CSINY / Tropes 0 to L

CSI: NY | Tropes M to Z

0-B

• 15 Puzzle: A large scale floor version of the child's puzzle is one of the booby traps in "Death House." It is already solved when the team arrives, but still helps them figure out what's going on.
• 555:
  • In "All in the Family," Flack tries to find Danny, who didn't show up to work. He resorts to calling dispatch to trace Danny's cell phone and gives them the number 212-555-0121.
  • In "Blacklist," a tech-savvy perp hacks into the lab's system and orders a surveillance camera to be installed in their hallway. Mac uses it to his advantage by holding up a hand-written sign that says, "Call Me, 555-0131" to get the man to call his office land line.
• A-Team Montage: Fittingly, the first 22 minutes of "Unspoken" contain no spoken dialogue. Shorter versions in all the other episodes as the team members process evidence.
• Abandoned Area:
  • The Cabbie Killer lives in an abandoned firehouse and "works" in an abandoned brewery. This allows him to elude capture for longer than the average perp.
  • The Compass Killer is ultimately revealed to live in the mostly forgotten "Underground Home" exhibit from the 1964 World's Fair where he hides away from society due to his disfigurement and mental issues.
  • Another perp lives in the back of the now-closed funeral parlor where his mother was the mortician. When the team show up to question him, they enter through the front door and find everything covered in dust.
  • "Death House" centers around a booby-trap-filled penthouse that has been unoccupied for 80+ years. Two present-day intruders get caught in the traps.
  • The victim in "The Untouchable" lives in the enclosed archway spanning two abandoned buildings, one of which is a department store. The cashmere sweater she's wearing when her body is discovered has a price tag of $5 on it, along with a few chips of paint no longer in use. These clues help point the detectives to the location.
• Abandoned Catchphrase: In at least three episodes of Season 1, Mac says while interrogating suspects, "Let me start this story for you." Danny also does it once in an obvious attempt to emulate his boss. As time went on, it was reduced to the subtle use of the word "story" by various characters during the interrogations.
• Abandoned Hospital: "Where There's Smoke...": Leonard Brooks takes one of his victims to the now-abandoned hospital where his mother, who worked in the burn unit, used to take him with her when she couldn't find a sitter.
• Aborted Arc: Peyton's single episode return in the end of the sixth season was hyped as the beginning of a love triangle. The season would have ended with Mac trying to choose between the feelings he still had for Peyton and the early-stage relationship he was beginning with Aubrey. Who he picked would have been revealed in the beginning of season seven. However, Claire Forlani got a part on Camelot and couldn't return for more episodes, plus Melina Kanakaredes decided to leave the series, pushing the writers to put aside that plot to focus on the newly-arrived Jo.
• Absurdly Spacious Sewer: The team trek upright thru a very large sewer while hunting their suspect's living quarters in "Manhattanhenge."
• Abuse Mistake: The would-be killer's motivation in "Unspoken" is getting revenge on his former boss who had accused him of being inappropriate with children and cost him his job for a year.
• Abusive Parents:
  • Adam's father. Full revelation doesn't come until season 9's "The Real McCoy" but as early as season 3's "Some Buried Bones", Adam describes him as "a bully."
  • Shows up with the Victim of the Week a time or two. One example is the step-father in "Sweet 16". Mac, having recently met his own college-age step-son for the first time, doesn't take kindly to the man's attitude or conduct, especially when he spies bruises on the teenage boy.
• Accent Relapse: "Yahrzeit": A man pretending to be Jewish is revealed to be a German former Hitler Youth soldier. Even after 64 years of pretending to be a non-practicing Polish Jew, marrying a Jewish woman, and raising an Orthodox Jewish son, he reverts to his German accent when his crime is revealed.
• Accidental Murder: Happens fairly often throughout the series. To name a few:
  • "Child's Play": A 10-year old boy is fatally shot because he's in exactly the wrong place at the wrong time;
  • "Fare Game": A man kills someone he intends to scare with a prop gun because he doesn't realize blanks can kill at close range.
• Accidental Pervert: In "Right Next Door," Stella finds a hole in her bedroom wall and mistakenly assumes one of her neighbors is a peeping Tom.
• Accidental Suicide:
  • "The Fall" : The investigators look into the death of Melvin Heckman, a Fat Bastard movie producer, who was apparently pushed from his apartment's balcony. After the investigation goes through a series of people who all had an axe to grind with him for ruining their lives, the team finally discovers that Heckman had been on the balcony eating chocolates and simply lost his balance, falling to his death.
  • "Cold Reveal": The team investigates the death of Toby Finch, who was found dead in a church with angel wings strapped to his back after seemingly falling from the sky. Initially, Toby's friend and girlfriend are seen as suspects but further investigation reveals what really happened. Toby, obsessed with becoming internet famous, drunkenly attempted to catapult himself off a roof, expecting his artificial angel wings to help him soar across the sky like a hang glider. To ensure this, he pre-cut the bungee cords on his safety harness, thinking that the force of the catapult would fully disconnect them. Unfortunately, they held faster than he expected, giving him such severe whiplash that his neck snapped in two places, killing him before he even fell through the window. Mac surmises that the only crime committed was the victim's misdirected ambition.
• Accident, Not Murder: In "The Fall," after spending the whole episode researching the dozens of people who would have wanted to kill a truly big asshole of a studio executive, the investigators figure out that his death (from a fall off his balcony) was not a murder, but an accident that happened when he was eating from a stash of chocolates that was hidden there (his wife had forced him on a diet) and lost his footing.
• Actor Allusion:
  • In "Fare Game," the perp is an aspiring actor, and to catch him off-guard Mac pretends to be trying out for Of Mice and Men; Gary Sinise directed and played George in the 1992 remake.
  • Detective Mac Taylor shares last names with Gary Sinise's most famous role, Lieutenant Dan Taylor of Forrest Gump. Sinise says he gave the character his last name in tribute to that character. The character's first name, by the way, is after Gary's son, McCanna, whose nickname is Mac and who, in turn, is named after one of his own uncles. The same brother-in-law of Gary's whom Mac's father, McCanna Boyd Taylor, is named for.
  • In "Playing with Matches," the Quip to Black is "Houston, we have a problem," referencing Apollo 13, in which Gary Sinise played astronaut Ken Mattingly, although his character in that movie was not the one to say that line.
  • Mac playing bass in the jazz band is a direct reference to Gary Sinise's role in his own rock band, the Lt. Dan Band. Several Lt. Dan Band members played members of the jazz band, and Gary brought along his own guitars.
  • Carmine Giovinazzo's backstory of having to give up an aspiring baseball career was incorporated into the backstory of his character, Danny Messer. He mentions it to Aiden in "The Closer" and tells some characters-of-the-week all about it in "The Box."
  • Mac helping with the Brooklyn Wall of Remembrance in "Indelible" was based on Gary Sinise's real life help with the project.
  • In season 7, Jo tells the team she was a cheerleader in high school. Sela Ward had been one both in HS and at the University of Alabama.
• Addiction Displacement: In season 8, Mac reveals to Christine that her brother, Stan, who was his partner back in the day and who had been killed in the line of duty pre-series, had been trying to quit smoking at the time and had taken up the habit of chewing on ink pens instead.
• Adopted to the House: Sheldon, when Mac lets him crash at his place for a while beginning in 'It Happened to Me.'
• Adoption Angst: There's a bit of it with Ellie Danville, Jo’s daughter. She knew she was adopted, but got upset at Jo for not telling her that her birth mom was in prison.
• Adults Dressed as Children: A dark version of this occurs in 'Admissions,' when a guy in his 30's and his accomplice pose as a teenager in high school and his father, respectively, in order to prey on innocent young girls.
• Advance Notice Crime: In "Vigilante," the killer calls 911 to report a murder and gives the location of the body. The operator asks when it happened and the perp replies, "It's about to," and hangs up. The call, conversation, and crime are repeated before the killer is caught.
• Advancing Wall of Doom: 'Death House' has a penthouse filled with booby traps including one particular room whose walls would close in or, depending on the trigger, cook you to death. Sheldon accidentally triggers them to close in on himself; Mac rescues him by shoving his forensics kit in the gap long enough for Sheldon to squeeze out.
• Adventurer Archaeologist: The first victim in 'The Cost of Living' who, as Stella says, appeared to have "fancied himself a real-life Indiana Jones."
• Adventures in Comaland: In 'Near Death,' Mac is shot in the back and left, well, near death. While he is being operated on, he journeys through a limbo that looks like the crime lab where he meets and has conversations with his friends (and his dead wife).
• Affectionate Nickname: Danny calling Lindsay "Montana." Sid tells her Danny does that because he has a crush on her.
• After-Action Healing Drama:
  • In the season 2 finale, 'Charge of this Post,' Mac, Flack and an office worker are trapped when a bomb goes off. Flack has a very serious injury to his abdomen and Mac uses the other man's shoestring to tie off a profusely bleeding artery before tearing strips from his own shirt to staunch additional bleeding.
  • In "Page Turner,' the gang have to race to find out exactly what type of radioactive substance had caused two people to die and the coroner, Sid, to collapse, so they can tell the doctors what to do to treat him.
• Afterlife Antechamber: 'Near Death.' It looks a lot like the lab. Mac wanders around the offices saying unofficial goodbyes to his colleagues and prepares to leave with Claire, but she tells him he can't go with her.
• Ageless Birthday Episode: Mac celebrates his birthday with Peyton in 'Murder Sings the Blues,' but his age is not mentioned.
• Agonizing Stomach Wound: The Native American victim in 'Communication Breakdown' is killed with a tribal technique used to injure wolves' intestines. It causes abdominal pain and death from sepsis, which can take a couple of days.
• Agony of the Feet: In 'The Closer,' a barefoot woman clad only in lingerie darts into traffic and is hit by a truck. At autopsy, Dr. Hawkes discovers several puncture wounds on the soles of her feet. Turns out she escaped an assailant by climbing through her window and had stepped on spikes put there to deter pigeons from roosting.
• Air-Vent Passageway: In 'Not What It Looks Like,' a trio of jewel thieves dressed as Holly Golightly escape via a ventilation shaft. Since Lindsay is approximately their size, it's her task to examine it for evidence.
• Alice Allusion: "Down the Rabbit Hole" features a white rabbit who does indeed disappear down a hole. It Makes Sense in Context.
• Alien Abduction: Inverted with a twist in "Consequences." A schizophrenic woman "captures" a badly injured paintball player, thinking he's an alien and that the green paint oozing all over his gear is his blood.
• Alliterative Name:
  • A villain from Danny's past named Sonny Sassone who shows up in the first two seasons.
  • Mac's late wife's maiden name had been Claire Conrad. Mentioned when his step-son Reed shows up in season 3.
  • Subverted by Jo Danville, who had refused to take her ex-husband's last name of Josephson due to the cheesy way it would've sounded.
• All Part of the Show: In the opening of "Grounds for Deception," an audience is watching a production of a Greek tragedy in Central Park. During a pivotal scene, the shadows of two people appear behind the curtain at the back. As one stabs the other, the audience is enthralled...until a large pool of blood appears beneath the curtain.
• All There in the Script: Mac's full first name, McCanna, was in an early script, but was never said onscreen.
• All Your Base Are Belong to Us:
  • The lab gets stormed by an Irish gang intent on reclaiming their seized drugs in "Snow Day."
  • The precinct gets invaded in 'Today Is Life' by a mob of rioters angry over the shooting of a young black man by a white police officer.
• Almost Holding Hands: The episode in which Lindsay tells Danny she's pregnant ends with the camera focusing on their hands, the backs of which are barely touching each other as they stand side by side watching a pair of grandparents meeting their infant grandson for the first time.
• Alone with the Psycho: Both Stella and Jo had to confront men out to kill them alone, and both lead to Killing in Self-Defense.
• Alpha Bitch: "Crushed": She pretends to be homely girls' friends, dolls them up, has her boyfriend have sex with them, rates their experiences online, and gives each of the girls a big necklace so everyone will know what happened. The sister of her victims strangles her and then part of her house falls on her.
• Alternative Foreign Theme Song: The ending theme for the Japanese version is "The First Day Without You" by Dreams Come True (the band behind the music for Sonic the Hedgehog and Sonic the Hedgehog 2).
• Always Murder: Occasionally averted with accidents (ex; 'The Fall,' 'Tri-Borough') and suicides (ex: 'Blood, Sweat and Tears,' 'What Schemes May Come').
• Amalgamated Individual: ("Dead Recononing"): The twist is based on "The Phantom of Heilbronn", where a spate of crimes involving the same person turns out to be due to a woman in one of the factories where their swabs are produced not wearing gloves.
  "I am I in trouble?" [cue Mac rolling his eyes]
• Ambiguous Syntax: 'City of the Dolls:' A recording describes two people "kissing again" and "a bad touch." One realizes that her daughter witnessed her relationship with a younger male student and told him to try to get the recording deleted, leading to the victim's Accidental Murder. It turns she could've ignored it due to how vague the description is without any context; the daughter could've just been talking about two students at her school.
• American Series: NYC is The Big Apple after all.
• Amicable Exes: Jo and Russ. Although he didn't like Jo being a career woman when they were married, they're still friendly and even have some UST in his first episode.
• Amoral Attorney: These guys show up every so often as villains. Two examples are serial rapist D.J. Pratt's lawyer and a guy who irradiates a copy of the Tibetan Book of the Dead with thallium in an attempt to defraud the city; this leads to two radiation deaths and nearly gets Sid killed as well.
• Anchored Ship: At first, Lindsay pushes Danny away because of her emotional problems with having survived an incident that took the lives of her friends. Then, he pushes her away while he grieves for Ruben.
• And Another Thing...: Detective Flack does this once. When he makes to leave, the door gives him a "Eureka!" Moment; he realizes that the victim's door had been locked from the outside, so whoever killed him must have had a key.
• And I Must Scream: The victim with Locked-In Syndrome in "Blink." Mac is so desperate to help her that at first he is convinced she's trying to communicate with him through her eyes.
• And Starring:
  • Eddie Cahill gets an "And," Hill Harper the "With."
  • For the final two episodes, Megan Dodds and Natalie Martinez, respectively, got the "With" and "And," but without their images being shown.
• And There Was Much Rejoicing: A crowd gathered around the first crime scene in 'Happily Never After' breaks into applause upon learning the identity of the victim, a much-hated woman.
• Animal Assassin:
  • Subverted twice in 'Zoo York.' The first victim is eaten by a tiger, but turns out he was already dead before being thrown into the enclosure. The victim in the second case is killed not by the actual Brazilian Wandering Spider kept by one suspect, but by another using venom from the same type of spider.
  • Double subverted in 'Sweet 16.' The cobra is only meant to scare the birthday girl, but appears to have killed her father. Then it bites Lindsay, who has to be helicoptered to the hospital.
• Animal Reaction Shot: Subverted by the dog show beagle in 'Recycling.' His owner is insistent that Mac has almost driven him to tears. Cut to the dog...with a perfectly bland expression.
• Animal Wrongs Group: Not a group, but the guy who kills someone for trying to kill a cockroach in 'A Daze of Wine and Roaches.'
• Arc Number / Harassing Phone Call: 333. For a while, Mac keeps getting strange calls at 3:33 am. Eventually it leads to someone angry about an event from Mac’s teen years.
• Arc Villain / Story Arc:
  • For season 4, there are two: The 333 Stalker (Drew Bedford) for the first half, and the Cabbie Killer for the second half.
  • In season 6, a shorter arc concerns the Compass Killer.
  • From season 3's 'Hung Out to Dry' up to the season 6 ending cliffhanger is the Shane Casey arc, which concludes in the 1st episode of season 7, 'The 34th Floor.'
  • A few episodes in season 8 deal with the serial rapist case that had prompted Jo's transfer from the FBI to the New York Crime Lab.
• Area 51: In "The Lady in the Lake," Adam finds what he thinks is a piece of an alien space ship, figures he'll be famous for making first contact, and immediately makes plans to open his own theme park called ARea 52. ^note That's not a typo; he deliberately capitalized his initials.
• Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: To the culprit in "Veritas":
  Mac: You're under arrest for the murder of Derek James, Lauren Salinas, kidnapping and attempted murder of a crime scene investigator, armed robbery, grand theft auto, assault and battery. But most of all, for pissing me off.
• Artistic License – Biology:
  • "What You See Is What You See": The femur being the strongest bone in the human body, there's no way Sheldon could twist it to make the lodged bullet fall out.
  • "What Schemes May Come": The heart monitor hooked up to the (actual) lab rat is set for human heart rates, not those of rats which would have been many times faster.
• Artistic License – Law: "Grand Master" deals with fugu being openly sold in a sushi bar. This is extremely illegal in the US. Even in Japan there are very specific laws strictly regulating the selling and serving of fugu.
• Artistic License – History: The Native American tribe in "Communication Breakdown" never existed.
• As Himself:
  • John McEnroe, appears as himself, and portrays his own doppelganger, in "Comes Around.'
  • Train's Will Dailey performs at a jazz club during the conclusion of "Time's Up."
  • Maroon 5 put on a free concert in Central Park during the opening of "Page Turner."
  • Kid Rock performs in the opening of "All Access," then portrays himself as a murder suspect throughout the rest of the episode.
  • Josh Groban performs in the venue where Mac & Christine eventually have their Valentine's date at the end of "Blood Actually."
• As Long as It Sounds Foreign:
  • There are some odd choices for character names from time to time, like one girl named Risa Calaveras ("Laugh Skulls" in Spanish).
  • The Egyptian suspects in "Seth and Apep." An Egyptian viewer posted on another site that their names aren't Egyptian at all, but from another Arabic-speaking area.
• Asshole Victim:
  • "Grand Master": A dead fashion designer is revealed to have been poisoned by her former personal assistant, whom she'd fired for refusing her sexual advances, blacklisted from the industry, and further humiliated by sexually harassing her at her new workplace.
  • Who's There?": The victim was purposefully destroying his family's company, liquidating every cent they had, destroying the future of his own daughter, just to spite his estranged wife.
  • "All Access": Frankie, Stella's deceased ex-boyfriend, is revealed to have shot a sex tape between the two behind her back (and posted it online). When Stella breaks up with him, he stalks her by entering her apartment and after she refuses to accept him, he attempts to kill her, with it ultimately ending with her killing him in self-defense.
• As the Good Book Says...: Mac quotes relevant passages from memory in "The Ride-In" and "Taxi." To specify the exact verses would require spoiler formatting.
• At the Opera Tonight:
  • Downplayed when Lindsay shows up to a scene in a formal dress, having been called in while seeing an opera with friends.
  • "Murder Sings the Blues": Peyton takes Mac to the opera for his birthday. He gets called to a crime scene during the standing ovation, interrupting the rest of her plans.
  • Subverted for drama in the 9/11 10th anniversary tribute, "Indelible." Mac & Claire are shown in a flashback to that fateful morning. He had surprised her with opera tickets for that evening and held onto them after she died in the attacks, but finally releases them in the tide at the end of this episode.
• Attack on One Is an Attack on All: Mac, in 'Heroes': "You attack one, you attack us all." It initially refers to the dead Marine in Central Park; Mac is a Marine himself. But it takes on a double meaning when Aiden is found as the episode's second victim.
• Attack the Injury: Twice.
  • In 'What You See Is What You See,' Mac jumps in the ambulance with a suspect who has been shot. The EMT tells him he can question the guy as long as he doesn't get in the way. Suspect gets uncooperative. Mac gets angry and slams the guy in his shoulder where the GSW is. EMT yells at Mac.
  • In 'Seth & Apep,' Mac tries to get one of Christine's kidnappers to reveal her whereabouts by squeezing the man's arm where he had just been shot right before being apprehended.
• Auction: 'Yahrzeit' opens with a murder during an auction. As the case unfolds, one of the pieces being offered is discovered to have been stolen from a Jewish family during the Holocaust.
• Audit Threat: Flack does this a fair bit. Mac does & and follows through in "Pot of Gold." He and Stella walk away grinning while a Treasury Agency officer laundry-lists the perp's charges.
• Author Tract: Gary Sinise, a noted veterans' advocate in real life, seems to have influenced Mac's dialogue about veteran-related issues now and then. His and Jo's discussion of the plight of homeless veterans in "Clean Sweep" is a noticeable example.
• Autopsy Snack Time: Sheldon admits to Sid that the rule against eating in the morgue "never stopped me from sneaking in the odd bag of microwave popcorn."
• Awkward Kiss: Downplayed with Mac & Christine at her parents' anniversary party in 'Flash Pop.'
  Christine: [referring to her family] Look at them. They're watching every move we make.
  Mac: Well then, why don't we give them something to talk about? [leans in and kisses her on the cheek]
  Christine: [slowly moves to kiss him on the lips, then realizes what she's done] Did I do that? I mean, I didn't mind doing that...lemme just get our coats.
• Baby Be Mine: In 'The Box,' a baby is stolen by the desperate couple he'd been promised to after his mother changes her mind about giving him up.
• Baby's First Words: Discussed twice.
  • Stella expects Danny to utter his catchphrase "Boom" when they find a piece of evidence. He doesn't, and she asks why. He tells her Lindsay doesn't want him to use it anymore because she's afraid it'll be Lucy's first word. A few seconds later, Danny finds more evidence and can't help himself, "Boom!"
  • "Do Not Pass Go": The mother of a young man who'd gone missing tells Flack what her son's first word was. He replies that his own first words were "cookie and cake."
• Back for the Dead: Aiden in "Heroes."
• Back to Front: The entire opening of "Nothing for Something" is shown in reverse.
• Badass Crew: Yep, the whole team.
• Badass in a Nice Suit:
  • Mac and Lindsay are called to a crime scene that Danny is already working. Mac shows up in a tux, having been at a benefit for the mayor. Lindsay arrives wearing a formal dress since she was at the opera. Danny makes a comment about being underdressed.
  • "The Party's Over": Mac chases down and arrests a purse snatcher while dressed in a tux because he's about to attend a formal event.
• Ball Cannon: In "Buzzkill," a man attacks a group of models doing a live billboard display with a tennis ball launcher. The balls injure several of the models, and one of them smashes a neon sign and drops a live wire into the oversize glass a model is frolicking in. This would have electrocuted her, except she had already been poisoned.
• Ballistic Discount: In "Command+P," a young inventor demonstrates his new process for 3D printing a gun to someone he thinks is an investor. He hands the gun to the guy, along with a bullet so he can see that the gun takes standard rounds. The "investor" loads the bullet into the gun, shoots the inventor, and steals the computer, printer and software.
• Ballroom Blitz:
  • In "The Dove Commission," the author of the titular report and the woman he's dancing with at a party are taken out by a sniper using an armed drone-like device belonging to the TARU (Technical Assistance Response Unit).
  • The sniper in "Hide Sight" takes out a woman at an office celebration, complete with cake and party hats, in a high rise.
• Bank Robbery:
  • "Rain," about valuables being stolen from safe-deposit boxes.
  • "Hostage," wherein a guy intending to rob a bank was beaten to it...and the manager was shot to death in the process, so he demanded a CSI prove his innocence. Mac volunteers and is eventually taken hostage as well.
  • "Unusual Suspects," where two brothers rob a bank on their way home from school, and get robbed themselves.
• Baseball Episode: "The Closer," where the killer is a player, and Danny gets to use the pitching skills from his aborted baseball career.
• Bastard Bastard: The perpetrator in "Manhattan Manhunt" is the illegitimate son of a multi-millionaire. He commits murders out of resentment towards his father and half-sisters.
• Bathroom Break-Out: In "She's Not There," the team search a building where a sex trafficking ring held their victims and find a young woman hiding under a cot. She asks to use the restroom. Initially thinking her to be a victim, they let her. While she's taking her time, they deduce that she's in on it, break the door down, and discover that she has escaped through the window.
• Bathroom Stall of Overheard Insults: A girl hiding in a bathroom stall who overhears two cheerleaders insulting her becomes a vital plot point in "Do or Die."
• Batter Up!:
  • In "Boo," a guy who tries to fake his death to collect on the insurance by using blowfish poison to make him appear dead is betrayed by his spouse and buried alive. He manages to break out, so the spouse's lover kills him with a cricket bat (but not before the husband manages to inject both of them with the poison).
  • In "Tanglewood," the Tanglewood Boys kill a wannabe with an autographed baseball bat taken from a sports bar. The fragment of signature on the splinter left in the body provides the CSI investigators with a vital clue.
• Battle in the Rain: A variation in "Snow Day." Half the fight is done soaking wet because the perps set the Lab's sprinklers off in at attempt to blend in with first responders and get away.
• Bear Trap: A schizophrenic woman captures a man she claims to be an alien by leaving a bear trap in an alley. He triggers it while running during a paintball battle.
• Beast in the Building:
  • In "Till Death Do We Part," two doves are found in a basket that was meant to be opened during a wedding held in a hotel ballroom. They had been alive when placed there but died before the ceremony... along with the bride. The investigators question the unusual practice of releasing them indoors.
  • In "Sweet 16," the birthday girl's brother tries to scare her by putting a poisonous snake in the expensive car their father surprises her with at her party. While that doesn't happen, the dad is found dead in the vehicle and when the team investigates, the snake bites Det. Monroe who has to be raced to the hospital for anti-venom.
  • In "Turbulence," a nightclub owner keeps his pet jaguar on the premises, and his scantily clad female employees walk her around on a leash. He tells the detectives that she's a bigger draw to the club than he is.
• Beggar with a Signboard: While investigating the death of a homeless man in "Crime and Misdemeanor," Danny and Aiden spot a man with a cardboard sign which reads, "Why lie? I have a huge cell phone bill." (Signs of the times, it originally aired in 2005.)
• Beneath the Earth: The Compass Killer lives beneath a park.
• The Bet:
  • Danny and Lindsay in "Snow Day":
    Danny: There's no way you're gonna make this shot, too, Montana.
    Lindsay: A Benjamin says I do. (shoots the billiard in the hole) Now you owe me $100.
  • Part of the second episode of season 8 is a betting pool about when Mac would return to the lab.
  • In "Nine Thirteen," the entire subplot is the group trying to figure out whether or not Lindsay is pregnant and when she's going to tell Danny. After she tells Danny in the last scene, the others are shown paying up their bets to Sid. Mac & Christine have a Side Bet going as well. Early on, he tells her she owes him ten bucks before he relents and agrees to get more evidence.
• Beware the Nice Ones:
  • After Danny jokingly asks Lindsay how she'd get away with killing him and suggests that she would use her forensic know-how to clean up the scene, she responds that she wouldn't clean up but would claim that Danny was a Domestic Abuser.
  • The Messers discuss what to do if the other dies: Danny wants a two-week wake (first week for mourning, second week for partying) and Lindsay "jokingly" declares that she'll haunt him and any future girlfriends forever while eating all of his cannolis.
• Big Applesauce: The CSI franchise finally makes its way to NYC with this show. Mac, who is from Chicago, tells Danny at one point that they are blessed to be working for the finest institution in the greatest city in America.
• Big Bad: Several, including Shane Casey, the 333 Stalker, the Cabbie Killer, and the Compass Killer, all of whom have arcs of four episodes or more.
• Big Guy Rodeo: The victim in "The Party's Over" is strangled by someone much smaller than him jumping on his back and strangling him from behind.
• Big Heroic Run: Sheldon runs down the middle of the street with his game face on and carrying a rifle when he heads to the warehouse to help rescue Danny and Adam in "Snow Day."
• Big Honking Traffic Jam: In "Summer in the City," Mac is one of those honking his horn in the middle of stopped traffic blocking the way to a crime scene. He gives up and says, "Grab your kit, Hawkes. We're walking."
• The Big Rotten Apple: The series zig-zags this. Overall, New York is presented as an amazing place to visit and live in... but it's a show that takes place in the CSI-verse, so you may want to watch out for all of the (mostly murdered) dead bodies.
• Big, Stupid Doodoo-Head: Dets. Angell and Flack have nabbed a mouthy suspect:
  Angell: Shut up, you stupid idiot! [turns to Flack] Is that redundant?
  Flack: Not with this guy, no.
• Billy Needs an Organ: "Live or Let Die" has a variation: it's the doctor's wife who needs the liver. He orchestrates a medical helicopter hijacking and kills several people in the process. Mac tells the man he will likely be in prison when his wife dies.
• Bird-Poop Gag: In "Risk," Stella and Flack are questioning a suspect who is feeding pigeons while standing up through the sunroof of his limo. They need his handkerchief for evidence and ask him to explain a large stain on it. He says the birds gave something back to him. A reference is made to that being considered good luck.
  • This scene has a mild Call-Back "Food for Thought." Adam finds traces of bird saliva on a victim and asks Mac if he thinks someone getting bird spit on them is good luck "just like bird sh..." Mac testily interrupts him before he can finish his question.
• Birthday Episode:
  • Downplayed in "Murder Sings the Blues." Mac has his birthday off and goes to the opera with Peyton, who wants to celebrate afterward. He gets called in to work and the case keeps getting more complicated, keeping him there. They end up sharing a cupcake from a vending machine on another floor of the Crime Lab building. In the next episode, it is revealed that Stella had stopped by his place to drop off his gift, but no other mention of his birthday is ever made.
  • One of the cases in "Sweet 16" involves a murder at a teenage girl's birthday party.
  • The case in "Unwrapped" is that of a man murdered on the way to his niece's birthday party and a missing gift holds a vital clue. Meanwhile the team are all making plans to attend 3-year-old Lucy's birthday party. Mac uses the opportunity to invite Christine so she can meet everyone. Adam, seeing all the gifts she brought, mentions that his birthday is the next month and that she and Mac "are definitely invited."
• Bizarre and Improbable Ballistics: "Hostage" features a gun that fires two successive rounds so quickly and accurately that they pierce the victim through the exact same entrance wound. Played as a real thing in-universe.
• Black Comedy: Mac is not amused when another cop makes a joke after a suspect dies trying to jump from one rooftop to another in "Blood Out."
  Robert Hicks: [grinning slightly] Heard you had a falling out with Carmen Vega earlier today.
  Mac Taylor: [frowning] Young lady made a bad decision. Paid for it with her life.
  Robert Hicks: [apologetically] Gallows humor. Occupational hazard, I suppose.
• Bland-Name Product:
  • "World Send" delivery service is used throughout the series.
  • "Kiddie Clay" stands in for "Play Doh" in "Happily Never After."
  • Danny uses "Mighty Glue" to lift some prints during his "Trapped" predicament. He also finds some "Clog Away" drain cleaner in the victim's bathroom.
  • There's some "Handi-Foam" insulation in the episode with the urban golfers.
  • Facebook accounts are referred to simply as "profile pages" in season 8.
• Blonde, Brunette, Redhead:
  • In "Cavallino Rampante," the carjacker's three daughters (blonde and brunette went into the family business, redhead went to law school).
  • Franchise-wide, we have the male version. In color order: Gil/D.B., Mac, and Horatio.
  • Mac's love interests: Claire is shown with red/auburn hair in two flashbacks. Peyton is brunette and Christine is blonde.
• Bloody Handprint:
  • "Rain": After a robbery, one of the robbers is found in a pool of blood with baby-sized prints leading away from it.
  • "The Past, Present and Murder": A body goes missing from a crime scene. Then, a bloody handprint is found on a "trash bag animal" that appears when airflow from passing subway trains comes up thru the grates. It really does make sense in context.
• Bodily Fluid Blacklight Reveal: As is true for the entire franchise, investigators use blacklights quite frequently. One of the cases in "Tanglewood" has Danny and Aiden searching for clues in a seedy massage parlor. He aims his light in a waste basket and declares, "This is Chernobyl."
• Body in a Breadbox: Probably the most prone to this of all the CSIs, because bodies found in generic NY alleys would get pretty dull after a few weeks. A prime example is the body in a 2x2x2 foot wooden box found on a beach.
• Body of the Week / Victim of the Week: Goes with the territory, this being a Cop Show / Police Procedural.
• Body Paint: A can of green body paint laced with ecstasy leads to a model's death in "Wasted."
• The Body Parts That Must Not Be Named:
  • In "Uncertainty Rules," Danny says two female victims may have been hired "to blow out the birthday boy's candle."
  • In one episode, Danny whistles instead of using the word "penis" when telling Mac where some evidence was found on a victim.
• Body Sushi: A season 1 Victim of the Week is poisoned by her former personal assistant now employed as a human table at a sushi restaurant. The PA had only meant to sicken her former boss, who had fired her for refusing to sleep with her and blacklisted her from the industry, but the tiny amount of blowfish venom that the girl had used was potent enough to kill.
• Bolivian Army Cliffhanger:
  • In the season 5 finale, the entire team gathers in a bar which gets sprayed with bullets in a drive-by. The episode ends with everyone having hit the deck.
  • The season 6 finale ends with the Messer family facing off with Shane Casey. The screen goes black before a gunshot is heard. Who shot who?
• Booby Trap / Death Trap: An inventor's house, designed to gruesomely off his enemies. Stella narrowly avoids getting skewered by one of the traps, and Sheldon is in danger of being crushed by another.
• Bookcase Passage: A closet Neo-Nazi in "Yahrzeit" keeps his horde of Holocaust memorabilia behind a bookcase that slides in front of the entrance. The investigators find it after Mac notices scratch marks on the floor.
• Born from a Dead Woman: In "The Box," an unwed pregnant woman promises her baby to a couple, then changes her mind in her last month. She gets pushed down the stairs during a fight in their home. The husband realizes she's dead, but cuts the baby out of her and hides her body.
• Bound and Gagged: Chronlogically, Camille in "Smooth Criminal," the wife in 'Who's There?", a victim in "Where There's Smoke," and Christine in "Seth and Apep."
• The Boxing Episode: "Tales From The Undercard." Mac is revealed to be a fan of the victim, a retired boxer who got back into an underground version of the sport.
• Brats with Slingshots: Mentioned in "Commuted Sentences" when country-girl Lindsay uses one to simulate how a bullet would ricochet off a column.
• Break the Cutie:
  • Danny is involved in several fights with Mac, has been held hostage and had the shit kicked out of him by a gang of drug dealers, has been implicated in the shooting of another officer, his neighbor's 10-year-old son was murdered during a robbery-in-progress while under his care and he blamed himself for it, and his brother was put into a coma while trying to save him from (another) murder rap.
  • Flack has gotten blown up, gets beaten to a pulp on the subway, had to participate in the investigation and arrest of his mentor, had problems with his sister, and his girlfriend was killed in the line of duty.
  • Adam came pre-broken but hides it well most of the time, but has also been held hostage and roughed up by drug dealers (with Danny, from above), among other things.
• Break Up Demand: The fathers in "Blood, Sweat and Tears" forbid their kids to see each other.
• Bringing Running Shoes to a Car Chase: As Don removes a handcuffed man from a squad car when perps drive by and dump a body in front of the precinct. He takes off after them on foot, but doesn't get very far.
• Broke Episode: "It Happened to Me." Sheldon loses his life savings in bad investments. He is shown sleeping on a friend's couch after having to give up his apartment and sell his furniture. He tries to hide this from his colleagues, but reveals it to Mac and a perp when said perp is about to jump from a building due to similar circumstances. Mac lets Sheldon crash in his spare room for several episodes till he can get back on his feet.
• Broken Glass Penalty: A group of boys are playing football in the street when their ball goes thru a ground-floor apartment window. They look in, see a dead body, freak out and run away, thinking they killed the man. Later, one convinces another to turn themselves in. Det. Flack locks them up just for fun.
• Broken Pedestal:
  • Mac, Danny, and Flack have all had former partners &/or training officers turn up again and turn out to be bad.
  • Stella's mentor and pseudo-father figure turns out to be an art thief and smuggler of Grecian antiquities.
• Broken Record: Bill Withers' "Ain't No Sunshine" is used in "Manhattanhenge." The "I know, I know, I know..." part plays at least twice.
• Broken Tears: Danny weeps along with his neighbor, Rikki who is distraught, after he tells her that her 10-yr-old son was accidentally shot to death.
• Brooding Boy, Gentle Girl: Mac and Christine. He's the serious, brooding, widowed detective whose whole life is his job; she's his new sweetheart who coaxes him out of his moods and is, in his own words, "...everything that's good in my life".
• Brooklyn Rage: Danny in the earlier part of the series.
  • He wants to go Jack Bauer on the guy he thinks killed Aiden.
  • He slugs the guy who disses Rikki Sandoval after her son is killed.
  • He gives a beat-down to a neo-Nazi who spits on Sheldon.
• Buffy Speak: Mild example. In "Rain," Stella finds "something gooey" on the first victim's face. Mac snarks, "Gooey. That's a good forensics word; we should use it more often."
• Bullethole Door: "Snow Day" features a group of robbers breaking into the lab vault by shooting a circle of holes in its door. Done slightly more realistically than most of the examples of this trope, involving a .50BMG sniper rifle (i.e. a BFG) and taking most of the episode.
• Bullet Holes and Revelations: Having to wait until season 7 to find out who shot who in the finale of season 6.
• Bulletproof Vest: The team wear them when they know a suspect is particularly violent and armed.
  • Danny forgets his in one episode, forcing Mac to tell him to stay with the SUV. Unfortunately for Danny, the perp runs out of the building and he chases him anyway.
  • The 333 Stalker's brother is given one to wear before confronting him.
  • Mac, Ray Langston, and all the other officers involved wear them while trying to apprehend Casey Steele, one of the human traffickers in the NY portion of the "CSI Trilogy."
  • At the beginning of season 7's "Exit Strategy," Mac and Danny are shown getting ready to apprehend a suspect. Danny kisses a picture of Lucy before sticking it in his vest pocket while Mac, also wearing a vest, kisses his crucifix before dropping it down his shirt. Half-way thru, the episode has a Call-Back scene.
• Buried Alive: The first victim in "Boo" escapes from a "green coffin" made of hemp, digs his way out of his grave, and is mistaken for a zombie by bystanders due to his appearance and the fact that it is Halloween.
• Burlesque: The titular bar in "The Real McCoy" has a burlesque dancer. Jo mentions to Mac that she worked for a burlesque club during college and lets him think for a good while that she danced, before confessing that she kept their books.
• Burn Scars, Burning Powers: During the first two episodes of season 9, the team deals with an arsonist who has a nasty burn scar on his right hand, courtesy of his abusive mother who, ironically, was a nurse in a burn unit. She had also repeatedly punished him by making him sit in the basement, where he would stare at the fire in a wood-burning stove for hours at a time. These things had contributed to him becoming a fire bug.
• Bury Me Not on the Lone Prairie:
  • In "Get Me Out of Here!", Danny tells Lindsay he wants his ashes scattered over the Mets' field. She says she'll flush them out of the lavatory of her new husband's private jet on their way to Paris.
  • In "Misconceptions," Flack discovers a letter from his father expressing his wishes to have his ashes scattered on the diamond at Yankee Stadium. He spends the rest of the episode persuading his sister to help him do this.
• The Bus Came Back: Peyton in "Point of View" and Reed in "Pot of Gold", but just for one episode each.
• Bus Crash: Aiden's death. Everyone expected a case of The Bus Came Back when the episode and Vanessa Ferlito's guest appearance were announced, but the character only appeared alive in flashback. She is found in a burned out car, dead and charred.
• Busman's Holiday: Mac in "Greater Good." He uses his day off to reinvestigate a closed case that has been bothering him.
• The Butler Did It: Discussed by Stella and Flack in "Trapped." He lists the wealthy victim's hired help, leading her to ask:
  Stella: That's it? No butler?
  Flack: No.
  Stella: Too bad. I though we could wrap up this one up quick.
  Flack: What?
  Stella: In a mansion like this, it's always the butler.

C-D

• Cake Toppers: The head of the bride from a wedding cake topper is found lodged in the throat of a victim in 'Murder Sings the Blues.'
• California University: Fictional Chelsea University is mentioned quite a few times. Mac's stepson, Reed, is a student there beginning in Season 3.
• Call-Back:
  • In "Necrophilia Americana," Mac and Danny each use the presence of beetles on the body to tease Lindsay about having eaten the bugs at the end of "Fare Game" two episodes earlier.
  • In "Can You Hear Me Now?", Mac and Danny find a victim who has had his tongue cut out, and Mac is visibly shaken when telling Stella that the man died at the hospital. He gets the same look on his face when Christine's kidnappers send him a tongue in the mail in "Seth and Apep."
• Calling Card: Left by both the Compass Killer (compasses, obviously) and Shane Casey (t-shirts with screen-printed clues).
• Calling the Old Man Out: Adam, except his dad no longer remembers abusing him.
• Camping a Crapper: The woman who gets locked in a high-tech public toilet and drowns when its self-cleaning feature kicks in.
• Candlelit Bath: In "Heart of Glass," the first victim breaks into the apartment of a guy she wants to get back together with, sets up the classic scenario with a bottle of wine, rose petals leading to the bathtub, candles, etc., expecting him to come home soon.
• The Can Kicked Him:
  • The woman who drowned in a newly installed but faulty public toilet.
  • The guy who is accidentally killed when "blue ice" from a passing airplane conks him on the head.
    Flack: So our guy was killed by a crapsicle?
  • The high-school girl who is killed by a classmate bashing her head on a bathroom sink.
• Can't Tie His Tie: Lindsay has to help Adam with his before they go to the 9/11 10th anniversary memorial program in "Indelible."
  Lindsay: By the time you're done, it'll be the 20th anniversary.
• Can Only Move the Eyes: The victim of Locked-In Syndrome in the pilot.
• Car Cushion:
  • In "Dancing with the Fishes," a couple are driving underneath a tramway when the body of a young lady falls onto their windshield.
  • In "Past Imperfect," Clay Dobson falls (or did he jump...hmmm?) from a rooftop and lands on a squad car.
  • Downplayed in "Happily Never After" when a dead woman slides of the top of a bus that came to a sudden stop in traffic, although it is later revealed that her body was dropped from an above window by her assailant.
  • In "Nine Thirteen," the victim lands on a parked cab after falling off a 10th floor balcony.
• Car Fu: Lindsay takes out a suspect with her Avalanche when he runs off. She doesn't kill him, though.
• Carpet-Rolled Corpse: One of the victims in "Jamalot" is found rolled up in an expensive rug inside a dumpster.
• Carrying the Antidote: Played with in "Personal Foul." The perp fills one capsule with deadly poison and a second with its antidote. *She* swallows the antidote first, then crushes the poison capsule with her teeth... immediately before kissing her victim, thus transferring the poison to him.
• Carved Mark:
  • The Cabbie Killer from season 4 carves "L2729" on the back of his victims' necks with a piece of gravestone. The last episode of his arc reveals that it stands for Leviticus 27:29, which refers to the irrevocable giving over of things or persons to the Lord, often by totally destroying them. He fancied himself the Greek god Charon, a.k.a. The Ferryman of Hades, whose duty it was to transport the newly dead down the River Styx.
  • The leader of the vampire coven in 'Sanguine Love' uses a sharpened ankh to carve the same symbol into the inside of all the members' left wrists.
• Casting Gag: In 'Comes Around,' John McEnroe plays himself and his own doppelganger, who has taken to impersonating him. McEnroe can't believe anyone would mistake the two of them.
• Catchphrase: Lampshaded by both Danny, who knows he says "Boom" a lot, and Adam, who admits he says "What up!" too much.
• Catfishing: In 'Who's There?', a woman makes a fake Facebook profile to lure her husband into an online affair so she can use it against him in their divorce.
• Cat Scare: In one episode, Danny & Lindsay enter a suspect's apartment in the dark, guns drawn. A cat startles them, causing Lindsay to say, "Whew, almost neutered you, Kitty."
• Caught in the Bad Part of Town: In 'Blacklist,' the killer hacks the GPS of a CEO's car and sends him into the worst part of New York. He then activates the car alarm to attract the attention of the bad element.
• Caught on the Jumbotron: One victim is killed because he kisses the man next to him at a baseball game and it gets shown on the big screen.
• Cell Phones Are Useless:
  • While the lab is being stormed in "Snow Day." Peyton is outside, knowing Mac is still in the building & tries to reach him, but the service has been tampered with.
  • In "Unfriendly Chat", Mac has just left the office when Adam witnesses a murder in real time via the internet. Adam tries to catch him before he leaves the parking garage but just misses him. Then he tries to reach him on his cell, but the call won't go through so he wanders around for a bit, panicking while trying to find a signal.
• Chairman of the Brawl:
  • In 'White Gold,' Flack and Lovato attempt to arrest a suspect in a bar. The suspect knocks Flack down and then uses a bar stool to knock Lovato's gun out of her hand and knock her down. Flack puts a gun to his head before he can finish her off.
  • Previously downplayed in Lovato's first episode, "Where There's Smoke." As she arrives unannounced at the precinct, still dressed in her undercover get-up, the cops are trying to restrain a very large, very aggressive perp who breaks away from them and barrels in her direction. Without even looking at him, she calmly slides a metal chair into his path with her foot, tripping him so they can recapture him, then plants her foot on his chest:
    Det. Lovato: Where do you think you're going?
• Chain-Link Fence: In 'Unspoken,' the perp outruns Flack at one point, ducking down an alley with a fence at the end. He scales it, but injures his hand on a spoke at the top and his ball cap falls off, giving the team two pieces of evidence to analyze.
• Chalk Outline: In a season 4 arc, a perp out for revenge for the death of his brother when they were kids invokes this by leaving a child-size outline as one of a series of clues to his motivation and identity.
• Character Narrator: Two instances.
  • In season 5's 'The Box,' Danny tells the story of the case to someone off screen for most of the episode.
  • In season 9's 'The Lady in the Lake,' while waiting to file a report in the precinct, Adam tells two little girls about his case.
• Cheated Death, Died Anyway: Mac's wife (who died on 9/11) made it out of the first tower, only to (apparently) be crushed by falling rubble from the second.
• Childhood Brain Damage: One of the victims in 'Super Men' suffered from this after trying to fly out a window as a child. At the time of his death, he is living in a group home and still thinks of himself as a superhero.
• Christianity is Catholic:
  • The opening scene of the series proper finds Mac trying to have a quiet moment in a Catholic church.
  • A few episodes later in 'Three Generations Are Enough,' Stella makes the sign of the Cross before beginning her search for evidence in a church. Later she asks Mac if he still goes; he replies, "Sometimes."
  • Danny takes his young neighbor, Ruben, to the "Blessing of the Bikes" at the boy's church in 'Child's Play.'
  • One of the firemen en route to a fire in the opening of 'Playing with Matches' kisses his crucifix before dropping it down the front of his shirt.
  • The street basketball player in 'Oedipus Hex' visits his church to make confession, light a candle, and obtain a prayer card (which he places in his sock) before an important match.
  • The gang leader in 'Sangre por Sangre' prays and makes the sign of the Cross before beginning his breakfast.
  • The perp in 'Life Sentence' kept his girlfriend's rosary after she died.
  • Mac is seen wearing and kissing a crucifix twice in 'Exit Strategy.'
  • After Mac prays over a deceased first responder in 'Indelible,' he makes the sign of the Cross...although he's so exhausted, his hand drops and he can't quite finish it properly.
  • Christine prays over Mac with a rosary in 'Near Death.'
• Christmas Episode: 'Second Chances' from season 6: The team collect toys for children of fallen officers, Mac & Stella deliver a very large Christmas tree to the venue where they'll be handed out, a fellow officer of Flack's is recruited to play Santa, and several of the team dress up as elves and pass out the toys.
• Chuck Cunningham Syndrome:
  • Danny's brother Louie is left in a coma in season 2. He's only mentioned once again, in season 6's 'Redemptio,' and is referred to in the past tense then.
  • After The Bus Came Back for one episode in season 6, Peyton disappears again.
  • Dr. Aubrey Hunter, who briefly appeared to be a new love interest for Mac, vanished without a word after the episode following Peyton's second disappearance.
  • At the end of 'Pot of Gold,' Mac takes a rain check on Reed's offer to go "grab a green beer or something." They agree to get together later, but Reed is never seen or mentioned again.
• Circling Vultures: All three branches of the CSI franchise have used the spot-the-vultures technique of finding human remains. Even New York, for a body on a rooftop in 'No Good Deed.'
• Circus Episode: In 'Blood, Sweat and Tears,' a very small box is found on the beach with the body of a man curled nicely in it. What is amazing is that this box is only 2x2x2 feet. This leads the detectives to a circus where the man was working as a contortionist.
• City of Adventure: Cultural festivals, abundant nightlife, magic acts in the street, Fleet Week, parades...there's no reason to be bored in NYC.
• Clean Cut / Diagonal Cut: The second victim in 'Corporate Warriors' has been decapitated by a katana so cleanly that his head is still sitting atop his neck when his body is found.
• Clear My Name / Clear Their Name:
  • Danny, twice. He's implicated in the shooting death of a fellow officer in season 1, and one of his trainees tells higher-ups that he told her to lie about the particulars of another shooting in season 8.
  • Hawkes is framed for a robbery/murder in 'Raising Shane.'
  • Flack is benched when a suspect dies in his custody...with no one but the two of them in the interrogation room.
  • Mac spends three episodes under suspicion of murder when a serial killer invokes Taking You with Me.
• Claustrophobia: One of the perp's intended victims in 'Blacklist' is a nurse who is severely claustrophobic. He uses remote technology to trap her in a hospital elevator and send her to a floor that's temporarily empty. Mac and Sheldon barely get to her before she passes out from hyperventilating.
• Close to Home: A case with a young female victim in 'Silent Night' upsets relative newcomer Lindsay so badly she deserts the crime scene.
• Clothespin Nose Plug: A variation in "Dancing with the Fishes" has Mac and Stella walk into his office to find Lindsay waiting with two bottles on his desk, one of hydrogen sulfide (which is known for smelling like rotten eggs) and the other of a test product not yet on the market which is designed to block out bad smells. She demonstrates the new product's use by smearing some of it right underneath Mac's nose, then opening the smelly chemical and having him sniff it. All he can detect is the scent of vanilla.
• Clothing-Concealed Injury:
  • In episode 2.05, 'Dancing with the Fishes,' Lindsay encounters a woman who exploits this. She uses makeup to fake a black eye, then wears sunglasses to cover it up.
  • Justified and downplayed by Mac, whose battle scar from the 1983 Beruit Marine Barracks bombing is naturally covered by his shirt. When Stella sees it while he's being checked out by the paramedics after the explosion in episode 2.24, 'Charge of This Post,' he merely comments, "Old injury."
  • Reed wears a scarf to hide his neck injury inflicted by the Cabbie Killer (season 4) when he returns (in season 6) to ask for Mac's help in 'Pot of Gold.'
• The Coats Are Off: Justified on a couple of occasions:
  • Lab coats are normally worn while processing evidence and/or doing reconstructions, but in 'Corporate Warriors,' Mac is seen brandishing bladed weapons, including a katana, without one because it would impede his range of motion.
  • Also downplayed in 'Snow Day.' After the sprinklers kick on, Mac removes his jacket, quietly balls it up and sets it aside while discussing tactics with Sheldon & Stella. Ostensibly, it would be uncomfortable if soaked, but he'll need that range of motion again before it's over.
• Cobweb of Disuse: In 'Death House.' While the team investigate a suspected murder in a penthouse that's been closed up for 80+ years, Flack sticks his head up through the attic door. The area is full of cobwebs and they're hanging from the door as he opens it.
• Coca-Pepsi, Inc.: Subtle example. Apparently Goodyear and Firestone have merged, because one episode features GoodFire tires.
• Cockroaches Will Rule the Earth: The killer of the week in "A Daze of Wine and Roaches", a Friend to Bugs who murdered a man to prevent him from killing a cockroach, delivers this tidbit of trivia as part of his Motive Rant. It only makes Danny think the guy is completely deranged.
• Color Motif / Color Wash: See Mood Lighting below.
• Comatose Canary: Subverted - it only looked like a Comatose Canary...twice: in 'Blink' and 'Damned If You Do.'
• Combat Cue Stick: In 'Corporate Warriors,' two executives are kung-fu fighting in a bar. One grabs a broken pool cue & stabs the other in the heart, killing him.
• Comforting the Widow: Danny has sex with the mother of Ruben Sandoval, a kid who was accidentally shot during a robbery and died. Not exactly a widow, but a single mom - pretty much the same idea, though.
• Condensation Clue: In 'Unspoken,' Danny learns that a would-be killer has been in Lindsay's hospital room when steam from his coffee allows Jo to spot smudges on the room's window which contain fingerprints.
• Confess to a Lesser Crime: Invoked with Aiden's case in 'Officer Blue.' She makes the perp believe they think he's guilty of stabbing the victim, as well as what he actually did. The guy balks, admits to what he did, but is adamant that he didn't stab anyone. What he doesn't realize is that what he did was actually lethal, so he's arrested anyway.
• Connect the Deaths:
  • Inverted when a killer is identified because he'd turned on the lights in his downtown office suite, breaking the pattern of lights in which the victim had spelled out "Marry Me," as a grand romantic gesture.
  • Played straight in 'Sláinte' when Mac plots the three locations where a victim's body parts have been found, but whose head is still missing, and realizes that the sites are corners of the neighborhood formerly known as Hell's Kitchen. When they search the fourth corner, they find the missing head.
• Constructive Body Disposal: In 'Tales from the Undercard,' the body of a retired boxer is found in freshly laid concrete on a construction site.
• Content Warnings: The original airing of "Yahrzeit" opened with a notice that the episode dealt with the horrors of the Holocaust and was thus possibly disturbing to some viewers.
• Continuity Nod:
  • Mac keeps folders of unsolved cases on the corner of his desk. In Season 1, he tells Stella there are currently nine but that there used to be 12. In Season 2, he tells an employee he has to fire that he'll add the case at hand to the pile. Throughout the series run, the folders are seen there but not mentioned again until the season 7 finale, when he solves the last one and moves its folder to a cabinet.
  • 'Zoo York': On Lindsay's first day, she has to paw her way through a tiger's waste looking for evidence. Five episodes later, Mac has her dumpster diving. She tells him the rookie stuff has to stop. He responds with, "Beats sifting through tiger dung."
  • The death of Jessica Angell is referred to several times, including her father inviting Flack over for dinner on what would've been her birthday, and Mac's in-limbo conversation with Flack in 'Near Death.'
• Contortionist: The young man who dies after the box he is folded up in is buried on a beach.
• Convenient Character Replacement: In the season 7 premiere, Jo is brought in to fill the position Stella vacated to head up the New Orleans Crime Lab.
• Conveniently Placed Sharp Thing:
  • When Frankie ties her up, Stella uses the blade from a straight razor to cut herself loose. Justifiable in that he dumped her in her *own* bathtub.
  • The rebar Mac uses to saw thru the zip-tie the preps bound his wrists with in 'The Untouchable.' Also justifiable in that they left him in an alley full of this sort of stuff.
• Cool Code of Source: 'Kill Screen' involves someone using a hack to cheat in a Gears of War 3 tournament. At one point we see the hack's source code. Apparently, it's coded in...HTML. The author of this article (in Polish) even tracked down the original website from which the HTML code was taken for the show.
• Cool Shades: As seen in 'Zoo York' for example, Mac does have some; he just doesn't flaunt them the way Horatio does. Justified on a number of occasions when the team is out in bright sunlight. See 'Tales from the Undercard' where Stella and Mac have on shades but Lindsay doesn't. She's squinting and holding her hand up to block the sun as she's talking to them.
• Coolest Club Ever: A number of popular clubs are mentioned throughout the series.
  • Adam is familiar with a lot of them, and is quite surprised in 'Risk' that Mac knows all about one called "Wild, Wild, Wet" which features fighting Beta fish on its tables. Mac tells him he was there working on a case, but then smugly adds:
    Mac: The shrimp cocktail was *fantastic*.
  • In season 5, Terrence Davis keeps his pet panther at his nightclub. He tells the detectives that she's the draw that keeps people coming there.
  • 'The Real McCoy' in season 9 is a speakeasy. Flack can't believe people would pay $20 for a cocktail. Lindsay tells him it's for the nostalgia.
• Cop/Criminal Family:
  • Detective/CSI Danny Messer and his older brother Louie, who, in his younger days, was a member of a gang whose leader had shot and killed a rival. Louie and another member were present at the time, making them accomplices at best. They were all also guilty of shakedown activity.
  • Detective Don Flack and his younger sister Samantha, who was an alcoholic and had been in prison and part of one of the later seasons revisited the friction between them a few times.
• Cop Killer, which of course leads to Cop Killer Manhunt:
  • One example is Flack's Love Interest, Angell, who's shot in the season 5 finale while protecting a Donald Trump/Rupert Murdoch expy's son (who was due to testify against him. The killers turn out to be kidnappers, who knew this would put immediate suspicion on their target's father). The episode also ends with the bar they're holding a wake for her in being shot up in a drive-by. Nobody's killed (although Danny ends up in a wheelchair for a while), but it fits the trope in spirit.
  • Aiden also counts, despite no longer being on the team. They are dead set on finding the perp and Danny is willing to beat up the guy he thinks did it. Mac's speech in the beginning has a double meaning. He's talking about the dead Marine, being one himself, but it clearly shows with Aiden too. "You attack one, you attack us all."
  • Mac himself is a variant in the season 8 finale, having been shot In the Back after stumbling into a drug store robbery. He only nearly dies, but the NYPD's reaction is largely the same as in a straight example.
• The Corpse Stops Here:
  • Zig-zagged in "Night, Mother." Don wants to arrest the woman caught with her hands in a dead woman's chest, making stabbing motions. Mac wants to wait for more definitive evidence and she turns out not to be the killer. She is a chronic sleepwalker trying to massage the woman's heart in an attempt to revive her.
  • The woman who leaves a bloody trail from a stabbing victim to her apartment is immediately arrested, but turns out to be a nurse who had stopped to see if she could help him.
• Corpse Temperature Tampering:
  • In "Not What It Looks Like," a man kills his wife and places her corpse in front of an air conditioner in an apartment in a building scheduled for collapse in hopes that it will never be found, but that if it is, her time of death will be off, allowing him to formulate an alibi. The team eventually figure out what he did and he's arrested.
  • The killer in "Prey" attends a lecture Stella gives during a college course on forensics where she uses examples from previous cases, including the woman from "Not What It Looks Like." This killer picks up on the change-the-time-of-death thing but uses dry ice instead of air conditioning to make it look like her victim (who'd been stalking her) had died earlier than he had. She does a very good job and almost gets away with it. She's arrested, but it's left up in the air if she goes to jail because she never confesses.
• Couldn't Find a Pen: There's a variant where the victim doesn't do it; the killer uses the victim's finger to write someone else's name in order to frame them. 'Air Apparent'
• Counterfeit Cash: Central to the first season finale, 'What You See Is What You See,' as well as 'The Ride In' and 'Keep It Real.'
• Courtroom Episode: Mac trying to clear his name in the Dobson fiasco in 'Comes Around.'
• Covered in Kisses: When Mac finally finds Christine in 'Seth and Apep,' he can't seem to stop kissing her face and the top of her head. It's hard to blame him.
• Creator Cameo: Writer/producer/editor John Dove appears as Det. John Scagnetti in three episodes of Season 2.
• Creator's Culture Carryover: In 'Unfriendly Chat,' Adam slacks at work by chatting with a French girl who is promptly murdered on camera. The only clue as to where the murder took place is a TV in the background noting the temperature outside, so the team checks climate reports from all over the world to find what place had that temperature at that time. At no point do they notice that the temperature is in Fahrenheit, which is only used in the United States and four small island countries. (The murder turns out to have happened in Manhattan).
• Creepy Cockroach: 'A Daze of Wine and Roaches' has a live, bejeweled Madagascar Hissing Cockroach worn as a broach to a restaurant. It hisses loudly while Lindsay examines it in the Lab.
• Creepy Doll: The one in 'City of the Dolls' that sounds demon-like when they first turn her on and her first sentence drags out, making her sound like a spooky man, "Myyy naaame is So—phie."
• Crime After Crime: In the two-parter with Mac's old partner, it is revealed that 17 years prior Bill Hunt had stolen a large amount of cash, then killed a witness to cover it up.
• Crime and Punishment Series: A number of episodes end with a Perp Walk. Some of the guilty, including Shane Casey, Leonard Brooks and the guy from Lindsay's past, are shown in jail after being caught.
• Crime Reconstruction: Pretty much every episode. Techniques include stabbing a pig to determine a type of weapon, digital simulations, acting out fights, and setting things (Mac's arm among them) on fire.
• Crossover:
  • With the other CSIs, first with CSI: Miami pursuing a suspect wanted in both states, when a kidnapped girl is taken cross country; and more recently with the original when Mac's girlfriend is kidnapped by her shady employee's loan shark, and the girl who impersonates her in Las Vegas is killed trying to rob a jewelry store.
  • With Miami and Vegas in the "CSI Trilogy" which occurs in episode 7 of all three shows (originally airing during Nov of 2009).
  • Also with Cold Case. Stella's foster sister killed someone in PA, and due to their blood brothers thing, the necklace she still had with some of Stella's blood causes one of the Cold Case guys to come investigate it in NY. Ends up with Let Off by the Detective, when Stella finds that her friend had killed a man who had molested her as a child.
• Cross Player: Adam changes Mac's Second Life avatar in 'Down the Rabbit Hole' to female so Mac, who is clueless about such things, can go after the bad guy. Stella has to take over his dialogue because he's got no game, either... at least as a female.
• Cruel and Unusual Death: Leonard Brooks' post-arsonist M.O. He roasts one victim to death inside an elevator, and burns another one from the inside out using a chemical that mixes with stomach acid. Drinking water only makes it worse.
• Cruel Twist Ending: In "Dancing with the Fishes" a tram operator is killed by the brother of his wife, who claimed he was abusive. When Stella interviews the wife, she discovers she was applying bruises with makeup and tricked her brother into murdering her husband while he was on the job, because that meant a large payout from the city, which a divorce would not provide. She seems unfazed that her actions also led to the death of an innocent passenger, and that her brother will spend the rest of his life in jail.
• Cry into Chest:
  • Lindsay, with Danny at the end of 'Not What It Looks Like.' She's relieved the undercover ordeal she'd volunteered for is over.
  • Christine, when Mac rescues her from kidnappers in 'Seth and Apep.'
• Cut Apart: In 'Smooth Criminal,' Flack & Co appear to have found the apartment where Camille is being held by a hitman. But, they break down the door of a Red Herring, and the hitman has Camille open his... to find his building's superintendent.
• Cut Himself Shaving:
  • Played straight by Henry Darius' psychiatrist who claims this is what happened after Mac spots a wide scrape on his cheek, but then admits Darius had just assaulted him and snuck out the back door of his office.
  • Lampshaded by a suspect in 'Turbulence' when Mac finds blood on his cuff:
    "Is this the point where I say I cut myself shaving?"
  • Played straight when Sheldon gets beat up by thugs sent by a so-called friend of his who wants him to destroy evidence. At first he tells Mac he walked into a wall, then fesses up to him.
• Cyberspace: 'Down the Rabbit Hole' takes place half in Second Life.
• Daddy's Little Villain: Two of the daughters in 'Cavallino Rampante' follow their father into the car theft business, and the one in 'Identity Crisis' becomes a con-artist just like her old man.
• The Daily Misinformer: A Season 5 arc features a sleazy media mogul named Robert Dunbrook who owns more than 20 publications. One of his newspapers is The Ledger which runs stories on every perceived scandal the owner can come up with... everything from corrupt politicians to UN-proven sexual harassment by various city leaders. In "The Party's Over," the paper sensationalizes the "Blue Flu" when most of the NYPD goes on strike due to not being paid when the fund their salaries come from dries up. Dunbrook then turns around and donates twenty million dollars to the city to make himself look good. At one point, Mac confronts Dunbrook during a photo shoot. A young woman being photographed for the cover of The Ledger is wearing only a low-cut top with an NYPD logo on it, an NYPD cap, and a thong while eating a donut. Dunbrook is handed a printed shot of this with the heading "New York's Finest" which he approves while speaking to Mac, who's looking on in disgust. There is a momentary zigzag in the season finale, though, when The Ledger's cover story is a memorial for an NYPD officer who was killed in the line of duty.
• Dance of Romance:
  • A variation. In the opening of 'Down the Rabbit Hole,' a janitor does a tango with a mannequin in honor of his and his late wife's wedding anniversary.
  • Mac & Christine slow dance to Josh Groban performing "Happy in My Heartache" as the Valentine's Day episode, 'Blood Actually,' ends.
• Dark Secret: Often the motive for many of the crimes. Then there's the one suspect who postpones reporting his car stolen because he doesn't want his wife to find out he's having an affair... with another man.
• Data Drive MacGuffin: A stolen flash drive pursued by various characters throughout most of Season 5 is said to contain scandalous information that could ruin the lives and careers of a number of city officials.
• Dead Animal Warning: In 'Dead Inside,' Stella receives a dead rat in the mail: a warning to her that the murder of the "rat fisherman" should remain an unsolved case.
• Dead Man's Chest:
  • In 'Hammer Down,' the 2nd part of the "CSI Trilogy," the team discovers a woman's body stuffed in a barrel that fell off a semi during a traffic accident.
  • In another episode, a dead woman is stuffed into her own suitcase before being thrown into a lake.
• Dead Person Conversation:
  • Mac talks to Claire twice in 'Near Death.'
  • The Compass Killer talks to his dead wife in 'Manhattanhenge.' Mac realizes this and uses it to his advantage in apprehending him.
• Deadly Bath:
  • 'Heart of Glass' has a woman who fills a bathtub with rose petals and water ending up electrocuting herself.
  • In 'Flag on the Play,' the body of a lingerie football player is found in the whirlpool tub in the team's changing room.
• Deadly Prank: The victim of the exploding cigar meant for Laughing Larry in 'Child's Play' dies from having his entire lower jaw blown off.
• Deadly Road Trip: 'She's Not There' has the death of a tourist, who comes to NYC in search of his missing daughter.
• "Dear John" Letter: Peyton breaks up with Mac via an Air Mail letter sent from London to his office, though she apologizes for it later during her one episode return visit.
• Death by Falling Over: The episode "Recycling" features an unusual variant on this trope. The lady who is stabbed in the heart: Someone who is jealous of her accidentally poisons her with Ipecac, which doesn't really kill you, but can make you deathly sick if given too much. She is walking across the floor when she starts to feel sick and tumbles forward, landing on an open bag of knitting needles, one of which fatally pierces her heart.
• Death by Origin Story: Claire Taylor, who died in the terrorist attacks on 9/11/01, three years before the show began.
• Death from Above: The construction worker victim in 'Tri-borough.' A frozen chunk of waste from an airplane toilet dislodges and hits him on the head.
• Death in the Clouds: 'Turbulence.' A man is found stabbed to death in an airplane lavatory during a flight from NYC to Washington D.C.
• Death of a Child:
  • 'Corporate Warriors': A 10 yr old boy dies from smoke inhalation.
  • 'Child's Play': Danny's young neighbor is hit by a bullet during a bodega robbery.
  • 'Unspoken': A little girl is accidentally shot by her best friend who had removed the magazine from the gun they were playing with so he thought it was empty.
  • 'Misconceptions': The body of a little boy who'd been missing for 20 years is found to have been sealed up in a wall by his killer.
• Debating Names: While Lindsay visits her parents in Montana during her maternity leave in "Communication Breakdown", Danny is trying to decide what to name their child, which he assumes is a boy. The team gathers at the end of the episode and get in on it. Flack suggests "Crocket," while Sheldon prefers "Tubbs." Stella adds "Mac" into the mix, which Adam immediately laughs out loud at. As Mac gives him a stern look, Danny's phone rings. It's Lindsay... saying the baby's a girl.
• Deceased Fall-Guy Gambit: In 'Party Down,' a semi-truck with 20 people locked in the trailer hurtles headlong into the Hudson and four victims drown. The killer tries to frame one of them for the crime.
• Defective Detective/Dysfunction Junction/Standard Cop Backstory: Let's take it from the top, shall we?
  • Mac: 9/11 widower, has been framed for murder, blown up three times, taken hostage three times as well (once by a Stalker without a Crush), seems to attract serial killers like flies to honey, shot nearly to death, his previous girlfriend left him with only a letter (though The Bus Came Back). He had to deal with having a Stalker with a Crush for quite a while. Spent several months struggling to overcome speech aphasia related to his gunshot injury and nearly lost his new girlfriend because he was too darn stubborn to let her in on what was happening. Then, said girlfriend was abducted and nearly killed before Mac found her.
  • Danny: Has been suspected of murder twice. The second time, his brother ended up in a coma while trying to clear Danny's name. He's gotten in trouble more than once for losing his temper with suspects. For a while he was suspected of shooting an undercover cop and it caused problems between him and Mac for almost a season. His neighbor's son got shot while Danny was looking after him. Was in a wheelchair from a motive-less shooting. Had his wallet (with ID, credit cards, and *badge*) stolen by Shane Casey. And then Shane Casey tried to kill him, fell to his death (not!), broke into his and Lindsay's apartment and threatened to kill their daughter, only stopped by Lindsay's shot. Later, he became a sergeant, only to have one of his rookies shoot the wrong man when two guys threatened the group, which had gone out for a drink.(One guy had a gun, but the rookie cop shot the other one.) On top of that, he was accused of having an affair because the same rookie was seen cozying up to him on a surveillance camera tape. She then lied and said Danny told her to lie, nearly costing him his job, though he was cleared when Lindsay pressured the rookie to tell the truth.
  • Stella: Orphan, with lingering if mostly well-hidden issues as a result. Had to shoot a stalker ex-boyfriend and had her apartment burnt out by a next-door neighbor. Discovers that the professor whom she regarded as a father figure is an art thief and kept the fact that he knew her mother a secret for years (and judging from his confession that he loved her mother gives the implication that he may have been her father). Then when she confronts him, the professor takes a bullet for her from his brother and dies in her arms.
  • Lindsay: Witnessed her friends' murder and has been dealing with the lingering trauma ever since. Married Danny who kept secrets from her and was in a wheelchair. Later became traumatized after killing Shane Casey in her own home. Had to listen to accusations Danny was cheating on her after the incident with Danny and his group of rookie cops, though it was untrue.
  • Flack: Alcoholic sister. Had to arrest his mentor for tampering with a crime scene, which caused problems between him and Mac and between him and the rest of the PD. Got blown up. Girlfriend was shot and killed, leaving him mentally screwed up for at least the first part of season 6.
  • Adam: Has hinted at past abuse (psychological, eventually revealed to be physical as well). Was held hostage and tortured so the criminals could get access to the lab. In the episode 'The Party's Over,' it's hinted that he may have OCD. His job also seems to be perennially in danger, first from budget cuts and then from one of the other lab techs. He also happened to be playing street hockey when a car bomb went off right next to him. His very secret shame is he slept through 9/11. He made up for it by going to "The Pile" the next day, although depending on how long he was there he could now be susceptible to cancer. Additionally his dad was/is an abusive jerkass who, thanks to Alzheimer's disease, doesn't remember the abuse or Adam (most of the time - he recognized Adam long enough to tell him what a disappointment he is and looked awfully shifty when Adam asked him about the abuse directly); he does, however, remember how much of an abusive jerkass his father was. Fortunately he has a very understanding girlfriend.
  • Sid: Changed careers for unknown reasons. Divorced at least twice. Inhabits a "creepy place" with dead body trivia. The woman he treated like a daughter was murdered after her husband, a former colleague, had to be fired, then murdered drug addicts, and turned out to have been stealing organs from corpses while he worked at the lab. And let's not forget having to go to the hospital: once for an allergic reaction, another time for getting radiation poisoning while examining a body, and finally the exploding bullet to the face that would have blinded him if it weren't for his glasses. And having survived all that, he was then diagnosed with Non-Hodgkin's lymphoma that may well kill him, as it's well advanced.
  • Sheldon: Lost a series of patients on the table, accused of robbery and murder, friend tried to bribe him to destroy evidence. Lost most of his savings in an insurance scam, resulting in him losing his home and having to sell a lot of his stuff until Mac offered him his spare room to give him time to get back on his feet. His sister was murdered, and his girlfriend left him some years back because she was raped and he ended up not being there like she needed. Got called out for having marijuana in his system after his new girlfriend was using it and spent time with him, causing him to breathe it in off her.
  • Jo: Forced out of the FBI after turning in a dirty agent that got a rape case she was working thrown out, attacked by the rapist after the victim's father tried to get him caught by framing him, and was forced to shoot said rapist in self-defense. Lost her sister to a drunk driver several years ago.
• Defenestrate and Berate / Fake Kill Scare: 'The Lying Game' opens with a jilted boyfriend throwing his ex-girlfriend's belongings out of the window at her and her new boyfriend. The last item is her pet dog. When the new boyfriend's legs are covered in blood, the viewer is led to believe that the dog has just splattered on the sidewalk. The camera then pulls back to show the girl has safely caught the dog and the blood has come from a passing truck that was spreading salt on the icy street.
• Derailed Fairy Tale: In 'The Lady in the Lake,' Adam begins telling two little girls in the precinct about the case, describing it as a "princess story." It derails when he overlaps it with telling them about the "piece of a spaceship" that he found at the scene.
• Destroy the Evidence: In one example of many, Flack's mentor removes evidence that would incriminate his son in 'The Fall.'
• Deus Ax Machina: Played with in 'Uncertainty Rules.' It's not the suspect with the ax who's guilty. He would most likely have been another victim had he not been strung out on LSD in the bathroom at the time.
• Diamonds in the Buff: In 'Summer in the City,' Stella and Danny must solve the mysterious death of a famous designer found dead, wearing his latest creation which is a bra made of diamonds. In the course of the investigation, they interview the model who wore the bra for a photoshoot, and there are plenty of flashbacks to the shoot where she is wearing the diamond bra and nothing else.
• The Diaper Change:
  • Joked about after Mac is asked to be Lucy's godfather.
    Flack: Godfather, you know that's code for "diaper changer."
  • Later, Danny jokes about it to Lindsay, too.
    Danny: You got your "I don't like what I see face." The one you get when I'm changing Lucy's diaper.
• Did I Mention It's Christmas?:
  • The show's only mention of Thanksgiving is in season 3 when Sid asks Mac over if he doesn't have plans. Mac says he does, but won't tell Sid with whom...then walks away smiling.
  • That same year, in "Silent Night," the outside of the first victim's house is shown decorated for Christmas. The ep bookends with a grandmother giving her infant granddaughter a snow globe. It's implied, but never stated, that it's her Christmas gift.
  • In mid-December of season 7, Jo goads Mac into going window shopping with her so they can see a particular store unveil it's "holiday" window display. He spots a pickpocket in the crowd, and when the window is revealed, there's a dead body in it. Mac grumbles, "Now you know why I hate shopping." The word "Christmas" is never uttered.
  • The victim of season 9's "The Real McCoy" is found impaled by a stand at a Christmas tree lot. After the team leaves the scene, no further mention of the holiday is made.
• "Die Hard" on an X: The third season finale, 'Snow Day,' is a straight-up homage to the film. The lab is stormed by a gang of mobsters intent on stealing back their confiscated cocaine horde. Mac, Stella and Sheldon have to outsmart them using only what's available to them in the Lab and Morgue while their phone lines have been cut and cell service has been tampered with. Slowly they take the perps out, one by one.
• Died in Your Arms Tonight: After getting caught in the crossfire during a shootout, Professor P dies while Stella cradles him.
• Diegetic Soundtrack Usage: An alternate arrangement of an instrumental portion of Baba O'Riley is played by a violinist during a nighttime street party in 'Boo.'
• Digital De-Aging: During season 5's 'Blacklist,' CGI, lighting and sepia tones were used to make Sinise look 15-20 years younger in flashbacks to Mac visiting his parents right before leaving the Marines to join the NYPD.
• Dirty Cop: Repeatedly. Danny, Mac and Flack have all had former partners or mentors revealed as this.
• Disability Alibi:
  • In 'Cavallino Rampante,' a perp known for his electronic inventions is considered a suspect for a string of Ferrari thefts, until the cops arrive at his apartment and discover that he's aged, quite weak, and dependent upon a wheelchair.
  • Averted in 'DOA for a Day' when the Navy Seal son of a judge has motive for his father's murder. When the detectives arrive to question him, they discover he's a triple amputee, but he tells them he still could've done it...20 different ways.
• Disappointed by the Motive: Danny's reaction to the murderer in 'A Daze of Wine and Roaches:'
  You killed a guy over a cockroach?!
• Disappointing Promotion: At the end of season 7, Danny Messer secures a promotion to sergeant, which takes him out of the crime lab and down to the ground floor commanding beat cops. He's initially okay with it, until one of his subordinates screws up and tries to pin it on him, leading him to request a "demotion" back to the crime lab.
• Discovering Your Own Dead Body: A variation during Mac's "limbo" period in 'Near Death.' When he visits Sid, he finds the man about to remove a sheet from a body. He asks Sid to wait and wants to know if that's himself on the table. Sid says, "Only if you've given up." They continue talking, but the body is never shown.
• Disguised Hostage Gambit: 'Snow Day.' Two police officers are taken hostage and dressed up like the bad guys. Adam stops Flack and his team from shooting them.
• Disgusting Public Toilet: 'Tri-Borough' finds Flack and Aiden with a victim who was subjected to Overturned Outhouse in a Porta-Potty before dying at a construction site. Flack makes her examine it since there might be evidence. She opens the door and is completely grossed out.
  Aiden: Ewww, what do you guys *do* in here?!
  Flack: I don't go in public.
• The Dissenter Is Always Right: In one episode, Stella is adamant that the deceased is a murder victim; while everyone else, including ME Sid Hammerback, is convinced the woman committed suicide. The detective spends a good bit of time miffed at everyone (especially Sid) and trying to prove her point. Then, the ER doctor who had examined the victim makes an off-hand comment to Mac which leads to proof that Stella was right all along.
• Disobeyed Orders, Not Punished: During her "Greek antiquities theft" arc, Stella goes against Mac's direct order to stand down because of a conflict of interest, saying he'll handle it himself. Later, he turns it over to a more appropriate department, but she keeps investigating behind his back anyway and goes so far as to involve another officer. The two of them discover a dead body and Stella reports it anonymously via a 911 call from a pay phone, completely against NYPD/Crime Lab policy. Mac is furious and tells her that her actions are grounds for a desk assignment, if not a full-on suspension. She angrily slams her badge down on his desk and heads to Greece. He and the team find more evidence, he follows her there, helps her instead of chewing her out again, and gives her badge back when they return to NYC. Far-fetched to how a real-life situation would go, but then again this episode was written by Melina Kanakaredes, who plays Stella, so there you have it.
• Disposable Sex Worker: A call girl is murdered in 'Means to an End,' and Adam makes a joke about a possibly dissatisfied customer. Lindsay calls him out on it.
• Disproportionate Retribution / Revenge Before Reason: Various victims were killed for comparatively minor offences such as:
  • trying to kill a cockroach in 'A Daze of Wine and Roaches.'
  • mocking an overweight basketball fan in 'Personal Foul.'
  • kissing someone of the same sex and having it shown on the Jumbotron at a baseball game in 'The Closer.'
• Distressed Dude:
  • Adam and Danny are taken hostage in 'Snow Day.'
  • Sheldon is caught up in a prison riot in 'Redemptio.'
  • Mac is knocked out and placed in a Laser Hallway by the perp in 'The Thing About Heroes.'
  • Downplayed in 'The Untouchable' as Mac frees himself from zip ties after being tasered from behind.
• Divorce Assets Conflict: In 'Who's There?' a divorcing couple are at such serious odds over who was to get what that their daughter stages a home invasion to get what she could because she wants to get out of their lives. Naturally, things go awry.
• Dizzy Cam / Orbital Shot: Several times, but 'Hung Out to Dry' has a nice example of the symbols whirling around Mac when he's noodling over the cryptic messages on the various victims' t-shirts.
• Dominance Through Furniture: In 'Hush,' Danny & Aiden go undercover as a couple looking to learn about BDSM techniques. The seminar they attend features a woman hanging upside down as a chandelier and a man posed as an end table. The detectives ask the leaders how long they have to stay like that and one replies, "until I tell them they can stop."
• Don't Call Me "Sir": Mac.
  • Danny plays a joke on his future wife, Lindsay, on her first day on the job, telling her to call Mac "Sir." Mac tells her to stop after a few times, and she realizes Danny tricked her.
  • Averted with Adam, who calls Mac "Sir" quite often. Mac never says a word.
• Don't You Dare Pity Me!:
  • Invoked by a triple-amputee former Navy Seal who's a suspect in 'DOA for a Day,' when he sees Flack looking him up and down:
    Russ: Don't you *dare* pity me!
    Flack: It's not pity, Russ. I'm just wondering if you could've done it.
    Russ: [gesturing toward his prosthetic limbs and scoffing] With these? At least 20 different ways, Detective.
  • In season 9, Mac essentially reacts this way to the aftermath of being shot. He thinks it's his problem to get through, despite people starting to notice and his friend Kevin saying he should at least tell Christine. Fortunately, he finally does, though only when she's near to leaving him.
• Double Standard: Rape, Female on Female: The victim in the B-plot of 'Grand Master' is killed for sexually harassing a former female employee who'd refused to have sex with her.
• Down the Rabbit Hole: 'Down the Rabbit Hole,' obviously. There's a white rabbit in the game who helps Mac/his avatar, and who disappears down a hole at one point.
• Dramatic Gun Cock: Mac is on the receiving end in 'The Untouchable.' A rich guy tazes him, kidnaps him, blindfolds him and drives him to a bad part of town before doing it. He then drives off and leaves Mac bound and still blindfolded. Fortunately, Mac is not easily intimidated.
• Dramatic Sit-Down: 'White Gold.' Mac & Danny go to a pizzeria to notify the victim's family of his death. Upon hearing the news, the uncle who had raised him since his parents were killed in an accident when he was nine is visibly shaken and his knees start to give way. Danny tells him to have a seat and he does so on the nearest stool.
• Dream Intro: 'Rest in Peace, Marina Garito' opens with Stella dreaming that she gets in a traffic accident and is helped out of her vehicle by a young woman. She awakes with a start, and that day gets presented with a new case - the murder of the very woman she was dreaming about, whose missing twin brother Stella has been searching for for quite some time.
• Drowning Pit:
  • One of the illusionist's tricks in 'Sleight Out of Hand' is a vertical, water-filled chamber in which the participant (or in this case, his victim) is slowly lowered upside down while in a straight-jacket.
  • Another victim is sealed in a room which slowly fills with cold water and almost dies from a combination of drowning and hypothermia.
• Due to the Dead: Quite a number of examples:
  • 'Officer Blue:' Stella and Mac are seen wearing their dress uniforms, having just returned from the memorial service for the mounted officer who was shot in Central Park.
  • 'Heroes:' Mac tells Stella that Aiden's father will let them know when the arrangements for her service are finalized.
  • 'Yarhzeit:' The broach owner's aunt leads Mac through the titular service in honor of her niece and his father. Also downplayed when Adam quietly fills in for Sheldon who goes out of town for his uncle's funeral.
  • 'Pay Up:' The team hold their own private wake of sorts for Angell.
  • 'Indelible:' Mac participates in and the other team members attend the dedication of the Brooklyn Wall of Remembrance for first responders who lost their lives on 9/11.
  • 'Clean Sweep:' Mac uses his military connections to see that a deceased homeless Marine is laid to rest with full honors.
  • 'Flash Pop:' The lab techs, who are usually just background characters, hold a vigil at work for one of their own who gets murdered. Jo is particularly moved by this.
  • 'Reignighted:' Christine accompanies Mac to the funeral of Cap. Curtis Smith, a firefighter friend of his who is killed in the line of duty.
  • 'Civilized Lies:' Danny and Lindsay visit the family of an off-duty police officer who gets shot and killed. They give the man's son, who is going through the Police Academy, his father's badge to wear when he graduates. The young man proudly shows it to his mother and sister.
• Dumpster Dive:
  • In 'Bad Beat,' while Lindsay is still a rookie, Mac has her dig through one looking for a missing weapon:
    Lindsay: Ah, now, see? That's a shame.
    Mac: What's a shame?
    [She pulls something up out of the dumpster]
    Lindsay: Somebody went and threw away a perfectly good shotgun.
  • In 'White Gold,' Sheldon examines a corpse in a dumpster. Luckily for him, it had been emptied before the body was placed there.
• Durable Deathtrap: The traps in 'Death House' are still working after almost 100 years.

E-H

• Eagle-Eye Detection: When Danny spots something odd on a surveillance tape in 'Officer Blue,' he tells Mac, "They don't call me 'Eagle Eyes' for nothin'."
• Ear Ache:
  • The younger brother of the victim in 'Trapped' had had his ear cut off as a child. It was sent to the family & the brother still keeps it in a jar.
  • The victim in 'Rush to Judgement' has cauliflower ear due to having been a wrestler.
  • The victim in 'Sanguine Love' and one from 'A Man a Mile' each have a part of an ear bitten off.
• Ear-Piercing Plot: A variation of the trope: Lindsay has a flashback to her young teenage years when she and three of her friends hid in her bathroom for her to pierce one of the other's ears. Girl #3 holds a potato behind the piercee's ear while Lindsay prepares the needle and they hear a thud. Girl #4, who was supposed to be keeping an eye out for Lindsay's parents, passed out from the thought of seeing their friend get stuck.
• Easily-Overheard Conversation: One perp overhears two women through his thin apartment walls and intercepts their delivery of a package used to pay someone back. One's unwitting husband is there and refuses to hand the package over; the perp panics and shoots him.
• Easy Amnesia: Averted. It takes Mac eight and a half months of therapy to recover from his speech aphasia.
• Eat the Camera: Done a few times with variations due to the nature of each episode.
  • "A Man A Mile": The camera zooms into the victim's mouth to watch something be retrieved from her throat.
  • In both "A Daze of Wine and Roaches" and "Forbidden Fruit" explaining how poisons affected the victims who unknowingly ingested them.
  • "Page Turner: A camera is used to inspect the throat of a woman who died at a concert.
  • Used in "Fare Game" to show how a woman swallowed a live baby octopus.
• Eiffel Tower Effect: Much like the mothership, this series treats its aerial shots like a love letter to the titular city's landmarks. The Empire State Building, the Chrysler Building, and the Statue of Liberty are all shown practically every episode, and not just in the opening credits. Sometimes they're featured more prominently:
  • A famous building climber falls to his death while scaling the Empire State Building in the season 2 premiere.
  • A murder is committed on Lady Liberty in the season 4 premiere and the Statue is vandalized as well.
  • Another episode has a clue left in a box atop a high-rise with a perfect view of the Chrysler Building and Mac tells Adam it's the spot where he & Claire got engaged.
  • Mac, Danny & Sheldon search for evidence while harnessed to the top of Empire during "The Triangle."
• Elderly Ailment Rambling: Lindsay is getting ready to go on maternity leave in "Green Piece". Sid, who's over 50, equates his own ailments with her symptoms:
  Sid: So, how's it feel? It's your last case, right? And then off to Montana.
  Lindsay: It feels pretty good.
  Sid: Oh, I bet it does. No bodies at 3 a.m. No double shifts with no sleep, a slice of pizza on the run.
  Lindsay: Constipation, swelling of the feet, help getting up from a chair, constant urination. Wanna switch?
  Sid: Oh, I already have all of that. I just want the time off.
• Electric Torture: In 'Blood Out,' the team investigates a particularly brutal murder. Before being cut in half with a chainsaw, the Victim of the Week is tortured by having car battery jumper leads attached to his pecs.
• Embarrassing Browser History: When former FBI agent Jo first joins the team in season 7, she freaks Adam out by telling him, "we know about those websites you visit."
• Embarrassing Middle Name: In 'Near Death,' Christine reveals to Jo that her brother Stan, who was an early partner of Mac's, had picked on him unmercifully about his middle name of "Llewellyn."
• Embarrassing Nickname: At first Lindsay hates Danny constantly calling her "Montana," but over time it becomes a term of endearment.
• Encyclopaedic Knowledge:
  • Mac knows a lot about a lot of things, even stuff like the rules of Roller Derby, which shocks Stella:
    Stella: You can NOT know this.
  • See also his character page.
  • Averted in a late season 8 episode when Lindsay asks him about a certain type of rare wood. He's completely unfamiliar with it.
  • Sheldon impresses Mac with his knowledge of mosquitoes during his first outing in the field:
    Mac: Did you know that Hawkes is a walking encyclopedia of tidbit information?
    Stella: Good. We can go to him instead of Google.
• End-of-Series Awareness: The powers that be were unsure of renewal at the end of each of the last three seasons so they either dropped hints of the characters' futures, lampshaded the possible end, wrapped up loose ends while leaving things open enough to come back to, or some combination thereof.
• Energy Weapon: The laser beam-equipped car in 'You Only Die Once.' The beam actually scalps a victim.
• Enhance Button: Used frequently, including getting an image off a reflection in someone's eyeball, and getting fingerprints when someone waves their hand in front of a security camera.
• Episode on a Plane: 'Turbulence.' Mac has to get his flight to DC turned around when a murder victim is discovered on his plane.
• "Eureka!" Moment:
  • Hawkes watches a Jennifer Lopez video during his lunch break in 'Grand Murder at Central Station.' While admiring her, um, assets, he remembers they are insured, helping him figure out the case - it's an insurance scam.
  • In another episode, Flack closes a door then realizes that the room im which the victim was discovered had been locked from the outside, meaning someone else had been there.
• Even Evil Has Standards:
  • A hitman turns himself in and spills the beans on his client in 'Greater Good' when said client switches targets from a man to a woman. This hitman doesn't do women.
  • The would-be killer in 'Unspoken.' Lindsay sees him shooting at his intended target and is injured in the chaos. He comes into her hospital room intending to dispose of her before she can identify him. But then he sees the drawing her daughter, Lucy, had made and backs off, realizing she is a mother. It ties into what he later tells the detectives about never wanting to hurt a child. Lindsay dying would have hurt Lucy.
• Everybody Was Kung-Fu Fighting: The 'Corporate Warriors' in season 2. They are all trained in martial arts. One uses their skills to kill another, only to be killed in turn by a third.
• Everyone Is Single: Although Mac is a widower before the series begins, the only team members to be married during the 9-year run are Danny & Lindsay (who tie the knot late in season 5) and Sid (who arrives mid-season 2), and even he's twice divorced by early season 7.
• Everything Sounds Sexier in French:
  • When Stella speaks to Mac in Greek while he's brooding over a case in 'The Closer,' the following exchange ensues:
  Mac: I give, what was that?
  Stella: What the hell's wrong with you, Mac?
  Mac: Ugh, it sounds so much better in Greek.
  Stella: [smiling] Everything always does.
  • In 'Communication Breakdown,' Flack overhears Angell questioning a witness in the man's native French and whispers as he passes behind her, "Sexiest thing I've ever heard."
• Evil Lawyer Joke: In 'Enough,' Mac visits a lawyer whose office has just been sprayed for bugs. The man kills a cockroach while complaining that his fumigators didn't do a good job, and says he and the bugs are from the same species. When Mac stares at him blankly, he asks: "What, you don't like lawyer jokes?" Mac replies, "I don't like lawyers." At the end of their conversation, Mac turns it on him with "What do they call a thousand lawyers at the bottom of the ocean? A good start." Pause. "What, YOU don't like lawyer jokes?"
• Evil Stole My Faith: Alluded to in 'Yahrzeit.' A Holocaust survivor says that the soldier (Mac Taylor's father) who rescued him by carrying him out of the camp from which he was liberated and who gave him a Hershey bar to eat "put back some of the faith I had lost. My grandchildren put back the rest."
• Exact Words:
  • '...Comes Around.' During the hearing about Mac's encounter with Clay Dobson, Danny is asked if he can read a portion of the autopsy report. He says, "Sure" and proceeds to do so...silently.
  • In 'The Ride In,' a man convicted of counterfeiting explains his motivation to Flack: since his father told him "Jimmy, everything I have is mine; you ain't got nothin' coming, so you got to go out and make your own money," he did just that.
  • In 'Hide Sight,' Mac is told "not to utter the word 'sniper'" during a press conference. He doesn't, but when a reporter says, "Sounds like a sniper to me," Mac, concerned that the public needs to know the truth, replies, "Me, too." Chief of D's Carver asks what he's supposed to tell their superiors. Mac says, "Tell them I never uttered the word 'sniper'."
  • In 'Seth and Apep,' Flack & DB buy time for Mac to find Christine by heading off Federal Marshalls at the pass, telling them the Egyptian murderer they're after is at another precinct due to a mix-up. As they lead the officers away to get coffee while they wait, DB says, "Why, I'll bet our guy's walking him out the precinct right now." Cue Mac *leaving* the building with the handcuffed man in tow.
• Expensive Glass of Crap:
  • Non-wine example in 'Grand Master.' The Japanese delicacy fugu is being sold for $500/serving. It is supposed to be made from vicious, wild blowfish, but the ones in question were raised in captivity with their mouths sewn shut. Danny says it's actually worth about $20 a pop.
  • In 'A Daze of Wine and Roaches,' cheap wine was being passed off as expensive, though that wasn't ultimately why the vic was killed. It involved the killer trying to squash the guy's jeweled cockroach.
  • In 'The Real McCoy,' one of the speakeasy employees cuts corners with counterfeit vodka.
• Exploding Cigar: A victim is killed by one meant for "Laughing Larry" in 'Child's Play.'
• Exploding Fish Tanks: The male victim in 'Heart of Glass' falls into his aquarium, shattering it to pieces.
• Extremely Cold Case: In "Death House", an episode loosely inspired by H. H. Holmes's "murder hotel", the CSIs come to the titular Durable Death Trap-filled house after a person trapped inside calls 911. While trying to find the caller before he runs out of oxygen, they come across the body of a man killed in 1923, and investigate his murder as if it was a fresh one.
• Eye Contact as Proof: During Mac's speech aphasia arc when he's not telling anyone about his memory problems, Christine becomes suspicious and asks him to look her in the eye and tell her nothing's wrong. He can't, and doesn't, so she gives him the silent treatment for a couple of weeks until he fesses up.
• Eyepiece Prank: In 'Clue: SI,' Lindsay gets blue circles around her eyes from her husband, in a prank meant for Adam, the lab tech. She wears sunglasses the rest of the episode to hide them and spends most of the ep trying to determine the prankster. She tells Danny she'll find a way to get him back for it.
• Eye Scream:
  • The eyeball that falls from the sky into Stella's coffee cup in 'No Good Deed' had been plucked from a dead man on a rooftop. The audience is treated to at least two close ups of it; first, floating in her coffee, then being examined in the lab.
  • The man who's nailed to a tree with railroad ties thru his eye sockets, and whose eyeballs Mac finds in his pocket in 'Hung Out to Dry.'
  • Clay Dobson's victims, whose eyelids he cut off so they'd have to stare at him as they died.
• Face Doodling: In 'Get Me Out of Here!', Danny and Adam arrive at a frat house to investigate a murder. They wake up a pledge who has had a pair glasses drawn on his face and the word "TOOL" written on his forehead.
• Face Palm:
  • At the end of 'Oedipus Rex,' when the Suicide Girls strut away and Danny realizes what he's lost out on by turning down one's offer for a date, you can clearly see him doing this in the background.
  • Mac does the face-wipe version a number of times. A notable example is while chewing Flack out for going A.W.O.L. in 'Cuckoo's Nest.'
• Failure-to-Save Murder:
  • Mac's 333 Stalker is out to get him because Mac had failed to save the guy's brother back in Chicago when he was 14 years old.
  • Also the killer's motivation in 'Where There's Smoke.' He blamed his foster brother and sister for not saving him from his mother's abuse when they were children.
• Fake Danger Gambit: The victim in 'Battle Scars' gets a friend to pose as an armed robber so he can be a hero to his girlfriend. It backfires.
• Fake Identity Baggage: In "And Here's to You, Mrs. Azrael", a pissed-off mother kills a comatose teen whom she blames for the drunken car crash that killed her daughter. However, Hawkes reveals to the mother that the girl she killed was her own daughter, who had exploited the fact that she looked almost exactly like the girl who died in the crash by carrying the other girl's ID when she drove that girl's car home from the bar where they'd been drinking because the other girl had also done drugs and was more wasted than her. The mother is left sitting distraught in the interegation room as she has a nervous breakdown over having killed her own daughter.
• False Confession:
  • One episode has a man confess to murdering the quack doctor who milked him & his wife of all their savings while "treating" his terminal illness. It was his wife who killed her, but he wants to take the rap since he knows he doesn't have long to live anyway.
  • "Greater Good" sees Mac struggling over an old case on his day off. A man had confessed to fatally hitting a girl on her bicycle and had served his time. After his release, Mac realizes that the man's bruises from his seatbelt prove that he'd been on the passenger side. His daughter, who was studying to be a doctor at the time, was driving; he confessed so she could finish med school.
• False Rape Accusation: The alleged victim of the DC Rapist in the three-part season 7 arc. The senator father of his earlier victim hired the woman to allege that the guy raped her, but Lindsay's forensic tests showed that given the rate at which GHB leaves the system, she would be dead if she really ingested the indicated levels at the time of the attack. The senator then kills the woman, hoping to frame the guy for murder, but that backfires as well.
• False Roulette: Mac does this to one of Christine's kidnappers as he tries to force the guy to talk in 'Seth and Apep.' He fires point-blank at the guy's forehead three times before the man relents & tells Mac he'll take him to her.
• False Start: Danny & Lindsay's romance, until she dealt with her past.
• Family of Choice: Mac regards his team as his family, and tells Christine so in 'Unwrapped.'
  Mac: For the longest time, this place, those guys, were my whole world. They got me through some really tough times. Now I have you.
• Fan Boy: Mac apparently idolizes Ronald Reagan judging by the framed picture in his office and "eight-hour documentary [he's] always watching."
• Fan Disservice: The one time we see Flack without a shirt, he's got a whopping great hole in his chest where he was seriously injured in an explosion. Another time, he lifts his shirt to reveal severe bruising from a beatdown he took on the subway.
• Fanservice:
  • Certain features of Stella are on display a bit.
  • Danny ends up shirtless or in a vest/wifebeater a lot.
  • Lindsay once took a walk in the rain and ended up in a Sexy Soaked Shirt.
  • Mac kicking ass while soaking wet in the season three finale.
  • Shirtless Mac in bed with Peyton in the s3 opener, whether you liked the ship or not.
  • Angell in Flack's button down shirt with a pair of handcuffs.
  • Mac swimming in the 100th ep.
  • Mac testing the weapons in 'Corporate Warriors.' Especially the katana...in a tight black t-shirt.
  • The episode about the lingerie football league. Must have been designed for the Male Gaze.
  • The Suicide Girls episode as well.
  • And the female roller derby team in 'Jamalot.'
  • The female lube wrestler in 'Trapped.'
  • The housekeepers wearing French Maid outfits in 'Murder Sings the Blues.'
• Fashion Show:
  • In 'Wasted,' models are wearing *literally* painted-on swimwear. One dies on the runway and another is bludgeoned to death backstage.
  • In 'Like Water for Chocolate,' a fashion designer uses expensive chocolate and damiana flowers in his designs, which are presented by models on a runway. Det. Flack comments to Stella how cold it is in the venue. She tells him it's necessary because chocolate melts at body temperature.
• Fantasy-Forbidding Father: 'Blood, Sweat and Tears.' Due to Feuding Families, a circus girl's father forbids her to see her boyfriend who's also in the circus.
• A Father to His Men: Mac, particularly to Lindsay and Adam. See Character Page for more details.
• Fatal Attractor: Stella Bonasera. Her boyfriend tried to kill her after she broke up with him and another guy she was seeing turned out to be Mac's 333 Stalker, who was out for blood as well.
• Fatal Method Acting: Two in-universe examples:
  • The girl portraying Marie Antoinette in 'A Daze of Wine and Roaches' is discovered dead in the guillotine prop right after the group's picture is taken.
  • In 'The Formula,' a Formula One racer dies when his car explodes during an exhibition race.
• FBI Agent:
  • FBI Agents offer their assistance and phone tracing equipment when a millionaire's son is kidnapped in 'Brooklyn Til I Die.'
  • Jo Danville is a former FBI agent, and her ex-husband, Russ Josephson who is also an agent, appears in two season 7 episodes. He provides intel that helps with cases in both. Two other FBI colleagues of hers appear in additional episodes.
• Feeling the Baby Kick: Before Danny and Lindsay get married, she tells him at work that she felt their baby kick. He ushers her to a secluded area and tries to feel it, too, but there's no movement. He tells her to find him as soon as possible the next time it happens.
• Fictional Counterpart: In "Some Buried Bones," a Students' Secret Society at Chelsea University called "Kings and Shadows," in which membership is passed down from powerful alumni to their sons, stands in for Yale's real-life counterpart "Skull and Bones."
• Fictional Painting: One of the three cases in "Tri-Borough" centers around a fictional early-American painting called, Immortality, by fictional artist Jacques de Suis.
• Fiery Cover Up:
  • 'Right Next Door': Subverted by the "victim" of Stella's apartment building fire who, as it turns out, had died two or three days earlier.
  • 'Do Not Pass Go': Played straight with the perp tricking the mother of a missing college student into setting a fire to destroy evidence in return for information on the whereabouts of her child.
• Finger in the Mail:
  • 'Trapped' deals with the heir of a wealthy family whose little brother had been abducted at a young age. When the family was slow with the ransom money, his brother's ear was cut off and sent to the family; later, the brother was killed. The surviving man kept the ear, which Stella finds in a jar of preservative.
  • In 'Brooklyn Til I Die,' the estranged father of a victim receives a finger with a family ring on it from kidnappers, proving that the vic is indeed his son.
  • Mac gets a tongue in the mail from Christine's kidnappers in 'Seth and Apep.' It isn't hers, but it does freak him out for a while (see Call Back above).
• Finger-Licking Poison: In 'Page Turner,' the killer coats the pages of a book in thallium to poison his victims.
• Fingore: Danny getting his fingers stomped on and broken in the season three finale.
• Firefighter Arsonist: Inverted. "Reignited" features a firebug who is also a wannabe firefighter, having applied and been turned down no less than 11 times in at least 3 boroughs before the events of this episode. He had also set an abandoned car on fire in an alley two weeks prior, just to watch it burn. He arrives at a genuine apartment building fire dressed in stolen turn-out gear and quickly becomes the prime suspect when the authorities realize the number on his stolen helmet is from a firehouse in a different borough. However, he's quickly ruled out by Mac on the grounds that he's too stupid and deluded to have pulled out such a complex plot.
• The First Cut Is the Deepest: The series opens with Mac still mourning the loss of his wife, Claire, in the 9/11 terrorist attacks three years prior, and still wearing his wedding band. He has his first date as a widower in the Season 1 finale, but nothing comes of it. By Season 3 he has a girlfriend, but refuses to tell anyone and is still so hung up on his wife that he calls the woman "Claire" during an argument over his secrecy.
• The Fixer: There's an arc involving a fixer named Ann Steele and a flash drive on which she keeps records of all the movers and shakers in NYC whose problems she makes disappear. She gets killed and someone steals her flash drive from the evidence locker. A sleazy newspaper magnate then begins publishing dirt on various politicians she'd worked for, including the Chief of Detectives. He'd sexually harassed his secretary, who threatened to sue him, Steele had "fixed" it, but word gets out after the theft, and The Chief's wife leaves him over it.
• Flag Drop: Mac keeps full-sized US and NY state flags in his office. In practically every scene shot there, one, if not both, of them can be seen.
• Flashback: Aside from the ones used every episode to show how the crime(s) of the week actually went down, there are three major examples, chronologically as follows:
  • Near the end of season 3, Mac and Clay Dobson's rooftop confrontation is shown three times, once during each episode of Dobson's arc.
  • Beginning with the season 4 premiere, Mac spends several episodes explaining individually to various colleagues how his stalker situation began. Each time the audience is treated to repeats of him being woken up by 3:33 a.m. phone calls at two different hotels in London.
  • In episode 5.20, 'Prey,' Stella recounts a college forensics lecture she gave using some of the team's past cases as examples. Scenes from the three she chose are repeated, including the mummified body found in a building being demolished in season 3.
• Flashback Echo: Flack's injuries in 'Charge of This Post' take Mac back to the 1983 Beirut barracks bombing:
  Smith: How'd you know what to do?
  Mac: I've lived through this moment before.
• Flashed-Badge Hijack: Flack does it to a taxi driver in the beginning of 'You Only Die Once,' running up a $60 cab fare in the process. Between that and his unauthorized high speed chase, Chief Sinclair is not pleased.
• Flash Mob Cover-Up: The killer in 'To What End?' puts out an ad for people to show up at the scene dressed as clowns, offering a bonus if they wear his same costume.
• Flatline: Mac, after being shot in 'Near Death.' One of the operating room nurses shouts, "He's flatlining!"
• Following in Relative's Footsteps: Detective Don Flack, Jr. follows his namesake into law enforcement because he looks up to him. His sister, Samantha, once states about police work, "You Flack men; it's in your blood."
• Found Family via Work: Lab Chief Mac Taylor is an only child and both his parents are deceased. No mention is ever made of aunts, uncles or cousins. He and Stella sometimes fight like a stereotypical "old married couple;" he has some heart-to-heart chats with the younger members of the team when they're struggling with personal issues; and takes Sheldon in when he loses his apartment. Referring to his co-workers, he tells his new girlfriend in season 8, "For a long time this place, those guys, were my whole world. They got me through some really tough times."
• Fleur-de-lis: In 'The Untouchable,' a disturbed, homeless young lady seeks out Mac to report the death of "the woman with the purple flowers." The flowers turn out to be the tattoo of a fleur-de-lis on the dead woman's wrist.
• Food Porn:
  • Quite literally, during the "food sploshing" in 'It Happened to Me.'
  • Also literally with the practically nude women serving as tables in the sushi restaurant in 'Grand Master':
  Stella: Oh, that can't be sanitary.
  Danny: Who cares if it's sanitary? I wanna see the menu.
• Foolish Sibling, Responsible Sibling:
  • Don Flack and his party-girl sister, Sam.
  • Danny Messer and his gangster-ish brother, Louie.
  • Doctor Sheldon Hawkes and his sister, who had been a drug addict (before getting clean, unbeknownst to him).
  • Chief Carver and his sister (see spoiler under Sibling Yin-Yang below).
• Forced Orgasm: A variation is used in 'Time's Up,' where an investigation reveals that a college student died in the middle of a restaurant after she climaxed to death. The autopsy reveals that she had used an experimental aphrodisiac that was being tested in a local university. At the end it was revealed that the girl told her sorority sister that she was still a virgin, so the leader of the chapter set up a romantic night between her and a fraternity member, and to ensure she enjoyed the night, swapped out her asthma medication with the aphrodisiac, which the girl kept using because her asthma got worse instead of better. When she got nervous and ran out of the room, the frat boy followed her to the restaurant and tried to talk to her, which is when the aphrodisiac kicked in and she had an orgasm that eventually led to heart failure.
• Foreshadowing:
  • A few episodes after Lindsay's introduction and after impressing him with sports trivia, Danny jokingly remarks that he'll have to ask her to marry him if she keeps that up. Three seasons later...
  • In the same vein, in a season one episode, Mac says something about how Danny could fall in love one day. Danny laughs it off, but then Lindsay shows up in the next season and...
  • In 'Dead Reckoning,' a mystery woman is tied to several crimes and homicides which baffles the authorities. Anything familiar that shows up when she is mentioned? A Q-tip swab. It’s later discovered that the mystery woman is in fact an innocent worker at a Q-tip production facility which earned a contract to supply the city’s forensics department. She didn’t like how her gloves felt, so she took them off. This ends up contaminating the entire stock onwards which creates a fictional serial killer who commits crimes at a sporadic rate.
• Foreign Cuss Word:
  • Stella occasionally curses in Greek, but the only translation ever given is the quote under "...Sexier in French" on this page.
  • After she is attacked by one of the Greek antiquities thieves, she tells Mac the man cussed at her in Greek.
• Foreign-Language Tirade: An antiquities smuggler yells at and curses at Stella in Greek while attacking her in a subway stairwell in 'The Cost of Living.' No translation is given there either.
• Forensic Drama: Obviously. Evidence is shown being processed in the lab more than once an episode.
• Forged Message: Chronologically...
  • In season 7, Raymond Harris somehow sends Bill Hunt a text from Mac, luring him to Mac's office so he can shoot at them both from the building across the street. Jo says the guy must've cloned Mac's phone.
  • In 'The Lady in the Lake', the killer uses the victim's cell phone to text the girl's boyfriend that she's going out of town.
  • In the season 9 crossover with CSI, 'In Vino Veritas,' Christine's kidnappers put fake texts on her phone as part of a robbery scheme. Before they realize the sham, the Vegas investigators strongly hint to Mac that she's cheating on him.
• Forgets to Eat: Seems to go with the territory.
  • In season 1's 'Till Death Do We Part,' Flack doesn't want Stella to drive because "when you drive, we don't eat."
  • In 'Love Run Cold,' Danny and Lindsay are working a case together and she doesn't want to break for lunch because "Mac wants us to solve the case." Danny replies that Mac wouldn't want them to starve to death in the process. She walks away oblivious; he follows reluctantly, while looking around for a pizza joint.
  • In 'Nothing for Something,' Jo has Flack take Mac to a diner after this exchange:
    Mac: I know what you're going to say. It's not the way it looks. I'm fine.
    Jo: It's exactly the way it looks. That's the same suit you had on yesterday, if not the day before. You haven't even been home in two days.
    Mac: This isn't the first time one case has rolled over into another. I'll be fine.
    Jo: When's the last time you had something to eat? I don't want to hear about that trail mix from the vending machine last night.
    Mac: (a tad defensively) It was a granola bar.
• Formerly Fat:
  • One of the cheerleaders in 'Personal Foul' has too big clothes still in her closet and keeps an old picture from her heavy-set days on her fridge.
  • In 'Blood Actually,' Sheldon confides to Danny that he used to be very overweight & even shows Danny a picture of himself he carries around as a reminder. Naturally, Danny wants to keep it; Sheldon wisely refuses.
• Foster Kid: Stella. She tells a suspect about it in one ep, it comes up as a plot point in "Cold Reveal," and is mentioned in her conversations with Prof. Papakota.
• Framed Clue: A variation in "Grounds for Deception." Stella discovers that her mentor is involved in the theft of Greek antiquities. In anger, she goes to her office, yanks down a framed painting he'd given her when she graduated from the police academy, and discovers that it, too, was stolen...from a museum...in Greece. She goes AWOL to return it.
• Frame-Up:
  • Evidence for robbery & murder is planted on Hawkes in 'Raising Shane.'
  • In season 3, Clay Dobson uses his suicide as a Taking You with Me gambit to make it look like Mac has pushed him off the roof.
• Framing the Guilty Party:
  • Aiden considers planting evidence from serial rapist DJ Pratt's first case onto an item from his second one.
  • After he gets away the first time, the serial rapist from Jo's FBI case has people attempt to frame him for another rape and then for murder.
• Freakier Than Fiction: See Ripped from the Headlines below. One of the IMDb reviewers of the look-alike girls' episode goes on a rant about how it could never have happened in real life (despite the actual situation being the basis of episodes of some other shows as well).
• French Maid Outfit: The victim in 'Murder Sings the Blues' requires his maids to dress in this type of lingerie... and to be blue-eyed blondes.
• Freudian Excuse Is No Excuse: See the "Awesome" page for Mac's retort to the serial killer in 'Manhattan Manhunt' whose motivation was his angst over not having been raised by his wealthy father and jealousy over his half-sisters who were.
• Friend to Bugs: One victim is murdered by a roach aficionado for trying to crush one.
• Frivolous Lawsuit: The victim in 'Fare Game' made her living with these and gets murdered by her latest potential victim who recognizes her from an earlier suit against him. Wayne Knight plays her lawyer.
• From Dress to Dressing: Various characters tear off parts of their shirts/use their own clothing to bandage victims from time to time. Including:
  • In 'What You See Is What You See,' Mac uses his jacket to stem the flow of blood from the waitress' gunshot wound.
  • In 'Charge of This Post,' he borrows a shoestring from a fellow victim of the explosion to bind a profusely bleeding artery in Flack's gut until the paramedics can arrive. Then he tears strips from his own shirt to stuff in the gaping wound to staunch additional bleeding.
  • 'Epilogue' has a variation. A perp stabs a security guard, hitting his femoral artery, then tears off one of the man's sleeves to use as a tourniquet on his own arm where the guard had injured him earlier.
• Fruit Cart: Too many to list them all, but for example... There's a foot chase variant in "Unspoken." The suspect of the week shoots at a politician during a stumping speech. He then runs like heck, pushing a concession cart out of the way, slamming it into Lindsay, who ends up with a nasty concussion.
• Gaia's Vengeance: The eco-terrorist bombers in 'Green Piece' are attempting to stop someone from sending electronic waste to Chinese landfills where toxins seep into the soil and cause illnesses and birth defects.
• Games of the Elderly:
  • In 'Uncertainty Rules,' two friends take their introvert buddy out on the town for his 21st birthday. One of the places they visit is a retirement home where they join in on Bingo Night...and win the $25,000 pot.
  • In 'The Real McCoy,' Adam visits his father, who has Alzheimer's, at his senior care facility and plays dominoes with him.
• Gangbangers: One of several gangs depicted in the series, The Tanglewood Boys are secong-generation Italian thugs who fancy themselves as Mafia. Danny, being familiar with them because his brother was part of the group for a while, says they're "more made than the made guys."
• Gas Chamber: The Cabbie Killer turns his taxi into a mobile gas chamber and traps his victims in the back seat, poisoning them.
• Gas Leak Cover-Up: In 'Snow Day,' the Irish gang infiltrates the lab by introducing a fake gas smell, setting the alarm off, and dressing like gas company workers.
• Gender-Concealing Voice: A voice-distorting device is found at the second crime scene in "Vigilante", clueing the detectives into the fact that the caller who reported both crimes is most likely not who he appears to be. When they reverse engineer the voice on the 911 tapes, they discover it was a woman who'd been calling all along.
• Generic Ethnic Crime Gang:
  • The Greek antiquities smugglers Stella goes after in season 5.
  • Also the Trinitarios, a Dominican gang, in season 9's 'Blood Out.'
    Flack: Nobody loves a good dismemberment like the Latin street crews.
• Genius Cripple: Dr. Leonard Giles, the wheelchair-bound forensics/DNA expert from season 1.
• Genocide Survivor: In 'Yahrzeit,' Mac is shown a video of a woman recounting her days in a concentration camp, during which her niece's entire family had been executed. Later, he is sent a video of a man telling the story of his rescue by Mac's father from the camp in which he had been imprisoned. The episode ends with Mac visiting the woman to return a broach of her niece's that had been evidence in the team's current case.
• Genuine Human Hide: Some of the evidence in 'Yahrzeit' is made from human skin.
• Girls With Mustaches: A piece of evidence found in one case is a single strand of hair from a beard, but the DNA is determined to be female. Danny has an idea and takes Sheldon with him to question some Coney Island performers, one of whom is a bearded lady. Sure enough, the folks there put them on the right trail.
• Give Me Back My Wallet: Averted in 'Nothing for Something.' Mac's pickpocket brings his wallet back to the Lab, but the case turns out to be much more complicated.
• Given Name Reveal: Christine telling Jo that Mac's middle name is Llewellyn in 'Near Death.'
• Glass-Shattering Sound: 'Not What It Looks Like.' It's used when glass counters in a jewelry shop are shattered during a robbery.
• A God Am I: The Cabbie Killer believes himself to be the Greek god Charon, aka The Ferryman, thus it is his duty to transport the deceased across the River Styx.
  Cabbie Killer: The newly dead who have coins to pay for the ride must be taken across the river, or they'll wander the banks for a hundred years.
• Going by the Matchbook: In 'White Gold,' Hawkes and Flack find a matchbook stuck to the victim's back with blood, having fallen out of the killer's pocket when he dumped the body into a dumpster. This leads them to the bar where he hangs out.
• Going for the Big Scoop: News-blogger Reed Garrett pursues the Cabbie Killer so doggedly he ends up getting kidnapped by the guy and barely survives getting his throat slashed.
• Good Cop/Bad Cop: In 'Civilized Lies,' Mac is extremely irritated and aggressive while interrogating a suspect when an off-duty officer is shot, and Flack tries a good-cop approach after Mac storms out. The suspect even asks if it's this trope.
  Suspect: Oh, are you gonna play good cop now?
  Flack: To tell you the truth, I don't quite know what to do. [gestures towards one-way glass] *He's* usually the good cop.
• Gone Horribly Right: In 'Clean Sweep,' a cage fighter is so afraid of a stalker harming his family that when his friend, a homeless veteran, dies after an accident he decides to set the body on fire and fake his own death. The fighter is eventually found, but he burned the body so thoroughly that there's no proof the homeless vet wasn't murdered and the cops will be forced to charge him, although Mac does try to put in a good word (he also gets the vet a military funeral).
• Gory Discretion Shot: 'Blood Out.' Kinda a requirement when the victim is being dismembered with a chainsaw. All the audience sees is the man's blood spraying up on his killer.
• GPS Evidence: Many times played straight, once subverted because an enemy of one of the investigators figures out that the team chases this sort of evidence.
• Gratuitous Italian: For the Greek name of Stella Bonasera, which means Star Goodnight.
• Great Escape: Sheldon goes to PA to witness an inmate's execution in 'Redemptio' and gets trapped when the prisoners start a riot.
  Mac: We're gonna have to break Hawkes out of prison.
• Greens Precede Sweets: Mac won't let the little boy in 'Necrophilia Americana' have a candy bar until after he gets him "some real stuff."
• Grief-Induced Split: "Child's Play" features an indirect case with the culprit behind one of the episode's two victims of the week. Having watched his friend drown as a child due to a prank gift gone horribly wrong, the man's lingering trauma and grief manifested in adulthood as being so overprotective of his own son that he would keep the boy indoors 24/7. His wife, understandably and rightly, left him and took their child away for the boy's own good.
• Grievous Bottley Harm:
  • Danny gets beaned with a beer bottle upon leaving a bar with his band of rookies after work one evening in 'Officer Involved.'
  • In 'Blood Actually,' one of the three victims is bludgeoned to death with a champagne bottle.
• Hair Flip: While undercover trying to infiltrate a Latino drug gang that regularly hangs out in a pool hall, Det. Jamie Lavato wears a short, form-fitting, low-cut, silky red dress and flips her hair from one side to the other as she leans over to line up her cue for her next shot. The ploy works.
• Half the Man He Used to Be: In 'Blood Out,' the Victim of the Week is cut in half with a chainsaw, after being subjected to Electric Torture.
• Halloween Episode: Two.
  • Episode 4.06, 'Boo,' which originally aired on Oct 31, 2007, has a possible murder-suicide at the Amityville Horror house and what appears to be a zombie.
    Sid: He was dead before he was killed. Medically, that makes him a zombie. Happy Halloween.
  • Episode 8.06, 'Get Me Out of Here!' concerns a fraternity prank gone awry on Halloween...a pledge is missing and the pledge master, who is the only person who knows where the young man is, is found dead in an open grave himself.
    Jo: Not often you find a body where it actually belongs.
• Hammerspace: Unintentional. During Episode 4.15, a Killer of the Week enters a building dressed only in heels, shirt and tight jeans. In the next scene, she brandishes large pistol with a supressor. After she is killed, the team finds a cell phone on her body as well.
• A Handful for an Eye: In 'Point of View,' Det. Flack approaches a perp on a rooftop and the guy attempts to get away by scooping up a handful of sand and grit from the surface and flinging it in Flack's face. Fortunately Danny is sneaking up behind the guy and nabs him.
• Handy Cuffs: In 'Vacation Getaway,' Shane Casey uses the shackles around his wrists and ankles to strangle a guard and escape.
• Hanging Judge: The Victim of the Week in 'Crossroads.' He is discovered to be a corrupt judge who got kickbacks from sending juvenile delinquents to a specific hellhole juvenile prison center. The Killer of the Week had had his whole life destroyed because he was sentenced to do time for stealing a pack of gum.
• Happily Adopted: Jo's daughter Ellie (not to be confused with Ellie Brass from CSI), who knows she's adopted and only goes thru a brief period of angst over not knowing her birth mother.
• Happily Married:
  • Danny and Lindsay, beginning in season 5.
  • Mac and Christine will be joining them now. Had the show continued to season 10, it would have had the most married team members in the franchise, with 3.
• Harmful to Minors:
  • As a teenager, Lindsay witnessed the murder of several friends. In season three, she is called to testify at the trial of their murderer.
  • The little girl in 'City of the Dolls' who witnesses her mother, who is a teacher, having sex with a high-school student.
• Hazmat Suit: The team has to wear them due to the thallium radiation Sid is exposed to in the morgue during 'Page Turner.'
• Head-Tiltingly Kinky: 'Bad Beat.' Danny, Sheldon & Adam are viewing a home-made sex tape recorded over a wildlife documentary. Lindsay approches and tilts her head to match theirs while saying, "Who's the other walrus?"
• Hedge Maze: In 'Some Buried Bones,' the victim, a friend of Reed's, is found in a hedge maze on their college campus. He belonged to a secret society which held rituals there.
• Helicopter Parents: Danny says Lucy will never have a computer and won't date until she's 30. He won't even let one of the male lab rats talk to her the first day he and Lindsay bring her to work...Lindsay's first day back from maternity leave.
• Helping Another Save Face: During Mac's speech aphasia arc (he can't recall names of certain everyday things due to lack of oxygen to the brain after being shot and Left for Dead), Lindsay falls victim to an Eyepiece Prank; namely, someone put dye on an microscope which resulted in rings around her eyes. She pops into Mac's office wearing dark shades while his girlfriend Christine is there. Christine gives a quizzical look, Lindsay pulls off the glasses and says she got "punked." Mac attempts to explain:
  Mac: Someone dyed her eyes...
  Christine: [realizing he's drawing a blank, she tries to cover for him] Blue! I see!
• Hero of Another Story: At least two.
  • Quinn Sullivan, head of the New Jersey Crime Lab, is featured in two episodes of the Cabbie Killer arc.
  • After Melina Kanakaredes left the show at the end of season 6, her character, Stella Bonasera, is revealed in the series 7 premiere to have left NYC to head up the New Orleans Crime Lab.
• Heroic BSoD:
  • After seven episodes of teetering on the brink, Flack finally has one in episode 6.08, 'Cuckoo's Nest.'
  • Mac has one as well in episode 7.22, 'Exit Strategy,' after having his own gun misfire as a perp attempts to shoot him with it point-blank between the eyes.
  • Christine has a mild one in her walk-in closet while deciding what to wear for her Valentine date with Mac in 'Blood Actually,' along with flashbacks of her kidnapping.
• Heroic Vow: Mac, due to the oaths he took as a Marine and an NYPD officer, along with his personal ethics. "There are three things that I'll protect at any cost: the honor of this country, the safety of this city, and the integrity of this lab."
• He Who Fights Monsters: The perps in 'Charge of This Post' and 'Point of View' both turned into villains while trying to prove the same point, namely that NYC isn't prepared for another terroist attack.
• Hey, That's My Line!: When Jo says "Boom" upon finding some evidence in the field, Danny turns to Sheldon and asks, "Did she just use my word?"
• Hidden Wire: Several cases, including these:
  • Louie Messer wears a homemade one while trying to clear Danny's name in 'Run Silent, Run Deep' and gets beaten to a pulp when the Tanglewood Boys find it.
  • A suspect in 'Slante' agrees to wear one in order to get the real culprit to incriminate himself.
  • In 'Seth & Apep," Jimmy, the manager of Christine's restaurant, wears one (along with a button camera) to try and get the guys who kidnapped his brother along with Christine to reveal where they're being held.
• Hiding Behind the Language Barrier: While in Greece during 'Grounds for Deception,' Stella and Mac don't let on to the local officials that she knows Greek until their investigation is complete.
• Hiding the Handicap: Mac not letting on to anyone about his speech aphasia.
• His and Hers: Played with. 'Stealing Home' has a "committed threesome" in whose bathroom Sheldon finds towels embroidered with "Hers," "His," and "Hers."
  Sheldon: Hey, Mac, there's three of *everything* in here...except the tub.
• Hitbox Dissonance: Comes up as a plot point relevant to the motive in 'Kill Screen.' An Xbox used in a Gears of War 3 tournament had been hacked to give one player a hitbox half the size it should have been, and everyone else a hitbox twice the normal size.
• Hockey Fight: There's one between the NYPD and FDNY teams in 'Reignited.' Danny, Don and Adam are on the NYPD's team.
• Hollywood Blanks: Averted. A Victim of the Week is accidentally killed by a blank-firing gun going off point-blank in his chest. The murderer — a down-on-his-luck actor that was humiliated by the victim — makes clear as he confesses that he didn't think a blank could do that.
• Hollywood Hacking: In one episode, Lindsay says, "I'll create a GUI interface using Visual Basic. See if I can track an IP address," leaving many tech-savvy folks groaning and shaking their heads in disbelief.
• Hollywood Healing / Throwing Off the Disability:
  • Although it takes Danny several episodes to learn to walk again in season 6, he still goes from wheelchair to cane and then to walking unaided and even running a little too fast (like, two episodes), with only one instance of complaining that his back hurt.
  • A milder form with Mac...it is possible to recover from aphasia over a couple of months, but it still moved somewhat quickly. Not so fast as to make it impossible to believe (especially with the six-month time skip), but a little bit. And, in real life, it can still re-surface when the person is angry or afraid...and Mac seems fine the whole time he's worried about Christine in the crossover.
• Hollywood Silencer: A perp in 'Turbulence' uses a teddy bear as a silencer for a Desert Eagle pistol.
• Hologram: Adam finds one as a clue that leads them to the real killer in 'Air Apparent.'
• Homage: The season three finale is clearly a Die Hard homage.
• Honorable Marriage Proposal: Danny's first to Lindsay, after she tells him she's pregnant.
• Honor Thy Abuser: In 'The Real McCoy,' it is revealed that Adam's father, Charles, had been verbally and physically abusive to Adam, his brother and their mother; that Adam's brother had left home because of it; and that later Adam had threatened to kill Charles if he ever hurt his mother again. Adam has moved Charles, who is suffering from Alzheimer's, to a nearby facility so he can keep an eye on him. When Mac asks Adam why he visits the man, Adam answers, "Because I'm his son," and explains that he feels no emotion towards his father and is concerned by that. Choked up and on the verge of tears he says, "You're supposed to honor your parents. What does that say about me as a person?" Mac tenderly replies, "Looks like you're feeling something now."
• Honor Thy Parent: "Yarhzeit": After Mac returns a family heirloom to a Holocaust survivor, the woman says she plans to light a candle in honor of her relatives who were killed in the camps. She invites Mac to join her, asking if there is anyone he would like to honor as well. There is...

  Mac: [softly] My father.

• Hood Hopping:
  • A suspect in 'Dead Inside' wakes up in a house that's being transported via highway, freaks out and hood hops his way thru traffic.
  • In 'Hammer Down,' Mac jumps from car to car while he and Langston chase a perp thru a junkyard.
• Hooks and Crooks: In 'Happily Never After,' the killer uses a longshoreman's hook (that someone else had been using as part of a Captain Hook costume) as a murder weapon.
• Hostage Situation: Several, including:
  • 'Snow Day.' Adam and Danny are held by the Irish gang that want their drug horde back.
  • Reed is taken hostage by the Cabbie Killer and forced to use his blog to get the killer's message out.
  • 'Hostage' / 'Veritas.' Mac is taken hostage in the bank by "Joe."
  • Sheldon's girlfriend, Camille, is taken hostage by a hitman in 'Smooth Criminal.'
  • Christine is kidnapped during the 'In Vino Veritas' / 'Seth and Apep' crossover.
• House Fire:
  • There's an apartment fire in the B-plot of 'Corporate Warriors.'
  • Stella's apartment suffers this when two kidnapped kids start a fire to try to get the police to rescue them, only for the flames to follow an air vent and an open window into an apartment that is a bonafide fire hazard (polyurethane foam furniture and an ignitable floor varnish caused a flashover to happen in there).
• How We Got Here:
  • A minor example with the B-plot characters in 'Oedipus Hex.'
  • Several major ones, including what led to Mac getting shot in 'Near Death.'
• Human Notepad: The second victim in 'Jamalot.' His killer suffers from a compulsion to write on any and all surfaces, including the young man's body.
• Human Resources: In 'Point of No Return,' Dr. Marty Pino is discovered to have been harvesting organs in order to extract unmetabolized drugs to sell.
• Human Shield: Several perps use other people as shields throughout the series, including Suspect X and Shane Casey.
• Hummer Dinger:
  • The Chevy Avalanches used throughout the series.
  • Averted by Mac and DB in 'Seth and Apep' when they take unmarked sedans to go look for Christine. Of course, Mac has Zane stashed in the trunk, so...

I-L

• I Am Very British: Jane Parsons, Peyton Driscoll and the psychiatrist in 'Clue: SI' all have very strong British accents.
• I Can See You: "Joe" the bank robber and Mac trade these off in 'Veritas.'
• I Can't Feel My Legs!: Danny says this after he is shot in the back.
• Icarus Allusion: A victim in 'Cold Reveal' is obsessed with internet fame and makes an angel costume to wear while he launches himself from a rooftop. He dies because his wing harness doesn't work the way he intended.
• Iconic Items: Mac's Detective Bureau lapel pin and the picture of Ronald Reagan he keeps in his office, Sid's glasses, and Danny's dog tags that were his grandfather's from the Korean War.
• I Didn't Mean to Kill Him: Several victims are killed due to accident or mistaken identity.
• Idiot Ball: The criminals from time to time. Susan from "Turbulence" is a prime example. She very easily could have gotten away with murder, if only she had stuck with the lie that Greenway was a hijacker and her actions saved the plane.
• I Don't Know Mortal Kombat: Averted by Mac in 'Kill Screen.' The others, particularly Adam, don't think he'll be too good at the video game they're playing ("Asteroids has got to translate."), but Mac and Jo both kick Adam's butt from the get-go ("Hey, who's shooting at me?").
• I'd Tell You, but Then I'd Have to Kill You: How Sass Dumonde responds to Adam's request for her name when they meet on "LookinAtChu" in 'Unfriendly Chat.'
• If Only You Knew: 'No Good Deed' opens with Mac & Stella having coffee on the street, when a vulture drops an eyeball from the Victim of the Week into hers. It ends with, Mac having a conversation with Ella McBride from 'Dead Inside':
  Ella: Hey, have you heard the latest urban legend? A woman goes to take a sip of her coffee and an eyeball falls right in the cup.
  Mac: [smiles] That's impossible.
• If You Die, I Call Your Stuff: Danny, to Mac, in 'Sleight Out of Hand,' jokingly. Mac is testing coolant gel used by stunt performers during burn scenes:
  Mac: What other job allows you to set your boss on fire? Going once, going twice...
  Danny: Sold, but if you go up in flames, I get your office?
• Ignore the Fanservice: Mac does a good job of this when roller-derby player Polly rips off her blouse after he asks for the team members' uniforms in 'Jamalot,' much to her dismay...she's got a crush on him. He tells them all that Lindsay will collect their items, and just walks away.
• I Have No Son!: Inverted near the end of 'Yahrzeit,' where the killer's Orthodox Jewish son disowns his father after it is revealed the father was a Hitler Youth member and only pretended to be a Holocaust survivor in order to not be caught for his crimes.
• I Have This Friend: After Lindsay gets pregnant; she uses this in a spectacularly transparent attempt to ask Stella if she needs to worry about any of the chemicals in the lab affecting the baby.
• I Have Your Wife: Well, serious girlfriend anyway. Christine's kidnappers make her call Mac and talk to him before they do in 'Seth and Apep.'
• I Just Shot Marvin in the Face: The guy who kills someone with a gun loaded with blanks and the boy who accidentally shoots his friend after thinking he'd removed all the bullets but forgot the one in the chamber.
• I Lied: In 'Point of No Return,' Stella promises George Kolovos that she won't send him to Cyprus (where he's a wanted criminal) in a shipping container if he gives up his partner. He does...and she locks him in the container anyway.
  Kolovos: Wait, we had a deal!
  Stella: I lied.
• I Like Those Odds: In the opening of 'Crime and Misdemeanor,' a sheet-wrapped victim is delivered to a laundry facility that handles hotel linens. Flack snarkily comments that there are only about 70,000 hotel rooms in NYC. Mac's response? "I'll take those odds." Ten minutes later, the team has it narrowed down to the right hotel. Cut to them entering the correct room.
• Imagined Innuendo: In 'Rush to Judgment,' Flack discovers that a murder victim had been secretly taking dance lessons to surprise his wife for their anniversary. When Flack tells Mac what he was doing but before he can explain, Mac asks:
  "Private salsa lessons? Is *that* what they call it these days?"
• The Immodest Orgasm: In the B-plot of 'Time's Up,' the Victim of the Week suffers a fatal immodest orgasm while seated in a deli.
• Immoral Journalist: Two.
  • Robert Murdock appears in a few season 5 episodes. He runs a sleazy newspaper and revels in printing stories that make the NYPD look bad, particularly when the "blue flu" hits. Although, he subverts it himself later when he prints a tribute to a fallen officer.
  • In season 8's 'Clean Sweep,' Mac is approached by a reporter named Jennifer Walsh who openly flirts with him, trying to get him to corroborate/comment on things she's speculating about...even going so far as to ask if he would compromise his own values in order to close a case.
• Impaled with Extreme Prejudice: Every so often the CSIs will be faced with someone who was killed by something pointed.
  • A woman is stabbed to death with an icicle ('Love Run Cold').
  • A man is stabbed to death with a swordfish ('Dancing with the Fishes').
  • Another victim falls off a balcony and lands on a spike in an awning ('Sangre por Sangre').
  • Yet another is pushed over a railing and lands on a spiked piece of artwork in a hotel lobby ('Open and Shut').
  • Another time, Mac & Flack work a case with a dead murder suspect who had scaled a high fence, only to land on a long piece of rebar sticking out of some concrete on the other side ('Forbidden Fruit').
  • In season 9's 'The Real McCoy', the victim is impaled by a Christmas tree stand at a tree lot.
• Impersonating an Officer: Shane Casey steals an NYPD uniform and uses it for several episodes.
• Implausible Synchrony: The 333 stalker will time certain events to happen exactly at 3:33 a.m., and he can rest assured that Mac will be freaked out when he looks at his watch.
• Impossible Pickle Jar: Exploited by Flack's grandmother. One of the ploys she uses to get him and his sister to come over for dinner is claiming she can't open her jar of pickles.
• Improvised Weapon / Improvised Weapon User:
  • Adam defends himself with a fluorescent bulb he grabs from a pile of trash in the parking garage in 'Unfriendly Chat.' Cue ribbing from Danny and Sheldon, who call him Obi-Wannabe-Kanobi for starters.
  • Murderers throughout the series intentionally use such things as a cricket bat, a Statue of Liberty key chain, a baseball, etc., on their victims.
  • Other victims are unintentionally killed with a knitting needle, a pool cue, a swordfish, and a guitar...to name a few.
• Improvised Umbrella: In 'Rain,' while the team are staking out a newspaper box where kidnappers have instructed their ransom to be placed, a woman hurries up to the box, buys a paper and uses it to shield her head from the rain.
• Incredibly Obvious Tail: Subverted in that there isn't anything obvious from the viewer's perspective, but in 'Commuted Sentences,' Flack and Angell are tailing a suspect, and not only does she catch on, she gets into their car and gives them her itinerary for the day (and her cell phone number in case they lose her).
• Informed Self-Diagnosis: Sheldon, diagnosing his own fracture after his and Danny's scuba diving mishap in 'The Deep.'
• Initialism Title: Two initialisms for the price of one!
• In-Series Nickname:
  • Danny starts out calling Lindsay "Montana" as an Insult of Endearment, but drops it after they're married. He picks it up again briefly while she's hospitalized in season 9's 'Unspoken.'
  • Once Sheldon joins the team in the field, Danny calls him "Doc" all the time; some of the others occasionally do too.
  • Danny, Adam and Sheldon all call Mac "Boss" quite a bit.
• The Inspector Is Coming: The episode with Quinn. The lab stays accredited, but Lindsay is warned not to let Danny distract her into leaving evidence unattended again. And Quinn flirts with Mac a bit, reminding him about the time before Claire died that they kissed at a party. Mac can't deny liking it, but is firm about loving Claire and that he wouldn't have done anything further. Quinn seemed to hope she might strike up something with him again, but he isn't interested.
• Instrument of Murder: In 'Stuck on You,' a guitar handle is used to crush a victim's larynx so badly that he can't breathe.
• Insurance Fraud: The motive of the main storylines in 'Grand Murder at Central Station,' 'Boo,' and 'Second Chances.'
• Intercontinuity Crossover: The season 3 episode, 'Cold Reveal,' crosses over with Cold Case.
• Internal Affairs: Mac, Stella, Flack, Danny and Sheldon all have run-ins with IA at various points.
• Internal Homage: The title of the 100th episode, "My Name Is Mac Taylor," is spoken by several characters with that moniker, since it involves a killer looking for someone who goes by that name. Curiously enough, Det. Taylor does NOT utter the line, although introduces himself that way quite often over the series' 9-year run.
• Interservice Rivalry:
  • NYPD vs FDNY in 'Reignited.' It involves the two sides playing each other in a hockey game. A fight naturally breaks out.
    Mac [snarking to his FDNY buddy, Curtis]: I guess there's no truth to the rumor that the departments hate each other.
  • Regular detectives vs the lab team. Flack and Danny both admit at times that the pure detectives see the lab guys as nerds.
• In the Back: The mounted policeman in season 1's 'Officer Blue,' Danny in the season 5 finale, and Mac in the season 8 finale.
• Ironic Name: During 'Indelible,' Flack and Jo interview two street thugs nicknamed "Black Mike" and "White Mike". Black Mike, who is black, is really named Mike White; and White Mike, who is white, is really named Mike Black.
• Is It Always Like This?: Jo's reaction at the end of her first day on the job after finding a dead pregnant woman in the Lab and dealing with a premeditated murder, a crime of passion, and a high-end thief...all of which are connected.
  Jo: Are all your cases like this?
  Mac: [nodding] Pretty much.
• Is Nothing Sacred?: In "Can You Hear Me Now?", the team learn that a couple were having sex on the Statue of Liberty's torch.
  Mac: [disgusted] Is nothing sacred anymore?
• ISO-Standard Urban Groceries:
  • Played straight in 'Nothing for Something.' Mac's old partner, William Hunt, goes after a perp they put away who's out of jail and up to his old tricks. He carries your standard-issue brown bag of groceries complete with baguette into an alley he knows the guy will be walking through. When the guy gets there, the bread, an orange, some paper towels, etc are scattered around and Hunt is nowhere to be seen. Hunt jumps out, beats the guy to a pulp, calmly gathers his groceries and walks away.
  • Downplayed in 'Slainte.' After having cancelled another dinner date, Mac tries to make things up to Christine by showing up at her restaurant with what appears to be a plain, medium-sized gift bag. It has handles and nothing is seen sticking out of it. She offers to fix him something to eat; he says he thought they'd fix something together. A minute later, they're in the kitchen and he's slicing up a small baguette which he uses to make bruschetta for her.
  • Slightly more downplayed in 'Today Is Life.' Mac is waiting for Christine on her steps and sees her coming up the sidewalk with a brown bag of groceries. The only identifiable object peeking out is a roll of paper towels. He takes the bag from her and sets it on the steps. It is neither dropped, spilled nor emptied on screen; it's just used to show where she's been.
• It Is Not Your Time:
  • Mac, with Claire telling him so during his "limbo" period in 'Near Death.' Near the end he's packing up his office, apparently ready to head to the afterlife with her, but she tells him he can't come because he's "not invited."
  • Stella tells Danny this after he recovers from his paralysis. He's wondering why he survived being shot and she says, "It wasn't your time." He replies, "Yeah, let's go with that."
• It's Always Sunny in Miami: Played straight for the most part, but there actually are a few non-plot driven rainy scenes. Lindsay goes for a rain-walk during the Danny/Ricki arc, and it's raining as Mac and Flack arrest a suspect in the Valentine's Day episode, "Blood Actually." Also averted in season 1's "Rain" where evidence gets washed away, and being set farther north than it's sister shows, snow plays a factor in three or four episodes as well.
• It's Personal:
  • Mac was in the Marine Corps; once a Marine, always a Marine, and he takes that very seriously. He refers to himself as a Marine (in the present tense) in several episodes, including 'Officer Blue' and 'Tanglewood.'
  • Also the reason why Flack kills Angell's murderer in the Season 5 finale.
  • The reason why every member of the team is out for justice first after Aiden is killed...
  • ...and then in the season 8 finale. A perp shoots Mac, and when you do that, they all come after you. Luckily, they don't kill her over it.
  • If you kidnap Mac's girlfriend, it gets personal real fast ('Seth and Apep').
• I Want You to Meet an Old Friend of Mine: Mykelti Williamson, who plays Chief Sinclair, famously portrayed Bubba Blue in Forrest Gump alongside Gary Sinise.
• Jack Bauer Interrogation Technique:
  • Averted in 'Heroes.' Danny wants to do this to a suspect, but Mac tells him they have to do things right for Aiden's sake.
  • In 'Life Sentence,' Mac's first partner, William "Wild Bill" Hunt, returns and beats the snot out of a recently released perp the two of them had put away 17 years earlier, who's out to get both of them.
• Janitor Impersonation Infiltration: In 'DOA for a Day,' Flack dresses as a Parks Department employee sweeping up trash as part of the group's attempt to nab Suspect X.
• Jaywalking Will Ruin Your Life: The boy who had been sentenced by a Hanging Judge to years in a juvenile detention center for stealing a pack of gum in 'Crossroads.'
• Joggers Find Death: While approaching a victim in Central Park, Mac asks Flack who found her. Flack gestures over his shoulder and says, "Richard Simmons over here." The camera pans to show a middle-aged man in a track suit holding a poodle on a leash and giving his statement to a uniformed officer.
• Jurisdiction Friction: Several times, including with the NJ police (in "Tanglewood"), the FBI on occasion, UN officials (in "A Daze of Wine and Roaches"), and Barcelona law enforcement (in "Holding Cell").
  • Downplayed with the Department of Homeland Security in "Charge of This Post." The officer in charge agrees to let Mac lead while insisting that her team be involved.
  • Mac has a bit of personal friction with Quinn from the NJ Crime Lab when she wants to subpoena Reed for his blog info's source during the Cabbie Killer arc in season 4.
  • Zig-zagged in "The Past, Present and Murder." Before he learns they were fired, Mac visits the FBI agent a dead man and his partner reported to, asking for help in solving the first man's case. The agent rebuffs him, but gives him the info he needs after the partner dies from his injuries.
• Justice by Other Legal Means: In 'Pot of Gold,' when the episode's main perp denies having any connection to the murders, Mac calls in a Treasury Agent who informs said perp of the laundry list of charges against him.
• Justified Criminal:
  • Two middle school aged boys trying to pay the rent, who are themselves robbed by a much more conventional robber.
  • Carver's nephew, who, as a young boy, had killed his abusive mother when she started beating his younger siblings.
  • The guy who steals a clown's costume to kill the drug producer who sent a hitman after him. He even gives the clown his day's pay.
• Just One Little Mistake: The only mistake the second killer in 'Criminal Justice' makes is planting the evidence after Hawkes had sprayed for footprints at the scene. The distribution of chemicals on the evidence alerts the team to the fact the evidence was planted afterwards. Otherwise he nearly commits The Perfect Crime. Which makes sense, because he's a DA, and has fifteen years of experience with criminals and the crime lab to know how they work. Also a case of Murder the Hypotenuse because the planted evidence was a lighter that belonged to a guy whom his wife was banging; he kills that guy and grinds down his body to invoke Never Found the Body.
• Katanas Are Just Better: 'Corporate Warriors' features one of these iconic swords. Mac is shown brandishing it as he tests it to see if it is indeed the murder weapon he's looking for.
• Keeping the Enemy Close: Mac alludes to this trope once when speaking to Lindsay:
  Mac: You know what they say: keep your friends close and your enemies closer - and if that doesn't work, kill 'em.
• Kicking Ass in All Her Finery:
  • In 'Risk,' Mac and Lindsay are called to a crime scene that Danny is already working. Mac shows up in a tux, having been at a benefit for the mayor. Lindsay arrives wearing a formal dress since she was at the opera. Danny comments about being underdressed.
  • In 'The Party's Over,' Stella is in a revealing Little Black Dress when the deputy mayor is found dead at the fundraiser she's attending with a date. She starts processing the scene immediately & doesn't change until Mac brings her something else to wear from the Lab.
• Kill and Replace: To fake her own death in 'DOA for a Day,' Suspect X is revealed to have kidnapped a young woman, forced her to have multiple plastic surgeries to look exactly like herself, then held her hostage so long she got bed sores. When the time is right, she kills the young woman and leaves her body where it can be found, figuring law enforcement will believe it's her and drop their pursuit.
• Killer Outfit: This trope and an urban legend based on it are used in 'Til Death Do We Part.' The first victim is a bride on her wedding day. It turns out that she had bought her wedding gown used, and it was severely contaminated with formaldehyde. (The gown's original owner had been dressed in it for her funeral, but the gown was stolen so it could be resold.)
• Kill It with Ice:
  • One victim is stabbed to death with an icicle.
  • Another has her heart frozen when she is impaled by the valve on a tank of liquid nitrogen.
• Kinda Busy Here: It's bound to happen with cops. In fact, the series opens with Mac's phone ringing in church. Sometimes blends with Interrupted Intimacy.
  • Mac's phone goes off once in the middle of watching an opera with Peyton, and once during sex.
  • In 'Snow Day,' she finally gets reception again and calls him while he's trying to sneak up on the Big Bad.
  • Happens with Stella and Frankie in bed as well.
  • Also with Flack and Angell.
  • Happens in the final season with Mac & Christine enjoying a quiet moment on "their" bench in Central Park.
• Kinky Role-Playing:
  • A woman who left her "boring" husband gets her new lover to fake-kidnap & fake-rape her for the excitement. Unbeknownst to them, her ex spies on them sees the "rape" happening, rushes in & kills the guy. The woman gets so turned on by his heroism, that she immediately has sex with him, too, then helps cover up the crime.
  • One of the dog owners at the dog show in "Recycling" has a dog fetish. She likes for her and her partners to pretend to be dogs when they have sex, even to the point of having one of them bite her on the thigh during the act. She lets her real dog watch, too.
• Kiss of Death: The killer's M.O. in 'Personal Foul.'
• Knight in Sour Armor: Just about everyone.
• Knows a Guy Who Knows a Guy: In 'Sangre por Sangre,' Adam and Sheldon are discussing an illegal type of fish they keep finding in a bottles of booze, much like a worm in tequila. Adam says he can find out who's been buying them. Sheldon wants to know how he knows who to call seeing as the fish are illegal.
  Adam: Well...I know a guy, who knows a guy, who knows a guy, [Sheldon starts walking away] who knows another guy...
• Kung-Shui: After the martial arts showdown in the bar in 'Corporate Warriors,' the owner bemoans the fact that she'd just refurbished the place and now it has to be done all over again.
• Labcoat of Science and Medicine: Whenever the characters are analyzing evidence, they're wearing labcoats.
• Lame Pun Reaction: Sheldon to Danny's after they discover that what a victim was actually transporting in his van was mozzarella, not cocaine as originally suspected:
  Danny: If you'da told me this morning that we'd be investigating a cheese case, you know what I'da said?
  Sheldon: Please don't.
  Danny: No whey!
  Sheldon: [groans] I thought I said "don't".
• Lampshaded Double Entendre:
  • Det. Maka states in 'Til Death Do We Part' when a bride falls dead at the altar:
    Gives a whole new meaning to the term "cold feet."
  • Flack repeats her comment word-for-word when referring to the dead groom in 'One Wedding and a Funeral.'
• Lampshade Hanging:
  • Sid knows he has a tendency to find weird things while doing autopsies. For example, in 'Nine Thirteen,' the "Curse of Building 913" is referred to when the team is called to the scene of yet another suspicious death; 37 people have died in various ways there since the original owner committed suicide by jumping from the building decades before. Then Don realizes something:
    Flack: Hey, Sid, how come they only ever call you out for the really strange ones?
    Sid: They...didn't call me. But, uh, this was one I was not going to miss.
  • Late in season 9, some of the team lampshade the Quip to Black puns so prevalent in the franchise. Sheldon has placed some evidence in the super glue chamber:
    Jo: I think your cake is done.
    Sheldon: Then let's hope it'll be the icing on the case.
    Danny and Lindsay moan, make faces, say "Ew," and such.
    Jo: [off camera, as Sheldon grins] I dunno, I kinda liked that one.
• LARP: The murder victim and her kidnapped boyfriend in 'Brooklyn 'Til I Die' are participating in a live-action role playing game involving spies. Their code names are Boris and Natasha.
• Laser-Guided Amnesia: Really laser-guided with Mac...he can't remember a lot of random words for things after being shot. It's a real condition called speech aphasia.
• Laser Hallway:
  • Mac creates a laser barrier in front of the perp he captures in 'Snow Day.'
  • The 333 Stalker creates one around him in 'The Thing about Heroes.'
• Last-Minute Baby Naming: After Lucy is born, Danny and Lindsay don't agree on one right way, leaving fans until the next season to find out whether it was Lydia or Lucy.
• The Last Thing You Ever See: One arc has a serial killer who cuts his off victims' eyelids before killing them. Mac and Sid surmise that he does this so his face will be the last thing they see before dying. Once the killer is caught, Mac berates him for it and the guy admits that it was his motivation.
• Latex Perfection: In 'Civilized Lies,' three perps use identical masks...of the face of an ex-con one of them had previously shared a cell with, sending the investigators after the wrong guy for a while.
• Lawman Gone Bad: Mac discovers that his first partner, Bill Hunt became one of these. Having stolen a large amount of money from a crime scene (he was nearing retirement and didn't think he was being paid enough) and having murdered the girlfriend of the guy who has a vendetta against him and Mac. (The guy doesn't know, then doesn't care that Mac wasn't responsible.)
• Law of Inverse Recoil:
  • Played straight in 'Stealing Home.' The shooter isn't used to firing a gun and suffers from "limp wrist."
  • Averted in 'Stuck on You,' where Mac has Lindsay fire a crossbow to see what kind of effect it has on her since she's the same size as their suspect. She handles it very well and wants to keep firing it.
• Left for Dead: Mac, twice. "Joe the bank robber" thinks he's dead when he pushes an SUV with an unconcious Mac in the driver's seat into the Hudson, and the accomplice in 'Near Death' obviously thinks he's dead after being shot in the back during the pharmacy robbery, too.
• LEGO Genetics: The goats that produce spider silk and the rat with a human ear on its back in 'What Schemes May Come'.
• Le Parkour: Featured in 'Tri-Borough.' One of the three victims is discovered to be an avid participant of this sport. He also uses his skills to evade his girlfriend's father while sneaking in and out of her second-story bedroom.
• Let Me at Him!: Danny, when he sees Mac with the guy initially suspected of killing Aiden (although it was really a recurring serial rapist/killer and not even him). Mac warns Danny off, telling him they have to do it right.
• Let Me Tell You a Story:
  • In several early episodes, Mac begins interrogations with the phrase, "Let me start this story for you." He then runs down all of the suspect's actions that the team has discovered. Danny does this at least once as well.
  • In "The Lady in the Lake," Adam recounts the details of the case of a poor young woman who was taken to a party at Belvedere Castle in Central Park by her new boyfriend as "a princess story" to two little girls waiting for their mother at the precinct. He refers to the couple as a prince and princess.
• Let Off by the Detective:
  • Stella with her foster sister in the Cold Case crossover. She goes to the woman's house and says she was there as a friend, but will be back as a detective the next day, knowing her friend will likely be gone.
  • Several of the team in another ep involving a stalking victim who kills said stalker out of desperation.
  • Mac with Chief Carver and Carver's nephew in 'Justified.' The nephew, who had killed his abusive mother as a young boy, feeling he had no choice, will have to stand trial for manslaughter but likely won't get prison time, and Carver won't be tried, just forced into early retirement and stripped of his pension. Not a complete let off, but still showing leniency.
• Let Us Never Speak of This Again: After the death of a colleague, Stella and Adam have a one-night stand. Things being awkward at work later, they hastily agree that it should never, ever happen again.
• Let X Be the Unknown / Noun X: The team refers to the suspect in the 'Down the Rabbit Hole' / 'DOA for a Day' arc as "Suspect X." The don't learn her real name until 10 episodes after she's introduced.
• Life-or-Limb Decision: A kidnap victim in 'Til Death Do We Part' resorts to severing his own hand in an effort to escape.
• Life Will Kill You: Proof that it's not Always Murder. For instance, the overweight guy who falls off a balcony when he loses his balance trying to reach for his hidden stash of candy while intoxicated.
• Lighthouse Point: During "Vacation Getaway," the Messer family visits a lighthouse at the north end of Long Island and are confronted by serial killer Shane Casey when they reach the top.
• Linked List Clue Methodology: Mac's 333 Stalker leaves a series of puzzles with clues that lead to more of the same until finally leading Mac to his hometown of Chicago and confronting him about a tragedy from 30 years earlier.
• Lipstick-and-Load Montage: 'Cavallino Rampante' opens with a montage of a beautiful young woman getting ready for what appears to be a night at a club. She is actually a car thief getting ready to boost a Ferrari.
• List of Transgressions:
  • See Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking and Justice by Other Legal Means above.
  • Adam says of one suspect, "The penal code is his personal to-do list. Pick a section, he's violated it."
  • Don says of Hector "Toasty" Mendez in 'Blood Out,' "This guy should get a gold medal in the felony Olympics. He's got 17 arrests so far this year, and two open drug charges to boot."
• Little Black Dress:
  • Stella, on several occasions. Fixing to go on a date at the end of 'What You See Is What You See' and attending the mayor's event in 'The Party's Over,' to name just two.
  • The trio of thieves dressed as Holly Golightly in 'Not What It Looks Like.'
  • Christine has at least four. She wears different ones to her parents' anniversary party in 'Flash Pop' and when she fixes dinner for Mac for the first time in 'Sláinte'; then chooses between two others for their Valentine's date in 'Blood Actually.'
• Living Statue: 'Crime and Misdemeanor.' The guy in the misdemeanor case earns a living as one.
• Locked Away in a Monastery: A variation where a kidnap victim is handcuffed to a wall in an abandoned monastery. Unfortunately, he gets desperate and gnaws off his hand in an attempt to escape, but dies of blood loss before making it out.
• Locked in a Freezer:
  • A variation in 'Trapped' has Danny sealed in the victim's time-locked panic room with the corpse. Unlike most examples of this trope, his life isn't seriously in jeopardy; rather, it's the evidence he has to salvage in haste, using improvised materials, before decomposition sets in and ruins the clues.
  • They do, however, find a dead body that had been stored in a freezer in "Zoo York" which, coincidentally, was earlier in the same season as 'Trapped.'
  • Sheldon confines one of the perps who infiltrates the lab in 'Snow Day' to a drawer in the morgue.
• Locking MacGyver in the Store Cupboard:
  • 'Trapped' has Danny and Stella investigating the death of a millionaire inside his mansion's panic room. Danny accidentally trips the room, locking himself inside without a forensics kit. While he's waiting to be rescued, he uses the items found in the room to finish processing the crime scene.
    • Lampshaded by Danny addressing Stella as "Miss MacGyver" as she's walking him through said processing.
  • 'Snow Day' has Mac and Stella stuck fighting robbers who are trying to steal the Lab's confiscated drugs. Thank God Mac can build a bomb and laser trip wires from the stuff found in the lab.
• Lodged-Blade Recycling: Played realistically in 'Epilogue.' A security guard is stabbed, pulls the knife out and uses it to stab his attacker. He then bleeds to death from the wound he had suffered which he might have survived if he had left the knife in.
• Logging onto the Fourth Wall: The series has three examples, but all are now defunct.
  • "aresanob.com" had a link to "see what Stella saw" that Frankie had posted.
  • At the time, there was a site based off of the Edoc Laundry t-shirt line used in 'Hung Out to Dry.'
  • "Lookingatchu" from 'Unfriendly Chat' was made real for a while.
• Look Both Ways:
  • Thought to have happened in the b-case of season 1's "The Dove Commission" where the body of a young boy is found under the front of a taxi, but it's later discovered that the boy died before the taxi hit him. Unfortunately, this isn't determined until after an angry mob beats the taxi driver to death.
  • Played straight later that season in "The Closer" when a young woman running from her angry boyfriend while clad only in lingerie darts out from an alley and is hit by a delivery truck.
  • Played with again in season 5's "Page Turner" after a young lady runs away from a riot that breaks out during a free Maroon 5 concert in Central Park. Looking back over her shoulder, she runs in front of a bus that was just pulling away from the curb. Turns out not to be what killed her...the bus wasn't moving fast enough yet.
  • Played straight again late in season 6 during "Unusual Suspects." Flack is chasing a guy who's wanted for questioning in the shooting of a 14-yr old kid. The guy runs straight into the street without looking either way and is mowed down by an oncoming truck. Flack drags him out from underneath it, but he's already dead.
• Loose Floorboard Hiding Spot: In 'Admissions,' the victim is a high school guidance counsellor. When Mac and Lindsay search his office, they find a loose floorboard in the closet. Mac removes it and discovers a box filled with money and a few laundromat tokens. Curious, Mac and Flack go to the laundromat and discover a heavily taped off machine. They insert the tokens, revealing the door to a hidden gambling den.
• Loud Sleeper Gag: Played for laughs. A group of thugs kidnap a hedge fund billionaire's son for ransom and take him back to one's apartment, which he shares with his mother. Right before the cops arrive, the mother is asleep in a recliner in front of a TV playing at high volume. She's snoring so loudly the gang in the next room can hear her over the TV and her son shouts, "Ma! Shut up!" She keeps on snoring, but instantly wakes up fully alert when the cops bust through the door.
• Love Confession:
  • Lindsay is the first; she tells Danny in season 4 out of frustration, after he sleeps with Rikki Sandoval. He eventually reciprocates and they later marry.
  • Mac is the second; his telling Christine is a big step for the guy who grieved for so long. She responds by kissing him passionately.
• Loved by All: One Victim of the Week in the eighth season is a wealthy businessman who came from a poor background, and while many would expect the people of his old neighborhood to resent him, everyone (including the man who turns out to be his killer) respects him for it. Of note is one young punk who picks up the victim's wallet after the killer discards it, and takes out some cash. After being informed whose money it was, he voluntarily offers it back to the cops, saying it doesn't feel right to take money belonging to someone he respected so much.
• Love Informant: Mid-season 2, relative newcomer Lindsay asks Sid if he thinks Danny calls her "Montana" because she's a 49er's fan. He replies, "He calls you that because he has a crush on you."
• The Lost Lenore:
  • Claire Taylor, who died on 9/11. Mac not only still wears his wedding ring for going on four years, he still has insomnia so bad he won't go home to try to sleep in his empty apartment for even longer than that. He's still so hung up on her after five years that he accidentally calls his girlfriend by Claire's name... during an argument about him not telling hthe team that they're dating. When he finally gets serious about someone else, it's more than 10 years after Claire's death, it's the sister of a partner who'd been killed in the line of duty, AND in spite of her getting where he's coming from, it still takes him a while to fully open up to her.
  • Jessica Angell, Flack's girlfriend, after she is Killed Off for Real. He hides the pain well for a while but eventually ends up drunk on a subway (having neither bathed nor paid his bills in a while) with a Heroic BSoD that leads to him getting a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown from some thugs who swipe his gun and threaten him with it. They probably would've shot him point blank if a previous C.I. of his hadn't happened along in the nick of time. Three years after her death, he's still bemoaning the fact that he'd never told her he loved her.
• Luke, You Are My Father / Long-Lost Relative: Slightly sideways example: Reed Garrett, the biological son of Mac's dead wife, whom she gave up for adoption, comes looking for her. She died on 9/11, but he and Mac establish a sort of tenuous (Mac's not a people person) father-son relationship when Mac opens up and shares some memories of her.
• Lying to the Perp: Detectives occasionally employ what Mac refers to as "The Rule" during interrogations; i.e., police are allowed to lie to suspects in order to obtain a confession.
  • In 'Officer Blue,' Aiden accuses a pizza shop owner of stabbing his victim after beating him. The guy cops to everything... except the stabbing, thinking that's what the young man actually died from. Aiden then tells him she'd lied about that part, and that the victim died from being hit in the head even though he'd actually walked away from the scene, much like a boxer taking too many blows in the ring.
  • In 'Point of No Return,' Stella lies to a Greek antiquities smuggler, telling him she'll let him go if he confesses. She has him sent to Cyprus (where he's wanted for murder) in a shipping container instead. ^note It Makes Sense in Context