Original Air Date: February 15, 2007
Starring: William Petersen, Kathleen Quinlan
Directed by: Jeffrey Hunt

Cat Out of the Bag Alert!  This review contains spoilers for this episode!

Synopsis: A serial killer who sends miniature dioramas of his crime scenes is thought to have committed suicide until another miniature crime scene arrives, this time before the murder occurs.

Kitty Cameo: At the very beginning of the episode a gray cat is seen running across a living room floor.

Later Grissom (William Petersen) is studying the miniature replica of a room. When he removes some books from the miniature bookcase he finds a tiny cat lying behind them.

Grissom speculates, by way of ghostly video images shows on screen, how he thinks the victim, a woman lying on the couch, has been poisoned and that the cat has gotten into her tea and then goes behind the books and also dies.

One interesting note about this scene: while looking at the miniature cat Grissom asks Hodges (Wallace Langham) if he owns a cat. Hodges replies in the affirmative and explains his cat’s name is Kobi, short for Kobayashi Maru, which is a reference to a training exercise in Star Trek.

Having figured out the location of the apartment, the police barge in on a woman named Barbara Tallman (Kathleen Quinlan). She owns a gray cat named Tripper who one officer shooes away from the tray of tea and cookies.

Kitty Carnage Warning!  Later the officer who substitutes for Miss Tallman ends up dead in the apartment but the police don’t know how. Grissom walks to the bookcase and removes some of the books, revealing Tripper there dead. As is typical for the series a particularly gruesome shot of Tripper post-autopsy is shown but we’ll spare you that screen grab. Needless to say a fake cat was used for the last two scenes.

Final Mewsings: Poor Tripper, we hardly knew you.

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