CSINYS 02 E 09 - TV Tropes
- ️Thu Jul 16 2020
Directed by Norberto Barba
Written by Anthony E. Zuiker, Ann Donahue, Carol Mendelsohn, & Pam Veasey
"City of the Dolls" is the 9th episode of Season 2, and the 32nd one overall. It originally aired November 23, 2005.
Synopsis:
The "doctor" owner of a doll "hospital" is found dead on the floor of his establishment. Meanwhile a young waitress is found dead in her bedroom with no injuries and no signs of a struggle other than a spilled container of soup on her kitchen counter and a single glove on the floor beside it.
Tropes for the episode:
- All for Nothing: The killer of the second victim is the waitress' next door neighbor, who did it to buy the waitress' apartment and use it to expand his own by adding a nursery. As he is arrested, he is told that the waitress had terminal cancer and if he had waited a few months, the apartment would have become available.
- Ambiguous Syntax: The teacher believes that a recording talking about her and her teenage boyfriend will expose their relationship even though the person on it only says she saw "them," not who "they" are.
- Creepy Doll: The voice box on the doll that holds the recording is damaged, making the doll sound eerie rather than like a small girl.
- Harmful to Minors: The teacher's young daughter witnesses the woman having sex with one of her teenaged students and tells her Secret Sophie doll, "This time they were naked and I saw everything."
- Healthy Eating Fanatic: Stella and Sheldon find all kinds of vitamins and organic food in the female victim's apartment. Later, one of the woman's co-workers tells them that she had freaked out when the co-worker had brought her a Styrofoam cup of chicken soup after she'd missed a day of work due to being sick. The woman had screamed at her about the hormones in the soup and the toxins in the container, saying she didn't want to die from them.
- Not the Illness That Killed Them: The waitress knew she had cancer, but had not told her coworkers or neighbors, one of whom laced her teabags with the poison that killed her.
- Pun-Based Title: The title plays off the name of the area of Mexico City known as "Island of the Dolls" where thousands of broken dolls and doll parts have been discarded. The interior of the doll hospital here is strewn with many dolls in need of repair, along with boxes of various parts and yet more left on the counter.
- Soup Is Medicine: The waitress was supposed to have filled in for a co-worker, but didn't show up and the two fought about it. Feeling guilty because the victim had said she was too sick to go in, the other woman took her some chicken soup from the restaurant.
- Tampering with Food and Drink: The waitress' neighbor had laced some teabags she'd asked him to pick up for her with arsenic in hopes that she'd die from the poison, and he and his wife could purchase her apartment and connect it to their own because they didn't have room for a nursery for their soon-to-be-born baby.
- Teacher/Student Romance: The first case revolves around a teacher having an affair with one of her students. The young man says they had to keep it secret because "people wouldn't let us be together." In the end the teacher asks, "Does it matter at all that I love him?"