To do list: interview philandering men terrified by the Ashley Madison leaks and spend the afternoon trying to figure out who the RealMarkLatham is (spoiler alert, it’s the real Mark Latham: that anonymous egg disguise doesn’t work so well when you christen the egg with your actual name). It’s the kind of real life hacking the fictional team of CSI Cyber (Ten) would find themselves bored by.
A far cry, then, from the silly tech crimes that pervade most episodes of this latest offshoot of the CSI franchise. I get the sense that no one behind the show actually knows what cybercrime is, and has instead bolted tech elements on to everyday analogue crime, such as when they were tracking someone down who could start fires over the internet. A useless skill if stranded on a desert island: “Just rub these two sticks together until they generate Wi-Fi.”
In another episode, a cyber criminal went to all the effort of amassing a fortune by selling fake medication online using a back door in the worm matrix (don’t worry, they try to explain with holograms from an hallucinogenic nightmare), before getting caught trying to get his money paid out as a cashier’s cheque. At a bank. In person. Surely if he’s that good, he could wire the money somewhere using, I don’t know, a dongle or something?
Acts of arson started by a USB? Drug dealers lurking behind a pop-up ad? They’re sort of cyber-ish in that they involved a piece of technology somewhere along the line. But then, doesn’t everything? If I electrocuted someone by dropping my PC into their bathtub, it would be classed as cybercrime in this universe.
There’s bound to be an awkward crossover for a series like this. Until now, the CSI franchise had relied on geographical locations as a nifty means of rebooting and bringing in a new cast to sexily solve crimes in between bouts of awkwardly high-fiving anyone within reaching distance. Locations became as limitless as the number of places on Earth, although I’ll admit, CSI: Foula might have struggled to sustain itself.
We’re in new territory now though. With CSI: Cyber, it’s suddenly gone into abstract concepts: it’ll be CSI: Memories next. The problem is that now all the crimes have to be linked via a gimmick which doesn’t work so well when it’s overenthusiastically mishandled. For example, to help the audience along, a virus placed in some code is visually represented as an actual, wriggling, parasitic-looking creature, probably what the flu looks like in Tron. The Deep Web is portrayed as a genuinely evil-looking place, like a cross between Mordor and MS-DOS, and every time anyone in the CSI team does some hacking, it looks like their hard work is being done for them by a slave class of people trapped in The Matrix.
Unfortunately you can’t make tracing a text message seem exciting by amping up the motion sickness-inspired graphics to the point that you feel like you’re going to throw up a puddle of binary. That’s probably why they’ve left in the usual CSI ingredients of punch-ups, shootouts, bringing in a crowd of extras for a mass high-fiving scene, and James Van Der Beek rubbing his bum on a variety of cars as he slides over them (the scent is how CSI agents find their way home). It’s a regular CSI episode with dodgy holograms. They should have called it CSI: Next Generation.
Adding the tech element doesn’t enrich the franchise at all (assuming you were a fan of it in the first place). The latest episode saw the team tracking a criminal by checking out a kid’s gamer score and swiping through the apps on his tablet. Less an exciting dose of sleuthing, more like an Apple product launch insensitively held near the body of recently shot teenager.
The series feels like someone from an older generation trying to be cool by embracing hip, new gadgets to do the same old thing but ultimately looks a bit daft in the process, like a grandparent thinking they’re cool because they just used a smartphone to bid on a single Werther’s Original on eBay.
