Episode: 1.13, One Shot, One Kill
Air Date: February 10, 2004
The Victim: Gunnery Sergeant Freddy Alvarez, a Marine recruiter. And, later, Staff Sergeant Allen, same job.
Emotionally Traumatized, But Ultimately Irrelevant, Witness Who Finds the Body: Some dudes thinking about signing up for the Marines. They get recruited out of a convenience store after watching Gunnery Sergeant Alvarez use his marksmanship skills to excel at a shoot ‘em up video game. Back at the recruiting location, he gives them the hard sell on signing up…until a bullet comes through the window and kills him in front of his potential recruits.
Plot Summary: We start at the crime scene (instead of at HQ on a Monday morning with our non-Gibbs leads jawing about their weekends). Ducky assures Gibbs that GS Alvarez did not suffer, but Gibbs just wants to know if they can move the body. Kate interviews the recruits, but they aren’t much help. The LEOs say that GS Alvarez had some run-ins with gang members who vandalized the recruiting station.
Tony is looking for the bullet, and determines that it went through the wall and into a toy warehouse. Gibbs tells Tony and Kate not to come back without the bullet. They head to the warehouse and meet Carl the warehouse manager, who’s a bit of a CSI/Court TV geek. They determine that the bullet must have hit a pallet full of toys that went out on an earlier delivery, so they tell Carl to re-route that truck to NCIS HQ.
Gibbs chats with GS Alvarez’s CO, Major Dougherty. Not much new there, but he’s going to provide Gibbs with any complaints about GS Alvarez. Gibbs gives the pile of letters/emails to Kate.
Turns out the bullet lodged in the head of a baby doll. In Abby’s lab, Tony is highly disturbed that Abby removed the clothes from all the dolls and then took off their heads. The table full of doll’s heads makes every part of this scene funny, especially Abby aping Ducky’s accent and pretending to do an autopsy on the doll-head containing the bullet. Abby runs the ballistics and finds the bullet came from a rifle. She can’t ID the rifle specifically, but, given the path of the bullet and its likely velocity, it was a long-range shot. “Our shooter’s a sniper,” concludes Gibbs.
Tony and Kate update Gibbs on the complaints about GS Alvarez. GS Alvarez enjoyed the bait and switch, and often overpromised and underdelivered to recruits, but none of the complaints contain threats.
Gibbs and Tony go to check out the building Abby thinks the shooter fired from. They examine the scene, and Gibbs determines that the shooter only pulled out the one brick from the solid wall that he needed to remove to make his shot. Which makes him, per Gibbs, “highly intelligent and methodical.”
Kate’s continuing review of the files demonstrate that a lot of recruits loved GS Alvarez and that he kept in touch with a lot of his recruits. She also finds one worth following up on: Sgt. Aaron Barnes, who, at GS Alvarez’s encouragement, signed up for a six-year hitch to qualify for some special Marine program that his grades didn’t qualify him for anyway. Whoops. Also, he’s a sniper instructor. So, it’s time to go interview him. Sgt. Barnes denies the murder and tees up an alibi, naming Corporal Stinson as the person with whom he was doing PT at the time of the murder. Gibbs leads Tony and Kate through the woods into field exercises to corroborate Sgt. Barnes’s alibi before Sgt. Barnes gets to corporal Stinson first. Good thing, because Corporal Stinson does not corroborate any alibis- he got the PT right, but not the specific PT activity. Which wins Sgt. Barnes a trip to the NCIS interrogation room. He’s nervous and sweaty, but finally (a few scenes later), he admits that he’s nailing someone who isn’t his wife, and that’s why he lied about his whereabouts.
Meanwhile, another recruiter shows up in the sniper’s sites, and dies. NCIS hits the scene. And here comes the FBI, claiming jurisdiction because now we have shootings taking place across state lines. The inevitable measuring contest ensues between Gibbs and FBI Agent Freedman, but mostly so Kate can take the bullet out from under the FBI, while the FBI is fighting with Gibbs over a fake bullet-hole that Tony made in the wall with a knife. On the way out the door of the crime scene, Gibbs finds a feather by the water cooler. Gibbs likens it to the calling card of, Carlos Hatchcock, a former Marine super-sniper, and he thinks the killer is aping Hathcock’s ritual. Which means, if there’s a feather at GS Alvarez’s recruiting station, then the killer is meeting the recruiters before shooting them.
Abby runs ballistics on the second bullet. She’s not sure if it’s the same gun, but it’s the same model of gun. This time she thinks the shooter fired from a vehicle.
Tony and Abby return to the original crime scene, and, after a search, find the feather in the ventilation system.
Kate’s profile of the killer has her thinking that he’s not military. She thinks he’s operating in a fantasy world and wouldn’t be able to function inside the regimented command structure of a military organization. Gibbs determines that he’s targeting Marine recruiters because the Marines turned him down. “He’s a wannabe.” Searching through that list of people rejected by the Marines would take too long, so the Marines open up the recruitment station, and Gibbs goes undercover as GS Alvarez’s replacement recruiter. Kate goes undercover as Gibbs’s CO, so that she can profile the recruits as they interact with Gibbs. Tony, to his chagrin, goes undercover as a telephone lineman, and, cue a number of Village People jokes. Tony sets up a series of echolocation mics in a pattern devised by Abby to detect and triangulate any gunshots.
Major Doherty wants to stay in the office and help catch the guy, but Gibbs, uncharacteristically diplomatic, convinces the Major that they all have their roles to play.
Turns out Gibbs is really good at recruiting. He also isn’t wearing his bulletproof vest, which annoys the hell out of Tony. Towards the end of the first day, FBI Agent Freedman wants to knock off early since they’re outside the sniper’s time window for kills. Tony thinks that will look suspicious. Then, a kid comes in who seems to fit the profile, and Kate sics Tony on him as the kid leaves. But Gibbs, goes for a drink of water and finds a feather on the water cooler, which was replaced in an earlier part of the scene by a delivery guy (Kate the profiler didn’t even glance at him). Kate calls Tony off the kid, and the scene shifts to the sniper targeting Gibbs through his scope as the dramatic music revs up. And it would have been a hell of a kill shot. But for the bulletproof glass window.
The mics picked up the shot, and Abby has an address and a likely route of escape. Tony and the FBI move. They surround the sniper in an alley, and he turns to fire on Tony. Tony drops him, no problem. In fairness, Tony gave him every chance to surrender. Shrug.
We end back at HQ, with a light debrief and some Village People jokes.
Quotables:
(1) “Truth is, most Marines don’t see combat. I mean, look at me. Been in the Corps sixteen years, closest I been to a bullet is…[gunshot]” -Gunnery Sergeant Alvarez dies the kind of way you only die in a TV script.
(2) “Technically, he is correct. I mean, the Marines do save lives. Mostly through use of superior firepower.” -Gibbs, assessing Gunnery Sergeant Alvarez’s commitment to making one recruit a medic, even though the Marine Corps doesn’t have medics (the medics are all Navy)..
(3) [Gibbs and Tony are checking out the abandoned building from which the sniper shot GS Alvarez]
Gibbs: Hey, DiNozzo, kinda reminds me of your apartment. Except for that minty fresh urine smell.
Tony: For your information, I have a maid now.
Gibbs: You can afford a maid?
Tony: It’s amazing what you can do when you don’t have to pay three alimonies.
(4) Kate: You really think we’re gonna get any potential recruits today?
Gibbs: Yup.
Kate: A man was murdered here three days ago. Who’d choose today to decide to join up?
Gibbs: A Marine.
Time Until Sexual Harassment: 5:00. Kate asks Tony if she looks like the doll type (meaning, the type who enjoys or enjoyed playing with dolls), and Tony responds “Maybe if you smiled a little more and did something with your hair.”
Tony also says, “I’m going to need you on your knees over here, Kate. It’s time to get dirty.” It’s a reference to looking around on the floor of a filthy warehouse for a bullet, and Tony plays innocent when Kate reacts, but come on.
Carl the warehouse guy clearly checks out Kate’s ass, and the camera sets up a rather lascivious corresponding shot of it.
Ducky Tales: Ducky rants about Gerald’s dependence on technology, but tells no tales.
The Rest of the Story:
-Rules are back. Rule #9: Never go anywhere without a knife.
-Carl the warehouse manager opining, “That’s not how they do it on CSI,” is funny because CSI aired on CBS and very popular at the time; and also because Carl actor T.J. Thyne later ends up playing a character who engages in CSI-type work on Bones.
-Tony notes that Gibbs has never told them why he enlisted. Gibbs says it’s personal. We’ll get the whole story in a flashback a number of seasons down the road.
-There’s a reference to DiNozzo’s apartment being dirty. In later seasons, we find out that his place is immaculate, and well above his pay grade. A few seasons after that, we find out how he was able to afford it.
-Nothing in this episode out and out says that Gibbs is a trained sniper. But he seems familiar with sniper methodology. If the writers have decided that Gibbs is a sniper at this point in the show, the script is certainly playing it close to the vest. Still, while it’s a slow burn, it’s still a burn as Gibbs interviews Sgt. Barnes, the sniper trainer suspect, and talks like he’s intimately aware of the power trip that comes with being a sniper.
-“Oh, one more thing, Agent Gibbs. Fornell warned me about you. Do not try to remove the body.” FBI Agent Freedman is concerned that Gibbs will try to control the crime scene and the investigation vis-à-vis the FBI by using trickery to abscond with the body, as NCIS did in Yankee White (Episode 1.1).
Casting Call: Carl is T..J. Thyne. Fans of Bones will recognize him as the bug guy, Dr. Jack Hodgins.
Michael Gaston, who plays Major Doherty, also played Gale Bertram, the big boss on The Mentalist (and my chief pick for Red John, but I quit watching and I’ve never looked to see how all that worked out).
One of the recruits in the opening is played by Alex Solowitz, and IMDB is not helping me place him.
Man, This Show is Old: At the beginning of the episode, when Gunnery Sergeant Alvarez is trying to get the young men to sign up for the Marines, one of them expresses concern about being sent to Iraq. GS Alvarez mentions, in early 2004, that it will take new Marines 1.5 years to be combat ready, and that the Iraq War will be well over by then. The bulk of U.S. forces left Iraq pursuant to a Status of Forces Agreement on December 18, 2011, nearly 8 years, 4,424 American dead, and 31,952 American wounded later.
Ducky mentions iPods, which surprises me a little. I’m always a little behind the times on technology, but I thought iPods debuted a few years after early 2004.
Mention is made of the Beltway Sniper. John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo terrorized the DC area by shooting from a car at random victims in October 2002. The snipers killed ten and wounded three.
VIP: Remember, on this blog, killing the perp almost always gets you the VIP. This week, that’s Tony DiNozzo.
Rating: This is a solid episode. The stakes are high, there’s a lot of deference paid to Marine culture, and the mystery is interesting. It’s not necessarily one of my favorite episodes, but it’s well done. Seven Palmers.
A Year of NCIS 