#jencsi

-12- skills and abilities

No disrespect to any of the other characters intended, but I headcanon Sara being the smartest of the CSIs, from an academic/book smart perspective. For me, it would be between her and Grissom, and, since he will always have the age/experience advantage in matters of science, I like giving her that little edge in this respect.

But also, our girl really is brilliant. She must have skipped a grade in school at some point. She graduates and is her high school valedictorian at the age of 16. She goes off to Harvard on a full scholarship, still at the age of 16 (just weeks before her 17th birthday). She studies physics at Harvard and graduates magna cum laude. She then moves back to the Bay area and obtains her master’s (still in physics) from UC Berkeley.

Of course, @addictedtostorytelling has done the research on this (so thankful always!), and Berkeley doesn’t offer a standalone master’s degree in physics; it only offers that master’s as part of a doctoral program. So, if we assume those real life conditions existed in the CSI universe, she must have been working on her doctorate, and I headcanon that eventually she finds she likes her work at the San Francisco coroner’s officer so much that she leaves her doctoral program following the completion of her master’s degree in physics and goes to work for the San Francisco crime lab.

And she does all this on top of the most unimaginably traumatic childhood. She also must be working while she does all this, because scholarship money is only going so far. Truly she must have insane drive, insane levels of dedication.

And we know she does. Want someone to stay up for three nights straight? Ask Sara! Want someone to jump into a dumpster? Ask Sara. Want someone to climb under a house or a car? Ask Sara! Want someone to put her own life on pause and work tirelessly to make sure you’re not convicted for a crime you didn’t commit? Ask Sara!

-13- ideals or philosophies

I also headcanon Sara as being the most progressive (politically-speaking) of all the CSIs (although we know Grissom is an extremely open-minded individual and occasionally Sara is not). This feels consistent (yes, I did have a typo here!) with her Bay area upbringing and is another place where, in my mind, character and actor kind of converge.

JF has said that one of the first things she knew about Sara was that she came from San Francisco, so I wonder how much of that progressivism was already planned for the character and how much of that was brought in from JF’s own ideals. For example, in season 1, Sara says she wants a steak and a shot, but by mid-season 2 we learn that Sara has stopped eating meat, ever since she and Grissom spent their night watching a dead pig being consumed by insects. (Of course, it’s five episodes after that night with the pig that Sara wants her steak, and she also eats sea bass that episode. But it was the first season. They were still figuring things out.)

Anway, Sara is a vegetarian. She cares deeply about animals. Back in 2004, she is one of the members of the lab who has the sense of how to gender correctly a transgender victim. She is very aware of the way that popular conceptions of beauty (in the form of high heels) may quite literally hurt women. She doesn’t think people should follow traditions (like marriage) without reason. She drives a Prius (hybrid) car all the way back in 2007. She doesn’t hesitate to investigate a police officer’s mistreatment of a deceased homeless man. She fantasizes about going off on the Sea Shepherd to walk in the footsteps of Darwin, and I always presume her to be doing some sort of ecological research when she’s in Costa Rica. (The Sea Shepherd is a marine conservation activism organization that employs direct action tactics to achieve its goals, and I don’t know if that’s what CSI intended when Sara makes that reference back in 2008, but it does have a lot in common with what Grissom is doing in 2015.) She always keeps her own name, despite its negative associations (i.e., that it was bestowed upon her by her violent father).

One thing that is a bit at odds with Sara’s general activism is her attitude towards criminal defence lawyers, but, you know, people have multitudes and often contain contradictory attitudes within themselves. In this case, I think Sara’s attitude to criminal defence lawyers is (1) extremely wrong-headed (criminal defence lawyers protect constitutional rights, like those to a fair trial, freedom from unreasonable search and seizure, etc.!) but also (2) consistent with her background and how she came to choose a career in forensics.

Of course, I like to think that, since leaving the lab ten years ago, and the actions of Anson Wix notwithstanding, she has had the opportunity to rethink this attitude a bit (as well as that toward law enforcement). I also think that whatever she and Grissom are working on these days (which, in my mind, includes Sara finally having gotten her PhD, though not in physics) includes marine conservation, so that too is consistent with a progressive agenda.

-14- goals and intentions

 I think this answer is going to be part ideals or philosophies and part goals and intentions.

Sara is a roots for the underdog, tries to speak for those who can’t speak for themselves kind of girl. I think that she gets into forensics because she wants to speak for the victims. I know she references Grissom having said, “We're the victim's last voice,” but I think—be it explicit or implicit—that that has to have been her motivator. After the suffering she saw in her own home (“The fights, the yelling, the trips to the hospital”)—along with what she must have seen or at least heard about during her time in the foster care system—this may, given her personality, have been almost inevitable.

(In “Eleven Angry Jurors” (04x11), Nick says, “I'm always getting criticized for empathizing with the victims and their families,” but I think Nick tends to empathize more with the families and the living whereas Sara empathizes more with the victims and those who can no longer speak for themselves, although of course there is overlap in that.)

While camping over the summer, I spent a couple of days contemplating whether I saw Sara as essentially an optimist or essentially a pessimist. And, you know, as with everything else, it’s complicated; we contain multitudes—she contains multitudes.

I don’t think that, whenever she sees supposedly happy homes and supposedly happy families, she generally envies them (although, you know what . . . I think maybe every once in a while, in very special circumstances, she does); instead, she tends to imagine the lies and secrets and violence lurking below the surface. She is familiar with the worst of what humanity has to offer.

Yet she sees purpose in working so tirelessly at an exhausting, often horrifying, pretty thankless job. She sees value in speaking for the victims. I think that must contain an inherent optimism. Moreover, she never gives up on Grissom—she waits years for him, never gets over him even after they divorce—and that too must contain an inherent optimism.

I don’t think she sees the moral arc of the universe as bending naturally towards justice. But she will do whatever she can to help others all the same; she will do whatever she can to help bend that arc. And that attitude contains something inherently both pessimistic and optimistic. There has to be something optimistic about carrying on in those circumstances.

I also don’t think that when she was younger she ever really imagined much of a happy life or a happy ending for herself. She didn’t care a ton about nice things. She planned to work hard, and maybe, if she was lucky, occasionally she would get to experience some pleasant things along the way.

I don’t think she ever planned to grow up and get married and have kids. After everything she’d been through and everything she’d seen, she was a firm no on kids. She entered relationships—for the sex, for the companionship—but this was never real companionship with men with whom she’d be willing to open up; rather, it was very token companionship with men with whom she’d never be prepared to open up. Basically she just wanted a warm body to prove someone could want her (even if she didn’t realize it at the time).

I do think, though, that she had this incredibly latent, incredibly repressed desire to be seen and known and trusted and loved and cherished. But this desire was only activated—only began to become conscious—when she finally met the one man (perhaps the only man) whom she could finally see and know and trust and love and cherish. She must realize, at least on a subconscious level, how rare a connection that would be for the two of them, and, from what we see in canon (twice leaving her job and moving states, if not more, for him, for example), that becomes one of the most significant motivators (if not the most significant motivator) of her life. JF once said that Sara, being a very rational individual, would choose love over a job. One of those things can be relatively easily replaced; one of those things cannot. For people like Sara and Grissom, that kind of connection is once in a lifetime.

(This is a bit more rambling and less cohesive than I would like, but I really am just trying to get some thoughts out of my head this year without being all perfectionist about it. 😭😭😭)