Mac Taylor - in The Line of Duty

In The Line of Duty

Mac Taylor keeps a pile of unsolved cases on the corner of his desk. Rapist/murderer DJ Pratt's file remained there for some time, until the CSIs closed it with the posthumous assistance of former colleague Aiden Burn (episodes 202, "Grand Murder At Central Station;" 223, "Heroes"). Mac says the pile used to be bigger, which helps validate his feelings about being a CSI. He usually sacrifices his off-days when cracking a cold case or an urgent case (episode 316 "Heart of Glass". Flack commented in episode 523 ("Greater Good") that Mac "must've been the kid who did all the extra credit questions and made us all look bad" after seeing him at work on an off day. In the episode "Blink" Stella expressed her concern about Mac after finding out that he skipped his off hours and dived right into the new murder case.

When Miami CSI Lieutenant Horatio Caine comes to New York in pursuit of a murder suspect, Mac and his team help him discover the real killer and apprehend him (CSI: Miami episode 223, "MIA/NYC Nonstop"). Mac later flies down to Miami to assist Caine in recapturing escaped murderer Henry Darius, who eventually heads back to New York. Together, the CSI detectives successfully apprehend Darius and extradite him to Florida (CSI: Miami episode 407, "Felony Flight", CSI: NY episode 207, "Manhattan Manhunt").

In one episode, Mac and Flack are caught in a bomb blast in a building while trying to evacuate it (episode 224, "Charge of this Post"). Though he himself is wounded in the neck, Mac is able to stabilize a critically injured Flack long enough for help to arrive, thanks to his previous traumatic experience in the Beirut barracks bombing. Mac and his team discover the NYC bomber to be a schizophrenic would-be Marine out to prove the vulnerability of the city to terrorist attack. By appealing to the man's sense of military duty, Mac is able to get him to surrender. The detective privately acknowledges to Stella that, while the bomber's methods may have been flawed, Mac could not argue against the principle of protecting his city and country. After the resolution of the crisis, Mac and the other CSIs stay by Flack's hospital bedside in shifts until he recovers.

Mac and Flack are also instrumental in ending a hostage situation involving a deaf young man holding his baby daughter and his murdered girlfriend's mother at gunpoint in their car. While Mac talks to the young man, Flack sneaks up on the other side of the car and slips the baby out of the vehicle through the driver's side window. As soon as the child is secure, Mac is able to safely disarm the young man without anyone getting injured. The baby is then returned to the custody of her grateful grandparents (episode 312, "Silent Night").

One of Mac's most difficult situations on the job involves the discovery of Aiden Burn's questionable behavior (episode 202, "Grand Murder At Central Station"). Aiden had been sorely tempted to tamper with evidence in order to implicate a rape suspect whose victim decided to press charges against him after he raped her a second time (the victim declined to press charges after the first assault). Though Aiden eventually does not follow through, she had broken the seal on the evidence, and Mac, insistent on preserving the integrity of the lab, felt that his only option was to fire her. Nevertheless, he promises Aiden that he will bring the rapist to justice, a promise that he makes good on (with Aiden's help in a sad irony) in episode 223, "Heroes."

A serial killer, Clay Dobson, whom Mac helped put away five years previously, comes back to haunt him after the man is released, thanks to Mac's arrest of the detective (Dean Truby) who took his confession. Mac's single-minded intensity in his renewed pursuit of this killer makes him short-tempered with his concerned coworkers. After the CSIs discover one of Dobson's victims is still alive, Mac charges after him, alone, cornering him on a roof of a tall building. Dobson comes crashing to earth moments later, fatally impacting on the hood of a police cruiser, only feet away from Flack and some uniformed officers arriving as backup. His hands are cuffed, and Mac gazes down from the roof in horror (episode 321, "Past Imperfect"). Flashbacks in the following episode reveal that Dobson intentionally fell from the roof, telling Mac that if he went down, he would take the detective with him. The Chief of Detectives, Brigham Sinclair, in a bid to remove Mac from his position at the lab (for political reasons, as Mac believes), initiates an Internal Affairs investigation, even though the district attorney did not find enough evidence to charge Mac (episode 322, "Cold Reveal"). During the hearing, the prosecutor appears to be determined to destroy Mac's career, despite attempts by his colleagues to aid him in their testimony. Former Detective Truby calls Taylor from jail, desiring to meet him in person. During the visit, Truby, guilty over Dobson's release, offers Mac a trump card to play against Deputy Inspector Gerrard and Sinclair: When Dobson had originally been arrested several years previously, Gerrard, then a lieutenant, failed to remove Dobson's belt. Dobson used the belt in a suicide attempt in his cell. Gerrard and Sinclair, the precinct captain, covered up the suicide attempt as well as Gerrard's lapse in procedure. Mac confronts the two and threatens to take his evidence to the media, thereby ruining both their political aspirations. Sinclair decides to have Mac cleared of all charges and the Internal Affairs investigation discontinued, and Mac remains quiet about his knowledge (episode 323, "...Comes Around").

During his trip to England, Mac seems to be stalked by person or persons unknown; he starts receiving anonymous phone calls (most of which are silent, though some are very short messages from an unidentified caller) from a phone extension of 333 at 3:33 am; the calls continue after he gets back to New York. It appears that whoever is stalking Mac seems to know him intimately, as the calls keep coming despite him transferring to another hotel and changing his cell phone number.

During "One Wedding and a Funeral", Mac discovers, that the 333 caller has been stalking him for some time, and at the end, a three-dimensional puzzle of his first case and first apartment in NYC leads him to where he got engaged in NYC. There he finds another puzzle with a stone leading him to a building back in Chicago. Mac also tests the puzzle pieces and the t-shirt and sees that whomever handled the puzzle was the brother of the t-shirt's owner. Mac flies to Chicago and the building from the puzzle. The episode ends with the 333 caller saying to him "How does it feel to be home, Detective Taylor?"

In "The Thing About Heroes...," Mac continues his Chicago investigation and follows the clues to a body hanging in an unused floor of the Chicago Tribune building. A hangman puzzle written on the wall leaves out the letters that spell "Coward". The decomposed body is revealed to be that of Bobby Toole who died thirty years ago. Mac goes and talks to a former friend of his named Jimmy. He asks Jimmy if he's the stalker and if it's because of his brother Will's death. Mac has proof the bloody t-shirt is Will's and says they were the only ones who knew that Bobby Toole killed Will and that they killed Bobby. Jimmy is incensed at the idea and that Mac is acting high and mighty after he apparently let Will down that night. Jimmy says Mac has no idea what it was like seeing his father cry and lying to his younger brother Andy about Will's death. Then Jimmy storms away. Mac turns around to see Flack standing there. Since an attempt was made on the team's life while Mac was away, and the chief had been getting angry calls about Mac's work from Chicago police, Don has been sent to help Mac clean things up quickly. Mac tells Flack when he and Jimmy were both 14 they used to tag along with Jimmy's brother Will (age 16) to make deliveries for a guy named Sal Marchetti. One night, they delivered money to Bobby Toole, but Toole got upset that it wasn't all there. He began to beat Will. Jimmy grabbed Bobby's gun but was hit and dropped it. Jimmy yelled for Mac to get the gun and he did but Mac couldn't bring himself to pull the trigger. Jimmy grabbed the gun from Mac and shot and killed Toole. They took Will to the ER where he died and told the police they were mugged, but they didn't see by who. They then told Sal what happened and Sal told them he would help hide the evidence.

They never spoke of what happened again. Flack tells Mac it was self-defense, but Mac points out they were too young to know the difference. Mac compares DNA evidence from a cigarette butt of Jimmy's he took when they spoke to the puzzle pieces and the bloody t-shirt and doesn't find a match, thus proving that Andy must be the brother involved. This confuses Mac, since Andy wasn't present when it happened. Stella looks through the evidence again and discovers something odd. The unused Chicago puzzle pieces had blue place markers on them, and the NYC pieces had green markers. When she left a piece of the NYC puzzle at a man named Drew Bedford's work, she went back for it, but she actually had picked up a piece of the Chicago puzzle, which she wouldn't have had yet. Drew (Andrew) is revealed to be Andy, and he has been attempting to woo Stella in an attempt to get closer to Mac. Taylor and Flack race back to the city so they can assist in his capture. During a sweep of his office though, Andy hits Mac over the head and drags him off down a secret tunnel. The CSI team rushes back to the lab where they find that an MP3 player that had been rigged to control a murder scene/subway train earlier, in an attempt to kill them, has a song left on it. The song is called "Train to Nowhere", and is track 6 on an album. This points to the abandoned City Hall #6 line station. They realize that Andy leaving obvious clues to his whereabouts must be a trap, but with Mac's life on the line they have to try something. Flack says he was expecting this and brought along some insurance.

Meanwhile, Andy has Mac sitting motionless in a chair while he sets up a trap made of motion-detecting lasers, a shotgun, and a revolver. If Mac breaks the laser field, he will be shot by the revolver between the eyes. If someone opens the door to rescue him, they will be wounded with the shotgun. Andy had followed them the night of Will's death and saw what happened. 333 was the room that they were in, therefore this number was forever engraved upon his mind. Now living in NYC, Andy was content to let the past stay in the past until he saw the headlines praising Mac as a hero for taking down the Irish gang in "Snow Day". Jimmy is in NYC at Flack's insistence, and he calls Andy on Stella's phone. He tries to talk him out of his plan but Andy hears him on the other side of the wall. Jimmy starts to enter the room and Andy yells in an attempt to stop him. Jimmy is hit with a shotgun blast and knocked to the ground. Andy races over to his brother but as he passes in front of Mac's trap, Mac trips the lasers and Andy is shot in the gut (Andy is shot in the arm, as stated below). Mac jumps up and grabs the revolver while Andy draws a gun from his hip. Mac shoots him in the arm and the team runs in and subdues Andy. Stella assists Jimmy, who is revealed to be wearing a bulletproof vest. He is in pain and in shock, but not injured.

Flack approaches Mac and reminds him that in those situations they are trained to kill, not wound the victim's arm. "Not today", says Mac. "They've already lost enough, too much."

By the end of the fourth season, Mac is tricked and taken hostage by a criminal named "Joe". At the beginning of Season 5, he lost consciousness and after waking forgot what were the last things he did. He later revives his memories and is back on the case to find Joe. At the end of "Veritas" (Episode 5.01), he finally arrests Joe and tells him that he made him get very "pissed off".

In episode 5.10 (The Triangle), Lindsay Monroe and Danny Messer inform Mac that they're having a baby. Instead of taking it badly, Mac embraces both of them with joy. When Lindsay finally gave birth to a baby girl, who she and Danny later named Lucy, Mac is asked to be her godfather. Mac instantly and delightfully accepts the offer.

Right before the end of the sixth season in "Point of View", Mac is injured from chasing a murderer. During his recovery, he sits on a chair in his apartment, which is positioned at his window, allowing him to spy on his neighbors (in a Rear Window-esque way). However, he witnesses a man visiting Mac's neighbor Kevin Scott, who is a former university professor. Hours later, the man is found dead. Later, Mac sees him poisoning his canary until he is interrupted by a visitor, unexpectedly to be Peyton, Mac's ex girlfriend who he hasn't seen for over 3 years since his visit to London with her. He tries to convince her that Kevin is behaving suspiciously and that he killed his canary, but she thinks he is jealous and tells him that Kevin is just her friend. They talk about the past and they rekindle their relationship. Mac tells her that he missed her after she left him for her family, to which she apologies to, but he understood that her family is more important. Kevin's actions are proved to be criminal when he plotted to expose a group of people to a highly contagious chemical substance and he is arrested. Before the credits, Mac and Peyton look out of his apartment window amusingly, witnessing a couple kissing when a woman is about to catch them in the act.

In the eighth season finale, "Near Death", Mac is shot during a robbery gone wrong, he finds himself in limbo between life and death. As he fights for his life, the team struggles to keep their emotions in check as they process the evidence and bring the shooter to justice. The first and last “limbo” scenes feature Mac and Claire are great together. As with “Indelible”, the pair has a comfortable, believable chemistry that makes Claire’s death even more poignant. During her first scene this week, Claire explains to Mac that he’s dying. He isn’t ready, but she tells him it will all be okay. He wants to know why she is keeping her distance, so she comes closer and reaches out to touch him for the first time in more than a decade. Their second encounter at the end of the episode is very different. By then, Mac has come to terms with his situation and is ready to move on. Claire, however, tells him that he has to continue living. It isn’t like him to give up. During the final scene with Mac and Claire, Mac confesses that he has met someone. He and Christine Whitney have embarked on a tentative relationship, and it’s clear that he has been struggling with what this budding love might mean for his past with Claire. Claire gives Mac and Christine her blessing, which symbolizes Mac forgiving himself for falling in love again and allowing himself to move on. What he shared with Claire will always be an important part of him, but he deserves to find new happiness. In fact, Claire’s final words to him are, “Be happy, Mac.” While Mac deals with his internal struggles, Christine is waiting at the hospital to find out if Mac will live or die. Her brother Stan was Mac’s former partner, who died in the line of duty, and she is once again forced to face the reality of what it can mean to have a police officer in the family. However, she doesn’t run away. Instead, she stays at the hospital and waits, and she’s with Mac when he wakes up at the end of the hour. She has been praying over him, and she sheds tears of joy when he squeezes her hand and opens his eyes. The relationship between Mac and Christine has been a nice addition to season eight, allowing fans to see Mac in a different light as he makes an effort to have a personal life away from the lab.