Allen MacDonald has been with “CSI” since the show’s third season. He’s climbed the ranks from writers’ assistant to staff writer and has had a hand in some of the most significant episodes of the last few seasons, including “Dead Doll” and Goodbye and Good Luck", which saw the exit of the first regular character to leave the show, Sara Sidle. Though busy at work for an episode for the show’s eighth season following the hundred day WGA strike, MacDonald took the time to discuss the current season and his career at “CSI” with CSI Files.

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CSI Files: How many more scripts will you be doing personally after this one?

MacDonald: I think this is it for me. Anything can change, but I did “Dead Doll” with Dustin and Naren and I worked on Goodbye and Good Luck" , which was Jorja Fox’s last episode. Those were two pretty cool assignments to get to be involved in! I had a pretty good season, so I think that after this point I’ll be done until next year.

CSI Files: You’ve been involved in writing a lot of the episodes with Sara, like “The Unusual Suspects” and “Empty Eyes” where Sara’s disillusionment with her job really started and began to take its toll. How much advance planning went into that arc? How much warning did you that Jorja Fox was planning to leave the show?

MacDonald: First of all, I loved writing for Jorja Fox. I love all the characters on “CSI”, but I think all the writers gravitate towards a particular character and for me that’s always been Nick Stokes (George Eads) and Sara Sidle. Their worldview fits mine.

CSI Files: They’re really opposites in a lot of ways-Nick is the determined optimist while Sara is the jaded pessimist. What is it about those two different characters that appeals to you?

MacDonald: I don’t know if I have an answer. This is my interpretation of Nick: when you’re working a job like crime scene investigating and forensics, you’re encountering a lot darkness and a lot of death, seeing the darker side of humanity. I think most of the time Nick very successfully compartmentalizes everything. He can keep the darkness in a box without the job bleeding into his life. I think Sara has a very hard time compartmentalizing and keeping things in that box and it definitely bleeds into her daily life. That’s what always fascinated me about Sara Sidle was that she was so strong, but she feels so much that it’s a constant struggle for her.

CSI Files: They really do seem like two sides of a coin.

MacDonald: I love them working together because to me, they’re like brother and sister. The idea of them having any romantic relationship-which has never been brought up-I would find distasteful. They really care about each other. The scene that comes through the most for me is a scene in “Empty Eyes” when they’re processing the house where the showgirls live and Sara comes into the kitchen where Nick is already processing and he asks her if she’s okay and she says, “Yeah. Let’s work.” Just the look between them, there was so much empathy and connection between them. Those two characters were really there for each other. I’m talking a lot about those two, but I do love all the other characters. There was a line in that scene where Nick asks if Sara’s okay, and she says, “Yeah, I’m just not used to them being alive.”

You brought up Sara Sidle’s [exit]-I was very fortunate that I got to work on a lot of her final episodes, the kind of mini-arc leading up to her departure. You asked me before how long before we knew she was leaving-we only knew before we started those last seven episodes. When we did “The Unusual Suspects” we didn’t know [Jorja was leaving]. When we did that, I was pretty sure I wanted to do a sequel, but I didn’t know it was going to be Sara Sidle’s last episode. That was Naren’s idea.

CSI Files: So he was the one who came up with the idea to bring Hannah West back as an impetus for Sara leaving?

MacDonald: I always wanted to bring that character back. I had pitched two big stories [at the beginning of season eight]. They chose one of them, which was a very dark episode, to be Sara’s last episode, and as we got closer to that episode, it’s was Naren’s very clever brainstorm to [switch them]. I pitched the dark one and “The Unusual Suspects” sequel and basically the dark one was going to be Jorja’s last episode and then Naren flipped them.

CSI Files: So is that dark one on hold until season nine?

MacDonald: Yes. Just the idea of that Hannah West/Marlon West were, in Sara’s view at least, a failure in her life that she would like to remedy, and [a repeat of that] failure that would really get under her skin enough to make her rethink what she wants to do with her future.

CSI Files: And Hannah is a maddening character-she’s the prodigy that can’t be caught.

MacDonald: I love that character. Those two episodes are by far my favorite episodes, “The Unusual Suspects” and “Goodbye and Good Luck.”

CSI Files: How did you end up working on that last episode for Sara?

MacDonald: Because I had pitched those two ideas and they chose the darker one to be Sara’s last episode, I was assigned to that. And then because Naren liked “The Unusual Suspect” episode and since I had written the original episode, I [kept the assignment after the switch]. But it’s important to know that for all of the scripts, it is absolutely a team effort and a lot of different people are involved at different stages of the game. Sarah Goldfinger and Naren were both huge parts of both those scripts.

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CSI Files: Where did your inspiration for “Empty Eyes” come from?

MacDonald: That was based very heavily on a killer named Richard Speck, who in the late 60s had broken into a house at a nursing school and he had killed eight girls one after another. One of them had managed to crawl under the bed. In reality, he didn’t know she was there. He was so caught up in the killing, he never even counted and lost track, so he assumed he’d killed them all and left the house. She’s still alive. Carol always wanted to do the Richard Speck story-it was in Chicago and Carol’s from Chicago. I had pitched to her earlier in the year, the idea that I wanted Sara to find a victim still alive-a victim that was dying, who was going to die and there was very little that could be done, but that she would try to speak to Sara, and that Sara would be in a position where she would have to be empathetic, comforting her in her final moments, but also to get that valuable information about what happened to her that she would have as a first-person witness. It’s that conflict between being a human being and doing your job and how that would haunt Sara. Watching someone die gives it a whole new dimension.

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CSI Files: How was the decision made to end that season on a cliffhanger? Was there ever any talk of killing Sara off in “Dead Doll”?

MacDonald: There was never any serious talk of killing her off. We knew at the beginning of the season that she was going to be in peril at the end of the season. While we never intended to kill her, we needed [the audience] to think we were going to kill her. If they don’t think there’s much of a possibility that she’s going to die, then the episode isn’t much fun to watch! The rumors only helped!

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CSI Files: Sara and Grissom’s romance was a big part of the seventh season and the first part of this current one. “CSI” originally stayed away from romance, but now all three shows seem to be embracing it. Do you think it was wise for the show to go down that path?

MacDonald: Well, you can only play the ‘will they or won’t they’ for so long. They either do or they don’t. Another huge television staple is unrequited love-characters that love each other, they’re soul mates, but they can’t be together. And the fun part is their not being together. “Moonlighting” is the classic example of a show that was basically creatively dead when the couple got together. We brought Sara and Grissom together in a credible way, but I don’t think we short-changed the characters by doing it. You’ve got to have a bump in the road! It was fun to see them in a relationship during season seven, and what made it fun was that nobody else knew about it. That changed in the finale “Living Doll”. It’s such a great moment when Sara was kidnapped that it came out that they were together. I think you can make it work having them together. I think “The Office” does a phenomenal job of having Jim and Pam together. On a TV show, there’s always going to be some conflict around the corner. I’m sure eventually a wrench will be thrown into Jim and Pam’s happiness.

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