CSI: Miami/YMMV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Acceptable Targets: In one episode, gamers. An entire episode was dedicated to trying to catch a group of bank robbers/murderers who took the GTA expy they were playing far too seriously, but the episode was written like something Jack Thompson would come up with and failed to so much as whisper the fact that 99% of gamers know the difference between fantasy and reality.
  • Anvilicious: The beginning of 9x09 "Blood Sugar". Its images of workers hacking away at sugarcane, the lyrics of the background music, and even the title (riffing off the phenomenon of "blood diamonds"), appear to be trying to lay a guilt trip on the audience for...using sugar. No accident that the presumably rich people in the gazebo are white while almost everyone else is Hispanic, either. Would you like a little implied racism/reverse racism with your anvil?
    • Truth in Television, the vast majority of sugarcane workers are hispanic, and all of them are poor.
  • Broken Base: The Eric/Calleigh romance: the best thing that's ever happened to the show? Or a 'nomance' that's been dragging the show to its grave for years?
  • Crazy Awesome: Once you get over the fact that it's not even trying to be serious business, the show is this.
    • The difficulty in that line of thought is that everything that happens in the show seems to suggest it takes itself VERY SERIOUSLY. Not to mention the marketing...dear god, the marketing...
  • Critical Research Failure: The "killer gamers" episode mentioned above. Yes, the entire episode.
    • An example: Once the team determines that the crooks are basing their crimes on the plot of a video game, the obviosuly need to determine what happens next in the game's plot. They go to the developer (conveniently located in Miami) who refuses to tell them the game's plot, saying that they will "just have to play the game." Not only are his reasoning that an already-released game's plot is some sort of trade secret patently ridiculous, the writers have clearly never set foot in a video game store, where there is generally an entire wall of Official Strategy Guides proclaiming "All Secrets Revealed!" on the front covers. And apparently CSI Miami-verse has no such thing as online walkthroughs, story guides, or Wikipedia.
  • Crowning Moment of Heartwarming: Horatio Caine + child(ren) results in this trope.
  • Crowning Music of Awesome: Technically there's one every episode if you really like The Who's song.
    • The utterly nonchalant music playing during the climax of "All In" that captures both the utter confusion of the bad guy as to what the hell just happened and how badly the team outclasses him in the end.
  • Crowning Moment of Funny: The cast does their best Horatio imitations.
  • Ensemble Darkhorse: Julia Winston, who appeared in all of seven episodes, yet keeps popping up in the fandom.
    • Same goes for Rick Stetler and Ron Saris.
  • Evil Is Sexy: Julia, Horatio's secret baby-mama, who doesn't wear a bra and had a neckline steadily lower over the course of a two-parter.
  • God Mode Sue: Horatio. Seriously. Name me ANYTHING he's not capable of doing. He's a bomb expert, a flawless marksman, great driver, and seems to have a wider scientific knowledge than Grissom did.
    • I think Delko still dives better. Other than that...
    • Horatio is a proven moron around the women he likes. He mumbles and says "uhm" a lot. He's a little too old for that to be completely endearing.
      • Says you.
  • Like You Would Really Do It:
    • Season six finale: Horatio goes to an airport to send his ex-wife and son into hiding, gets shot in the stomach, appears to die on the shiniest tarmac in history. Wolfe gets text: "It's done". Might've been marginally believable if it weren't the motherfucking God Mode Sue of the show! And there's the whole thing about the similar moment on CSI:Vegas that was forced to stick by extenuating circumstances. Sure enough, season seven reveals Horatio to have faked his death, Wolfe to be in on it, and it all to be part of a gambit to lure Ron Saris out of hiding...in the space between the first and second commercial breaks.
    • Season nine finale: Horatio appears to get shot in the head, Natalia gets locked in a car trunk and pushed into the harbor. Season ten premiere: Horatio jumps into the harbor out of nowhere, gets Natalia out of the trunk, incapacitates bad guy...in the space of The Teaser. Again, no one will EVER believe you to have killed a Black Hole Sue on the order of Horatio. This troper doesn't even recall them Hand Waving the headshot...
  • Marty Stu: Horatio Caine... but in a good way, as you can't imagine the show without him.
  • Memetic Mutation: Looks like it's time for...(puts on sunglasses) the opening sequence.
  • Narm Charm: Horatio Caine Parks His Car. So Narmy it's TOTALLY AWESOME.
    • The most recent episodes have Horatio easing up on the one-liners, lowering the Narm Charm somewhat.
      • YEAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!
  • Nothing Is Scarier: Do we even want to know what Horatio did to that pedophile in "To Kill a Predator."?
  • Seasonal Rot: Seems to kick in near the end of season six, when Alexx left the team to "save lives" at a local ER. Taking the emotional core out of the team badly damaged the show as it became EVEN MORE OF A RIDICULOUS SUPEREGO-FUELED MIND TRIP by losing the one character grounded in anything resembling human emotion. Pulling an absurd Like You Would Really Do It for that same season's finale did not help.
  • So Bad It's Good: Everything ridiculous about the original CSI, distilled to pure form.
    • This troper maintains that it is in a category all of its own: So Bad It's Awesome.
      • This troper found it harder to ignore the "bad" side of it as the seasons wore on. That said, his twelve year old self was totally sold on it...
  • Tear Jerker: The death of Marisol. With prior knowledge of this event, the viewer may begin crying four episodes before the actual death (or so it went for this troper).
  • The Woobie: Even fans that don't like him admit that when Ryan puts on the Puppy Dog Eyes they have the intense urge to just hug him and reassure him everything will be okay.