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Sara Sidle

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Sara Sidle (born September 16, 1971) is a fictional character featured in the television series . Sara is 5 feet and 9 inches (1.75 metres) tall. She is a brunette, having straight, shoulder length hair and brown eyes. She is depicted by actress Jorja Fox.

Contents

Early life

[Spoiler warningSpoiler warning]: Plot and/or ending details follow.
Sara was born in Tamales Bay, an hour and a half outside of San Francisco. She had an older brother, who she once got in trouble when she found his bag of weed and showed it to her mother, thinking it was dirt. Her parents were ex-hippies who ran a bed and breakfast, where she preferred to associate with the adults over the children. Her intellect, energy and curiosity were much greater than that of a typical child. She was a perfectionist. It seemed that the roles of parent and child were reversed. They told her to relax and take it easy, and she in turn responded by creating business models for their B&B so they could take it public and franchise it.

In Season 5 it is revealed that Sara’s mother (Laura Sidle) murdered her father, and she was taken into foster care. In one fifth season episode, she tells a young girl in a foster home that she was in the system "for awhile" and is familiar with the feelings of helplessness foster children feel. She remembers being the child whose father was murdered. She cannot remember the name of the social worker who took her away from the murder scene, but remembers being unable to let go of her hand. It seems likely that she was either later adopted or raised in a long-term foster home after her biological mother killed her father and that the parents and brother she refers to in earlier episodes are adoptive.

Education

In high school, Sara preferred to befriend teachers over students and she often ate alone in the library. Her physics teacher inspired her interest in science. She graduated as valedictorian at age sixteen, having aced her exams.

She was accepted among the early admissions of Harvard University with a large scholarship. She found it to be a freeing experience because she felt she was finally among her equals. She graduated at the top of her class with a Bachelor of Science in Theoretical Physics from Harvard.

Sara decided to pursue an advanced degree from University of California, Berkeley. She graduated with Master's degree. While in graduate school, she started a Work-study position at the San Francisco Coroner’s office. She chose to stay on and worked her way up to a CSI Level 2. In order to keep up with new developments, she audited lectures and seminars with local universities. This is what led her to meet Gil Grissom.

Professional

Gil Grissom met Sara at one of his entomology lectures, where she asked him for advice and he took interest in her curious nature. He suggested they keep in touch. He later called her in from San Francisco to help with the Holly Gribbs case—an on-duty homicide of a rookie CSI. After the case was solved, the newly appointed supervisor Grissom invited Sara to stay on as a permanent member of the Las Vegas, Nevada night shift. He trusted her, and being new to the team, he had her investigate allegations against Warrick Brown.

Sara is currently a CSI Level III at the LVPD Criminalistics Bureau. Her forensics specialty is materials and element analysis.

Sara loves her work, and is as obsessed if not more so than Grissom when it comes to the case. She is passionate about her cases and often lets her emotions get ahead of her, especially in cases that involve violence against women. This can be both a benefit and a difficulty when working a case. Her passion moves her to go beyond the call of duty (she spent hours searching through missing persons reports to identify a Jane Doe) but can also make her lose focus on what her job truly is. She has a problem with authority, and is almost fired in Season 5 when she argues with Catherine Willows and Conrad Ecklie.

Her work is her life, and she has no outside interests or hobbies. On her evaluation, Grissom gave her an outstanding remark, but said she needed to improve her ability to prioritize.

Personal Life and Personality

Sara is unmarried. In Season 3 she had a boyfriend, Hank Peddigrew , who was an emergency medical technician. He was involved in several of her cases. Through the whole series, she and Grissom have had some sort of attraction between the two of them. Also, one of the lab techs, Dave Phillips has a crush on her but she keeps him at arm’s length. Lab tech Greg Sanders also had a crush on Sara, but she treats him much like a little brother.

Sara’s personality is that of a loner. Her hobbies are all work related (listening to her police scanner and reading forensic journals). She prefers to work with corpses over live people and is not sure what to do with children (as is evident in her interactions with Brenda Collins, a child who survived a family massacre). She does not trust other people, especially men.

Sara is very forthright in her attitude, and that can rub people the wrong way. She butted heads with Catherine Willows when they first met and had to work together on the Holly Gribbs case, but as they got to know each other, they've since become good friends.

Compassionate towards others, especially women who have been assaulted or abused, Sara puts her whole self into every case. When a rapist was on the loose, selecting victims much like herself, she offered herself as bait. She has a fiery temper that flares up when she feels justice is not being served to those women. She also has a soft spot for animals—after seeing Grissom’s pig experiment she became vegetarian, and she put in additional time on a case involving a slaughtered Gorilla.

She's an enigma... all softness and teary-eyed at times, and tough as nails at others. Perhaps this stems from her dilemma over who she really is and how she wants to be perceived.

She has changed over time. She decides to pursue outside interests after identifying too closely with a victim who ordered from catalogues and ate take-out (“You've Got Male”) which resulted in her having a relationship with Hank. However, when Hank betrays her (“Crash and Burn”) and she finds out he has another girlfriend (who was injured in one of her cases) she does not give him a second chance. A close call in a lab explosion motivates her to ask Grissom out when she realizes that she could have been killed.

In recent seasons, Sara seems to be on a downward spiral. Cases get more difficult for her emotionally and at the end of Season 4 she’s caught driving under the influence of alcohol and Grissom is called in. While not charged, she is humiliated in front of her supervisor. In season 5 she loses her temper at a suspect, and then at Catherine and Ecklie. When there is talk of her being dismissed, Grissom steps in and goes to Sara to find the real reasons for her behaviour. She admits she has a problem with authority, chooses males who are emotionally unavailable and has a self destructive streak. His further probing reveals her traumatic past. More specifically, in the season 5 episode “Nesting Dolls” Sara reveals to Grissom that her mother killed her father. It seems that Sara's father was abusive and her mother finally snapped. Sara grew up believing that violent behavior and subsequent trips to the emergency room to have injuries treated was normal. She didn't find out otherwise until she was taken into foster care. She worries that she might have inherited a tendency to violent behavior and asks Grissom if he thinks there is a "murder gene." Grissom tells her he doesn't think violent behavior is inherited. After her father's murder, Sara became 'the girl whose father was stabbed to death'

In a later fifth season episode, "Committed," Sara tells Grissom that her mother was admitted to a mental hospital for evaluation after she killed Sara's father. Sara was taken to visit her there and is now disturbed by the atmosphere in the mental hospital. She tells Grissom that "crazy people make me feel crazy."

In the finale of Season 6, it is revealed that she is having a relationship with her boss, Gil Grissom. The final scene of the episode showed Grissom reclining on a bed, talking about how he would like to die. He said he would prefer to die of cancer so he would have time to say goodbye to his loved ones. Sara then came out of the bathroom in a bathrobe, toweling her hair, and said, "I'm not ready to say goodbye." In a May 25, 2006 interview with the Chicago Tribune, the show's executive producer Carol Mendelsohn indicated that the relationship between Grissom and Sara is "not so new" and they have been a couple for some time. "He can talk about bugs with Sara," said Mendelsohn in the interview. "How romantic is that?" asked the reporter. "I think for a forensic entomologist, it is!" said Mendelsohn.

Miscellaneous

Sources

CSI Handbook (no URL) CSI itself.

 

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