CSI: Crime Scene Investigation

Abra Cadaver - S3-E5

Corrected entry: When Catherine and Nick are investigating the rock star's death and find the needle in his arm, why wouldn't they have just checked for prints on the syringe? In the flashback later on, it is shown that the murderer did not use gloves, and therefore her prints should be on the syringe.

Correction: The scene and show did not remotely indicate whether or not the villain wiped their fingerprints or not, which most guilty people do. Nor did the sequence indicate at all how much time the crime scene took place over as oppsed to time spent on screen. These two concepts together imply a legitimate counter to your mistake/.

Blood Lust - S3-E9

Corrected entry: In this episode, the CSIs discover that the father of the murdered boy had a handgun registered to him that was found at the crime scene. The gun was registered in California. California does not have handgun registration and prohibits any local registration laws.

Correction: In California they don't register guns but they keep records of who they are sold to.

Happenstance - S7-E8

Corrected entry: When they run fingerprints on the envelope from "Dora" they put the fingerprints from the left side and the right side of the envelope together to make one print from two partials but this would be impossible as one partial would be from the right thumb and one partial would be from the left thumb by the way the envelope is held.

Correction: If it had been held that way, sure. But there's nothing that says it was. It's possible the daughter held it with her left thumb in two different places, leaving two partials.

CocoCami

Grave Danger (2) - S5-E25

Corrected entry: Nick was supposed to have a 12 hour air supply while in the coffin, as the suspect mentioned in his e-mail. Nick was buried at night, a whole day passed and he was rescued at night. That was more then 12 hours underground.

Correction: No, the 12 hours was to get the money to the kidnapper. If you recall, Nick's coffin had a fan that was connected to the light. That fan was in a tube that ran to the surface thereby providing him with the necessary air. You are confusing fact CSI determined there was a limited amount of battery time on the fan itself.

moviemogul

Way To Go - S6-E25

Corrected entry: The season finale, the opening shows Jim Brass being wheeled in to the ER. He is intubated but no one is compressing the bag to facilitate his breathing, he would die without this action.

OneHappyHusky

Correction: It's in slow motion. However, you can see the attendant on Brass's left squeeze the bag just before the scene cuts out.

CocoCami

Paper or Plastic - S4-E14

Corrected entry: A major subplot is why officer Fromansky killed the wife. The good officer maintains he was firing at a third villain running along the back aisle of the store. The husband and wife are established early in the episode running the opposite direction in the back aisle. But apparently, the husband never sees the third assailant, for otherwise there would be no mystery as to officer Fromansky's actions, as the husband would have corroborated the officer. How can the husband fail to see an assailant who is charging straight at him and his wife?

Correction: Because he's focused on his wife and trying to get her to get out of the way. Tunnel vision, he's blind to everything else going on around him. It's common in times of extreme stress/concentration.

CocoCami

Viva Las Vegas - S5-E1

Corrected entry: In the teaser before the theme song, we see Lance Frazer sobbing with the bath water running. Normally, people don't run baths and then go gambling. The owner of the casino said that he had serious B.O., suggesting that Lance hadn't washed. Therefore, we can assume that he has already come back from the casino. However, he didn't lose his money on the way back, it was stolen after his death. He wouldn't be crying and running a bath at the same time. What would he be crying about? It just doesn't make sense.

Correction: What, he could not be crying about something else? This entry moves WAY into the land of speculation and assumption about what people should or could do in a given situation (of which you only see a short instance).

Twotall

Spark of Life - S5-E18

Corrected entry: In the initial view of the drowning victim, we see an EMT performing CPR on the child. Later in the show, they say it was recently her fifth birthday. The EMT, however, was performing CPR with two hands. On a child of her age, you would only use one hand to perform CPR. Brass also says that they're "just going through the motions", but the EMT would most likely out of habit do it correctly. It makes no sense that a trained lifesaving professional would perform a lifesaving treatment incorrectly, even if he knew it would be ineffective anyway.

Correction: I've been on two health and saftey courses and on both I was told to use both hands whilst performing CPR, even on children.

$35K O.B.O. - S1-E18

Corrected entry: When Nick and Greg are in the lab Greg is looking at his date's epithelials through the microscope. Nick wants him to look at some hairs so Greg puts them under the microscope without taking out the epithelials.

Correction: The entire scene is shot from shoulders up, so we can't see what Greg is doing other than he is clearly aware that Nick is prepping the slide with the hair. So it is reasonable to assume that one of the many movements we see in Greg's arms is his removing the epithelial slide in anticipation of Nick's request to view the hairs. At any rate, he obviously places the hair slide into a completely empty microscope.

OneHappyHusky

Face Lift - S1-E17

Corrected entry: After the store clerks enter their pottery store and find the store robbed and a dead body, it shows the Las Vegas Police and the CSI team drive into the front of the building in patrol cars and Suburbans. On one Suburban, you can see the police lights on the right passenger side strapped on to the visor, on the other side you can see the rear-view mirror is directly above the steering mirror. Last time I checked, rear-view mirrors are NEVER above the steering wheel.

Correction: The key here is the phrase "ON THE OTHER SIDE". On the front view, as the vehicle passes coming towards the camera the mirror is properly placed. "On the other side" after vehicle passes the camera and the view is now back through the drivers window the CAMERA ANGLE makes is appear to be over the steering wheel, when in fact it is still properly placed in the middle where it belongs.

OneHappyHusky

Boom - S1-E13

Corrected entry: When Catherine goes to the autopsy of Kristy Hopkins, it is Dr Al Robbins who is performing it. However, she calls him David, who is a different coroner.

Correction: Character mistake, not a film mistake.

Iced - S5-E23

Corrected entry: The girl at the beginning takes off her bra. Later, when the Sara and Nick find her, her bra is on.

Correction: I noticed this when I saw it too. However, the bodies are not found in the last position we see them. There is no reason that after the couple finished making love, the girl couldn't have put her bra back on prior to falling asleep on the floor.

Guy

Feeling the Heat - S4-E4

Corrected entry: The baby's car seat goes from front facing when they find him to rear facing and still strapped in when they go to investigate the car. Also, a baby that young would be in a rear facing car seat anyway.

Melissa

Correction: The seat is rear-facing in all shots. Due to the angle in some shots, it looks forward-facing, but it's not.

Overload - S2-E3

Corrected entry: When Grissom is showing the pickle experiment, Warrick says, that the body didn't make any resistance, because of the high ironlevel in the blood, but that can't be, because anything makes some resistance to electric power, but iron just doesn't make that much. So therefore, he should have said, that the body didn't make ENOUGH resistance to make enough heat to make burn marks.

Correction: True, but it's a common usage to say that conductors don't make any resistance while isolant materials make absolute resistance to electric power. It's like saying that you slide on ice because there is no friction between the floor and your foot - there is, but it's too little.

Boom - S1-E13

Corrected entry: At the end, Grissom tears a article from the newspaper. When he sticks it to the message board, it has nicely cut edges.

Correction: It's possible that he could have detoured to cut the edges, it just wasn't shown explicitly.

Fur and Loathing - S4-E5

Corrected entry: While discussing with Catherine the dead Furry in the road, Grissom uses the phrase "which begs the question ..." Begging the question has a very specific meaning in logical argument: to unjustly assume the truth of that which is being proved in the argument. It does NOT mean "causes the question to be posed." Someone as exacting and well-educated as Grissom would know this and would not misuse the phrase thus.

Rooster of Doom

Correction: As all language specialists will tell you, oral language evolves much faster than dictionaries do. It can sometimes be years before a new acception (or meaning) of a word or a phrase is added in language resources, even though it is widely used and understood by native speakers. The same goes for acceptions which go into disuse: they'll still be listed long after no one uses them. Nowadays, the first and most common meaning of "which begs the question" is the one for which Grissom uses it. It is not a mistake, only proof that Grissom is a man of his time.

Sereenie

Ellie - S2-E10

Corrected entry: When Grissom puts Warrick in charge of the shift he asks why he didn't ask Nick since "he's more senior than me". However both Nick and Warrick were promoted to CSI-3 in the first season.

Correction: This probably implies that despite the fact that they were both promoted, Nick was hired first.

Sereenie

Invisible Evidence - S4-E7

Corrected entry: In the final interview, Warrick tells the murder suspect that he saw him go into the toilet with dog tags, and come out without them. He subsequently found them in a toilet cistern. However an officer was detailed to go into the toilet with him, so the suspect shouldn't have been able to dispose of the dog tags.

Correction: The officer did go to the toilet with him, but he didn't go into the stall with him. He could have quite easily slipped it off and put it in the tank then.

Cool Change - S1-E2

Corrected entry: When we switch back to flashback mode and Holly is scratching the man who shot her, she was working a crime scene and therefore should be wearing latex gloves. Catherine takes the DNA sample from under her fingernail. Do gloves scratch?

Correction: You can see in both this episode and the previous one, that Holly has taken off her gloves before scratching her attacker.

The Lost Reindeer - S14-E11

Corrected entry: Jayse, the reindeer owner, states that reindeer are indigenous only to Iceland. Dead wrong, reindeer also exist in northern north America and Canada, as well as in northern Europe and northern Asia. (00:10:00)

Budoshi

Correction: That's not what he says, nor means. He said the snow reminds the reindeer of Iceland, "the only place you can find real reindeer." But this would be like a New Yorker saying "New York is the only place you can get real pizza." He simply feels Icelandic reindeer are the real thing and everything else is a subspecies of Caribou.

Bishop73

CSI: Crime Scene Investigation mistake picture

Too Tough to Die - S1-E16

Character mistake: Seven minutes into the show, Sarah Sidle is about to do an internal sexual assault exam/kit on an unconscious victim in the hospital, Sarah picks up a metal speculum and says aloud to the victim (in a presumed moment of empathy), that she "never really liked this part of my yearly exam. These things are always freezing" referring to the speculum in her hands. She then brings a speculum to her mouth and begins to blow open-mouthed on it two times, forcing her hot breath on it to warm it. She then begins to insert it into the victim as the scene cuts away. This is pure stupidity, as no trained CSI would ever contaminate the tool like this. Sarah just added her own DNA to the speculum via her breath so any saliva or body fluids are now on the speculum what she is about to use on this patient, who is now also exposed to any STDs from Sarah.

More mistakes in CSI: Crime Scene Investigation
More quotes from CSI: Crime Scene Investigation

Trivia: Anthony Zuiker chose to set the series in Las Vegas because that city's crime lab is the second most active in the United States, behind the FBI lab in Quantico, Virginia.

Cubs Fan

More trivia for CSI: Crime Scene Investigation

Suckers - S4-E13

Question: After finding out that Ty was committing insurance fraud, why did Grissom walk away instead of arresting him?

Answer: He doesn't have the authority to arrest him - when anyone is arrested in the show, a police officer does it. Also he tells Ty that he is going to be submitting his case findings to Ty's insurance company, who would no doubt contact the IRS, who then would have him arrested for fraud etc.

More questions & answers from CSI: Crime Scene Investigation

Join the mailing list

Separate from membership, this is to get updates about mistakes in recent releases. Addresses are not passed on to any third party, and are used solely for direct communication from this site. You can unsubscribe at any time.

Check out the mistake & trivia books, on Kindle and in paperback.