CSI:NY, "The Cost of Living"
"She's tough."
Stella is indeed tough, and it serves her particularly well in this episode, in which the idea that no place is safe -- a lesson that has, sadly, been hammered home for Stella over and over again -- comes back to haunt her in a very personal way.
The alley attack on Stella comes out of nowhere; violence explodes with no advance warning, and she's left struggling with an attacker who is, for all intents and purposes, faceless, no more than a dark, unidentifiable figure who's hell-bent on killing her. Worse, he speaks fluent Greek, and this is where the idea that no place is safe gets uncomfortably personal: Stella's Greek heritage is now, suddenly, no longer a place of safety, an idea that's reinforced at the end when she recognizes the man who assaulted her as an employee of the Greek Embassy, and that it might even be part of a greater conspiracy.
The fear and anger in her reaction to this are palpable, as they are throughout the episode when we watch her reactions to being attacked, and it's all given an additional dimension because of the Greek factor. An attack by someone who was speaking any language would be traumatizing, of course, but this added personal twist must make it that much more upsetting; it's going to cut close.
A person's ethnic heritage often forms a core part of their identity, and it seems like this is certainly the case for Stella. Knowing, as we do, that she grew up in an orphanage without ever having a relationship with either of her parents, think what great lengths she must have had to go to in order to familiarize herself at all with this part of her background, much less how much work it would have taken in order to learn to speak Greek as fluently as she does. She never had the opportunity to do so within the bounds of family, so she would have had to learn all this on her own, with only her self-determination and need to know to guide her; this would have been a conscious act of will.
So Stella has had to go to much greater lengths than most people do, not just to learn about her heritage, but to learn what that heritage would mean for her identity and for her core sense of self. In other words, Stella is someone who would have had to construct her identity on her own, with much more awareness of that than most of us probably have. Now that identity is being threatened, or, at the very least, is suddenly another place that's characterized by its lack of safety. Stella is already far too aware of how unsafe the world is, how unsafe people are; now the background she probably had to fight for is a threat as well, and how will she deal with that? What does this do to her core sense of identity, of who she is?
As we continue to consider the question of identity, we also have to consider James Sutton, who sold his entire life and walked away, and Mitch Henson, who purchased that life and began to build a new one for himself -- who, as he tells Sutton in flashback, did with that life what Sutton could never do for himself. Meanwhile, Sutton, of course, found out that walking away into a new life wasn't all that it was cracked up to be.
Although the dialogue refers to the money running out and to a series of bad investments, it seems that Sutton's real problem isn't so much his financial woes as it is the literal loss of his entire identity. He murders Henson because he wants his old life back, and yet it seems that his entire problem is that he's still the same person even in his "new" life. Nothing changed for him, and yet he seems to believe that taking back his old life will make everything better.
Meanwhile, Henson seems to believe that his assumption of the role of James Sutton is what changed his life for the better -- but the thing is, he was still Mitch Henson throughout all of that. Buying Sutton's life may have granted him access to some things he wasn't able to get before, but when you get right down to it, he's not Sutton and never was; he was still Mitch Henson all along. Or was he? This is where questions of identity get confusing, and where we start spinning in circles as we try to break down, precisely, what identity really means. What does it mean to be James Sutton? What does it mean to be Mitch Henson? And what's the difference, for either of these men, in the name they bear? What did a change of name change about who either of them were inside? (A rose by any other name...)
Mitch/James's girlfriend is confronted with the fact that the person she had been involved with for the last three years is, literally, not the man she thought he was, and her frantic questions to Flack about who she was with all that time speak to the terror anyone would feel when they suddenly find out someone they loved isn't who they appeared to be. All of this is, of course, simply a literalization of an idea the show has presented before, that it can be impossible to truly know another person, and that sometimes even someone we think we know well can show us an unexpected dark face.
Similarly, the confusion described above over who's who between James Sutton and Mitch Henson is a literalization of the show's key narrative obsession, the question of how we construct and deconstruct identity. And that, of course, brings us back to Stella.
Archaeology also strikes me as an interesting choice for the central theme of this particular episode, since it is, again literally, a process by which the buried past is brought to light. This is also a theme that has emerged again and again on the show, and one that seems to be a key part of Stella's storyline, as well. And since that storyline ends on an open, unsettling note, it will be interesting to see where it's going to go later on.
Briefly Noted:
"No pun intended." Flack is a deeply honest guy, but I somehow have a hard time believing that.
"'Till someone made this his last crusade." Yeah, they really couldn't resist that one. I'm only surprised that they refrained from making even more Indiana Jones jokes.
Danny (or Carmine Giovinazzo, really) seems like he might have had a cold here. He sounds really stuffed-up and nasal in a few scenes, and a couple of times he has that bright red, semi-feverish look to him. It's particularly apparent during his and Stella's conversation with the Fisherman.
"I'm gonna walk away and work and hopefully save my job." Oh, Adam. Honey.
"You okay?" Mac's concern here for Stella is really nice, especially since, as always, he knows not to push it too far with her. What's even nicer is that their mutual anger over the attack is palpable.
"Good luck trying to cheat off this guy." Mac's delight at being on Track 61 -- check out the smile on his face as he looks around -- is sweet and unexpected, as is his extensive knowledge of FDR's private train set-up under the Waldorf Astoria (all of which is true, and another interesting bit of New York City history). Flack's and Danny's interest in the story is also played really nicely, as is their back-and-forth with each other.
Flack's compassion in deciding not to tell Mitch/James's girlfriend that it was her bullet that actually ended up killing him is also done well, as is Mac's brief conversation with Hawkes about that decision.