Catherine Willows
[4] Helgenberger announced her departure in 2011, with Catherine making her last appearance in the twelfth season episode "Willows in the Wind", which aired on January 25, 2012.Due to the nature of her mother's jobs, Catherine was constantly moved around the West Coast of America as a child, and because of this, she found it difficult to settle in school.Catherine joined the CSI team at LVPD as a lab technician, after which she worked her way up to the role of supervisor under the watchful eye of Gil Grissom.In the following episode (in which it is revealed the resignation e-mail was fake), she and Russell make it through the firefight, and she is covertly nursed back to health by Doc Robbins with help from others, including the son of Catherine's former boss at the strip club.The character's original CBS biography (which has since been removed) stated that she was born in Bozeman, Montana on March 26, 1963, and raised by her mother, Lily Flynn (Anita Gillette), a former show girl ("Weeping Willows", "Kiss-Kiss, Bye-Bye").The new version states that the character was born in Las Vegas and raised by her single mother, who worked as a cocktail waitress and showgirl at various jobs along the West Coast.Willows's relationship with Lindsey soured somewhat after Eddie's murder, and the girl's behavior took a turn for the worse; she would get in fights at school and was once picked up for hitchhiking.A later brief flirtation, in the episode "Weeping Willows" (Season 5), ended when the man (Adam Novak, played by Marg Helgenberger's real-life husband, Alan Rosenberg) became overly aggressive.In Seasons 4 and 5, she dates nightclub owner Chris Bezich (played by Nicholas Lea) whom she meets while investigating a murder that occurred at his night club.Willows maintains a close friendship with the other investigators on the night shift, especially Grissom, though she has occasionally criticized him for his lax attitude towards paperwork and office politics.After Greg Sanders is injured in an explosion in the lab in "Play with Fire", Willows visits him in the hospital so that she can tell him personally that she was partially responsible for the accident.She accepts, and, before leaving Las Vegas, instills some sage advice upon Morgan Brody, paralleling her first conversation with Holly Gribbs in the pilot episode.Catherine would return to CSI to help out when Grissom and Sara left but also because she had another reason - a friend of hers (Grace) went missing after her shift at the Eclipse."[12] While reviewing the pilot episode, Mark A. Perigard from The Boston Herald thought that Catherine was an exception to the show's "revolting characters", calling her "harried but compassionate".[13] Mia Jones from After Ellen praised the character, commenting "CSI's Catherine Willows oozes feminine sex appeal even when she's bogged down with a bullet-proof vest, a gigantic utility belt, baseball cap and aviators.One paper published in the International Journal of Gender, Science and Technology found that CSI "contributed to the cultural dialogue on women entering STEM fields," saying that Willows specifically is typical of female characters as of 2000: significantly more complex than those in earlier periods but not immune to stereotyping.