Throughout my viewing of this week's episode of CSI: Cyber, the only thing I kept thinking to myself was "How can these kids being victimized be so stupid?" That's usually not a good thought to be having when watching a show that is trying to make the audience feel sympathy for the victim.
This week's episode followed two children who get wrapped up in a folk legend created on social media, the Red Crone. Due to the machinations of a child predator trying to lure them into a trap, the children go on a dangerous treasure hunt, as they believe they have been specially chosen by the mythical being to do so. As I watched this plot unfold, I kept getting quite annoyed with the naivete of these children. Up until the end of the episode, these kids continue to believe in the Red Crone myth, to the point of delusion. It was almost unbelievable to me that something like this could happen, perhaps due in part to the fact that social media culture does not affect my world as much as it does people younger than me (I swear, I'm not that old!). That digital divide made the plot unrealistic for me. After considering it for a while, though, I realized that perhaps I was too hasty to judge the plot in this way. As we saw with the Slender Man case, this type of thing does actually go on.
Beside my initial doubts that anything featured in this episode could ever occur in real life, I found this to be another solid installment in the show's well-crafted second season. The episode continues this season's pattern of integrating interesting and conceptually accessible technology. I found the use of the tablet camera as a decoder in the Red Crone's treasure hunt to be particular inspired. Ditto for DB's fancy new camera/radar thing, which can be used to test the age of a blood sample.
This season's writers are also continuing to do a good job in taking us home with the characters. This week, we got some more development in Elijah's story line with his father, who has cancer. Gregg Henry of Gilmore Girls and Scandal was well cast as the elder Mr. Mundo. However, he was not seen until the final moments of the episode. All I'm going to say about the matter is this: If you have access to the guy who nailed it as Mitchum Huntzberger and Hollis Doyle at your disposal, you utilize him for more than a few seconds.
Overall Episode Grade: 8 Megabytes Out of 10
