I recently started a trial separation from my best friend and soul mate – the one with the 25-inch diagonal. No big deal; it happens every year after Sweeps Week, when we’re typically sick of each other.

Some of this year’s finales really had me questioning the strength of our relationship. I knew it had been a long season when I started to doubt my favorite series of series, CSI.

[In case you’re still reading, first of all, thanks! But there be spoilers ahead….]

Is CSI’s Jorja Fox still paying for the Great Hold-out of 2004? If you don’t remember it, here’s a dramatization:

Jorja/George Eads: We’re not showing up to film until you pay us more!

CBS: Fine. You’re fired.

Jorja/George: We’ll be there in the morning.

They were rehired, but their characters have paid the price. Eads’ Nick Stokes was later kidnapped, buried alive atop an explosive charge and ravaged by fire ants while a webcam broadcast his predicament to his colleagues. All because a young woman forgot her coffee cup, went to jail, and got an involuntary flower tattoo, sparking her father to vengeance.

Make sense? Hey, if a synopsis isn’t clear in 50 words, the plot doesn’t belong on television.

Take this year’s cliffhanger, when it was payback time for Jorja’s character, Sara Sidle: A barely functioning, diminutive woman-child steals a wreck from impound, transports it to a remote desert setting, overpowers Sara, and entraps her underneath it. All while working, undetected, at the crime lab. As a maid. Who fears bleach. And builds models near a huge projection of a dead doll’s head.

Hard to swallow from supposedly the most scientifically grounded of the three CSI series. In fact, each one’s logic is proportional to the relevance of its Who-penned theme song.

The original has “Who Are You?” and I’ll give ‘em that. The show is about a quest to determine identity, so in essence, the employees of the crime lab are asking that thematic question.

Miami uses “Won’t Get Fooled Again,” which is pushing things. I guess it means the crime lab won’t get fooled. Again. Does that mean they were fooled before? Boy, that Miami-Dade Crime Lab must be a crack team of second-guessers!

For New York, they went with a theme song that makes no sense – “Baba O’Riley.” Excuse me? Out here in the fields, you plow for your meals? Where – in Central Park?

If CBS breaks out “Magic Bus” for the next location, I’m leaving the fan club.

But it’s not surprising that CSI New York featured such classic leaps of logic as the cult leader who was secretly building an ark…. An ark! A massive boat. Biblical proportions. Hidden. Among 8.2 million people.

Then there was the episode where they were looking for a suspect based on what they determined to be a woman’s bare footprints in the snow. Turns out, they belonged to a mannequin. What’s wrong – was the epithelial-versus-plastic analyzer in the shop that day?

The New York season finale promised to make it all up with non-stop action, via a mob assault on the lab. Exciting, right? Turned out, it was the Irish mob.

Umm, there’s an Irish mob? What’s next, CBS? Will the boys from The Unit be pitted in the fight of their lives against special operatives from Luxembourg?

And yet, I watched…. Unarmed and stranded in the lab, Mac and Stella fended off thieving terrorists, who planned to escape disguised as rescue personnel. It took me 40 minutes to realize I was essentially watching Die Hard.

They captured one of the Irish mob goons and duct-taped him to a pipe bomb that would explode if anyone entered the room. I thought it was a bluff, but when the Irish mob boss later lost his gun during the climactic fight with Mac, it slid into the booby-trapped doorway. He ran to get it and – kaboom! Problem solved, lab demolished, Mac on vacation, U.S. Constitution in tatters.

Seriously, I’m no lawyer (you’re welcome, Mom), but I’m pretty sure Mac violated Amendments 4, 5, 6, 8, and possibly 2.

That’s tough to buy so soon after he was suspected of throwing Joey Lawrence off a roof. Sure, there’s no crime in that, but shouldn’t he toe the line now?

Sigh. I hope three months away will renew my love, but for now, there ain’t no cure for the summertime blues.

Wait – can I say that, or has CBS bought the rights to it for CSI 4?