A Year of NCIS, Day 7: Sub Rosa (Episode 1.7)

Episode: 1.7, Sub Rosa.

Air Date:  November 18, 2003.

The Victim:  Petty Officer (It’s a surprise.  You’ll have to read the Plot Summary)

Emotionally Traumatized, But Ultimately Irrelevant, Witness Who Finds the Body:  An unfortunate hazardous waste specialist is moving some drums with a forklift when a couple of drums tip over, and a decomposed seaman falls out of a vat of hydrochloric acid.

Plot Summary:  McGee!  Tony begins the episode speaking over the phone to Special Agent Timothy McGee at Norfolk.  He comments to Kate on McGee’s seeming lack of experience. 

Ooooo..Kate spills Gibbs’s coffee.  Time seems to freeze, and Tony and Kate look genuinely terrified.  Tony notes that he has never seen Gibbs without his morning coffee, and Gibbs exudes menace without being cartoonish.  This is all well-acted.

Ducky examines the body.  He finds that it was only recently placed in acid in the last day or so.  Clothing traces demonstrate the man is enlisted, and there’s a mark of some sort on his arm. Other than that, there are no identifying features, and Gibbs notes that the DNA registry is terminally backlogged, so there will be no help there.

Gibbs talks to base security personnel and determines that the victim must have been murdered on base, as it would be too hard to get a dead body onto the premises.  They take a few minutes to observe some nearby protesters who are angry at the harm Navy SONAR testing allegedly causes to whales.

Ducky takes some photos of the body so Abby can use computer software to put together a facial appearance based on the bone structure.  He lets Gibbs know that death was caused by blunt force injury to the skull, and Abby has also determined that the mark on the victim’s arm was a submariner tattoo. McGee’s records demonstrate that all submariners are present and accounted for, including the ones assigned to the recently departed Philadelphia.  Gibbs concludes that if a submariner is dead under identity-destroying circumstances and none are missing there may be an impostor on the Philadelphia. 

Gibbs talks Captain Veitch, the head of submarine ops, into letting him go to the Philadelphia to investigate.  Gibbs and Kate do a bit of planes-trains-and-automobiles to get to the sub.  First, a plane back to the carrier Enterprise from last episode (short leave for those guys), then a helo, then a cutter, then to the submarine.  The sub commander is not pleased with the distraction caused by NCIS’s presence during impending war games where he has a bottle of vodka on the line.  But he grudgingly cooperates.

Gibbs and Kate begin interviewing the 5 new submariners that can’t be eliminated as impostors by other means (dental records, race).  These interviews are inconclusive.  The sub commander would like NCIS to leave, but Gibbs makes clear that he’ll leave when he feels like leaving.  Yet, it’s easy to empathize with the sub commander because Gibbs’s impostor theory does sound pretty half-baked. It’s also easy to empathize with Gibbs because this sub commander is awfully confident in a crew with 15 new sailors that he met yesterday.

Fingerprints taken on the boat are a no-go.  But that gets Gibbs thinking that if the prints match the personnel records, then maybe the impostor worked in the personnel office at the base and altered the records, or had an accomplice.  Gibbs decides to contact NCIS HQ and ruins the Commander’s war game (and vodka bet) to do it.  He sends Tony to investigate the personnel office angle. 

Tony takes McGee with him, and McGee impresses him by asking if any personnel office employees have quit recently.  Having obtained the address of a likely suspect, Tony and McGee find a shack in the middle of nowhere and perform an extraordinarily warrantless search.  Or, to be technical, they break and enter.  They find a secret room and determine that whoever lived in this home is an environmentalist with a serious mad-on at the Navy on behalf of the whales.  They also determine from the suspect’s computer that he’s planning to introduce sarin gas into the Philadelphia’s air conditioning system in order to get revenge for his whale friends, and they locate a sample gas delivery mechanism.

Tony gets word to the sub and they surface via emergency blow.  We get a cool scene of the sub leaping out of the water.

Meanwhile, Abby and Ducky get the idea to compare photos of the suspects to independent photo sources.  They decide to use crew photos from previous deployments. That doesn’t work out because one suspect, Petty Officer Drew, missed his last crew picture.  But Abby finds his pic in a ship newsletter and he matches her facial reconstruction (that she could have used process of elimination if only one suspect missed their picture is not addressed).  The impostor is Petty Officer Drew, who, back on the sub, realizes he’s close to being caught and requests to make a head call.  Gibbs gets word from shore, tracks “Drew” down to his rack, and finds that he has committed suicide by taping a bag over his head.  They match his prints, and “Drew” is ex-Navy, former Petty Officer Shawn Travis, a SONAR operator before his dishonorable discharge.

Abby determines that the gas delivery mechanism Tony and McGee found is activated by intense cold.  Back on the sub, Gibbs can’t explain the suicide, because Travis was going to die when he released the gas anyway.  Then a petty officer shows up with ice cream for Gibbs and Kate.  The crew had to move the ice cream out of the freezer to make room for Travis’s body and they don’t want it to go to waste.  This is SOP on a sub, and it hits Gibbs that Travis would have known that.  Suicide was the back-up plan so that Travis could get his body placed somewhere cold enough to activate the gas mechanism.  They find Travis’s body in the freezer, and the gas has already released and is distending Travis’s belly.  It will take too long to surface, so Gibbs and the Chief of the Boat (COB) rush the body to the torpedo room and shoot it out of the sub.  This is an awesome scene, made all the more awesome by the COB’s step-by-step ordering of the launch procedure while the NCIS action music accompanies.

Safe from sarin gas, Gibbs and the COB discuss and agree that the most important thing is now making sure to get the ice cream back in the freezer before it melts.      

Quotables:

(1) (Gibbs sees some “Save the Whales protesters just outside the Navy base at Norfolk)

Gibbs: Whale Huggers?

Guard: Yes, sir.  They’ve been doing this for weeks.

Gibbs: Why don’t you just shoot ‘em?

(2) (On the sub, Gibbs has pissed off the COB)

Kate: Do people react that way to us because we’re NCIS, or do you just have that effect on people?

Gibbs: I like to think it’s me.

Time Until Sexual Harassment: 2:00.  The last two episodes have made us wait for it, but here, when Kate mentions she may be coming down with something, Tony suggestively swishes his tie and says, “Want to tell the doctor about it?”

9:10- Captain Veitch, on learning that Gibbs wants to take Kate to the Philadelphia,  makes it clear that he will not have a woman on a submarine.

Time Until the Opposite of Sexual Harassment:9:43. Gibbs lets Captain Veitch know that, regardless of whether he wants women on his subs, Kate is the best agent for the job of hunting for the impostor on board the Philadelphia; and that she is damn well going on the mission.

And Now Back to Sexual Harassment.  34:40. The sub surfaces via an emergency blow and Kate falls into Gibbs’s arms.  When the sub finishes surfacing, Kate reacts to the experience by saying, “Wow.”  Gibbs says, “Yup. That’s what they all tell me.”  The COB smirks at Kate as she follows Gibbs out the door of the ward room.

Ducky Tales: Back with a vengeance after giving us nothing last episode, Ducky, while examining the body, lets us know about the many uses for hydrochloric acid on military bases.  Between the description of what the acid does to human flesh and the contemporaneous practical example, McGee comes close to puking.

Later, on a teleconference with the field team, he tells about the history of tattooing, but the scene moves on without him as Gibbs glares at McGee for being disorganized with his paperwork.

He talks about his days playing cricket.

The Rest of the Story:

-Special Agent Timothy McGee makes his first appearance.  He is the NCIS agent stationed at Norfolk.  He’ll have a different, better job within about a season.

-Tony is wearing a suit and tie at the office.  This will become standard in subsequent seasons, but is a first here.

-Kate’s cold comes up at the beginning of the episode and is never mentioned again. Sometimes, you just need filler dialogue. Still, I bet having a cold on a submarine sucked. For Kate and the sailors she infected.

-Kate refers to Gerald as “Jackson.”  That is his last name, but nobody on the show has referred to him in that manner up until now, and I don’t think it ever re-occurs.  I wonder if Sasha Alexander muffed her line.

-Was the Armed Forces DNA Registry not backlogged when Gibbs was trying to scam his way into it in Hung Out to Dry, Episode 1.2?  And how are they not able to cut through that red tape given everything they think is at stake?

-Kate criticizes Tony for hazing McGee as a newbie agent.  When Tony sarcastically remarks, “I bet you were a lot of fun in college.”  Kate responds, “I was a LOT of fun in college.”  Tony says, “Really?” and you have to wonder if this is the start of what will later be revealed to be a bit of an investigation into Kate’s past.

-This is the team’s third investigation afloat in four episodes.

-Once again, the command crew of the ship being investigated does not care for NCIS.  Here, they’re almost actively hostile.  But Gibbs earns the sub commander’s respect by the end.  Funny how saving a man and his crew from sarin gas poisoning makes one friends.

-McGee and Abby start a flirtation.  It gets some mileage in subsequent episodes, but ultimately doesn’t go anywhere except in some weird dream Gibbs has years from now.

-It’s funny to see McGee kowtowing to Tony and calling him “sir.”  Tony will remain the Senior Field Agent until he leaves, but McGee comes into his own relatively quickly. 

-The eco-terrorist’s screen saver of an animated whale jumping out of the water, and eating a submarine is pretty great.

-We learn that McGee got his Masters in computer forensics at MIT and a B.S. in biomed engineering at Johns Hopkins.  Tony has a phys ed major from Ohio State.

-Sarin gas cannot be purchased at the grocery store.  How a random eco-terrorist obtained some, or his fancy delivery mechanism, is left to our imaginations.

-Whoops.  How does Kate know the sarin gas cannister is designed to be triggered by cold?  Didn’t they re-submerge before Abby determined that?

– McGee doesn’t make the best first impression on Gibbs.  Gibbs has Tony take him away from the body before he pukes.  Then McGee makes the mistake of siting on Gibbs’s briefcase to recover, and Gibbs yanks it out from under him as he passes.  He glares as McGee tries to access his random filing system; and he gets in his face when McGee suggests that maybe Gibbs doesn’t want to mess with the head of submarine ops, Captain Veitch.  BUT, by the end, it’s clear that Gibbs was impressed enough with McGee to look up his educational background.

-McGee maybe got a tattoo that said “Mom” on his ass to impress Abby.  Maybe.  I’m not sure if this is true or if it ever comes up again.

Casting Call: I’m not counting Sean Murray as McGee.  He’ll be in the opening credits soon enough. 

Peter Onorati, who plays the COB, has had roles in a number of network television shows.  My wife would know him from This Is Us.  It took me a minute, but Onorati was one of the leads and played an attorney on Civil Wars, a lawyer drama that aired in the early 90s.  Mariel Hemingway was his co-lead.  I remember liking the show, but this was also years before law school.  I can’t stomach legal dramas now.

Glenn Morshower plays the sub commander.  He looks familiar because he seems to have guest-starred on almost every TV show imaginable.

Man, This Show is Old:  McGee is wearing a filter mask, like you buy at Home Depot, at the initial crime scene and Gibbs refers to him as “Michael Jackson.”  Michael Jackson has been dead nearly 10 years as of this writing, but he had a little less than six years left when this episode aired.  Toward the end of his life, he rarely appeared in public without a surgical mask.

One has to wonder, given the prevalence and general popular awareness of identity theft, if Gibbs’s impostor theory would be so credibly dismissed by Naval officers in this day and age.

When the team realizes that the killer has altered the personnel records of the sailor he replaced, Ducky points out that all they need to do is compare the photos of the five crewmen to independent, non-Navy photos of the five crew members.  In 2019, that would take about five minutes.  In fact, the eco-terrorists’ plan would probably not be possible now given that even people without social media accounts usually appear in photos on-line somewhere.  2003 was probably one of the last years that this plot was remotely credible.

VIP: Gibbs.  He stuck to his guns throughout the episode and saved the day.

Rating: If you look too closely, you can see some holes in the plot, but by and large, this is a good mystery and a mostly clever scheme (that certainly wouldn’t have been credible even two years later).  Gibbs has some great moments, the guest cast is above par, and it’s fun to see Baby McGee for the first time.  Eight Palmers.