The classic film Rear Window gets a real-world, cyberspace makeover in this week’s episode of CSI: Cyber. A young woman named Isabel Stanworth was murdered in her apartment in Tampa, Florida while on a video chat with her parents back in New York. I half-expected a crossover episode with CSI: Miami, with Lieutenant Horatio Caine leading the charge, but then I remembered that the third spin-off series was cancelled after 10 seasons. The location shots in the beginning of the episode reminded me of the many location shots filmed for CSI: Miami, and then you would see the Hummers of the Miami-Dade Crime Lab drive along the highway towards the crime scene.
Memory Lane trip aside, let us get back to the case at hand. Agent Ryan interviewed a man named Tristan Jenkins, a key eyewitness to Isabel’s murder. She tried to get him to recall the killer’s face, but due to Tristan’s PTSD from seeing the murder happen right in front of him, Agent Ryan barely got enough information from the emotionally distraught man that would solve the case.
It was discovered, later in the episode, that someone had hacked into Isabel’s computer through a device that she owns. After narrowing it down, the team found out that Isabel had a sex toy, designed by a company called Teledildonics, that could send signals over the Internet to her boyfriend Ethan as they carried out the more sexual side of their long-distance relationship. The scene where Nelson figured out that it was Isabel’s sex toy that infected her computer with the malware was both hilarious and face-palm worthy given that there’s technology for everything, even for acts of extreme intimacy. My reaction was the same as Raven’s when Nelson told her to go look for the toy in the back of Isabel’s bedside table drawer, as he and Agent Krumitz laughed their heads off.
I was amazed that D.B thought of using ABBI, or Automated Body and Belongings Identification, to identify the killer’s face, running it through FriendAgenda to find the killer. When it looked like the search had reached a dead end, D.B then thought to use the DNA results that he got from analyzing the saliva samples that Raven collected from the crime scene, which then revealed that the killer had a 50-50 chance of inheriting Marfan Syndrome. This new development then produced a very short list of two possible suspects, where the person who owned the profile on the right was the murderer.
That murderer turned out to be Isabel’s boss, Neil, whom I assume was sexually assaulting Isabel from her deleted video journal entry. Her threat of going to the police to tell them what happened to her must have sent Neil over the edge, and that was what led him to stab her over and over. However, the whole truth was never brought into the light, as Isabel’s father shot Neil dead after Agent Ryan talked Tristan out of taking the shot first. It also turned out that Tristan was the one who hacked into the video chatting software to spy on users from around the world, Isabel included (hence the Rear Window reference). He became so immersed in this make-believe world that he had created for himself that he developed a psychological behavior known as Technology Facilitative Social Isolation, where the person associates themselves with strangers in an online environment and spends their entire life indoors.
We also saw a member of Nelson’s family, as his older brother Jordan came to the FBI asking Nelson for help in figuring out if the FBI is investigating one of his firm’s clients for money laundering. When Nelson had tried asking Jordan to defend him in court after the he was arrested for his hacking crimes, his older brother flat-out refused and showed Nelson the door. I get that Nelson still felt hurt that his own brother refused to help him when he was in need, but at the very least, he should’ve tried to help out a little bit. No one can get under your skin more than family, but when they need help, you do whatever it takes to help them in anyway possible.
This was a great episode of CSI: Cyber. It goes to show what technology can do to our overall behavior if we let it take over our lives. I also hope that the Nelson brothers can find a way to repair their estranged relationship, because like it or not, they are family.
[Photo credit: Peter Iovino/CBS]
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