C.S.I.: Miami went where no episode has gone before this past week: into space! Specifically, the world of commercial space tourism. Maybe you caught the preview during Sunday's Super Bowl Game. If not, here's the gist:
A dead man falls from the sky onto the hood of a car that just happens to be in the midst of being carjacked. The intrepid Horatio and his team eventually determine that the victim was a passenger on a private spaceflight along with a fictional action star and two pilots.
Really, it's only a matter of time before a couple of team members find themselves aboard the "Vomit Comet," trying to recreate the same zero gravity conditions aboard that doomed spaceflight so they can study blood spatter patterns. And you just know one of them has to live up to the hype and lose their lunch (in this case, the unfortunate Omar — right after bragging about having an iron stomach, too). [SPOILER ALERT!] It made for a fascinating experiment: apparently blood just doesn't spatter that easily in the vacuum of space. It took a gunshot to do the trick.
It took awhile for Horatio's team to figure out the gunshot method because the body showed all the signs of having been exposed to the vacuum of space while the victim was still (barely) alive. This is something that has been studied quite a bit by scientists. In fact, I wrote a post over a year ago about the effects of vacuum on the human body. (after taking a handy online quiz). It would not be a pretty sight:
It's not a nice way to shuffle off this mortal coil. But it certainly made for a novel plot twist for the series.
