A.V. Club

William Petersen on Manhattan, Michael Mann, and sailing into the sunset on CSI

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AVC: So were you happy to come back in order for Gil and Sara to literally sail off into the sunset?

WP: Well, yeah, that was kind of… [Hesitates.] I mean, what are you going to do after all these years and everything, and you’re supposed to do a wrap-up in two hours? If they’d said, “Why don’t you do a wrap-up over several episodes?” we’d’ve done something different. But they sort of just sprang it on us after they canceled the show. They said, “Do you want to say goodbye?” And it was, like, “How do you do that?” We had to write it in six weeks and shoot it in four and then put it on the air. It was a cram job to get it done.

But they had asked me, “What do you think Grissom’s been doing?” And I said, “Well, I think he’s in the ocean. I think he’s sick of dead bodies and bugs, and he wants to save fish.” So we put that together, and then they said, “Well, what are we going to do about you and Sara? The fans are desperate for you to deal with that.” So I said, “Well, just let ’em sail off into the sunset!” [Laughs.] I mean, if that’s what they want, why at this point would we care? Give ’em what they want! And I just thought it was sort of nice, in that we’d tried to stay away from that stuff all along. We even tried at the end to just keep it as simple as possible: off they go onto the boat. So I was good with it. I just hope that the fans, the people who watched it, were happy about it.