Victim of a guest shot
MICHAEL Keppler emerges, of course, from shadows and fog. The temp fill-in for Gil Grissom (William Petersen) in the Las Vegas crime lab on “CSI,” Keppler is played by Liev Schreiber, who has mottled skin, speaks terse dialogue and is possessed with a rough, uncomplicated voice -- all of which play well on the small screen. He sometimes recalls a character in a David Mamet play -- not surprising, given that Schreiber won a 2005 Tony for his turn in “Glengarry Glen Ross.” Or a disembodied informational voice -- not surprising, given that Schreiber’s long worked as a narrator of documentaries.
Schreiber’s four-episode arc as Keppler comes to a close Thursday, and it’s been instructional. He’s an utterly controlled actor; there’s no doubt he’s taking the role seriously, but he manages to be just droll enough to pull off the sort of zingers that are stock in trade across the “CSI” franchise. “I’m kinda on a deadline,” a tissue recovery specialist told Keppler in last week’s episode, looking up from a corpse. “That’s mortuary humor.”
The straight-faced Keppler replied, “I’m sure it never gets old.”
Zing! The transition is seamless. It’s something of an accomplishment how easily Schreiber fits into the “CSI” paradigm. In his own way, David Caruso reformatted it for his turn as the smug, slithery lead investigator on “CSI: Miami” (as has, to a far lesser degree, the grim Gary Sinise on “CSI: New York”), but Schreiber hardly makes a dent, something that says less about him than about the unforgiving structure of the show. Procedurals are imperfect devices for short-term character development, and it’s hard to see Schreiber doing anything other than a narrow school assignment. It’s as if he’s been green-screened into the action; nevertheless, he finds himself as capable as anyone of taking charge.
As Keppler, Schreiber has echoes of another idiosyncratic investigator, agent Dale Cooper of “Twin Peaks.” At the top of the arc’s second episode, Keppler interrupted a work-related conversation at a restaurant to blankly complain: “My eggs are runny. I couldn’t have been more specific with the waitress.” Except it’s not just funny, it’s pathological.
Over his four-episode run, Keppler has suffered through fever dreams and flashbacks, appeared to half-stoke a romantic flame with CSI Willows (Marg Helgenberger) and has done damage around the lab. He spearheaded an effort to fake a crime scene (“reverse forensics,” he calls it -- “You gotta be willing to deceive the people you work with”) so as to trick a fugitive into coming out of hiding. Problem is, he’s not very good at the work, meaning the team he was trying to dupe easily figured out the ruse, and also that whatever meaning might be attributed to his engaging in this ludicrous venture was never established.
In this week’s episode, the root of his stress is revealed in cluttered fashion, connecting his personal struggle with the resolution of a double homicide he’s assigned to investigate. By episode’s end, even though he’s seen his way out of his pain (“I thought it would be nice to play a redemptive character, because I’ve played so many who aren’t,” Schreiber told Entertainment Weekly last month), it doesn’t at all feel like a victory, because there’s never enough revealed about Keppler to make him sympathetic.
Instead, it’s a victory for “CSI,” which marches on unperturbed. The visual effects are as crisp and zippy as ever -- the techniques of forensic science have never looked so vivid without being as gorily ostentatious as they often were in early seasons. And the rest of the characters -- bossy Willows, slick skeptic Warrick Brown (Gary Dourdan), blossoming Sara Sidle (Jorja Fox), forever beleaguered Nick Stokes (George Eads), trying-too-hard Greg Sanders (Eric Szmanda) -- are remarkably unchanged, as reliable as Mt. Rushmore. This week, as Keppler is making his fate, Grissom is returning from teaching a seminar on the seasonal behaviors of the Walden Pond swamp mosquito at Williams College. His eyes are as hollow as ever, his face as droopy and it’s a reminder that, over time, it’s possible to wring some genuine quirk out of even the most unforgiving of Borgs.
