The truth is obviously out there

I'm on a sugar high as I write this. And I just had my first cup of coffee in two weeks, so I've got enough energy to pull a bus from here to Indianapolis with my teeth. Yet I still can't write anything enthusiastic about CBS' new cop show "C.S.I.," or Crime Scene Investigation (9 p.m. Thursdays).\nIn all fairness, "C.S.I." is a decent show: It's shot like a movie, it uses some interesting formal techniques, and it offers several plot lines. The problem is "C.S.I." just can't outdo a formerly great show that also dealt with crime scene investigators: "The X-Files."\nMore on that later.\n"C.S.I." deals with members of the Las Vegas Police Department crime lab. Every time someone drops dead, they get called in to do batteries of forensic tests. You know how in "The A-Team" there had to be one scene in every episode where they make a hot air balloon out of trash bags and hair dryers, a flame thrower out of lumber, or a PVC pipe out of a soda can? Well, there's one scene like that in every "C.S.I." where the detectives reassemble a skeleton or use strange chemicals to find blood stains.\nThere are about four main characters, but I didn't catch their names. Since they're just caricatures anyway, let's refer to them as "the blonde," "the brunette," "the socially awkward guy" and "the black guy."\nSounds like characters from "Dick Tracy."\nIn the episode I saw, "the blonde" proves her powers of deduction. Fifteen minutes into the story, after the police find human bones with jagged marks on them strewn over a hilltop, she exclaims, "He was chopped up! That's homicide."\nTurns out the wife did it as part of a Social Security scam. But she gets off because she did it out of love.\nMeanwhile, by analyzing a woman's vagina, "the brunette" and "the black guy" discover a woman's fiance murdered a male stripper whom she was banging, but the two tried to put the incident behind them and get married. As they're about to get hauled away, "the black guy" tells them, "Laws don't end when you come to Vegas."\nAs you can see, one of the main failings of "C.S.I." is that the scientific tests the main characters perform only seem able to prove the obvious. They're not like Dupin in "The Murders In The Rue Morgue," who realizes that to truly understand how the world works, he must begin the analytical process outside the limits of the rational.\nThis was the basis for "The X-Files" before everything went to hell. Reason was a monstrous blindness for Scully, who always began the analytic process in the wrong place, limiting the question "who is guilty" to simply human terms. \nWhile Mulder was great at beginning the analytic process with irrational assumptions to prove the impossible is possible after all, he looked for the truth in the wrong place. He tried to get inside the minds of his opponents, allowing them to get inside his. \nThese two characters rarely found what they expected to find. In fact, they usually made the frightening discovery that the world operated differently than they expected. Episodes like "Bad Blood" proved neither agent had a true understanding of how the world works. \nBoth the older "The X-Files" and current "C.S.I" use low key lighting, relying on black hues to create deep, impenetrable shadows. But there is one main difference: Vancouver. When "The X-Files" was shot in British Columbia, the lighting was just right to make everything feel off kilter. The nights were chalkboard black, and even during the day, only a few rays of sunshine managed to penetrate the gray clouds to illuminate the pale, shivering agents.\nFilmed in the U.S., "C.S.I" looks like some kind of film noir porno. Everything is sunny during the day, and even the black of night is made innocuous by the bright, neon signs on the Strip. Despite its use of shadows, the whole lighting design feels as cheesy as a made-for-TV Showtime movie or a USA original series.\nIn summary, "C.S.I." is as hollow as the Trojan horse. It lacks the existential ethos of "The X-Files" in its golden years: The truth is out there, but it can be within your field of vision while remaining completely outside your field of understanding.