TV Surfing

Sara Sidle (Jorja Fox)

Gender: Female
Occupation: CSI, Swing Shift CSI
* First appeared on October 13, 2000 in the episode Cool Change.

Sidle was born in Tamales Bay, an hour and a half outside San Francisco. Her father was abusive, battering both his wife and children, until Sidle's mother, Laura, killed him in 1984. Afterward, she spent time in the foster care system, which didn't keep her from graduating high school as valedictorian at age 16. She attained a scholarship and attended Harvard, moving on to graduate school at the University of California, Berkeley. While at Berkeley, she started a work-study position at the San Francisco Coroner's office, she would also audit lectures to keep up with new developments, it was at one of these that she met Gil Grissom. Some time later, while she was working in San Francisco, Grissom called her because he was in need of someone outside the Las Vegas team. Sidle then went to Las Vegas and helped resolve some internal affairs problems within the CSIs. Some episodes later she became a permanent member of the Las Vegas crime scene investigators night shift as a CSI Level III at the LVPD Criminalistics Bureau, specializing in materials and element analysis. In season eight, Sidle changed from the night shift to the swing shift.

Character development

Perhaps because of her traumatic childhood, Sidle has demonstrated compassion and empathy for victims of domestic violence, and fury against their abusers. She also has a soft spot for animals, and became a vegetarian after she saw Grissom conduct an experiment on a dead pig. She has also shown a tendency to become very aggressive when under pressure or annoyed - such as her arguments with Catherine and Ecklie, and engaging in a heated argument with a man suspected of murdering his wife.

In the early years of the show, Sidle is depicted as a loner. Her hobbies are all work-related (listening to her police scanner and reading forensic journals); and she claims to prefer working with corpses over live people. In a mid-second season episode, she realizes how much she is missing out on and decides to "get a life" outside of work. During season three she dates a paramedic named Hank Pettigrew, but this relationship ends later in the season when she discovered that he had a long-term girlfriend. Later in the third season, she is injured in an explosion in the lab and, realizing she could have been killed, she decides to ask Grissom out, though he turns her down.

During the fourth and fifth seasons, Sidle seems to be on a downward spiral as her memories of childhood resurface, with cases becoming more difficult for her emotionally. Also, the fact that Grissom decided to promote Nick Stokes instead of Sidle, did not help. Season Four concludes with Sidle being stopped by a traffic cop. Although she is driving under the influence, she is not charged, but is nonetheless humiliated in front of Grissom. Later, in season five, she loses her temper with a domestic abuse suspect and then argues with supervisors Catherine Willows and Conrad Ecklie, which results in her suspension. Following this incident, she admits to Grissom that she has a problem with authority, has chosen emotionally unavailable men (like Grissom), and has a self destructive streak. Sidle then opens up to him and reveals her family story; it is during this season that she apparently starts bonding with Grissom. During the subsequent seasons (sixth and seventh), after it is revealed that they are in a relationship, she appears to be happier and on a more even keel.

In CSIs eighth season, when Fox decided to leave the show, both she and the writers decided not to kill the character, so as to leave the door open for a possible comeback. Consequently, Sara Sidle is submerged into depression after she is abducted in the season seven finale (she is rescued in the first episode of the new season), and, even though she accepts Grissom's marriage proposal on the season's fourth episode, she shows signs of burnout during the subsequent episodes, breaking down on the season's seventh episode, leaving Las Vegas with only a goodbye letter for Grissom and a good luck note for Ronnie Lake. In the letter she states that ever since her father's death she has been living with "ghosts" and that she now needs to go away and deal with them before self-destructing. In the season eight episode "You Kill Me", Grissom indicates he has talked with Sidle and that she is in San Francisco visiting her mother.

Promos for the season nine premiere announced that actress Jorja Fox would return as Sara, and showed her in three clips. However, Sidle left again after the second episode. She appeared again in the final scene of the tenth episode of season nine when she appears to be working on a research team in Costa Rica, where Grissom joins her after leaving CSI.

Relationships

Sara Sidle's romantic relationships have been largely unsuccessful. In the first season she named a college boyfriend, Ken Fuller, with whom she had an unsatisfactory relationship, also saying that they had joined the Mile high club (Unfriendly Skies). In season seven she mentioned a college boyfriend who cheated on her. It is unclear whether Fuller was also the boyfriend who cheated on her. In the third season she had a casual relationship with Hank Pettigrew, who was an emergency medical technician. He was involved in several of her cases, but they later broke up after she found out Hank had a longtime girlfriend.

During the first seasons coroner David Phillips, laboratory technician Greg Sanders and fellow CSI Nick Stokes occasionally flirted with her, but nothing more than friendship has resulted from those flirtations.

Gil Grissom

Since CSI's first season there were hints that both Sara Sidle and Gil Grissom were interested in each other romantically; in fact, the show's producers initially introduced Sara Sidle as a future love interest for Grissom. However, during the show's first three seasons Grissom flirted with other female characters, and when she asked him out to dinner he rejected her, saying that he didn't know what to do about what was going on between them.

In season four Grissom's true feelings were revealed in Butterflied, an episode that centers entirely around Grissom exploring his attraction to Sidle. In this episode Grissom admitted that he was unable to risk his career to be with her. In this season Sara Sidle apparently developed a drinking problem, which Grissom acknowledged in the season finale. In the next season, Sidle was suspended for insubordination and told Grissom about her tormented childhood. He refused to fire her and has her working with him in almost every episode from season six and season seven.

It was not until the sixth season finale that it is revealed that Grissom and Sidle have worked through whatever issues they had and are, in fact, a couple. In season eight it was revealed they have been intimately involved for two years. This revelation caused mixed emotions from fans, some of whom see this relationship as CSI "jumping the shark", an attempt to include more drama and romance to the show to compete with the medical drama Grey's Anatomy, which airs in the U.S. at the same time. By resolving the sexual tension between the two characters, critics posited that the show might appeal to some of Grey's younger audience. This has been denied by the writers. In one interview, producer Carol Mendelsohn said that she has never been able to see Grissom with any other character other than Sidle and that this episode was seen by the writers as the right time to reveal the relationship. Jorja Fox and William Petersen have also said that the relationship between their characters is not new.

Throughout season seven the audience saw Grissom and Sidle as a couple, but the relationship was kept secret from the others in the lab until Sidle's abduction by The Miniature Killer in the season finale. In season eight, they become engaged to be married, but this storyline is left inconclusive when Sara leaves Grissom with a note three episodes later.

A season eight scene showed Catherine Willows visiting Grissom's apartment, updating him on a case. Whilst he is in his bedroom she snoops around. She finds a woman's dressing robe in his closet and looks intrigued. She then notices the photograph of Gil and Sara together on the fridge and smiles knowingly. When Grissom emerges from his room, she asks him "How long have you and Sara been together?". He changes the subject, looking guilty. She smiles and remarks on how she always thought of him as sad and alone. He turns away. This scene was cut from the episode for unexplained reasons.

"One to Go," the tenth episode of season nine, the last scene shows Grissom reunited with Sidle. Grissom is walking through a rain forest,holding a GPS System that places him in Costa Rica, spots a bug on a leaf, but continues on. He comes across a camp, and we see a person with their back to him. When the camera shifts to show the person's face, we see that it is Sara Sidle. She takes a picture of a monkey up in a tree, and turns around, only to see the man that she thought didn't love her any more. They smile at each other, and as Grissom takes off his backpack and tosses it on the ground, they walk toward each other, Grissom with his open arms out towards Sara. The couple join and kiss for about ten seconds before the show ends.

William Petersen has said that what Grissom loves about Sidle is her tenacity. "She's a bulldog. And he always saw that in her. And he always knew that subconsciously the only person who'd be able to give him a second look is someone who's not willing to take the first look for granted." On her side, Jorja Fox has said that "The story of Sara and Grissom is a little like a fable. And most great fables don't really have 100 percent resolution."

Public reaction

The GSR (Grissom and Sara Romance: this double entendre acronym is also a reference to Gunshot residue, often mentioned in CSI episodes) has accumulated an extensive fanbase during the years with some web sites getting thousands of viewers a week. Three other popular pairings are called "Sandle" "Snickers" and "Cara or CSR", depicting her with Greg Sanders, Nick Stokes and Catherine Willows respectively, though none of the three are considered "canon" pairings. Some fans consider the GSR "ship" very similar to the one of Mulder and Scully in the X-Files which, as did CSI, showed a lot of chemistry between the two co-workers since the beginning of the show, letting viewers assume that a relationship between the two would soon begin when in fact it would take years of a platonic relationship and sexual tension for a romantic relationship to be more than hinted at. Mulder and Scully didn't kiss until the seventh season of "The X-Files". Other critics have remarked that the repressed sexual attraction between Grissom and Sidle was a large part of their appeal in the first six seasons of the show.

Grissom and Sidle's relationship has been the subject of intense debate in the press and on-line forums, between fans of the romantic relationship and those who believe the romance detracts from what was once a show devoted mainly to mysteries and a forensics laboratory.

In early August 2007, upon rumors of Jorja Fox leaving the show, a grassroots campaign started. Thousands of fans donated to the cause, and they had a plane flying over the Universal Studios of Los Angeles weekly on Tuesdays and Thursdays with a "Keep Jorja Fox on CBS" banner for a month. The online forum Your Tax Dollars At Work, which has about 15,000 members and has organized the campaign, created another campaign that includes mailing the show's producers a dollar, so as to keep Fox on the show. By October 5, 2007, more than 3,500 dollars had reportedly been mailed to the Universal Studios from forty-nine countries. The campaign had started less than a week before, on September 29, 2007.

Though the effort garnered media coverage, it was announced in late October, 2007 that Jorja Fox's final appearance as a full cast member would be in the episode Goodbye and Good Luck, which aired on November 15, 2007. Both writers and Fox have said that they believe that Sara Sidle "will be back" sometime in the future. Fox and CSI writer Carol Mendelsohn chose to donate the money sent to the studios to CASA, a national association that supports and promotes court-appointed advocates for abused or neglected children.