Grave Danger

The episode features veteran actors Tony Curtis and Frank Gorshin as long-time friends of character Sam Braun.

The separated graveyard-shift team join together after one of their own is kidnapped from a crime scene and held for a million dollar ransom by a mysterious and vengeful assailant.

The scene cuts to earlier that night: Grissom and Sara are reviewing a past homicide case, Greg and Hodges are playing a Dukes of Hazzard board game and Nick and Warrick toss a coin to choose assignments: an assault at a strip club or a "trash run" at the cross of Flamingo and Koval.

Back to the present, police scent dogs track the smell of Nick's vest to an empty parking space on a side street.

With the help of the lab technicians and a dispatch officer, Warrick determines the getaway vehicle to be a Ford Expedition and tracks its escape route on the traffic camera video tapes.

A cut scene shows the kidnapper (as yet unidentified) placing an unconscious Nick in a Plexiglas coffin, throwing in his loaded service pistol, a set of glow sticks—one already lit—and a dictaphone.

Grissom and the team review: there was no trace on the coffee cup or the evidence bag, although there was ether on a white fiber present on Nick's stab vest.

He and a SWAT team storm the house, but find only an overweight drunk lying on the couch; the address was picked at random.

Back at the lab, Nick's parents, Judge Bill Stokes and his wife Jillian, meet with Grissom, who shows them the webcam link.

[citation needed] In desperation, Catherine asks her father, casino mogul Sam Braun to donate the money for the ransom.

Soon afterwards, a message appears on the webcam site, giving an address — 4672 Carney Lane, Boulder Highway — and a deadline: "Be there in 20 minutes, or don't bother coming."

The episode ends with a shot of Grissom lying on the floor of the barn, splattered with blood, while Sam Braun's money drifts down through the air towards the ground.

Greg and Warrick tap into the Expedition's trip computer to narrow down a search radius, Catherine collects up Sam's money and Sara finds the kidnapper's amputated thumb, but on returning to the lab she cannot match the print.

Grissom looks up the file, and sees that the homicide took place at 625 Viking Circle—where the messenger picked up the package containing the USB key.

When Catherine leaves to talk to Warrick, Greg notices that the liquid is sinking into the ground in some places on the floor, and the team frantically begin to dig.

On site, dozens of officers fan out, and Catherine sweeps the ground with an electronic scanner and soon locks onto the webcam transmitter and finds the vent pipe.

The scene cuts to the autopsy room; in black and white, we see Al Robbins and "Super" Dave Phillips cheerfully dissecting Nick, who watches dispassionately.

The team force open one corner of the coffin and use a fire extinguisher to send in short bursts of carbon dioxide, killing the ants.

However, before they can pull him out, Catherine receives a phone call from David Hodges; the GCMS found traces of Semtex on the underside of the box, attached to a pressure switch.

A line is clipped to his belt and a nearby tractor is enlisted to dump 200 pounds (91 kg) of dirt onto the coffin, to equalize the pressure.

[4] Nick's situation echoes that of The Bride, played by Uma Thurman, in the Tarantino film Kill Bill; both are buried alive.

An exchange between Walter Gordon and Grissom also paraphrases a line from the movie (italics indicate the shared dialogue): Visually, the episodes have been referred to as "Tarantino-esque...really attentive to detail"[5] by Gary Dourdan, who plays Warrick.

His co-star Marg Helgenberger opined that "his [Tarantino's] filmmaking style lends itself really well to CSI... there's an enormous amount of close-ups, and it's a very visual show".

For example, the kidnapper buries his victim, a businessman's wife, underground in the Nevada desert and demands $2 million for her safe return, on a short deadline of 3 hours.

However, the culprit in "Crate 'n Burial" is after the money, not revenge, and the victim (Laura Garas) was initially an accomplice in a staged kidnapping.

One scene from "Grave Danger" in particular, of Nick hammering on the lid of the coffin and screaming after he hears the dictaphone message, echoes a scene from the earlier episode, wherein the victim wakes up in a box, flicks on a lighter, and seeing her predicament, starts to scream wildly.Tarantino was nominated for the 2005 Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Directing for a Drama Series.

Ecklie initiated the dissolution as retribution against Grissom for allegedly mishandling an older case in the episode "Mea Culpa".