A Year of NCIS, Day 52: The Voyeur’s Web (Episode 3.6)

Episode: 3.6, The Voyeur’s Web

Air Date: October 25, 2005

The Victim: Jamie Carr, wife of a deployed Marine corporal.

Emotionally Traumatized, But Ultimately Irrelevant, Witness Who Finds the Body: Ooooo…sexy time.  A masked lady performs a half-naked bedroom porn show for a webcam. Meanwhile a bespectacled fellow who isn’t Palmer but kind of looks like Palmer watches from somewhere else and IMs her original requests like “take it all off.” 

Uh-oh.  Our webcam watcher sees a guy in the room behind the sexy lady.  He’s wearing a mask.  Our viewer is both a good citizen and not a fan of snuff films because he IMs her a frantic warning.  She looks and sees it too late, the masked man attacks, pushes her to the bed and slits her throat.

How on Earth will NCIS get jurisdiction over this one?  

Plot Summary: Tony is making a dinner reservation at a fancy DC restaurant.  He is dating a girl named Monica, and seems to be into her.  But now he needs a gift.  Ziva figures why not go with the standby: honey dust (See Swak, Episode 2.22).  McGee apparently let that slip but claims it’s not his fault.  Ziva says she finds honey dust erotic. 

Gibbs walks in, disagrees, slaps Tony in the head, and establishes jurisdiction by saying a Marine corporal’s wife has gone missing.  Tony tells McGee to not tell the resident Mossad agent about his personal life, but McGee says she tricked him.  The elevator closes on a fun set of facial expressions, Ziva wryly amused, Tony pissed, McGee regretful, and Gibbs…yeah, Gibbs doesn’t give a shit.

Gibbs says the victim’s name is Jamie Carr and neighbors haven’t seen her in two weeks.  Abduction is assumed because the back door was kicked in.  McGee takes the perimeter, Ziva takes statements, Tony is to go with Gibbs.  Ziva wants to know why she’s the one always taking statements and Tony grumps that she’s good at getting people (like McGee) to talk.  Ziva protests that she is not invading Tony’s sex life but is trying to figure out American customs since she keeps going out with dudes who are “uptight.”  This would be an interesting conversation but Gibbs is impatient, so Tony has to run.

Tony and Gibbs case the house.  Gibbs tells Tony that Corporal Carr is deployed in Iraq.  Gibbs finds blood in the bedroom.

The neighborhood is having yard sales, and Ziva is questioning one of the sellers, Bart Powell, about Mrs. Carr.  He says she keeps to herself and didn’t click with the other military wives. 

Tony sees that the big wedding picture of the Carrs is covered up and remarks on it.  Gibbs says people cope in different ways when their loved ones go to war.  Tony finds a vibrator and makes a joke about coping.  They don’t actually show it, and Ziva enters and says Tony could poke an eye out with it, so it must be huge.  Tony can’t turn it off and Ziva has to help.  Because the show would like to remind us that Ziva is way more comfortable with sex than Kate was. 

Ziva recognizes the perfume in the air and it’s expensive.  Too expensive for a corporal’s wife, Gibbs thinks.  McGee found some blood out back, consistent with a dragged body.  Then he enters the bedroom and does a double take.  Ziva asks what’s wrong and Tony says, “He’s fine.  He’s just never been in a woman’s bedroom.”  But McGee has been in this woman’s bedroom.  At least virtually.  He flashes back to a show like the sexy lady show from the beginning of the episode.  Haha- then he claims his girlfriend emailed him the video.  Tony is as disbelieving as I am, but he homes in more on the idea that McGee has a girlfriend than the idea that McGee just randomly encounters porn because he has the coolest girlfriend ever.  In Canada. 

Wait, never mind.  McGee has seen the actual video from the beginning of the show, masked intruder included, so I guess Mrs. Carr really has been missing two weeks (it took two weeks for neighbors to notice a kicked in back door?).  McGee describes the snuff part of the sexy lady snuff film and flashes back to that.  Now his girlfriend seems less completely made up and more the type who will steal his kidneys after he passes out.

Ziva naturally questions why McGee didn’t bother to report watching a woman die on the internet, and he just thought it was a hoax and blew it off.  Tony tap dances on his grave and walks out, and McGee braces for the typhoon force of Gibbs’s fury.

In Abby’s lab, Gibbs watches the video and says it doesn’t look like a hoax to him.  McGee tries to apologize/explain and Gibbs expresses his displeasure by talking over McGee to Abby, the competent employee whom he doesn’t presently hate.  Abby technobabbles, but ultimately comes down on the side of “this wasn’t faked.”  Gibbs gives them an hour to find out where it came from and McGee, desperate to escape this doghouse, has already figured it out.  Mrs. Carr was running a sex site from her bedroom and feeding the stream through some host site.  Mrs. Carr is a marquee presence on the host site, along with a girl named “Skylar,” who runs the site.  Abby has backtraced Skylar’s feed to the same neighborhood as Mrs. Carr and the home of another Marine deployed to Iraq.  His wife’s name is Leeanne Roberts.

Gibbs sends McGee to get the car, and Abby tries to defend McGee.  Speaking for the show’s audience (especially those of us watching in the far, far future), there’s really no way to police or investigate this type of thing.  Gibbs doesn’t seem convinced, though.

Gibbs, Tony, and McGee visit the Roberts house.  Tony is enjoying McGee’s misery over not reporting the murder and calls it comeuppance for McGee telling Ziva Tony’s life story.  Which seems…disproportionate?  Insensitive?  That’s the Tony we know and love. 

There doesn’t appear to be anybody home at the Roberts abode and the accumulated mail indicates that this has been the case for a while.  Then the agents hear something clang inside the house.  In NCIS world, that’s probable cause for Tony to kick in the front door, so that’s what happens.  The sound was a mean looking cat, but the house is a wreck and there’s blood on a cracked glass coffee table. 

Back at the squad room, Gibbs notes two crime scenes, one website, zero bodies and he wants answers.  Tony gives background on the missing women and their website, Naughty Naughty Neighbors.  They started it 9 months ago, it has 2000 members and gets about 50,000 hits per day.  Gibbs stares blankly and Tony compares it to Playboy.com getting 5 million hits per day and the NCIS website getting about 400 (dammit, I’m not even beating the NCIS website).  Ziva chooses to snark about prudish Americans loving porn while pretending to be virtuous, but that’s old news and Gibbs and Tony ignore her.  Gibbs wants background on all the members of the site which sounds impossible, so he tells Tony to get cracking.  Ziva doesn’t believe the perp is an obsessed voyeur and tries to argue against searching the membership rolls and it’s adorable that she hasn’t learned yet.

McGee has located NNN’s webmaster, a guy named Carter Finch.  Gibbs tells Tony and Ziva to check him out.  McGee has found no evidence that the missing women put any of the extra income from on-line nudity into their joint accounts with their husbands.  Gibbs tells McGee to find that money.  Also an impossible task. 

Ducky, with no body and needing something to do, is flipping though picture stills from the snuff video.  He’s trying to put together a de facto autopsy.  This segues into him telling Palmer a Ducky Tale about his uncle at D-Day, until Gibbs comes in and tells the punch line out from under Ducky.  Some episodes he’s just meaner than others.  Gibbs asks about the video, and Ducky thinks Mrs. Carr is dead, and that she died slowly and painfully.  The cut on her throat was made by an amateur, and was too shallow to kill quickly.

At Webmaster Finch’s mom’s house, where he works out of her basement, Tony and Ziva conduct their interview.  There’s a glass case full of large Star Wars figurines to make the point that Finch is a nerd.  Finch knew Mrs. Carr was missing, but he never saw the snuff video.  He and Tony squabble over his Star Wars collectibles with Finch playing the role of the Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons, and Tony playing Reggie Mantle from Archie.  It hasn’t aged well.  You don’t necessarily feel sorry for Finch because he’s a pedantic tool, but, at this stage anyway, he hasn’t done anything wrong.  So, Tony and Ziva are definitely punching down, particularly when they make fun of his marriage prospects or laugh at Finch for telling his mom the agents showed up to interview him for a job.  It’s not a good look.

Fortunately, we get back to the case.  Finch says he and Mrs. Carr/Mrs. Roberts are business associates: he manages the site, and they pay him what Tony thinks is a pretty low amount for what the site rakes in.  But Finch manages other sites.  He met Mrs. Roberts because she would flirt with him when he delivered her paper and conversations about web sites escalated.  Mrs. Carr came in to the business because she wanted extra money.  He hasn’t spoken to either woman in a month because the site is built to pretty much run itself.    

Abby has a PhD in porn at this point.  She thinks she may have watched even more than Tony since this case started.  Then she corrects herself because that’s like having more touchdowns than Jerry Rice.  Related to the case, Abby has coordinated the original stream of the murder with the data on the hard drive to determine the date and time of the murder- 8 days ago at 9:00PM.    

Abby is interrupted by an awkward bald guy who introduces himself as Abby’s new assistant, Charles Sterling.  Abby did not order one of these.  Abby ordered a raise.  But HR told this fellow to report instead.  He calls her “ma’am,” he has read her thesis, and he’s hypervigilant in his mannerisms.  She names him “Chip” and tells her not to call her “Ma’am.”  She exits to make a quick phone call to Gibbs.

Which means Gibbs and the Director are about to have another conversation about personnel and how he’ll eat what she feeds him.  It ends up being less acrimonious than the Ziva discussion in Silver War Episode 3.4. Shepard says Abby is overworked; Gibbs says Abby works best alone (but doesn’t say why and says Shepard can ask Abby herself); and Shepard tells him to give it a month.  Then she says she’s briefing SecNav on the missing Marine wives and needs an update.  Gibbs doesn’t have one.  She presses.  Gibbs says to tell SecNav they were running an internet sex site while their husbands were deployed and may have gotten murdered over it.  Shepard decides that she can delay briefing SecNav.

Tony and Ziva are eating Chinese while McGee is searching for the NNN money.  Gibbs appears and tells the team that the LEOs found Mrs. Roberts.  She’s in the trunk of a car in a junkyard with her throat slit.  Ducky has no clue on TOD because of all the environmental variables.  The wound is consistent with the knife in the Mrs. Carr video.  A dog makes ready to sweep the junkyard for other human remains.

Ziva thinks it will take days to search the junkyard for Mrs. Carr.  Tony tells her to take it up with Gibbs.  The dog runs over to sniff McGee and Tony notes that this is consistent because McGee has been a dead man since yesterday.  Gibbs pulls everyone out except McGee, and he tells McGee to lead the search for Mrs. Carr.  McGee tries to push it down to Ziva (nice) and he and Gibbs have a loud, condescending, but also accurate, discussion where they conclude that Ziva is not sufficiently trained for such a task.  I don’t think Ziva minds, though.  As they leave, Tony tells McGee to do what he does best: find answers when no one else can.

In autopsy, Ducky has a TOD.  He thinks 10-12 days ago, and prior to Mrs. Carr.  COD is a compound fracture of the skull.  The slit throat happened post-mortem.  Hmmmmm.

Abby is still watching porn.  Chip is zoned out and Abby ribs him a little for it.  But then he asks to be assigned to another project because he doesn’t like porn.  Abby says that all guys do, at least that’s what Tony says.  Chip visibly recoils at this but explains that he engages in a rigorous routine to train his body and his mind- calisthenics and brain teasers basically.  Abby marks him as being home schooled.  He asks how she guessed.

Ziva is angry at her computer.  She used Macs at Mossad and doesn’t like Windows.  McGee returns having not found Mrs. Carr’s body.  That said, he did find the murder weapon buried under some scrap metal not far from Mrs. Roberts’s body. 

Shepard and Gibbs are in MTAC where Sgt. Robert’s CO, Captain Caldwell, tells them that Sgt. Roberts requested emergency leave two days ago.  But they only just found his wife’s body.  Captain Caldwell says the sergeant requested leave for a personal reason and doesn’t know his wife is dead.  Instead, Sgt. Roberts found out about the NNN site and believes one of his neighbors caused his wife to be involved.  Sgt. Roberts is headed home to kill the man, and Captain Caldwell needs his own ass pulled out of the fire for granting that leave without talking to anyone first to ascertain Sgt. Roberts’s intentions.  Captain Caldwell identifies the neighbor as Bart Powell (the yard sale guy) and says that Sgt. Roberts is a good man and a better Marine and just needs a cooling off period.  Gibbs says they’ll pick him up and Captain Caldwell smiles and says his Sergeant Major said Gibbs could be counted on.  Gibbs grins and asks if the Sergeant Major got the bottle Gibbs sent.  After the call ends Shepard sternly tells Gibbs that alcohol is contraband in Iraq.  Gibbs says he didn’t think it would take him this little time to see Shepard as a Director instead of a field agent.  Which is NCIS-speak for, “Come on, Jen!  You used to be cool!”

Whoopsie.  Sgt. Roberts changed his itinerary and arrived at Dulles two hours ago.  The team squeals into the neighborhood and Gibbs feels the need to warn Ziva that they’re here to stop Sgt. Roberts, not kill him.  Hilariously, Ziva starts a “what if…?” question but Gibbs shuts her down.  They hear a scuffle around back and Sgt. Roberts is beating Powell’s face, and getting ready to gut him with a giant combat knife.  Ziva and Tony pull guns and Gibbs starts talking the sergeant down, both with logic and by using his Gunny voice on a man habituated to following orders.  It’s a good, tense scene, because we’re genuinely not sure if Sgt. Roberts is going to kill Powell (who cares?) and/or get ventilated by Tony and Ziva while doing so (that would be bad).  And when Sgt. Roberts, having seen the police tape at his house, gets confirmation from Gibbs that his wife is dead, it really looks like he’s going to go for a gold in the murder/suicide-by-cop biathlon.  Sgt. Roberts pulls back the knife, and Tony and Ziva make ready to shoot as Gibbs frantically throws up his arms to get them to stop.  The knife lands between Powell’s legs and Powell stares in horror.  Nobody has died.

Back in interrogation, a beat-to-hamburger Powell swears he didn’t kill Mrs. Roberts.  Gibbs signals for Abby to run a tape from the observation room.  It’s a little something she found set in Mrs. Roberts’s room while combing through hundreds of hours of porn.  While setting up the video, she takes a moment to complain to the Director about Chip, who enjoyed the porn marathon way too much in Abby’s eyes. 

In interrogation, the video comes on and it shows Powell coming in through Mrs. Roberts’s window.  Powell cops to an affair but says that’s not a crime.  But blackmail is a crime.  Mrs. Roberts sent Sgt. Roberts a letter coming clean about how Powell used knowledge of the NNN website to blackmail Mrs. Roberts into sleeping with him.  So now Gibbs is going to make sure Powell goes down for Mrs. Roberts’s murder.

BUT…out in the hall, Tony says that Powell’s alibi for Mrs. Roberts’s death checks out.  He was at Disney World. 

The next day, Tony gets to work late after stopping at the mall to get his lady a gift.  Lingerie, the classy bastard.  McGee stayed at work all night and finally found the money.  It’s in an offshore account that McGee traced to an 86-year old woman who is also the grandmother of Finch the webmaster.  Finch emptied the account last night.  Tony and McGee head to pick him up.

Abby has examined the knife McGee brought in and it’s not the knife from the video where Mrs. Carr gets killed.  In fact, Abby can’t match the knife that killed Mrs. Carr to any type of knife…so far.

Tony calls and says Finch is in the wind.  Tony sees that the Star Wars collectibles are gone, so Finch isn’t coming back. 

Back at the squad room, Tony and Ziva put together a way to track Finch via his collectibles.  McGee finds the rare collectible Chewbacca figure Finch identified to Ziva in an on-line auction and traces the seller to a nearby hotel. 

On their way to pick up Finch, Tony and Ziva argue about whether Ziva has to follow Tony’s lead given her experience.  Not unreasonably, given his inexperience with her, Tony is thinking of her like she’s a probie.  Of course, the gravity of Tony’s position is undercut by him turning to check out the ass of a hot redhead walking by with a suitcase. 

Tony and Ziva raid the hotel room and find Finch dead with a Marine k-bar knife in his chest.  Ziva thinks Sgt. Roberts killed him.  But then she and Tony both recognize the expensive perfume from Mrs. Carr’s room.  And the “blood” in the sink is red hair dye.  And then Tony remembers the redhead with the suitcase. 

McGee and Abby are both looking for Gibbs.  McGee stupidly fumes that Gibbs had better have a good reason for turning off his phone, which is how you conjure Gibbs.  Sure enough, he appears and asks if briefing SecNav is a good enough reason for McGee.  McGee stammers out an update to Gibbs on the Finch situation, but then Abby steals the show by saying she can’t endure her oppressive working conditions anymore and slitting her throat with a knife.  A fake knife from a magic store that only looks like it’s drawing blood.  

Looks like Mrs. Car faked her own death.  Which should make McGee feel a lot better, since Abby, Ducky, and Gibbs all fell for it. 

Too bad she couldn’t do a better job faking being a redhead.  Tony and Ziva arrest her at her car, and confiscate a bag filled with money.  Gibbs calls a happy Tony to tell him things he already knows: Mrs. Carr faked her death and killed her accomplices to keep the money for herself.  “She’s a naughty little kittycat,” Tony says and Mrs. Carr glares at him.  Abby looks at Gibbs and notes that now he knows how she feels, all calling people and telling them stuff they know.

Mrs. Carr claims she accidentally killed Mrs. Roberts in a fight, which makes some sense given the appearance of the coffee table in the Roberts’s home. Gibbs ties to console Sgt. Roberts.  Sgt. Roberts blames himself for being gone, for not wanting to start a family until they had more money (which prompted his wife to start stripping for money).  Gibbs says he knows how it feels to lose one’s family, and Sgt. Roberts asks how he can keep going.  Gibbs says you ask the question every day until you find the answer.  Sgt. Roberts asks Gibbs what he found, and Gibbs just pats his shoulder.   

Shepard learns that Sgt. Roberts is headed back to Iraq and wonders if that’s wise.  Gibbs says it’s what he’d do.  They walk out together.

Ziva asks about Tony’s date.  They broke up.  Apparently. her husband was not enthused by her dating Tony.  “Too good to be true,” says Tony.  But, if Tony still has those restaurant reservations, Ziva’s buying.  Tony takes her up on it and then slyly reaches for the lingerie he bought his girl.  “You will not be needing that,” says Ziva.

Yet. 

Quotables:

(1) Ziva: Still the odds of finding him off a list that size…

Gibbs: Are better than the odds of you winning this argument.  

(2) Gibbs: Good work, Abby.

Abby: I do what I can.  And as a reward, I will treat myself to more exciting girl on girl action.

(3) Tony: Never kick a probie when he’s down, Ziva.

Ziva: I thought the expression was “dog.”

Tony: Same difference.

(4) Tony: As far as I’m concerned, you’re a probie.

Ziva: I’ve never had sex with you either.  Does that mean I’m a virgin?

Ducky Tales: Ducky talks about his uncle’s adventures at D-Day.

The Rest of the Story:

-Tony gets a head slap.

-Tony lost his virginity at fifteen to a Rockette?!  Golf clap.

-Ziva confuses “Rockette” with “coquette,” but is there a difference when the Rockette is bedding a fifteen-year old boy?  Regardless, McGee corrects her.  She doesn’t understand yard sales, both from a linguistic and a practical standpoint.

-Tony comes off as quite the Internet porn expert and seems to have expert-level knowledge on pricing packages.

-Tony blew out his knee during his senior year at Ohio State.  He thinks he would have made it to the NBA if that hadn’t happened.  Picture pro-Tony in your head.

-Tony reprises his role in My Other Left Foot, Episode 1.12, when he recognizes the perfume in Finch’s hotel room from having smelled it in Mrs. Carr’s room.

-How does a tiny lady like Jamie Carr put a knife through a grown man’s rib cage and into his chest?  Even Comic Book Guy should have been able to survive that.

-We saw a perp fake their death last season as well in Doppelgänger, Episode 2.11.

Casting Call: Chip is Michael Bellisario, son of producer Don Bellisario.  Between McGee, McGee’s sister, the mysterious redhead, and Chip, NCIS is quite the family affair.

Nat Faxon plays Finch, but also played the bear on The Cleveland Show.  He has had roles in all the MacFarlane-verse series.

Man, This Show Is Old: Mrs. Carr’s webcam is an antique, as is the instant message dialogue box. 

Presumably, in-home porno is still a thing, but you heard about it more in the early aughts.

For the second episode in a row, somebody mentions those old hidden 3-D pictures where you could only see the image if you stared just right.

Now that we have social media, nobody ever emails me internet videos anymore.  I assume that’s the case for everyone. 

Palmer references the ’97 NBA finals and Jordan hitting the Jazz up for 40.

Revenge of the Sith premiered in May of 2005, so Star Wars was still on everyone’s minds, but receding fast.  Possession of Star Wars swag was shorthand for a person or character being a dork starting in at least the late 90s.  It feels both old and cheap now.  But the late 90s through the early-mid 2000s is this strange spot in time where nerd culture really took off and became hugely prominent but was still derided as nerd culture by wider pop culture.  Since 2008-2010 or so, nerd culture and pop culture have been largely synonymous.

MVP: Tony and Ziva bag the perp without needing any help from HQ.

Rating: This one was obvious by the end, but it was still a good ride.  I’m giving it six Palmers only because the next three episodes are all really good.  It would have easily been a seven last season.  Hell, call it six and a half Palmers.

Next Time: A very nice little boy misplaces his Lt. Commander dad at a park, and the mystery of Gibbs’s family continues.