#think i will gif her a lot this cb i'm obsessed !

[hollygl125]

Hi! I just saw your new post, that I'm absolutely obsessed with, and I was wondering are Grissom's and Sara's middle name canon?

Hi, @inutilidadesbytamara!

I’m so glad you enjoyed my “favourite character” GIF-sets for Sara and Grissom—thank you so much for your kind words! ☺️☺️☺️

As for your question, Sara’s and Grissom’s middle names are not strictly speaking canon, but they (along with some of the other details included in my GIF-sets) are, I would say, the next closest thing to canon—what @addictedtostorytelling has called “deuterocanonical”: “(of sacred books or literary works) forming a secondary canon.” (That was a new word for my vocab list, I’ll admit! 😬)

(I would liken it maybe to obiter dicta in the (common law) legal context: something a judge says that isn’t essential to their decision and hence isn’t binding on another judge but could be persuasive.)

Basically there was information that was provided on official CBS website biographies for the characters and in official CSI books but that never made it onto the show. Some of these sources were themselves conflicting. More importantly, since it never made it onto the show it wasn’t (isn’t) canon and could still be changed by TPTB and the writers. Such was (I think!) the case with Sara’s childhood, for example, as I believe her original biographies did not reference the tragic backstory that would be revealed in “Nesting Dolls” (05x13).

I never saw those original CBS website biographies, so my knowledge of them comes via the (wonderful! amazing! indispensable! encyclopedic!) meta @addictedtostorytelling has shared with us here on Tumblr. She has a post here that discusses Grissom’s background (and references his middle name) and one here that discusses Sara’s (and references her middle name).

(If you are at all interested in the characters’ backstories, I would highly recommend reading the two posts linked above, as they compile a lot of canon and secondary source information and put that information into the context of reality—e.g., which universities actually offer which degrees, specializations, etc.)

I have three official CSI books (not counting the novels but rather books about CSI), but they are at my house, and I am not, so I will provide an update after the weekend as to which bits of information they contain. (The information is now all kind of mushed up together in my head, so I can’t really remember the specific sources for everything.)

Other pieces of information that came from these secondary sources but were not, to the best of my recollection, ever made canon on the show include Sara’s alma maters (Harvard and UC Berkeley), her area of study (physics), and her stated birthplace/hometown (the small fishing village of Tomales Bay, California).

As for that last bit of information, to be honest, a brief google search has disclosed to me no such village, although north of San Francisco there is an actual bay called Tomales Bay; a Tomales Bay State Park; a number of businesses named for Tomales Bay; and a “census-designated place” named Tomales, with a couple hundred residents, located 3 miles northeast of the bay. So either Sara’s hometown is fictional, I think, or . . . I don’t know . . . maybe her hippy mother opted for a water birth in the bay?

Sara’s birthday of September 16, 1971 was well-established amongst loyal fans for over a decade, based on these secondary sources, before apparently being overruled when the episode we shall not name (13x15) ran amok with it, only for it to be established by the CSI props department as canon in a later episode (and we’ll just ignore the completely nonsensical 13x15, or come up with completely ridiculous explanations for it like I did!).

Grissom’s birthday and hometown were both given on the show and are thus canon. His August 17, 1956 birthday came out in the Paul Millander storyline. His hometown was given to us by Hodges in “The Theory of Everything” (08x15): “In an interview in the San Francisco Chronicle—October 31, 1996, if I recall correctly—one Professor Gilbert Grissom revealed that, as a boy, he collected dead animals he found in his Marina del Rey neighborhood and performed necropsies on them.”

Now, @addictedtostorytelling’s meta will tell you that Grissom’s birthplace was always given in the secondary sources as Santa Monica. Santa Monica and Marina del Rey are located very close together in Los Angeles County, on the coast, separated only by Venice, California (where Grissom’s mom apparently had an art gallery). So it could be that the Grissoms moved when Gil was a young boy, or maybe he was born in a hospital in Santa Monica but the family was already living in Marina del Rey. (Wikipedia tells me that the current Marina del Rey hospital wasn’t constructed until 1969, after Grissom was born, but the Santa Monica hospital was founded in 1926.) I think I kind of absorbed the second option into my own headcanon, so to be more precise in my GIF-set I should have referred to Marina del Rey as his hometown, but to be perfectly honest I’ve been a little distracted and really wasn’t thinking about that distinction at the time!

Returning again to the main point . . . the information from these secondary sources isn’t strictly speaking canon, but it is the next best thing. It’s information that was provided by TPTB/the writers (the early writers! the ones who knew/developed our characters!). I would also assume it’s information that was provided to the actors as part of their characters’ backstories. So I take it as pretty persuasive, but you can decide for yourself how much (if any) of it you want to accept—just like canon itself, for that matter! 😉

While we’re here, though, can we just think for a minute about the fact that Sara was born exactly 15 years and 30 (i.e., 15x2) days after Grissom, they both have matching first and last initials (SS and GG), and they both have the middle initial “A.” I mean, these kids really were made for each other (literally)! 😜

Thank you for your question—I hope my answer was of some help! If you have any more questions, please let me know! 💛💛💛

[sungtaro]

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