The CSI Character You Probably Forgot Lea Thompson Played

For many fans, Lea Thompson will always be the lovesick teenager who thought Calvin Klein was an absolute dream. We're referring, of course, to her role as Lorraine Baines in the classic time travel movie gem, "Back to the Future." Besides that pitch-perfect trilogy, she was also a romantic interest for (sigh) "Howard the Duck," as well as the lead in the classic sitcom "Caroline in the City." However, there was a time when she was involved in a case on a long-running show that loves an extreme close-up of a corpse, "CSI: Crime Scene Investigation."

"CSI" played host to a wild collection of guest stars throughout its 15 seasons, including Justin Bieber, Michael B. Jordan, and Jon Hamm, just to name a few. Thompson turned up in Season 14, Episode 7 of the show, and thankfully didn't end up on a slab or the pavement, unlike a lot of actors in their one-and-done appearances on the show. In the episode entitled "Under A Cloud," Thompson plays Defense Criminalist Jennifer Rhodes, who turns up on the scene to review an old case of Greg's (Eric Szmanda) that left a man wrongfully imprisoned for murder. With the help of another member of the team, Rhodes gets to work figuring out how Gus ended up in the predicament he's found himself in — one that put a man behind bars for seven years.

While Lea Thompson gracing the show was great already, it likely had fans of her most iconic work that little bit more excited as she actually shared the screen with her "Back to the Future" co-star, Elisabeth Shue, who starred in the trilogy's second and third installments as Marty's girlfriend, Jennifer Parker, replacing Claudia Wells from the first film. Years later, Shue debuted in Season 12 of "CSI" as Julie Finlay, the Assistant Night Supervisor, which eventually gave us a meta moment of two of the most important women in Marty McFly's life reuniting.

Thompson's character in the show, Rhodes, is the sort of fair-but-fleeting guest role that makes for a welcome, if brief, addition to the cast. Determined to get to the bottom of the case and do things by the book, Lea Thompson's direct Defense Criminalist keeps tabs on the whole process as an effort is made to clear Gus' name and figure out how his assessment wrongfully left a man imprisoned for seven years. It's eventually revealed that, as expected, Gus did everything by the book and went with the evidence that was present. Under the watch of Thompson's Rhodes, it's discovered that it was just an overly keen police officer that contaminated the crime scene and got a blood splatter in the wrong place at the wrong time, leading to the wrongful imprisonment. You can never escape the stuff on that show, can you?