CSI: Miami - 4.2

At last, four months after being tantalised with the first half of Season 4, UK CSI fans can finally get their hands on some of the most explosive episodes the CSI Miami team have put together to date.

This season is all about character and story arcs – particularly those centring on head honcho Horatio Caine (David Caruso) and his changing relationship with Eric Delko (Adam Rodriguez) thanks to a growing affection for Delko’s sister Marisol (the impossibly beautiful Alana De La Garza). Beautiful, vulnerable women have always been Caine’s thing – from his brother’s ‘widow’ Yelena Salas (Selina Milos) to the girl made an orphan by a killer he’s still hunting in this part of the season, Walter Resden (Damian Young). It is to Caruso’s credit that although his character is sometimes almost impossibly mannered, he is still believable – and never more so than when his face is a sea of mixed emotions as he finds himself becoming closer to a woman.

The plots are still twisty – particularly the excellent Collision, which sees Horatio and the team track down a succession of people who may have caused a woman to die in a car accident – but the character back stories are even more murky. From Delko locking horns with CSI Ryan Wolfe (Jonathan Togo) over glamorous lab rat Natalia Boavista (Eva La Rue) to the continued hunt for the ‘mole’ digging dirt for the Feds, and an ongoing feud with the local drug gang, the Mala Noche, there’s enough to fill episodes even without the dead bodies.

In fact, even the cadavers have class this season, with many of the stories interweaving, such as the threat of the Mala Noche spiderwebbing out into multiple episodes, and apparent bit part characters Sienna (Ana Alexander) and Leo (Chris Batstone) coming back from the smallest of cameos in the instalment Fade Out, to have an episode (Free Fall) all to themselves. As Horatio says: “Worlds collide.”

CSI rewards its regular viewers much more than its sibling in Vegas, which is never scared to ditch or create a back story out of the blue if it suits its purpose. It’s also nice to see that the series producers reward their staff, too, with excellent DoP Eagle Egilsson, getting to helm his own – very good – episode, Driven.

The only shame about the second half of this season is the lack of character development for Emily Proctor as Calleigh Duquesne, but with so much back story going on, some characters inevitably have to take a back seat. The sets still look as impossibly beautiful as the actors – but there’s no denying that this series has style to burn. The montage sequences are, thankfully, much briefer than in previous series – and in CSI: NY, who have been wallowing in this sort of thing far too much lately. There are some gadgets on show but, for the most part, it’s the interaction between the characters and the crime scene that makes this season the most compelling yet.