‘CSI: Vegas’: 7 Burning Questions for Season 2
Now that we know when we’ll hear those ever-familiar notes of The Who’s “Who Are You” (September 29, moving to Thursdays), we know when we’ll get answers to some of the questions we’ve had since the first season of CSI: Vegas ended in December 2021.
After all, it ended with the CSIs getting a win — bringing down lawyer Anson Wix (Jamie McShane) after he tried to frame former CSI tech-turned-expert witness David Hodges (Wallace Langham) for tampering with evidence — and the tease of their next multi-episode villain. Furthermore, we know that two of the CSI vets who appeared in the first season, William Petersen and Jorja Fox as Gil Grissom and Sara Sidle, won’t be back, but another will be appearing, Marg Helgenberger as Catherine Willows.
With what’s to come next for those and more parts of the series, we’re taking a look at the burning questions we have for Season 2 below.
CSI: Vegas, Season 2 Premiere, Thursday, September 29, 10/9c, CBS
What brings Catherine back?
Helgenberger is back as Catherine in Season 2. The first season saw Gil and Sara return to their old stomping ground when their friend and former colleague, Jim Brass (Paul Guilfoyle), was attacked and Hodges ended up the prime suspect in the season-long case. In the series premiere, we learned Catherine was in Dublin (with her grandchild). So what will bring her back to Vegas? Will it be the new villain introduced in the Season 1 finale? Could it be connected to one of her old cases? Could it be another case that brings her to Vegas, then she decides to stick around to help out at the Crime Lab?
How will Gil and Sara's exits be addressed?
Petersen had only signed on for one season, and Fox announced she would not be returning after the finale with “So goes Grissom… so goes Sara. Wherever they go, they belong together.” As for what their future holds, it was left up in the air onscreen, with a debate of whether they’d continue working again as CSIs, stick to living on land or return to the sea. Now that we know they won’t be back, we’ll have to see if we hear where they are from Catherine upon her return or perhaps the head of the Crime Lab, Maxine Roby (Paula Newsome).
Who is the new serial killer?
The end of the final introduced a new serial killer in Vegas and we saw that person writing all over a completely white room. “There’s more there than meets the eye. There’s a whole invented language behind those little doodles on the wall. And it’s a story that Craig O’Neill, who was sort of my number two on this — and he and I have been writing partners for 15, 16 years — have had in our mind for a long time,” showrunner Jason Tracey told TV Insider. “We’re excited to hopefully roll out a whole new serialized mystery that won’t be necessarily quite as all-encompassing and every episode as this season’s serialized story, but there’s a lot of twists and turns ahead.”
As for what that language is, “it was loosely based on this crazy medieval text that was discovered in the woods years ago called the Voynich manuscript,” he continued. “It’s a lot of fun to goof around with it because when you write a madman or madwoman, you’ve got wiggle room, maybe they’re making their own grammatical mistakes in their own and crazy invented language.”
Will Josh and Allie get together?
The first season introduced a new will they/won’t they couple in the Crime Lab in Josh Folsom (Matt Lauria) and Allie Rajan (Mandeep Dhillon), so what will the future hold for them? He did, after all, melt the key from her boyfriend, and she smiled upon finding it. So how close might they be to getting together?
“Folsom will have some explaining to do, at a minimum. It’s a step forward in that he’s at least not going to hold his tongue about what he thinks,” Tracey said of that. “Maybe he’s not going to necessarily say everything that he thinks is right for Allie, but he’s certainly gonna be a supportive partner and speak up when he sees something that’s not right.”
Who will be the new ME?
Mel Rodriguez, who played head medical examiner Hugo Ramirez is not returning for the second season, though the nature of the show means they will need to bring in someone new in the morgue. Will we just see one ME, or might we see a few different ones throughout the season? After all, Tracey noted that the morgue is “a fascinating place” and said he wanted to “populate that world more fully and tell more stories down there.”
Will any more CSI vets appear?
After getting a few familiar faces in the first season of Vegas and with Helgenberger the only vet confirmed to appear in Season 2, we can’t help but wonder if anyone else might show up, and as the showrunner pointed out, “we’re blessed to have a really incredible deep bench and fascinating cast of characters that populated the original series and different iterations of the show. There were phenomenal actors that brought some really interesting characters to life in Miami, in New York, Cyber as well.”
Will Wix come back?
While Season 1 wrapped up the Wix arc in a nice, neat, locked-away-in-prison bow, he is still alive, meaning he could always resurface. “He’s a guy with a lot of strings that could be pulled and I would never put myself in a box of saying any living character — and we leave him quite alive — couldn’t reach out from behind bars and be a problem,” Tracey acknowledged.
