Goodbye CSI. We weirdly really loved you.

In the fall of 2000, a little show called CSI: Crime Scene Investigation premiered on CBS, and since then, television really hasn’t been the same. It ushered in a new wave of crime procedural that didn’t just focus on the crime at hand, but the personal lives of those trying to solve the crimes. It gave birth to the idea of spin-off franchises. It, oddly enough, made it a little bit OK to show strange, and gruesome things on TV. And now it’s going to join the great, big television graveyard in the sky. Yes, CSI has been canceled after 15 seasons—and today we learned it’s going to close with a 2-hour finale on September 27. As a true blue CSI fan, I’ve already marked my calendar for the final goodbye. In the meantime, here’s what I’ll miss most about the weirdly wonderful crime series.

Science, yo

Maybe this isn’t something to bring up at the Thanksgiving dinner table, but thanks to CSI: I can semi-correctly identity blood splatter patterns. I can also talk about GSR (gun shot residue) and how luminescence is used to test for blood. I didn’t learn that in any college creative writing class.

Science montages were set to techno music

What, you need to dilute that solvent and then extract the follicles from it to get a DNA sample and run it through the database for known matches? Sure, cue up some house music and examine that specimen. After a brief 30-second montage, a piece of paper usually printed out of the computer, and it was either a match, or it wasn’t a match! They made it look like science happened SO FAST.

They also could have been saying complete gibberish while they examined their results, but who were we to know that? We were just along for the crazy science ride!

The Grissom and Sara love was ALIVE

Yes, CSI was really a show about solving crime, but there was also the best will-they-won’t-they relationship of the 2000s — Gil Grissom and Sara Sidle. Also, nice alliteration.

Even though we were probably supposed to be paying attention to the case at hand, it was hard not to pick up on the tiny little glances they gave each other, and the sweet moments they shared together. Had they been an item before? Were they an item now? I NEEDED TO KNOW. In the end we got our answer: they were married! And OK, they later separated, but considering all they had been through to begin with, this was just a rough patch, right? William Petersen is set to reprise his role as Grissom in CSI‘s two-hour movie swan song, so we’ll get a final resolution for him and Sara, right? I’ve been following this relationship for 15 years.

The show epitomized early 2000-era style

Just get a load of Greg, “the lab rat,” with his choker necklaces and his frosted-tip, spiky hair. He was the one-man boy band of science —and his style didn’t really evolve as the years passed. You know what? That’s OK. He had a look and he was sticking to it.

Everything was blue. Always.

Why was the whole crime lab drenched in a blue light filter? Who knows! Blue was the color scheme for the whole building, and everything was a different shade of blue. Is there a scientific reason for that? Who knows! But they basically worked in an aquarium. It was weird when they sometimes went outside and everything wasn’t blue.

Justin Bieber once made a cameo…?

And he was immediately killed off. For real. He wasn’t the only one who showed up in Vegas to either play a suspect or a dead body — Taylor Swift showed up, John Mayer stopped by, and Ozzy Osbourne played himself. It was always guest stars galore on that show. CSI was the Love Boat of crime series, and I wasn’t complaining. 

The cases were usually insane

How about the Miniature Killer, who would create tiny little miniature scenes of his victims and then send them to the CSI team to basically taunt them? How is this NOT terrifying? Also the miniatures were pretty darn impressive, so it was a bummer that this serial killer was using his powers for evil and not good.

The dialogue was usually insane, too

What do these things even mean? Doesn’t matter. They solved the case in the end.

These guys singlehandedly bridged a generation gap, at least for me

CBS, as a network, skews to an older demographic. That’s just a plain TV fact. It also means that CSI became the one show my grandmother and I were both watching at the same time. I became really cool to my Grammy, and my Grammy became really cool to me. We used to email back and forth about crazy CSI plot twists. What I’m saying, CSI, is that you will not be forgotten. Grammy and I can promise you that.

Images via here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.