So did you know this show was set in Las Vegas? Yep, that's right. Vegas! Where even the deepest desert is lit by the garish glow of neon. We fade up this week on a frightened-looking blonde woman (whom I'm going to call "Have Another" Sherri Lewis, for reasons that will become obvious approximately forty-three minutes into the episode), who cranes her head rapidly from left to right as she drives along a dark and deserted desert highway. She suddenly swerves to avoid something in the road that we can't see, and ends up smooshed across the front grille of an oncoming eighteen-wheeler soon thereafter. After a nicely edited pull-back from said relatively unscathed grille, we see that Gil and Catherine are already on the scene, trading observations about vehicular physics and lingering over Sherri's bloody corpse (StC = 28. Nice!) for a lengthy amount of time that's in direct inverse proportion to her importance in the episode. Rubbernecking thus completed, they next proceed to use their Mood-Light^TM flashlights to follow the trail of Sherri's skid marks along the highway (and no, not those kinds of skid marks. Sherri's mom will be gratified to know that she died with clean underwear on) until they find a set of ridiculously large animal paw prints. "What kind of animal?" wonders Catherine. "A big one," replies Gil. Oh, please. Those prints are so obviously fake, they might as well have Acme© stamped on them.

Our intrepid investigators follow the paw prints into some underbrush by the side of the road, where they're soon confronted with what appears to be a dirty, amorphous lump of fur. The director heightens the "What is the hell is that, an elephant with alopecia?" suspense for as long as humanly possible by instructing Gil and Catherine to only shine their lights on bottom half of the corpse. Eventually, however, we do get a shot of the thing's head, and it's soon revealed to be an actual human being in a full-sized, extra-fuzzy raccoon costume, complete with striped tail and oversized headpiece. Hmm. Millions of Americans wait on the edges of their seats for the expected snappy wisecrack, but the ever-diplomatic Mr. Grissom decides instead to simply observe a moment of silence in honor of the absent Sobell, and we go shockingly quip-less into the credits.

The Who, however, have noted the StC reference, and are understandably curious as to my identity.