionally prepared to take; and
c) because he and sara are stuck in a strange āholding pattern,ā wherein they find themselves living in separate states with no idea of when they might ever be (physically) together again but still are deeply in love with each other and having at least semiregular contact, neither fully broken up nor fully together, waiting without knowing exactly for what.
while grissom may rationalize that he stays because he doesnāt want to leave the short-staffed graveyard shift high and dry and/or because he isnāt ready to retire yet, and while these rationalizations may to some extent be true, the underlying truth is that heās scared, and when heās scared, his m.o. is to hesitate.
neither option (either staying or going) feels entirely safe to him here, but at least staying is familiar to him.
grissom grapples with thisĀ āi canāt stay here without her, but iām too scared to go out there after herā paradox within himself throughout the beginning of s9, starting from septemberĀ ā08, when sara leaves at the end of episode 09x02Ā āthe happy place,ā and eventually reaching his emotional nadir in early december ā08, during the events of episode 09x05Ā āleave out all the rest,ā when he consults heather kessler, hoping that she, as an expert reader of him, can perhaps offer him some insight into what he needs to do.
she, thankfully, obliges, framing the problem for him more plainly than he has so far been able to do for himself.Ā
as stated in the first post linked above:
heather puts the idea into grissomās head that he needs to decideāthat he needs to prioritize what matters most to him, his career or the love of his life. if what he had with sara truly is over, then he should feel some sort of relief that it is so. if he doesnāt feel relief, then he needs to question why it is that he doesnāt and what it is he wants to do about the situation.
while i certainly donāt think that heather āships gsrā or cares about the sara of it all, i do think that she cares very much about grissomās well-being, and that, in talking to grissom, she comes to realize that, in this case, his well-being is contingent upon what he decides to do when it comes to sara.
based on this understanding of grissom and her own interest in making grissom happy, heather tries to help grissom realize that his current inaction is incompatible with his desires.
only after heather elucidates to him the true nature of his decision does grissom finally get the clarity he needs to make his active choiceāwhich is, ultimately, that since his desire to be with sara far outweighs his fear of her potentially rejecting him, that he is going to follow her, come what may.
to my mind, he consciously, actively lights on this decision sometime circa the events of episode 09x08Ā āyoung man with a horn.ā
as i talk about in the s9 shipperās guide,
the story grissom tells catherine [at the end of the episode] is illuminating, in terms of his relationship with sara. just like grissom constantly chose āscienceā over the girl from college, he constantly chose āworkā over sara. however, whereas he wasnāt truly in love with the girl from collegeāand therefore ultimately allowed science to take precedence over herāhe is truly in love with sara. during the course of his conversation with catherine, grissom seems to realize as much in a new and significant way. he sees the parallels between the two situations, and he decides that he doesnāt want the two stories to play out in the same way. this time, grissom wants to get the girlāthe right girlāand he is willing to risk everything else in his life (including science, his home in vegas, his friends, and his work family) in order to do so. so when he says itās time to āup the anteā? he means that maybe itās time to leave las vegas and go after sara once and for all. Ā
the moment is a significant one in grissomās trajectory, as it marks the full time that grissom full cognizes that he is willing to do whatever it takes in order to be with the love of his life, fears be damned.
but hereās the thing: even though grissom finally makes his active choice circa the events of episode 09x08Ā āyoung man with a horn,ā heād actually begun making it long before that point.
in truth, itās not so much that heather got him to make a decision as it is that she helped him to realize his decision was already (mostly) made, and he just needed to commit to it.
from the second he came home to find the condo empty at the end of episode 09x02Ā āthe happy place,ā he knew, deep down, that he could never be satisfied living there without sara again.
for as afraid as he felt to change, the truth was that he was already changing.
he already had changed.
heād lived without sara once before (when she first left vegas in s8), and part of him was already aware that he couldnāt abide doing so againānot in the long term.
back then, he had suffered through her absence and not gone after her because he hadnāt felt like he had the agency to do otherwise.Ā
but now he realizes he does have that agency.
itās in his hands to make a decision.
and he knows what he wants to decide.
though it takes him a while to reconcile himself to that fact, he does finally face up to what he has already known in his heart, which is that, for him, it was always going to be sara.Ā
she will always be his final choice.
āand thatās where catherine comes in.
as i talk about here,
catherine and grissom have known each other since the mid-1980s. in addition to being the supervisor and assistant supervisor for the graveyard shift, they are also frequent field partners. they have a great deal of working history between them and also maintain a social relationship outside of their work.
other than sara, catherine is grissom's best friend, as is evidenced by the fact that they socialize outside of work (see catherine coming over to grissom's condo to drink screwdrivers with him in episode 02x15 "burden of proof"), are familiar with each other's personal lives (see catherine's comments in episode 01x04 "pledging mr. johnson" which insinuate that grissom knew about eddie's cheating before she did), support each other in times of trouble (see catherine showing up to the hospital to wish grissom good luck before his surgery in episode 03x23 "inside the box"), have a playful rapport between them (see their back-and-forth banter in episode 03x19 "a night at the movies"), are comfortable showing vulnerability to each other (see grissom telling catherine about his father's death in episode 06x10 "still life" and catherine collapsing sobbing into grissom's arms after keppler is shot in episode 07x15 "law of gravity"), know each other incredibly well (see catherine anticipating that grissom will forget about her deadline and working around him in episode 01x20 "sounds of silence"), etc.
given how close catherine and grissom are, she can tell that a dial is turning in himāhas already turned, even!ālong before he makes that acknowledgment to himself.
prior to the events of episode 09x08Ā āyoung man with a horn,ā he may not be to the point where he is able to acknowledge what he truly wants with regards to his staying in vegas vs. leaving to follow sara dilemma, but catherine is.
she can.
sara already left vegas once before, but back then, things were different, and catherine can tell as much.
the grissom of s8 clearly wasnāt ready to leave his work and his life and his routine behind to chase after her, and particularly not when it was uncertain how she might receive him.
but the grissom of s9 is, and catherine can see the signs.
in over two decades of knowing the man, she has never once witnessed grissom acting so broken up about anything, so listless, so heartsick, so unable to concentrate. even back before his sabbatical in s7, when he was burning out on his work, the weariness didnāt reach so far down to his bones; it wasnāt so existential or deep.
but now it is.
what heās experiencing now isnāt about needing time.
it isnāt about needing a distraction.
it isnāt just about needing a vacation.
itās about needing something new, something different entirely.
catherine doesnāt really understand the ins and outs of gsr (and particularly not what appeal sara holds for grissom, beyond just the physical side of things), but she can tell that grissom is heartbroken over losing sara in a way that one can only be heartbroken over losing the love of his life.
every break-up requires a mourning period afterwardātime to grieve and process and heal and eventually recoverābut the thing is that grissom isnāt bouncing back. heās not getting over saraās departure. time isnāt healing him. if anything, heās just becoming more and more obviously despondent as the months roll on.
and catherine knows him well enough to know that though heāll inevitably be slow in coming around to it, eventually he will make the decision to pursue his love.
heās going to leave the lab.
he may not arrive at that decision until sometime in early decemberĀ ā08 himself, but catherine can sense it coming in october and november, can see it in the way he no longer seems as invested in the lab, in how he always has one eye peeled toward the horizon, which is why sheās not at all surprised when, come januaryĀ ā09, he finally reveals to her his intentions, letting her know that he is finally going to make that break and follow his heart once and for all.
he feels like itās a decision heās springing on her.
but for her, itās one thatās been a long time coming.
she saw that he was done with the lab long before his last day finally arrived, and though she may not fully understand the decision herselfāwho could walk away from beingĀ āking kong on cocaineā?āshe does respect it and support it, because ultimately she just wants him to be happy.
she told him to go after his girl a year ago (see episode 08x08Ā āyou kill meā), and now he finally is.
as for how their conversation might have continued had the scene not cut, honestly, i can only conjecture.
maybe catherine might have promised to take good care of the lab/team in grissomās absence, and maybe grissom might have told her he didnāt doubt that she would.Ā
maybe he might have started to try to express how much she means to himāthat sheās his oldest and dearest friend and that he honestly doesnāt know what he wouldāve done without her all these yearsāfumbling, as he always does, in his attempts to verbalize the full weight of his emotions. maybe she might have stopped him in his floundering with a simple,Ā āi know. iāll miss you, too.āĀ
and maybe they wouldāve hugged.
i donāt think grissom would have acknowledged to catherine where he was going or whom he was going to, but intuitive as she is, catherine still might have told him, as they were pulling away from each other,Ā āgo get her and donāt let her go this time,ā and he might have whispered,Ā āthank you,ā meaning more than he could say.
a few weeks later, catherine receives a postcard from grissom postmarked from costa rica, asking her to put his things in storage (see episode 09x11Ā āthe grave shiftā) but not saying much otherwise. she dutifully does as he requests, knowing full well he wonāt be back.
thanks for the question! please feel welcome to send another any time.
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
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