Yeah, I think the writers dropped the ball woth Brass finding out about Grissom leaving through the grapevine. There seemed to be a genuine friendship between them, even though Grissom told Greg that the two didn't hang together in Way To Go. They did share drinks after bad cases and in King Baby they met for drinks with Catherine. There have been other little clues along the way, not to mention that Brass gave Grissom his medical Power of Attorney. But idiot writers just ignored all that.

And as for Brass and Sara, I never saw the fatherly thing that others did. And he just seemed to accept her return without blinking an eye. Of course, that could be chalked up to more idiot writing.

One thing I hope we see this season is the writers actually picking up some of the loose threads that they dropped the last couple of years, remembering the things that have happened in the past with our characters. It is pretty bad when we know the show's canon better than the writers do.