#leakycaldron

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here’s what we’re told regarding super dave’s age and graduation year throughout the show:

for the first twelve and a half seasons of csi, no one ever discusses david phillips’s age or high school graduation year.

only halfway through csi s13, in episode 13x17 “dead of the class” to be exact, do these topics ever receive any mention whatsoever.

at this point, it is established that david phillips graduated from high school in 1998, meaning that he is approximately 32 or 33 years old when episode 13x17 “dead of the class” takes place in 2013. 

after the events of episode 13x17 “dead of the class,” neither david phillips’s age nor his graduation year are then never mentioned again throughout the remainder of the series.

here are some of the sticking points with regards to what we’re told:

if david phillips graduated from high school in 1998, then that means his birth year is (most likely) either 1980/1981.

if his birth year is 1980/1981, then that means he is either 19 or 20 years old during csi s1.

david berman, who plays david phillips, was born in 1973.

during csi s1, he was 27 years old.

if david berman was born in 1973 but david phillips was born in 1980/1981, that means there is a seven or eight-year age gap between the actor and his character.

another important potential sticking point to keep in mind: in episode 06x13 “kiss-kiss, bye-bye,” david phillips refers to having attended college at some point, presumably before he began working at the clark county coroner’s office.

so.

here’s the analysis:

super dave phillips makes his first appearance on csi during the events of episode 01x05 “friends & lovers.” 

however, judging by his interactions with sara in that episode, he appears to have already been working at the lab prior to that point, as sara does not treat him as if he were a brand new hire, and particularly not as if he were newer to the lab than she. 

that so, we can infer that super dave has probably been with the clark county coroner’s office since sometime prior to the start of csi s1. 

how long exactly he’s been with them, we can’t say, but a year at least seems like a safe (and probably even conservative) guess, and especially if we consider that he is already proficient at his job at the time when we first meet him and not at all unfamiliar with its required tasks, meaning that he is no longer a “trainee” but rather a full-fledged employee.

on the show, super dave’s original job title is “coroner’s assistant.”

in real life, there is no such job within the clark county coroner’s office; the closest analog is the “forensic assistant,” who, according to the job description, “performs a variety of manual and skilled technical work in the coroner's office involving the processing of decedents for examinations and communicating with funeral homes and families with regard to the decedents’ final disposition.”

while this position is open to anyone who has a high school diploma, it does require at least “one year of full-time public contact or general office support experience,” meaning that one could not simply start the job immediately out of high school; they would have to work for a year, preferably in a related field, first.

in most states, high school students cannot hold full-time jobs of any kind and are typically not allowed to work more than eighteen hours per week during the school year.

furthermore, having generalized knowledge of medical procedures and terminology is considered preferable for the job, and since most american public high schools don’t offer courses in that area of study beyond perhaps ap bio or ap anatomy & physiology, applicants to the position who had attended some prior college or technical training would be far more likely to be hired than those who had only attended high school.

while rural coroner’s offices will often hire whomever is willing/available to do the job regardless of background, the clark county coroner’s office, which serves both a major metropolitan area and the prestigious lvpd crime lab, would have competitive hiring; undoubtedly, dave would have been up against other talented and qualified applicants, meaning he would not have likely gotten the job had he not been sufficiently educated/trained for it. almost certainly, he would need to have additional qualifications beyond the minimum requirements in order to make the cut.

we know from episode 06x13 “kiss-kiss, bye-bye” that david phillips attended at least some college, as he refers to having worked as a waiter to put himself through school at that time. whether he finished his degree or dropped out before doing so, we can’t say, but the fact that he was there for at least a while is not in question.

given these requirements and preferences for the job plus what we know about his biography, i tend to think that if dave had in fact graduated from high school in summer 1998, there is very little chance that he could have the job of “forensic assistant” in fall 2000, as it seems unlikely that he would have been able to acquire the requisite work experience necessary to land the job in the first place (let alone the preferred medical education), attend at least some college, undergo full training through the coroner’s office, and gain enough on-the-job experience to be completely competent in his position and work even somewhat independently of doc robbins all within that short window of time.

the college thing is the real kicker. 

if he had started a full-time public contact job immediately upon graduation from high school in june 1998, worked there for exactly one year until june 1999, and then immediately gotten hired at the coroner’s office and completed his training there by june 2000, that would be one thing. 

but if you add in that one semester of college (at least) which we know for a fact that he had to have attended, then the whole projected timeline falls apart. 

in that scenario, dave would have begun college in august 1998, and unless he had already been working full-time while he was going to school full-time simultaneously (which is something that many people do but which isn’t necessarily a common practice for white, middleclass students in the continental us*), even if he’d dropped out by december 1998 and immediately begun working full-time in a public-contact job thereafter, he couldn’t have gotten the requisite year of experience before starting at the coroner’s office, let alone been fully trained as a forensic assistant by november 2000. * i’m inferring that the phillips family is middleclass, based on the fact that dave’s father is an officer in the us air force (see episode 02x17 “felonius monk”).

—and that’s only assuming that he dropped out of college after just one semester; if he’d stayed any longer at all, which is to say nothing of getting his full degree (either an associate’s or a bachelor’s), then the entire scenario becomes even more impossible.

that super dave is later promoted to the position of “assistant medical examiner” also suggests that he probably has further education, training, and licensure beyond simply a high school diploma (and most likely has a four-year bachelor’s degree of some kind, which would mean that there’s no way he could be twenty years old during the course of s1).

again, the position of “assistant medical examiner” is one that doesn’t actually seem to exist within the real-life clark county coroner’s office, but the closest analog, which is the “coroner investigator” position, requires training as a pathologist (as the job entails performing autopsies), which typically means that the applicant must have a four-year bachelor's degree in a medically-related field such as biology or chemistry, with additional medical school education and medical residency completion preferable.

with all of this information in mind, it doesn’t seem very likely to me that super dave could hold the jobs that he does throughout the course of the show if he had graduated high school in 1998, even if he were some kind of wunderkind.

—and especially not when we consider that super dave’s real-life portrayer david berman graduated high school in 1991.

while of course csi does not always make its characters the exact same age as the actors who play them—for example, jorja fox is three years older in real life than sara sidle is in canon—i have a hard time believing that the original writers of csi, who were much more conscious of verisimilitude and logistics than were their eventual replacements in the later seasons, would have arbitrarily decided to create a seven or eight-year age gap between davids phillips and berman for literally no goddamned narrative reason.

i mean, after all, prior to s13, super dave’s age is never even discussed. it’s certainly not a plot point or even something which really seems to figure in with his general characterization. he’s portrayed as being somewhat naïve about dating and women, yes, but his naïveté has nothing really to do with his age; rather, it’s a product of his relative inexperience around the ladies. while other characters on the show (such as former child prodigies grissom, sara, and greg) are known to have graduated from high school and started their professions “young,” with them, that detail at least feels relevant to how they relate to their worlds and the people around them; with dave, it doesn’t even seem to be a factor. the fact that it doesn’t raises the question: “if tptb really had intended for dave to be ‘just a kid’ from the very beginning of the show, to what end did they intend it? cui bono? why would they make that kind of character decision and then never even touch on the issue, even obliquely or by way of subtext, within the show’s narrative?”

to me, it’s much more likely that the production team originally conceived of super dave as being the same age or at least close in age to david berman, and particularly given that if he were so, then he would have had time to acquire the experience and training necessary for his job.

if super dave had like david berman graduated in 1991, then he would have been born in 1973/1974, and therefore would have been about 26 or 27 years-old in 2000. 

at that age, he would have already graduated from high school and had plenty of time to acquire at least one year of full-time work experience, if not more. he also would have been able to attend some college or even fully graduate (circa 1993 if he earned an associate’s degree or 1995 if he earned a bachelor’s).

he may have even had time to attend and complete graduate or medical school thereafter (though not to complete a full medical residency). 

if such were his trajectory, then i imagine that his path to eventual promotion involves on-the-job training and american board of medicolegal death investigators (abmdi) certification over the course of the next few years at the lab before before he qualifies to become a coroner investigator.

all in all, everything would make much more sense with him being 27 years-old in s1 as opposed to 20. 

and, to me, that’s occam’s razor: 

dave being 20 years-old in s1 doesn’t make sense from a logistical perspective, but dave being 27 years-old in s1 does. 

since his age isn’t mentioned until s13, it is likely that prior to that point, the csi production team had no intention to make him so impossibly young.

the question then becomes, “why is his graduation year given as 1998 in s13? how come the writers made that change (given how little sense it makes from a timeline perspective)?”

here’s where i get salty:

frankly, the later post-grissom seasons of csi are notorious for fucking up their internal dating system and character details—such as, for example, when tptb accidentally moved the date of sara’s birthday three times in two years or unintentionally changed finn’s death date between the end of s15 and the events of the series finale.

they were not the same writers who had worked on the show from the beginning, and they seem either not to have been familiar with the show bible or at least not cared very much about its contents.

mistakes like making a certain character too young to function in his chosen profession were a frequent occurrence with them.

as for the s13 writers’ exact motivations for placing dave in the sagebrush high class of ‘98, i think they boil down to the issue of “narrative convenience.”

as @bartramcat explains in this post, in s10 to s15 of csi, the writing on csi was “only for the episode,” meaning that the writers really didn’t pay heed to serialization or how the decisions they made would affect the show’s overall continuity.

in the case of episode 13x17 “dead of the class” in particular, i’m about 99.9% sure that the writers came up with the idea to tell the story of super dave finding a dead body at his high school reunion, fell in love with the concept, and then made their vision a reality, never mind that they had to “crunch some data” to make everything fit.

episode 13x17 “dead of the class” takes place in 2013, and since in the us public high school reunions usually only take place at five year intervals, that means that the writers had to choose a graduating year for super dave that worked according to those mathematics—i.e., a year that had taken place five or ten or fifteen or twenty years prior to 2013. 

obviously, any potential graduating year after the year 2000 was out, as dave had already begun working the the coroner’s office by that time. any potential graduating year before about 1986 was also out, just given david berman’s real-life age and physical appearance. 

(in 2013, berman could believably play a character who was anywhere between his early thirties and early forties but not much younger or older, at least without the aid of cgi, prosthetics, wigs, and makeup.)

the potential graduation years that would fall within that window of time were 1988, 1993, and 1998.

why the writers chose to go with 1998 instead of 1993 or even 1988 (which to me, would have been much more plausible options), i don’t know. 

maybe they felt like a fifteen-year reunion was the “sweet spot” between still being close enough to high school to care about all of the old social politics and far enough away to have grown up and fallen out of contact with most of one’s old classmates.

maybe they felt that david berman looked more 33 than 38 (even though in real life, he was actually 40 at the time).

maybe the decision had more to do with the actors they’d cast to be dave’s classmates rather than dave himself (as some of them looked decidedly more “early thirties” than “late thirties” in age).

maybe they just really wanted to include a 90s soundtrack featuring the spice girls and the offspring.

maybe they just didn’t give a damn.

i honestly can’t say.

all i know is that within the world of the show, 1998 makes very little sense as dave’s graduation year, and since it’s such a one-off, anomalous detail (really only mentioned or adhered to for just one episode), i personally am pulling a “nick fury”:

it’s all about the eye-test for me: super dave looks like he’s close in age to the nicks, warricks, saras, and gregs of the world, and throughout the show, he’s at about the same place in his career as they are (albeit with a kind of different job). that so, i believe what i see over what the writers of the later seasons tell me.

he’s got to be in his late twenties by the time s1 is taking place. he’s got to have a four-year college degree at least, if not some additional medical training.

his high school graduation year can’t be 1998 if he’s already firmly established in his job with the coroner’s office in 2000.

the timeline just doesn’t work out, and the story itself (i.e., a kid who’s barely more than a teenager and straight out of high school somehow lands a competitive, full-time job at the top crime lab in the country, working under one of the more perfectionistic and demanding medical examiners in the world, having no additional training or even work experience to his name) strains credulity.

i’m going with what i think the earlier csi writers intended on this one, which is that super dave is the age one would expect him to be, given the specifications of his job and established details of his biography otherwise.

/end salt

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1. episode 01x07 “blood drops”

featured main characters: grissom, catherine, warrick, nick, sara, brass 

in its premiere season, csi took a little while to find its footing, and especially to hammer out the characterizations of the members of the original team graveyard. to me, this episode is the one where the series truly starts to come into its own. 

featuring a memorable quadruple murder case, hauntingly dark aesthetics, and a real focus on the forensics, plus some good early characterization all around, it is essentially the whole show in microcosm.

not only will it give your friend a good introduction to all of the main characters (with the exception of greg, who isn’t featured), but it will also help him understand what makes csi different from your average cop show.

as a bonus, it is currently rated #1 on imdb’s list of the top 25 episodes of csi of all time, with a score of 8.7/10 stars. 

unique features/talking points:

-multiple homicide case -guest stars a very young dakota fanning -introduces some key characterization for the main cast (e.g. grissom’s reverence for the job and rivalry with ecklie, catherine’s struggle to balance work and motherhood, warrick being the team rock, nick’s soft spot for kids, sara being triggered by dv cases, etc.) -includes a shocking twist ending  

2. episode 04x08 “after the show”

featured main characters: grissom, catherine (focus character), nick, sara, greg, brass

an excellent example of one of csi’s “ripped from the headlines” stories, this episode’s commentary on vegas showbiz culture, which chews up and spits out beautiful women, is both poignant and gut-wrenching.

the verisimilitude is helped by the fact that show producer and consultant liz devine, herself a former csi with the los angeles county sheriff’s department, was actually the lead investigator in the case this one is modeled on and so was able to provide firsthand details to the production team and actors.

this episode will show your friend some of the most interesting team dynamics of the grissom era, as the csis (with the exception of warrick, who isn’t present for the action) start out divided over the case but then ultimately come together to get the solve. while catherine is at the heart of the action—and marg helgenberger delivers one hell of a performance—in the end, everyone gets a chance to shine.

unique features/talking points:

-sexual assault/homicide case -the suspect, howard delhomme, and his fixation on catherine are enormously creepy -good example of a csi “mojave desert case” (with beautiful scenery and cinematography) -fascinating team dynamics/tension         

3. episode 05x01 “viva las vegas”

featured main characters: grissom, catherine, warrick, nick, sara, greg, brass

this episode highlights the show’s vegas setting, featuring four different cases, each one of which could only really take place in sin city, usa. 

in the first case, grissom, greg, and brass investigate a shooting at a themed night club that before all is said and done ends up involving drug traffickers, hitmen, and a compromised crime scene.

in the second, catherine is called out for an apparent “trick roll gone wrong” at a casino hotel and arrives on the scene to find a truly horrifying amount of blood, one brutally murdered prostitute, and one very alive man who claims to have no idea what happened (having awoken from a stupor to find the prostitute, whom he swears he has never met before, dead on the bed beside him).

in the third, warrick looks into a seeming suicide at a seedy dive motel, tracing the decedent’s final hours, which involved him winning big at a casino only to then lose everything in a harrowing reversal of fortune.

in the fourth, nick and sara process the site of an “alien burial” near area 51 before eventually ending up on the strip, immersed in the surprisingly competitive world of the 24-hour drive-through chapel wedding business.

a good mix of comedy and tragedy, the episode deftly balances multiple plots and gives all of the characters plenty to do. it also progresses the storyline of greg transitioning from lab rat to field mouse.

unique features/talking points:

-four different cases in four different vegas locations -team broken up and paired off in interesting configurations -highlights the camp and corruption of sin city -french stewart plays a guy who runs an alien-themed drive up wedding chapel and somehow manages to bring pathos to the role?????

4. episode 06x05 “gum drops”

featured main characters: catherine (briefly), warrick, nick (focus character), sara, greg

episode 06x05 “gum drops” is one of the finest episodes of csi period and a superb example of a character-driven story.

the storyline sees warrick, nick, sara, and greg report to the tiny town of pioche, nevada, about 180 miles north of las vegas. there, they investigate the apparent in-home murders of the mcbride family of four, but with a catch: though there are blood pools in the house suggestive of homicide, there are no bodies to confirm if anyone has actually been killed. interestingly, none of the blood pools in the house match the family’s youngest member, ten-year old daughter cassie. 

when nick becomes convinced that cassie might still be alive, sara worries that he is deluding himself, allowing his hope to impair his professional judgment.      

by beginning the episode with ghostly narration from cassie herself, whom at the start of the episode is presumed to be dead, the writers invite viewers to question exactly what sort of story is being told and to ask from whose perspective we’re hearing her voice. 

is nick imagining things or is there actually still a life out there to be saved? if so, can the csis reach her to rescue her from her kidnappers in time?

while you may need to fill your friend in on the events of episodes 05x24 and 05x25 “grave danger” pts. i and ii in order for him to truly appreciate nick’s dedication to rescuing cassie, even sans the background knowledge, this episode makes for a wonderfully compelling hour of television and showcases csi’s willingness to experiment with narrative structure and genre conventions.

unique features/talking points:

-an excellent performance from george eads that sees nick at his very nickiest -since grissom doesn’t appear at all in the episode and catherine only does so briefly, the four younger csis carry the main action here -a+ narrative construct that leaves you guessing until the end -heart-wrenching story told with patience and attention to detail -good example of an “out of the lab” episode

5. episode 09x16 “turn, turn, turn”

featured main characters: catherine, nick (focus character), greg, langston, brass

my choice for the catherine/langston days of csi, this episode features one very young taylor swift as haley jones, a vulnerable young girl at the heart of a case that is literally years in the making. 

another solid, nick-centric character piece, to me, this episode’s melancholy mood and stylized aesthetics are highly characteristic of this particular era of the series.

though the tie-ins to bygone characters and previous plot points won’t necessarily resonate with your friend (him being new to the show), i think that the story itself, with all of its flashbacks, time-lapses, and narrative twists, will.  

unique features/talking points:

-notable guest star in taylor swift -cool nonlinear narrative structure -another great performance from george eads -mentions warrick’s death and references grissom -some neat cgi effects to simulate the passage of time

6. episode 12x16 “csi unplugged”

featured main characters: russell, finn, nick, sara, greg, morgan, brass, hodges, henry  

admittedly, i’m not the biggest fan of the later seasons, so picking an episode from the russell/finn era was hard for me, but this one at least has an interesting premise and features some inventive forensics (even if the story itself is somewhat weak). 

with the power out across las vegas, the csis are on the search to recover a missing child. lacking their usual technological resources, they must process the case the old school way, using basic chemistry and some pioneering tricks from the earliest days of criminalistics.

since russell and finn take point on the investigation, this episode offers a good primer on their dynamic, showing how the team runs under their leadership (and especially when up against a ticking clock).

unique features/talking points:

-fun, old-timey science -75% of the episode takes place in the dark -the whole team contributes to solving the case -shows key characterization for the newer cast members, as well as their relationships with one another (i.e., russell being the believer and finn being the skeptic and the two of them balancing each other out, morgan being close with greg and hodges, etc.)

if none of these episodes appeal to you or your friend (or if your friend develops an interest in watching a few more episodes beyond what you originally agreed to), some alternate choices would include*:

01x09 “unfriendly skies”

02x16 “primum non nocere”

03x06 “the execution of catherine willows”

04x07 “invisible evidence”

05x19 “4 x 4″

06x21 “rashomama”

07x05 “double-cross”

08x08 “you kill me”

* yes, i realize i’m cheating here.

anyway, whichever episodes you end up watching, i hope you and your friend enjoy the mini-marathon!