#speculation csi

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to my mind, probably the biggest reason why we never saw a "grissom and sara have a kid" storyline in canon is that, particularly in the earlier seasons of the show, the showrunners tried not to focus too much on the characters' home lives.

though they would show the occasional "off the clock" scene here or there or every once in a while toss in some kind of love interest- or family-centric story beat, anthony zuiker and co. wanted the majority of the show's focus to be on the job—on the cases the csis investigated, the goings-on at the lab and in the field, the team's interactions with each other as colleagues, the team's interactions with other law enforcement professionals and people they met in connection to their cases, in the politics of the department, etc.

they were much stricter about this policy even than other procedurals of the time.

that's why we saw so little of grissom and sara's romantic relationship actually play out on screen—because tptb never intended to offer us anything more than just a small window into their personal lives outside of their careers.

and while of course grissom and sara having a kid (whether through sara getting pregnant or them deciding to foster and/or adopt) would definitely affect their working lives and could allow for some interesting storylines centered around the lab and in the field—for example, how might sara deal with the physical and emotional requirements of her incredibly demanding job while pregnant?, how might grissom and sara have to change their workaholic habits if they were to try to become foster or adoptive parents?, how might having a kid in the mix affect both grissom and sara's willingness to face the dangers inherent in their profession?, would becoming parents change the way they responded to certain cases?, etc.—that kind of storyline, just by its nature, would also probably require the show to spend more time at home with grissom and sara than the showrunners and writers ever really intended to.

narratively speaking, catherine having a school-aged kid to start out the show is one thing, while grissom and sara having a newborn or a brand new foster kid and becoming first-time parents would be something else entirely.

in catherine's case, her being a mom to an older kid from the get-go is a much more lowkey deal, not only because a kid at that age can mostly exist in an off-screen capacity except for in episodes where her presence is plot-relevant but also because it's an already-established fact.

catherine is a mother—and an experienced mother, at that—from the very first time we meet her; it's part of both her personal and professional identities from day #1. the baseline is there. there are no questions about it. no big blanks to fill in. she's already made the life-changing decisions. she's already entrenched in that role.

the same would not be true if grissom and sara were to have a kid.

because they were "first timers" (and especially because they had seemingly never aspired to parenthood previously), the show would have to answer questions with them—depict grissom and sara making the huge, life-altering decisions; reckoning with big emotions; figuring stuff out; working through their fears and hang-ups; adjusting to a monumental change in their lives; drawing together in new ways; changing and developing as characters and as a couple; establishing new patterns; etc.

the groundwork would need to be laid where the audience could see it being laid in real time, you know?

and laying that groundwork would require showing lots of private conversations between grissom and sara, trips to the ob's office or talks with the social worker, painting the nursery or putting up a swing set, making childcare arrangements, changing their lifestyle, etc.

my sense is that tptb never really wanted to go there.

that much focus on grissom and sara's home life would have been too distracting—too much of a serialized personal storyline that required attention in every episode, regardless of the "case of the day"—for their tastes.

now.

in theory, the "keep the focus on the job, not the home" rule is one tptb could have considered breaking, had they really wanted to.

after all, it was just a production choice, not actually any kind of hard and fast rule, so if they'd decided they wanted to go the "grissom and sara have a kid" route, they could have done so.

there's always the old flannery o'connor maxim: "it's always wrong of course to say that you can't do this or you can't do that in fiction. you can do anything you can get away with, but nobody has ever gotten away with much."

however, another reason why i think they never chose to go the geek!baby route, beyond the "it goes against our sense of what our show is actually about" thing, is that, frankly, within the universe of the show itself, the timing for grissom and sara was never right.

grissom and sara don't even get together as a committed couple until s5/s6, so, barring a major deviation from what is now canon, they likely could not have had a child at any point prior to 2005/2006, just to start out with.

then their relationship remains a secret until the end of s7/beginning of s8, meaning that between 2006-2007, they're definitely not looking to have a kid and probably would be pretty averse to having one even were they to experience an unplanned pregnancy, just given the potential fallout where their jobs are concerned.

they would have to "come out" as a couple, and one or both of them might end up getting fired over it.

fast forward, and between s8 and s9, sara experiences a mental health crisis that eventually culminates with her moving away from vegas for the better part of two years from 2008 to 2009 while grissom remains behind—and by the time she's stable and moves back to vegas circa 2009/2010, grissom is then living abroad, and they're only seeing each other once a month via transatlantic commute.

back in the day, when sara first turned up in s10, i know there was some internet scuttlebutt that maybe at some point it would be revealed that in-between the events of episode 09x10 "one to go" (when last we'd seen them) and episode 10x01 "family affair" (when sara returns to vegas to "temp"), grissom and sara had had a "secret honeymoon baby."

however, such a revelation was never made—timeline-wise, it would have been a tight fit anyhow, as, within the universe of the show, episode 09x10 "one to go" takes place in january '09 and episode 10x01 "family affair" takes place in september '09—and neither did grissom and sara ever have a kid at any subsequent point.

with sara living in the states and grissom not, the likelihood that they would ever decide to expand their family steadily diminished as s10, s11, and s12 rolled on, both because they were getting older and because their marriage eventually ended up on the rocks.

cue the whole divorce debacle of s13, a few solid years of misery and loneliness in the interim, and by the time grissom and sara get back together/remarried in 2015, sara is forty-four years old and probably peri- or even full-on menopausal, and she and grissom are living a nomadic seafaring lifestyle, so the likelihood of them either having a biological child or fostering/adopting is incredibly low.

again, there was some speculation among fans—based on previous comments from showrunner anthony zuiker regarding his ideas for grissom and sara's post-"immortality" life at sea—that when the reboot rolled around, we would eventually get a "in the six years since we last saw them, grissom and sara have had a kid" reveal.

no dice, though.

s1 of csi: vegas ran its course with no secret boat babies anywhere.

all of the above being the case, there just weren't even that many points during the show's run when it would have made logistical sense for grissom and sara to have children together.

they were always either in a state of having to keep their relationship a secret for the sake of their careers or else of living apart from each other, and by the time they finally got all their shit together and were living in the same place on a full-time basis, sara was nearing the end of her prime childbearing years and they were living the kind of lifestyle where fostering/adoption would be next to impossible.

narratively-speaking, parenthood just was never in the cards for them.

of course, it's worth stating, the writers could have maybe swung a geek!baby storyline in the later seasons had they wanted to if they had just made the choice to move grissom back to vegas along with sara between s10 and s15. he wouldn't even have had to appear on-screen. sara would have just needed to reference him occasionally in dialogue and be shown to take phone calls from him at times, a "i'm meeting grissom for our first ultrasound appointment" here, a "he's been at home painting the nursery all morning. he put little ladybugs up the walls" there. they could have done a whole pregnancy storyline that way, and it would have given sara something to do during seasons when she is otherwise criminally underutilized. then maybe if they were lucky, they could have gotten billy to come back for a guest spot when it came time for the baby to be born. but, alas, such a storyline would have required them to imply depth, which is something they had no idea how to do.

—which brings us to the last big reason why i think the showrunners never had grissom and sara have children:

because, ultimately, they just never felt it was right for the characters.

as stated above, both grissom and sara have plenty of reasons, both individually and as a couple, based on their backgrounds and predilections and development, why they might never choose to pursue parenthood.

while there are certain very particular scenarios were i can imagine they might set those reasons aside, overcome their hang-ups and fears, and decide to "go for it" re: having kids, i also think it would take a lot of narrative work to get them there—that thread would be something the writers would have had to really develop, requiring more than a few "acts of god" and major plot interventions to make the idea seem feasible.

they could have done it if they really wanted to.

but in the end, i think they didn't feel any compelling need.

grissom and sara have been an unconventional couple from the get-go, and their development has been circuitous and unstraightforward. there have been many setbacks for them along the way and strange turns. they've definitely not done everything "by the book."

for them to have a somewhat "untraditional" happy ending—at least by primetime, network early 00s flagship couple tv standards—makes a good amount of sense.

they're not the "white picket fence, 2.5 kids, and a dog" norman rockwell family, and i think tptb are very okay with that outcome.

they like the image of this middle-aged couple that found immense fulfillment in each other and in their shared work (whether as csis or conservationists) and never felt the need to look outside of those things in order to be happy.

that's not to say they might not have written things differently had some of the production realities of the show been different along the way—like, say jorja fox had never left the show during s8 and grissom and sara had been able to get married in vegas as planned while both still working at the lab or that billy had come back to the show with jorja between s10 and s15; maybe in those cases, they might have eventually decided to go for the geek!baby storyline after all—however, all things as they were, i think they were generally pretty comfortable with how things ended up in regards to grissom and sara remaining childless.

they had explored the notion of "csis as parents" as much as they cared to with catherine, warrick, and russell.

they didn't want to go there with grissom and sara.

and who knows? maybe there were other outside factors that influenced their decision to that end, like actor preferences or the difficulty of including infant actors in a complicated production such as theirs, etc.

suffice it to say, i think the showrunners' decision to keep grissom and sara childless was probably a multifaceted one.

the good news is, regardless of how things turned out in canon, we as fans can always play around with the geek!baby concept as much as we want to and in as many different permutations as we like.

i certainly have a lot of fun in my accidentsverse, imagining grissom and sara facing both the challenges and rewards of parenthood, and i know a lot of other fan authors who have their own takes on that idea, as well.

anyway.

rambling now.

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so.

in the event that betty isn't in fact either incapacitated or deceased by the time the divorce takes place, then there are many potential ways she might react, depending on how one weights the variables in the equation.

if one believes that after the events of episode 11x13 "the two mrs. grissoms," betty actually makes good on her promise to try harder with sara and to respect her and grissom's marriage, then maybe there's a chance that by 2013, their relationship has significantly improved, to the point where she actually loves sara like a daughter and is in favor of grissom and sara being married.

she might even still be holding her breath for grandchildren.

in that case, it's possible that she might be very upset about the news of the divorce and that even try to prevent it from happening, trying to talk grissom (and possibly sara) out of what they’re doing.

however, if one believes that even after the events of episode 11x13 "the two mrs. grissoms," though betty perhaps applies more effort to being civil with sara, she nevertheless never develops any genuine affection for the girl (and never actually becomes any more convinced that the way grissom and sara are conducting their marriage, living across the world from each other, is valid), then maybe come 2013 her reaction might be more along the lines of "i always knew this was going to happen! i told them this ‘living on separate continents as a married couple’ nonsense would never work in the long run, and i was right."

with perhaps even a soupçon of “i always knew that sara wasn't good enough for my gilbert anyhow” thrown in for good measure.

of course, depending on when in the process she learns about the divorce, she also might be more or less understanding (or even potentially confused).

if as far as she knows, everything has been going fine between grissom and sara and then all of a sudden—out of nowhere, from her pov—grissom is calling her to say he and sara are getting (or even have gotten) divorced, her primary reaction might just be shock. but conversely, if she has been aware of some of the warning signs (e.g., knowing that they haven’t actually spoken in a while, picking up on that current of anxiety and doubt that carries through the both of them in early s13), then maybe she might be less surprised.

if, in typical grissom fashion, he tells betty little about the particulars of the divorce—what has led up to it, why it is happening, what his true feelings about the whole situation (and sara) really are—then betty might be left to draw her own conclusions, and, if so, who knows whether or not she would get anywhere close to being right in them? 

for example, she might assume there’d been an affair or that maybe grissom and sara had fought about whether or not to have children or something along those lines. maybe she’d even believe that sara had been the one to initiate the split due to the “fickleness of youth” or whatever. 

however, if grissom actually confides in her and tells her that it he’s the initiator and why and maybe even that he is still very much in love with sara (but firmly believes that he has an obligation to “set her free”), then betty might have a more accurate assessment of the whole situation, to the point where she might even be able to see grissom’s missteps for what they are. 

“if you still love her, why not just go to her, gilbert? why are you halfway across the world on a computer call with your mother when you could be making amends to your wife? get on a plane!” 

honestly, though, even if grissom does provide betty with his take on the situation, her perspective on the divorce still might be skewed, given that grissom’s own perspective is itself inaccurate. if he tells her that it seems to him that sara has grown tired of having him in her life and that he needs to do the right thing for her by severing ties and allowing her to go off without him, betty might (again, depending on her view of sara) accept that reading as truth, never knowing that in actuality sara wants nothing more than for her and grissom to be reconciled and that she would gladly give up everything she has in vegas if only grissom would provide her with any indication that he wanted her around him again.

maybe at some point, depending on what her relationship with sara was like, betty might try turning to sara for answers. if she were to, what sara said to her and in what tone would probably very much depend on the attitude of her approach itself.

if she stormed in in full mama-bear “why are you breaking my son’s heart, you little jezebel?” mode, that might get sara’s hackles up, but if it were more of a fact-finding, “why is this happening? sara, please talk to me! tell me what’s going on!” kind of mission, then maybe sara would just respond in that same heartbroken sort of “i don’t know. you’d have to ask him” way that we see when she reveals the truth about the divorce to nick, greg, and russell in episode 13x15 “forget me not.”

whether or not betty might try to intervene in the situation or encourage grissom and sara to pursue reconciliation would of course depend on many of the factors described above. on the one hand, someone as take-charge as she is might be inclined to try to insert herself in the situation, particularly if she actually did feel that grissom and sara were making a mistake. on the other, given her old-fashioned views, she might also consider that it was not her place to get in the middle of their personal business, particularly as they are both adults; she also might not feel compelled to try to save the marriage if she still disliked sara and/or felt that the marriage weren’t a good one.

maybe her main concern would just be to support her son, however she could—as much as he would let her.

a lot might also depend on her views on divorce itself.

as a staunch catholic, she might not approve of divorce, so maybe even if she didn’t like sara or think well of the marriage, she still might be against the divorce, just based on the principle of the thing. 

depending on whether or not she felt anyone was to blame, she might get defensive of whomever she felt were the “wronged party.” nine times out of ten, it’d probably be grissom whom she’d champion just because he’s her son, but she’s also no-nonsense enough that if she got the impression that he’d fucked up, she might get mad at him instead and lay into him for how he was treating sara.

whether or not she keeps in contact with sara post-divorce undoubtedly depends on what their post-episode 11x13 “the two mrs. grissoms” relationship is actually like and her understanding of the divorce and its dynamics and whether or not she finds that sara is to blame. maybe, as seems to have been the case with julia holden following her and grissom’s failed relationship of yore, she continues to maintain ties with sara and treat her like family. but she could also cut off contact.

a lot would probably depend on sara’s reaction—whether or not she was still comfortable around betty (if she had ever been at all).

if they did end up stopping contact after 2013, either by betty’s choice, sara’s, or both, either in acrimony, awkwardness, or just the reality of the situation, how might they react if for some reason they ran into each other again later on?

in this post, i imagine a hypothetical scenario where maybe if grissom and sara happened to be still somewhat “legally entwined” even after the divorce, serving as each other’s de facto “in case of emergency” contacts, sara might end up being called if betty were ever sent to the hospital and grissom couldn’t be located, just because her name was still on the list.

what would they say? how would they regard each other?  

to what extent betty eventually accepts the divorce after whatever her initial reaction may be is also subject to debate. if she were at first opposed to it, does she eventually make peace with the idea, or does she still harp to grissom about the colossal mistake that he made, even two years later? if she were at first in favor of it, does she eventually change her tune once she recognizes how miserable grissom is in sara’s absence?

if he never confessed it to her himself, would she be able to tell that grissom was still in love with sara, even after all was said and done? or would it be more of a mystery to her why he suddenly shipped off to sea, seeming to come around less and less?

would she have hopes that someday he would remarry?

maybe give things another go with julia?

what would her primary emotion about the whole situation be? compassion? sorrow? regret? anger? confusion? defensiveness? frustration?

who knows how she reacts when, in 2015, grissom and sara first reunite and then remarry (if she is still around by then)—if she is mortified or happy, disparaging or supportive?

frankly, there are no right or wrong answers to these questions. since the writers left the page blank, we can write pretty much any story that we want here.

there’s the potential for a story where betty, like the audience, is vehemently opposed to the divorce and can’t for the life of her wrap her head around how two such very intelligent people can be acting so foolishly. but there’s also the potential for a story where betty’s reaction to the news is to feel not necessarily happy—because of course she’d never celebrate her son going through a hardship—but at least somewhat vindicated, because she’d always considered that the marriage was a mistake and/or that sara wasn’t right for grissom, and now she had proof that she’d been right to feel that way all along. 

there’s the potential for a story about a betty who gets so little information about the whole situation that it just never makes sense to her, so mostly she’s just more bewildered than anything, and the potential for one about a betty who is just quietly sad because she’d really hoped they’d prove her wrong and make the marriage work, and now they haven’t, and it just seems like such a waste, because they really did love each other.

there could be a version where betty is so eager to forget that there ever was a sara that she starts trying to line grissom up on blind dates every time he visits her or there could be one where she never tells him, but she still sends sara a birthday card every year, secretly hoping that one day, there still might be hope for a reconciliation.

it all depends on a multiplicity of factors.            

personally, i don't really have a particular headcanon for this scenario because i, as a rule, straight-up ignore that the divorce ever happened, so the questions of betty's thoughts on the matter are a moot point to me. i don't really care to imagine how she may have reacted to the situation because the situation itself is something i reject.

anyway, sorry i can’t give you a more definitive answer!

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we’ll take your questions one at a time, okay?

do you think everyone on team graveyard readily accepts grissom and sara as a couple? is anyone upset either about them getting together or the manner in which they did so?

as per what we see in canon, it seems like everyone does accept grissom and sara as a couple—or at least we’re not shown anyone who outwardly objects—by the time the events of episode 08x02 “a la cart” are taking place.

that said, as i mentioned above, just because “blanket acceptance” is what we seem to see in canon at that point doesn’t mean a) that’s necessarily what we should see—or at least that it’s not what should be shown to us without some explanation—OR b) that things necessarily always were that way.

there is actually a lot of canonical evidence to suggest that various members of team graveyard could or even should have been upset with the news of grissom and sara’s relationship for various reasons, at least to start out with.

certainly the show itself never touches on the issue, but the possibility does exist that at least somebody—if not multiple somebodies—might’ve been upset with grissom and sara initially and we just didn’t get to see it during that four-month time gap. 

as mentioned above, catherine has frequently over the years expressed her patent disapproval of workplace relationships, opining that they never work in the long term and often foment awkwardness in the workplace when they inevitably flame out (see episodes 04x12 “butterflied,” 06x03 “bite me,” and 07x23 “the good, the bad, & the dominatrix”), so it stands to reason that she at least potentially might not be thrilled with the idea that two of her coworkers had been having a romantic relationship on company time—and especially not when their doing so could possibly have ramifications for the team, their cases, and even her own career trajectory. 

she also just might not understand the relationship itself as a concept.

by s7/s8, catherine and sara have finally developed a pretty good working rapport with each other and certainly get along much better than they did when sara first moved to vegas. however, that’s not to say catherine would necessarily get why grissom would choose sara for his romantic partner and/or approve of his choice.

as i talk about here,

specifically for catherine, while she has over the last few years come to respect sara a lot more than she did when sara first arrived in vegas, she has also always had this kind of view of sara as a “kid,” remaining highly aware that she’s got 10+ years of life and work experience up on her.

in all honesty, though she has come to view sara as a friend on her own terms, she’s never quite understood grissom’s attraction to sara and has only been able to rationalize it as a kind of “okay, well, he’s obviously going through a midlife crisis” deal; otherwise, it hasn’t really computed for her why someone his age might want to be with someone who’s still so incredibly young (and, in her view, oftentimes markedly immature).

while i can see paths down which catherine could eventually be persuaded to support the relationship—in the 20+ years of their friendship, never has she seen grissom so happy, and the fact that he is is worth something to her—and even to accept that her general opposition to “fishing off of the company pier” as a practice notwithstanding, gsr is somehow an “exception to the rule,” i don’t necessarily think it would be automatic for her to feel entirely at ease with the situation.

like.

yes, in episode 08x01 “dead doll,” she is going to reassure grissom of the chances of sara’s survival and play the part of the good, supportive best friend, showing up to help him find the love of his life with nothing but words of encouragement and actions of aid, and she’s definitely going to be thrilled and relieved and happy when sara is eventually rescued, but in the days and weeks afterward, might she wonder what the hell grissom was thinking in getting involved with a subordinate (and especially one fifteen years his junior)? could she possibly be pissed that grissom and sara had undermined the work of the team and the lab through their reckless behavior? might she be somewhat judgmental about their choices? feel just kind of bewildered that they of all people had ended up together? just plain not see what appeal sara would hold for grissom as a life partner, given her youth and (seeming) immaturity? 

sure. certainly. no doubt.

i mean, i’m not saying she’d be actively anti-gsr or that she’d hold a grudge about what happened (and particularly not forever), but i am saying there is at least the potential with her for some more complicated feelings about the issue than what the canon narrative actually depicts.

she might have to process some things. make a conscious decision along the lines of, “you know what? i’m just gonna have to let this go because done is done. they did what they did, and now whatever happens, we’re all just gonna have to deal with it.” just take a deep breath and move onto the next thing.

i mean, it’s a real possibility that she wouldn’t just immediately be on board with this whole sea change.

the same goes for warrick, who, as mentioned above, has in the past expressed his resentment at being deceived and who might then experience at least some initial upset that grissom and sara had not only lied to him and the rest of the team but had done so for so fucking long.

while i think he’d be less perplexed at the fact of the relationship itself than catherine might be—he has a good enough read on grissom and sara both to recognize some of the more deep-seated ways that they’re compatible—he still might not feel as if grissom and sara were justified in playing roulette with everyone’s careers and the integrity of the team in the ways that they did. much as is the case in episode 07x13 “redrum,” he might be offended that they had essentially chosen to make him complicit in something that could potentially affect his future without giving him the choice to opt out.

again, that’s not to say that there’s no way he might ever forgive them or that he couldn’t eventually come around to see why they felt they had to do things in the manner that they did, but it is to say (once again) that it’s not necessarily a foregone conclusion that he might take some umbrage to the way they’d chosen to conduct themselves.

he very much could be annoyed that they’d lied and he might require an apology before he could be expected to come around to them being together as a concept.

he might be somewhat hurt that they’d felt the need to lie in the first place (i.e., “we trust you with everything. why couldn’t you have trusted us with this?”).

along those same lines, out of everyone, nick has the perhaps the greatest potential for upset about gsr.

again, looking to episode 07x13 “redrum” as a guide, we can see that nick takes it hard when his team family lies to him, not only on a professional level but also on a personal one. 

he might really have a hard time understanding how grissom and sara could justify going to such extraordinary lengths to keep everyone ignorant of their living situation—it’s no small feat to hide the fact that you’re cohabitating from your team of trained observer coworkers; there’s some real and deliberate planning that would go into maintaining that kind of illusion for as long as they did—and find that it was difficult for him to trust them going forward, questioning how much he really actually knew them at all.

he might be angry that they felt they couldn’t trust the team to have their backs and keep their secret for them or at least support them in bringing the truth of their relationship to the administration.

he might start to second-guess significant moments from his history with the two of them, wondering how many of their interactions with him were really “real.”

while, again, i don’t think it’s entirely unrealistic that eventually he could come around to being okay with the whole situation—and especially after he got to see “gsr in action” and realize that grissom and sara were still basically the same grissom and sara he had always known, not significantly different as a couple than they were “individually”—he might be the member of team graveyard who needed the most time to cool off in the wake of everything; the hardest sell, as things were.

either before grissom and sara got back to work or afterward, he might end up having some kind of outburst of the “how could they/you lie to us like that, man?” variety. then afterward, he might be standoffish with them for a while, acting curt toward one or both of them when they were forced to work together.

eventually, he might end up having to hash it out with one or both of them, confronting them about the breach in trust.

like warrick, he might require an apology before he felt things were okay.

of course, canon gives us no indication that nick is at all upset by grissom and sara’s choices or that he ever was, as he is (quite literally) the first person who greets them in their public debut as a couple in episode 08x02 “a la cart” and is nothing but warm and accepting toward them when he does so.

but that’s one of those areas where i feel like the show glossed over something that maybe should have been interrogated more.

certainly, nick’s prior characterization to that point suggested that he of all people might find it especially difficult to swallow not necessarily grissom and sara’s relationship itself but definitely the way they’d gone about conducting it.

as for greg, while i don’t think he’d necessarily be shocked to learn that gsr was a thing—as i talk about here, he of everyone on the team has perhaps had the most “up close and personal” view of grissom and sara’s dynamic over the last several years, so once he actually figures out what’s what, he can probably look back in retrospect and identify a lot of previously ambiguous evidence for what it actually was—i also don’t think he would necessarily be thrilled to learn the truth that they were together, either. 

while he might not be as annoyed about the principle of thing as catherine or as personally hurt about as nick, i still think the news that grissom and sara were together might kinda knock the wind out of him, just given his feelings toward sara.

as i talk about here, sara has always sort of been greg’s dream girl and while after s4/s5, he has mostly given up on ever having any actual chance with her romantically (settling comfortably into the position of being her platonic best friend), i still think it’s probably a situation where learning that she is with grissom throws him for a loop.

much like catherine talks about in episode 06x01 “bodies in motion,” the great thing about a fantasy is “the possibility that it might come true,” so having that possibility taken away “sucks.” 

sara has always kind of been greg’s fantasy, so it might potentially be a bit rough on him to realize she was “off the market,” and especially in such a serious way—and particularly given the grissom of it all.

knowing that his long-time crush is in a long-term, committed relationship with their boss, whom he thinks of as a father figure, probably messes with his head on freudian levels. like. if he was having anxiety dreams about having sex with sara while grissom was watching/scrutinizing him before (see 05x16 “big middle”), one can only imagine what he’s dreaming about now.

ultimately, while i don’t think his hurt/upset would run very deep, it still might cause him to act a bit squirrelly around grissom and sara once they got back to the lab after their leave, at least at first.  

as for brass’s reaction, i think of everyone he might be the most understanding.

after all, he has himself in the past had an “office affair” of his own (see episode 05x20 “hollywood brass”), so i think he’d very much get that when two people in a high-intensity job work together closely for a long period of time, sometimes sparks fly. 

while he might be confused that grissom would have looked at sara as a potential romantic partner rather than as something more like a daughter figure—after all, brass and grissom are about the same age, and that’s certainly how brass thinks of sara himself—once he knew they were together, i think his reaction would be to just shrug and say, “sometimes the heart wants what the heart wants, you know?” secretly, he might even harbor a “you know what? good for them” kind of attitude, taking some comfort in the idea of two lonely people finding companionship in each other.

though he wouldn’t be ignorant of the fact that their flaunting of department policy could have potential ramifications for the team and even for the lvpd at large, i think that he’d get that people are messy, and especially when it comes to love.

so.

all of the above said, while i don’t think it’s a given that any member of team graveyard necessarily would oppose grissom and sara’s coupledom or be upset about how they’d hidden their relationship for so long, i do definitely think it’s possible that at least some of them could have done so, for the reasons previously outlined.

that said, i do also think that it’s likely that even if some of grissom and sara’s teammates did initially disapprove of their relationship or at least how they’d gone about conducting it at first, they would for the most part all eventually come around to the idea and support it in the long run, given the passage of time and their increasing exposure to the grissom and sara as a couple.

i don’t think it’s likely that this reveal would have been a “deal-breaker” for any of them when it came to their friendships with grissom and sara or their willingness to work with them going forward.

it just might be a case where maybe there was slightly more pushback at least at first than what the show allows us to see.

the whole process might have been much more dynamic than what canon seems to suggest.

does anyone on team graveyard blame grissom for sara's abduction?

personally, i somewhat doubt it.

certainly, the show never suggests that such is the case during episodes 07x24 “living doll” and 08x01 “dead doll,” but even beyond the issue of what canon does (and doesn’t) show us, i just think, from a character perspective, that it’s unlikely that they do.

while grissom—notorious self-flagellator that he is—likely does blame himself, thinking that if only he’d caught natalie sooner or hadn’t been so handsy with sara in public, sara might never have become a target, i believe that most of his and sara’s friends, if asked, would remind him that no one is ultimately responsible for natalie’s actions except for natalie.

claiming that grissom is responsible for sara’s abduction makes about as much sense as claiming that any of natalie’s other victims had brought their own murders upon themselves.

like.

while some of them were repugnant people, none of them deserved to get brutally murdered or brought their murders upon themselves; they just had the unfortunate experience of being in proximity to a serial killer and her bleach kill-trigger. it wasn’t their faults (or the faults of their friends and family members) that they got killed. 

it was natalie’s.

no matter how the various members of team graveyard might feel about grissom and sara being together or their secrecy regarding their relationship, i think all of them have been doing their jobs well enough to know that both grissom and sara are victims in this case; i don’t think any of them would have hard feelings toward anyone but natalie for what had happened.

grissom was already doing everything he could to solve that case as fast as possible, and he and sara were being about as discreet about their relationship as two people could be.

after all, they’d successfully hidden it from their teammates for years.

there wasn’t really anything he or they could have done differently to change the situation, and especially not knowing what (or whom) they were really up against. the members of team graveyard are all practical enough to realize as much.

do you think catherine or brass would have been upset that grissom didn’t tell them about their relationship even though they have been friends for a long time?

as talked about above, while i do think catherine might have reason to be upset once she learns the truth about gsr, i don’t think she’d be upset for this particular reason. 

imo, catherine knows grissom well enough to realize that he was probably never going to confide in her about his love life, regardless of whom he happened to be dating. 

for all of the ways in which their friendship is a very close one, that topic has just always been a one-way street for them; catherine may tell grissom about her adventures and misadventures with dating (and even complain to him about her “dry spells” on occasion), but grissom is never going to do the same with her, and she knows as much. it doesn’t offend her. she gets that that’s just the way things are with him.

she might even understand that in this particular case, he perhaps felt it was important to shield her from the truth so as to insulate her from potential professional fallout in the event that said truth was discovered by their superiors.

(after all, had she known about grissom and sara’s relationship and not “turned them in,” she could have gotten in trouble with the administration just as much as them. “aiding and abetting” in this instance could be a fireable offense.)

so of all the reasons she might be pissed at him for his behavior in this situation, i honestly don’t think this one ranks very high on her list.

the same probably goes for brass.

again, having himself had an office romance in the past, brass is aware that it’s just one of those things that one keeps to themselves. the more people one tells, the more likely the secret is to get out and the more potential damage will be done once it is.

he’d probably understand grissom and sara’s reasons for keeping this particular secret to themselves.

i don’t think he’d take it too personally, knowing that they did so not out of dislike of or distrust of him, per se, but just because that’s just how “secret affairs” are typically conducted.

once they learn the truth, do any members of team graveyard recall past events that now in retrospect seem to be obvious indicators that grissom and sara have been together for a very long time?

oh, yeah, definitely!

probably everyone on the team has at least one or two “looking back now, i definitely should have known!” type memories where gsr is concerned (and even some, “wait. were they together even way back then?!” type ones, too).

i mean, the truth is, grissom and sara have never exactly been subtle about their feelings for each other—and in fact, that’s kind of the reason they’re able to “camouflage” their relationship from their teammates for so long.

it’s the type of deal where because they have always in many ways acted like a couple, no one actually noticed when they became a couple officially, but then once they were a couple officially and finally “out,” their friends could look back and go, “oooh! so that’s the reason they were acting that way.”

i mean, warrick might remember a moment like the one where grissom brings sara the veggie burger in episode 07x01 “built to kill” pt. i and go, “oh, shit, i get it now!” or, thinking about it, nick might suddenly have an epiphany about how there was probably a reason why sara seemed a bit down/distracted during the four weeks that grissom was out of town on his sabbatical last year.

i’m sure everyone can think of some flirtatious exchange or weird interaction between grissom and sara that they’ve witnessed over the years that now, upon reflection, takes on a whole new significance, given the knowledge that grissom and sara are in love (and have been for a long time).

i’m sure there is a “5 + 1” fic to be written on this topic for anyone so inclined.

would team graveyard lobby for ecklie to be lenient with grissom and sara in terms of the rules violation?

eh, i don’t really think so.

i mean, regardless of what their personal feelings on gsr might be, i think the members of team graveyard know that the lab has the policies it does re: romantic relationships between team members for a reason.

there are a lot of serious ethical issues that could arise from two members of the same criminalistics team dating each other, and particularly when one of them is a boss and one of them is a subordinate, in terms of potential for the exertion of undue influence, and the legal liability in such a situation is very real. regardless of whether or not grissom ever did pressure sara to perform her job duties in certain ways in order to please him/earn his favor, just the possibility that he could have calls into question the validity of all of the work they did together.

i mean, even without them actually being in a relationship at the time, we see a defense attorney employ this very tactic in order to discredit sara/team graveyard’s work in episode 03x02 “the accused is entitled.” nora cross also gestures toward a similar point in reboot episode 01x04 “long pig.”

so while i don’t think anyone on team graveyard is happy about things having to change, i think they all understand that the fact that they do is somewhat inevitable.

grissom and sara can’t both keep working as supervisor and subordinate as long as they’re still in a romantic relationship together, and while maybe it might’ve been possible to shift the hierarchy of the team in order to allow them to still both remain working on the same shift together had they been more proactive about reporting their relationship rather than reactive about doing so—as ecklie suggests in episode 08x02 “a la cart,” perhaps catherine could’ve become sara’s supervisor or something along those lines, had they just come forward earlier—the fact is that, ultimately, they did break the rules, and there has to be some consequence for them doing so.

honestly, they’re actually lucky that neither one of them got fired or demoted.

in the scheme of things, sara having to switch shifts is a relatively minor punishment, given both the nature of their deception and the scope of it.

for as much as their teammates might not like sara having to move to swing, i don’t think anyone would argue that ecklie is being unreasonable in making her do so. like grissom and sara themselves, they probably realize that this outcome is one that they just have to accept for what it is.

does team graveyard find out that grissom and sara are living together at the same time they learn about their relationship?

yes.

i mean, considering that grissom takes four plus months off from work to stay home and nurse sara back to health after her ordeal, there’s really no avoiding the fact of their cohabitation.

would team graveyard be shocked to learn that grissom and sara were living together?

to my mind, the most shocking revelation in this situation would just be the fact of the relationship itself, so once they knew that grissom and sara were a couple, i don’t actually think it’d be that surprising to them to also find out that they were living together.

that’s just what people in long-term, serious romantic relationships (most often) tend to do.

that said, i do think they might be a bit incredulous that grissom and sara had managed to hide their living arrangements for as long as they did. 

like.

the amount of work that must have gone into them keeping up the charade that they had separate lives/residences must have been extraordinary—to the tune of them purposefully leaving the lab parking lot in different directions at the end of every shift, staggering their comings and goings from work, maintaining a separate address for sara somehow (likely still paying rent on her old place so that they could tell hr that was where she lived), hiding the fact that they had a dog for whom they shared care responsibilities together, never eating leftovers for lunch in the breakroom lest someone notice they had obviously had the same meal for dinner the day before, remaining silent when the other person answered work calls while they were at home together so that no one could recognize their voices on the other end of the line, just never slipping up and saying to each other “see you at home” when someone else was around to hear them, etc., etc., etc.

it’s not easy to pretend you don’t live with the person you live with, and especially not when you work with a bunch of trained observers whose job it is to notice details.

they would have had to be so fastidious in order to keep their secret secret, and i think that’s the thing their teammates would find shocking: not the fact of their cohabitation itself but that they managed to pull it off for two full years.

is there anyone in team graveyard (including brass, doc robbins, and/or super dave) who might have had their previous suspicions about grissom and sara’s relationship status proven correct?

mine is an unpopular opinion, but i honestly believe that prior to the events of episode 07x24 “living doll,” no one on team graveyard knows that grissom and sara are in a relationship or even has real suspicions that they are.

while at various points throughout the early seasons, some members of team graveyard might suspect that grissom and sara have feelings for each other of some kind (or that at least one or the other of them does so) and while some of them might even suppose that maybe they had some kind of prior romantic history together before sara moved to las vegas, i don’t think anyone actually realized that they were dating between 2005-2007.

for my money, here’s how things shake down:

catherine is dead convinced that grissom and sara were having a sexual relationship prior to when sara moved to vegas and that they then continued to have one for a brief period of time after she moved, as well. however, by the time the events of s7/s8 are taking place, she figures that their “thing” is ancient history, so she is completely blindsided by the revelation that they are currently together. while learning that they are a couple might seemingly lend some credence to her suspicions about grissom and sara’s past, i don’t think she was savvy enough to their “present” to be vindicated in that sense.

as i talk about here, “we don’t get much information regarding what warrick knows about gsr, except that in episode 01x20 ‘sounds of silence,’ he states that sara doesn’t like it when grissom has other women in his life—a statement which reveals that, at the very least, he is aware that sara is attracted to and possessive of grissom. in s6, warrick is part of a group that teasingly refers to grissom as ‘single boy,’ which suggests that warrick is oblivious to the fact that grissom is dating anyone at the time, let alone that grissom is dating sara (see episode 06x23 ‘bang-bang’). in s7, he witnesses grissom and sara acting coupley around each other in the ‘i got you a veggie burger’ scene in episode 07x01 ‘built to kill,’ pt. i. however, the show gives no indication that he picks up the vibe that grissom and sara are throwing down. (and, in fact, part of the joke in the scene is that warrick asks ‘where’s the love?’ without knowing that it’s right in front of him, between grissom and sara.) given warrick’s reaction to grissom’s revelation in episode 07x24 ‘living doll,’ it seems that he is probably fairly oblivious to romantic gsr prior to that point. so to sum up: warrick may have known that sara had a crush on grissom early on, but the thought that grissom and sara were in love with each other and in a committed relationship probably never crossed his mind prior to the big reveal.”

nick is straight-up clueless. he tells us so himself in episode 08x02 “a la cart.”

meanwhile, while greg suggests to nick that he was knowledgeable of gsr prior to s7, i don’t he actually was. to quote from the same post linked previously: “i’ve always been of the opinion that greg is kind of messing with nick and bending the truth when he says that he had special knowledge concerning gsr prior to episode 07x24 ‘living doll.’ he’s not lying, exactly—but he is taking what is probably his nebulous sense that something was going on between grissom and sara from 2005 to 2007 and making it sound like he had an absolute knowledge of their dating relationship during that time, even though he almost certainly didn’t. if you look at the way nick and greg’s conversation plays out, nick asks if sara ever said anything to greg about her relationship with grissom. nick asks this question knowing that grissom would be unlikely to disclose personal information about himself to anyone on the team, though sara might confide personal information about herself in someone, and especially greg, who is her best friend. nick’s question seems to take greg somewhat by surprise; greg’s body language shows uncertainty. ‘not in so many words,’ he hedges. his answer suggests that, at the very least, he has never had an actual conversation with sara about her and grissom’s love life (i.e., that sara has never actually sat him down and confided her and grissom’s secret in him), and, even more likely, that if he knew anything pre-reveal about gsr at all, it was all things he read between the lines—clues that only really make sense to him in retrospect, now that he knows the context for them. nick senses greg’s hesitation/equivocation, so he presses greg’s answer. ‘so you knew about the two of them?’ he asks, annoyed that he somehow may have missed something that greg was able to pick up on. greg shrugs—a gesture which suggests that he is again equivocating and maybe even stretching the truth. ‘yeah,’ he says awkwardly. based on greg’s responses and body language in this scene, it seems to me that greg probably didn’t know anything concrete about grissom and sara being together before grissom made his big reveal at the end of s7—he just wants nick to think that he did because he knows nick will be miffed about having been ‘kept out of the loop,’ and greg and nick never miss out on an opportunity to razz each other. sara never sat down with greg and said she was dating grissom, and greg probably didn’t know anything about gsr for certain until after grissom revealed that he is in love with sara and the truth about their relationship became public when natalie davis had sara kidnapped.”

i’m also maybe the one person in the fandom who doesn’t actually believe brass knows about gsr pre-episode 07x24 “living doll.” you can find my reasoning here.

i also don’t think either doc or super dave know just because it’s never even hinted at that they do.

so all of the above said, while i do believe that various members of team graveyard might’ve been able to say, “hey! i was right: sara has always had a crush on grissom!” or “oooh, so when i thought that one interaction between them seemed ~weird~, it was,” i don’t think any one of them can truthfully say that they believed grissom and sara were dating each other prior to the big reveal.

to me, that’s part of the whole joke of s7.

they’re all so close to the truth and yet so far.

would brass mention the interrogation scene in episode 04x12 “butterflied” to anyone else on team graveyard in order to offer proof of grissom and sara’s longstanding and deep love for each other?

personally, i don’t think so.

while he may himself realize in retrospect the significance of that particular moment, i think if he does, he also realizes just how deeply personal it is and knows it isn’t his place to talk about it “out of school.”

grissom was essentially “unburdening himself to the void,” and brass just so happened to overhear it.

grissom had no expectation that anyone in that room would understand what (or rather whom) he was really talking about.

just like he had no idea that sara had listened to him make his confession, either.

brass knows as much, and he’s discreet enough to keep what he is aware of to himself.

do you think catherine is horrified when she realizes the implications of her whole “wears the chaps” spiel speculating on grissom and heather’s possible past sexual involvement to sara in episode 07x23 “the good, the bad, & the dominatrix”?

no.

honestly, even once she learns about gsr, catherine still might believe that grissom and heather had slept together at some point in the past (just like many csi viewers do), so i don’t think, given that she is generally a fairly shameless person, that she’d feel at all bad about speculating to that end—even given that she now knows that sara is grissom’s current girlfriend.

hell, she might even think the situation was funny, in retrospect—her going on and on about grissom and (in her view) his past lover’s sex life, all while grissom’s current lover was standing there, unable to say anything a damn thing about it or even let on that she had a vested interested in the topic. kind of hilarious, no?

in catherine’s mind, it’s a fair game subject to speculate about, particularly considering that sara, as grissom’s girlfriend, probably is already aware of his sexual history anyway (at least the way she sees things).

do you greg, nick, and/or warrick are jealous or resentful toward grissom once they find out that he is with sara?

i don’t think nick or warrick ever has any kind of legitimate attraction to or romantic feelings for sara period*, so i doubt that they care about grissom dating her, at least on those grounds.

* while they may both play-flirt with sara at times (and she with them), it’s always done in a very jocular way. at least to me, i don’t think there’s ever any serious intention behind it.

however, as someone who has always had a crush on sara, greg, on the other hand, might be a little jealous and resentful, not to an extreme degree—i don’t think he wishes ill on grissom and/or grissom and sara’s relationship—but to the extent that he might wonder exactly what sara sees in grissom that she doesn’t see in him and (as discussed above) feel a little bit disappointed that his dream girl is no longer available to him.

fwiw, i do think we see at least a hint of this jealousy/resentment in play with greg’s curtness toward grissom in episode 08x08 “you kill me,” when he seems to blame grissom for “causing” sara to leave vegas in a way that no one else on the team does.

who on team graveyard pries grissom away from sara's hospital bed so he can get food and sleep?

no one.

the end of hospital visiting hours forces him to leave eventually.

does anyone on the team go to grissom and sara’s place to get clothes and toiletries for grissom and sara and make sure hank gets to the dog sitter? if yes, does this someone do any snooping inside grissom and sara's home?

i don’t think anyone does go to their house, as

no one would have needed to deal with hank, as he would’ve already been at the sitter’s at the time of sara’s abduction anyway, given that she had already left for work by then (stopping to grab a quick bite at a restaurant on her way to the lab, as per what is shown in episode 07x24 “living doll”) and grissom was already at the lab himself during that interval, as well,

and, as stated above, grissom would eventually have to go back to the condo himself anyway once visiting hours in the icu were over, at which point he could procure everything he and sara needed himself without having to direct someone else to do it.

to my mind, the first time anyone gets a glimpse of “grissom and sara’s inner sanctum” is in the deleted scene from episode 08x12 “grissom’s divine comedy,” when catherine shows up at the condo to talk to grissom about the case of the day. 

certainly, her snooping behavior in that scene tells us that she’s never been to grissom and sara’s place before, and if she hasn’t, then i doubt that anyone else on the team has, either. 

does anyone confront sara for not telling them about her and grissom’s relationship since they can't confront grissom as their boss?

i don’t personally think so—or at least not in an angry, aggressive kind of way.

while that’s not to say that no one potentially would have hurt feelings toward her, i tend to believe that in a lot of ways the timeline of events plus her status as the victim of a crime helps to spare her any kind of truly fraught conversations.

of course, at the moment when grissom reveals the truth to their friends about their relationship, sara is not present to be reacted at. 

then, even after her initial rescue, she’s in the hospital, where her teammates only have very limited access to her, probably in much worse shape than we as viewers are even shown, for a long time hovering in critical condition and then even afterwards still banged up and busted enough that it would take a kind of truly heartless person (which of course none of her teammates are) to show up in the icu or step-down unit and chew her ass for previous duplicitous behavior. 

even once she’s discharged, she’s on leave, which means she probably a bit difficult to pin down.

while other fans may (and probably do disagree), i tend to think grissom and sara don’t really invite anyone over to their place while sara is convalescing, probably for myriad reasons; in all likelihood, they just “drop off the grid.”

all said, for four plus months, no one really probably has much of a chance to give sara a piece of their minds, no matter how much they might be inclined to.

during that timespan, i’ve got to believe that a lot of the initial kneejerk reactions her teammates have to learning the news temper and eventually even dissipate as the months wear on. for however mad they may have been at her (and grissom) initially, the more time passes and life continues, the more they get over having been lied to, and especially because, at least insofar as we’re shown, there never does seem to be any real professional reckoning for grissom and sara’s actions for team graveyard—i.e., no cases of theirs ever do get overturned, no lawsuits are ever filed, nobody gets fired or demoted, and sara is the only one who ends up having to change shifts in the end—meaning that for all their fear of what might happen when “the other shoe drops,” the drop doesn’t actually ever occur. it just becomes a moot point.

ultimately, for as reckless as what grissom and sara did was, it turns into a “no harm, no foul” situation.

that so, i tend to suspect that by the time sara does finally come back to work in october, her friends have mostly moved past the point of even wanting to confront her; by then, they’re all just happy to see her alive and well (which is certainly what canon seems to depict in episode 08x02 “a la cart”). any anger or resentment there had been has long since been muted.

and especially because it’s probably difficult to feel anything but sorry for sara, considering that she is still pretty hurt, even by the time she finally does come back to the lab. it’s hard to yell at the girl with her face all cut up and her arm in a sling, you know?

while there might be some conversations along the lines of “you could have told us, you know”—i can particularly imagine this type of discussion between her and warrick or her and greg—i don’t think that when/if they happen, they are had in anger. i also think that when sara explains, at least in part, her and grissom’s side of things (“we didn’t want to drag anyone else into it. it was our thing”), her teammates accept the reasoning/intentions behind the action, even if they don’t necessarily agree.

as for whether or not anyone ever confronts grissom: i think it’s more likely that he gets confronted than sara does, even though he is the boss, both because he comes back to work earlier than she does—we’re not told how much earlier exactly, but we’re clearly shown in episode 08x02 “a la cart” that he’s already back to working cases while she’s still making arrangements to make the switch over to swing—and because, unfortunately for him, in some ways he is the less sympathetic party in this case.

i also don’t think that grissom is necessarily the kind of boss the members of team graveyard would feel too intimidated to confront. i mean, they’ve always called him out on his bullshit in the past (see, for example, their comments to him in episode 02x15 “burden of proof” or nick’s heated conversation with him in episode 04x11 “eleven angry jurors”), so it stands to reason that they’d be comfortable doing so in this situation, as well, particularly given how his actions might potentially impact them/the team/the lab.

whether or not anyone actually yells at him, i don’t know. possibly they could, but even if they don’t, i do think it’s likely that maybe his reception upon his return to the lab is a bit frosty or that someone makes at least some kind of comment to him indicating their displeasure at some point.

(my bets would be on catherine or nick.)

do ecklie and grissom have any kind of conversations regarding grissom’s leave of absence after sara’s rescue and prior to the events of episode 08x02 “a la cart”?

the show completely glosses over the logistics of grissom taking leave, but the fact is that he would have to communicate with both ecklie and catherine in order to coordinate with them while he was away to make the situation work.

based on the statements sara makes in episode 04x23 “bloodlines” indicating that she has (at that time) ten weeks’ worth of vacation on the books, we can calculate, based on her having worked at the lab for four years by that point and never having taken a vacation to date aside from maybe attending a short conference or two here or there, that the csis each likely receive between 2.5 and 3 weeks of vacation time per calendar year. 

considering that by the time of sara’s abduction, grissom has worked at the lab for about twenty-two years and has seldom taken any of his pto to date, he likely has well over a years’ worth of vacation time available to him at that point to take—and, legally, if he requests to take it, the lab has to let him.

that so, i think it’s likely that he flat-out tells ecklie, “i’m not coming back to work for the next few months,” and ecklie just kind of has to deal with it.

and especially because sara was injured more or less on the job by someone on the lab’s payroll.

like.

while it wasn’t actually the lab’s fault that sara was abducted, it still would have been a bad-faith move with potentially damning pr implications to deny grissom the opportunity to stay home and tend to her. 

however, even though grissom can basically take as much vacation time as he sees fit without ecklie being able to say boo about it, he still probably has to communicate with ecklie enough to hand off his cases and supervisory duties to catherine and potentially other shift supervisors—somebody from day or swing or even ecklie himself likely has to step in while grissom’s away in order to give catherine her nights off—and make sure that his team isn’t left even more in the lurch than they inevitably are, missing both him and sara for several months on end.

it also might be the case that on occasion, he would have to come back to the lab in order to prep his substitutes for upcoming trials or even to take part in said trials himself.

for as much as he’d be loath to leave sara home alone while she was recovering, i’m sure she’d be the first to tell him, “i don’t want you to let murderers walk free for my sake. please go testify in this case. you’re the only expert entomologist at the lab, and your findings are the only thing that’ll put this guy away where he belongs. i can have one of our neighbors come sit with me. i’ll be okay for a few hours without you. i promise.”

all of that so, i very strongly believe grissom probably has spoken with ecklie—and probably even regularly emailed with him and had phone conversations—prior to the events of episode 08x02 “a la cart.”

it’s just that they haven’t yet talked about the elephant in the room by then, you know?

—probably as much due to grissom’s dodging as ecklie’s own awkwardness about broaching the subject.

say what you will about ecklie, but i genuinely believe that, as he indicates in episode 08x02 “a la cart,” he takes no pleasure in administrating this particular issue. he probably doesn’t want to discuss grissom and sara’s looming disciplinary action while they’re both still away from work, particularly as he knows sara is still very much in recovery. chances are, he’s only too happy to put that conversation off until they both return to work, knowing that until then there’s really not much to be done anyway.

part of him probably wonders if they’ll even ever come back to work at all (particularly sara), especially in the immediate aftermath of the abduction. he’s probably wondering, “is this the kind of deal where what starts out as an extended leave of absence just turns into them never really coming back? am i gonna be looking for their replacements a few months from now?”

would hodges be full of himself, telling anyone who’d listen that he knew all along about gsr?

i mean, potentially.

certainly, that would be one way to write his character in this situation, and i don’t necessarily think it would be ooc to have him behave in that way.

that said, i think it’s maybe a bit more fun to imagine a more nuanced version of his behavior, where in the aftermath of sara’s rescue, everyone keeps kind of expecting him to play that “of course i knew all along” braggadocio role, but he kind of just, well, doesn’t.

imagine a scenario where the news of grissom and sara’s romance has started to spread around the lab, beyond just with the main players on team graveyard. now it’s the hot gossip. every tech and trainee and secretary is playing the “well, did you know? what tipped you off? did you see when x, y, or z thing happened between them?” game, sharing their own “close encounters of the gsr kind” stories with their friends, trying to pin down the logistics of the whole affair.

rumors are swirling—“grissom only hired her because they were an item before she moved from san francisco, you know;” “did you hear they have a secret love child? he’s eight and he already goes to harvard;” “someone told me that they got married a few years back during that time when sara got suspended;” “they’re into all kinds of bdsm and have threesomes with lady heather on the reg;” etc.—and everyone is just wildly speculating about their sex life and their home situation and which of the other members of their team actually knew about them and when.

at some point, the lab rats are all going on about it over lunch in the breakroom and hodges is uncharacteristically quiet. archie tries to get him to contribute to the conversation, but he just kind of demurs. henry even goes as far as to tease him (“he’s sitting over there all quiet and mysterious-like, just hoping we’ll ask him what he knows so that he can pretend that he knew all along”). but hodges just gets up and leaves.

while the other lab rats suppose that he’s just being a sore sport because he can’t actually to pretend to have known anything more than they did—“he was just as clueless as the rest of us”—wendy gets up and follows him and asks him to explain himself.

at first, hodges just tries to brush it off, but wendy is nothing if not persistent, so eventually she gets him to open up.

turns out that hodges is kind of shaken.

grissom is his hero, and after what happened with sara, well—

hodges just can’t get that look on grissom’s face out of his head; how haunted he looked, how small.

maybe while everyone else is treating grissom and sara’s love life like a cypher to be decoded, hodges is just worried because “if something like that happened to the woman i loved, i don’t think i could come back to work at the place that made it happen. i think i’d have to walk away.” 

of course, wendy can’t promise that grissom will be back—and hodges does actually make a good point; it would be difficult to willingly return to the darkness that had almost swallowed your true love whole—but she can reassure him: “if grissom and sara do walk away, i don’t think it’ll be a sad ending.”

“no?”

“i don’t think it’s ever the wrong thing to choose love. and besides—”

“what?”

she touches over his fingers where his hands rest on the desk. “—this lab will still be in good hands.”

do i have headcanon dialogue about your questions?

i tried to pepper a little into my answers here and there, but honestly these scenarios are not ones to which i have devoted a ton of brainpower to imagining, not for any particular reason—i mean, i’m certainly not averse to this part of gsr history in the same way i am the later seasons of the show—but just because i haven’t.

i don’t really have concrete headcanons about how everyone reacts to the news—like i’ve said, i could pretty easily be convinced that certain team members have much more complicated reactions (at least initially) than what we’re shown by the point that the events of episode 08x02 “a la cart” are taking place, but i could also believe that maybe they’re all fairly quick to accept the new status quo, as long as a convincing enough rationale was provided as to why so they did—and i especially don’t have fully mapped out scenes in my head for everything that happens.

anyway.