Directed by Eric Laneuville
Written by Anthony E. Zuiker, Ann Donahue, Carol Mendelsohn & Trey Calloway
"Unfriendly Chat" is the 2nd episode of Season 7 and the 142nd overall. It originally aired October 1, 2010.
Adam witnesses a murder while goofing around online at work, defies a direct order from Mac, and gets himself suspended.
Tropes for the episode:
- Cell Phones Are Useless: Mac has just left the office when Adam witnesses the murder, so he tries to catch him before he leaves the parking garage. Just missing him, Adam 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.
- Continuity: Mac finds the CSI office's address (5885 Broadway, 35th Floor, NY, NY 10008) in the suspect's apartment. First mentioned in season 2's "Grand Murder at Central Station" and repeated in the episode preceding this one, "The 34th Floor."
- Contrived Coincidence: The murder Adam witnesses on the World Wide Web turns out to have happened in Manhattan.
- Creator's Culture Carryover: Adam slacks at work by chatting with a French girl who is promptly murdered on camera. The only clue about where the murder takes place is a TV in the background noting the temperature outside, so the team checks climate reports from all over the world to know 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, the Cayman Islands, and Liberia.
- Facepalm: Mac wipes his face with his hand as he's chewing out Adam for deliberately disobeying a direct order.
- I'd Tell You, but Then I'd Have to Kill You: The victim, a pretty young woman named Sass Dumonde, tells Adam exactly this when he asks her name.
- Improvised Weapon User: Adam defends himself from an attacker with a fluorescent bulb he grabs from a trash pile. Although he Took a Level in Badass in doing so, his co-workers still rib him about it.
- Logging onto the Fourth Wall: "Lookinatchu," the chat site used in the episode, was made real for a while.
- Needle in a Stack of Needles: Sheldon invokes this word-for-word when telling Mac that's what they're looking for, due to the killer's constantly changing IP address.
- New Media Are Evil: Invoked in the opening, subverted throughout the rest of the episode. Yes, Adam witnesses a murder via "Lookinatchu" but Jo uses it to show a fellow Alabaman (who is stationed in Afghanistan) the NYC skyline, and she & Mac tease each other while on the site as the episode ends.
- Pun-Based Title: For "friendly chat."
- Suspicious Ski Mask: The killer wears gloves and a traditional black knitted ski mask, so all the detectives have to go on is eye color and skin tone.
- "Rear Window" Witness: Adam sees the murder happen via his webcam and is devastated that he is unable to stop it.
