A Year of NCIS, Day 90: Cover Story (Episode 4.20

Episode: 4.20, Cover Story

Air Date: April 10, 2007

The Victim: Petty Officer Darren Cove.

Emotionally Traumatized, But Ultimately Irrelevant, Witness Who Finds the Body: The fire department arrives at the scene of a burning residence.  The house is filled with smoke, so the firemen fan out to search for people in danger.  One of them finds an overcooked turkey or something in the oven.  He puts it in the sink, turns off the fire alarm…and then notices the signs of a struggle and some large blood stains on the carpet.

Quick and easy.

Plot Recap: At a cofee bar, McGee, a novelist in his spare time, is trying to write.  His coffee comes and it’s for “Thom” his pen name: Thom E. Gemcity, which is an anagram for “Timothy McGee”.  “Thom” yaks with Landon, the guy serving the coffee, about creative struggles and Landon ultimately recognizes him from the cover photo on the back of Deep Six, McGee’s bestselling novel and says he loved it.  

McGee gets the call and the team arrives at the crime scene.  Tony notices a poster for Ferris Bueller’s Day Off on the wall of the residence and works his way through John Hughes’s oeuvre.  Tony compares Hughes’s prolific output to McGee’s current writer’s block.  They jaw back and forth with Tony blaming McGee’s old-timey typewriter and McGee doubting a computer will help him with his…he almost subliminally acknowledges he has writers block 

Ziva tells Gibbs the house is leased to Petty Officer Darren Cove, but the neighbors say he’s rarely around.  Neighbors also said this was a notorious party house (how can both of these things be true?)  There’s plenty of beer in the fridge, and two mixed drinks sitting on the counter, but no hard alcohol or mixers.  The ping pong table is set up for beer pong, and that’s where the blood starts.  Tony has to explain beer pong to McGee because NERD!  McGee asks Tony to demonstrate but Tony, perhaps sensing Gibbs, declares that he will not engage in shenanigans at a crime scene.  McGee thinks this is “out of character,” and Tony declines to do things that will help McGee with his writer’s block.  Ziva enters and inquires about McGee’s writer’s block, forcing him to deny the condition.  Ziva suggests that that McGee just write about the team again and McGee offers his usual lame denial that Agent Tommy and Officer Lisa and L.J. Tibbs are not his teammates. 

Gibbs summons Tony to photograph a note pinned under a football that says, “One down, two to go.”

Back at the squad room, the team backgrounds PO Cove.  He’s a three-year serviceman, and his CO calls him a bit immature but basically a good kid.  PO Cove has two misdemeanor infractions for public intoxication and a noise ordinance violation.  Per the CO, he “Works to live and lives to party” and his mates call him “Diddy.”  He was on duty the prior day but hasn’t been seen since he left the base at 1800.  His Ford Ranger is also missing.  The boys think the attacker took it.  Gibbs thinks it could be PO Cove driving, and while the blood loss is significant, Gibbs thinks it may not all belong to PO Cove.  Abby will check.  Ziva reports that Norfolk police just found the petty officer’s truck.

The team arrives on the scene to process the truck.  There are fuzzy dice hanging from the truck mirror.  Ziva asks about them and Tony calls them a “redneck indicator.”  There’s more blood in the back of the truck.  McGee looks inside at various items and suddenly seems concerned.  Ziva notices.  McGee says he’s experiencing déjà vu, but can’t place it.

In the lab, Abby is showing off her bartender skills and flipping liquor bottles around as she mixes.  She says she tested the blood from the scene, and most of it was PO Cove’s, but there’s was some extra.  The prints from the cocktails belong to PO Cove and some unknown.  Abby has also used the mass spectrometer and her own mixology skills to identify the mixed drinks.  It’s a weird mix that Abby has never seen before.  Even weirder, McGee steps into the lab and finishes the ingredient list before Abby does, and then names the drink.  You see, he invented it.  The missing petty officer is a character in McGee’s next book, and the drink is his signature cocktail.

In the squad room, McGee reads from his manuscript, describing “Cameron Maher” as a man with a blue Ford truck, fuzzy dice, cinnamon rolls and a red track jacket in his truck.  Ziva asks how that’s possible.  And McGee finally makes an admission that is about as groundbreaking as admitting that water is wet or that Mexico is filled with Mexicans.  It turns out McGee bases his book characters on people he sees, like his co-workers.  And he saw PO Cove every morning at the drive-thru at the coffee shop.  McGee didn’t recognize PO Cove because he only saw the truck and what the guy ordered, but never got a good look at his face. 

Gibbs makes the obvious point- how did the recipe for the drink get from McGee’s head to the petty officer’s house.  McGee keeps the manuscript under lock and key, but he sent a copy to his publisher.  McGee also talks about some creepy fan mail the publisher got after Deep Six came out.  Gibbs takes Tony with him to see the publisher, and leaves McGee and Ziva to search for additional clues in his manuscript.

At the publisher’s office, an assistant leads Gibbs and Tony to publisher Lyndi Crawshaw’s office.  Tony takes exception to the large portrait of McGee.  Ms. Crawshaw joins.  She says zero people have read McGee’s manuscript.  She opens a locked file and pulls out the manuscript, wryly noting the similarity between the names “Gibbs” and “Tibbs.”  When she learns of PO Cove, she acknowledges that she’s a suspect.  But she also tells them that obsessed fans always find a way to get material early- searching trash, hacking computers, etc, so it’s not impossible that someone else knew about “Cameron Maher.”  On the subject of obsessed fans, Gibbs asks about the letters McGee described, and Ms. Crawshaw asks her assistant, whose name is Todd, to bring her three Gemcity letters.  No return addresses, each one increasingly weird.  Ms. Crawshaw thinks that if NCIS is looking for a psychopath, they should find the letter writers. 

Ducky does a profile of the letter writers and works Gibbs through the three stages of becoming a predatory stalker: attraction, obsession, and destruction.  The third letter is composed with cut-out letters and seems extra crazy.  Of course, Ducky identifies that all three letters were written by the same person.  And the postmarks indicate that the letter writer became increasingly delusional over a period of weeks.  Per Ducky, the letter writer believes McGee’s fiction is real.

The agents are working through McGee’s manuscript.  McGee sort of furtively approaches Tony’s desk and Tony says he’s confused by McGee’s new book effort.  McGee asks Ziva what she thinks.  She is also not complimentary.  So, McGee decides to re-focus the team’s efforts.  Gibbs arrives and says the team will have to follow the novel and trace the steps of Cameron, the pick-up truck character.

The agents arrive at a creek where Cameron goes to unburden his soul.  One of the understated bits of humor in this episode and other episodes this season is that McGee has no idea what a shitty, cliched hack of a writer he is.  Listening to Tony and Ziva question his plot choice to have Cameron go all Thoreau instead of unburdening himself with a plate of wings and some breswkies or a trip to see his priest is thus quite amusing.  Watching McGee defend himself is great too.  He says that Cameron keeps his emotions bottled up and visits the creek to feel better.  Gibbs interrupts the writers’ work shop to say, “Not always.”  The team joins to find PO Cove’s body, with a giant bloody hole in his torso.  Ziva finds another body, and McGee, horrified, IDs him as Jared Brenner, another character from the book.

Ducky arrives and examines the bodies.  He thinks PO Cove fought back.  Both men have been dead for less than 24 hours.  Ziva tells Ducky that both men are characters in McGee’s new novel, and Ducky begins asking about L.J. Tibbs’s new love interest.  McGee frantically tries to cut off this line of questioning, but now Gibbs is curious, and McGee has to admit the character is a lieutenant colonel in the Army.  Just like Lt. Col. Mann, Gibbs’s actual…whatever she is. 

Ducky is curious about the odd wounds on both corpses, but Tony and Ziva inform him in unison that they are wounds from a javelin.  After all, they’ve read the manuscript.  Ducky applauds McGee’s creativity, but Gibbs just stares at McGee in disbelief. 

Back at HQ, McGee reveals that Adrian Corbett, the second victim, was a valet at one of McGee’s favorite steakhouses, which also works its way into McGee’s book under a less than concealed pseudonym.  Tony, not unfairly but also not kindly, mocks McGee for his lame effort at changing the name of the restaurant, implying that McGee made this target easy to locate.  And the note from PO Cove’s apartment said “one down, two to go,” so we have one more target to worry about.  Gibbs wants to know how many more characters are based on real people.  McGee, again, acts like he’s engaging in some herculean act by admitting he based his characters on his team.  Since those are the only characters left who aren’t already dead, Gibbs wants security details on all the non-field agents. 

Ziva is tracking javelin purchases but having no luck Abby calls and the agents start heading her way, but Gibbs stops McGee.  McGee decides to have a pity party about causing these men’s deaths.  And, maybe there’s the tiniest amount of indirect culpability here, but Gibbs has no time for the melodrama.  He hands McGee a set of handcuffs and tells McGee to cuff himself.  McGee bristles at the obvious stupidity of that and Gibbs digs in on the obvious stupidity of taking responsibility for the actions of a crazy person.  McGee can either put on the cuffs or find the killer.  Gibbs even gets mad and shoves McGee to hammer home his point.

Tony and Ziva are talking about their character analogues in McGee’s manuscript.  The Lisa angle about a relationship that was never allowed to happen references Ziva’s near-relationship with Lt. Roy Sanders, who died in Dead Man Walking, Episode 4.16.  That’s pretty personal, and I’d be pissed.  Tony’s struggle between who he is and who he is becoming has also been a theme of the entire season.  This is decent meta-commentary. 

Abby’s apartment flooded and she didn’t get much sleep.  She doesn’t get into her findings immediately, because she wants to hear about McGee’s book.  Specifically, she wants to know who goth forensic scientist Amy Sutton ended up dating after having broken up with her boyfriend to date someone else at the end of Deep Six.  Tony and Ziva look nervous and play coy and Abby isn’t buying it for a second.  Now she thinks Amy’s new flame is gay because “Amy always wants what Amy cannot have.”  Gibbs breaks up Book Club and Abby gets down to business.  PO Cove had unidentified blood on him, likely the killer.  Abby also checked the fingerprints on the crazy mail to Thom E. Gemcity.  She got a print off the stamp and it’s Todd Ryder, Ms. Crawshaw’s assistant.  He was arrested last year for possession of marijuana (while wearing a flamboyantly gay club shirt), so his prints are on file.

McGee is in autopsy, looking at the dead guys.  Ducky arrives.  McGee tells Ducky that PO Cove wasn’t just a partier.  The investigation demonstrated that PO Cove visited with his elderly parents for two hours per day.  Corbett had just gotten married and was hardly the playboy McGee described in his book.  For some reason, McGee feels bad for misjudging randos he never met, but Ducky points out that he was writing fiction, and modeling characters on physical descriptions of people he encountered.  Ducky shuts the drawers with the bodies inside and tells McGee he’s not to blame.  McGee doesn’t buy it.    

Gibbs and Tony go to pick up Ryder.  It is sad and pathetic.  They find Ryder on a smoke break.  Ryder sees them and tries to run away.  He’s slow and goofy looking when he runs, but somehow stays ahead of Tony while he calls someone (wonder who) on his cell and tells them to get out of the building.  “They’re chasing me!”  Gibbs, however, makes the other employees tell him where Ryder parks.  When Ryder gets to his car, fumbling his keys, he runs into an amused Gibbs and the business end of a Sig.  Tony eventually arrives as well.                    

 The agents are watching Ms. Crawshaw stew in interrogation.  McGee is annoyed that he trusted her.  Tony tells McGee that if he writes a third book, Tony will kill him.  Ziva says McGee will already be dead once Abby finds out who she ends up with in the second book. 

Gibbs arrives in interrogation.  Ms. Crawshaw admits to faking the letters to rev up sales for her book.  But she denies murdering anyone.  In observation, Tony isn’t convinced, but McGee and Ziva believe her.  Gibbs leaves and Abby meets the team in the hall and says Ms. Crawshaw’s DNA doesn’t match the extra blood from the original crime scene.  Also, does anyone really think she could kill two grown men with a javelin?

In the squad room, McGee calls a camp fire so that he and Tony and Ziva can brainstorm the case.  Ziva suggests the answer to the mystery may be in how the killer got McGee’s book.  McGee heads to his place to check things out.  Gibbs forces Tony to go with him.

At McGee’s place, Tony is typing on McGee’s typewriter.  McGee puts on shitty jazz, and Tony likens it to the soundtrack of a bad 70s porno made in the San Fernando Valley.  McGee is trying to re-create his process.  He free writes when he gets stuck, so he sits down to put random ideas on paper.  If he likes it, he puts it in his binder.  If not, shredder.  McGee always uses the shredder, has never misplaced a binder, and nobody has broken in to photocopy anything.  Tony thinks they’re missing something.  They have a discussion about the difference between writing and typing and that gives McGee an idea.

McGee and Tony return, and McGee informs the team that the killer pulled his typewriter ribbons from his trash and read those.  Ziva notes that the killer’s actions may not just be based on the manuscript, but also on the freewriting ideas.  McGee opens his binder and begins looking at discarded ideas.  One of them involved the characters based on PO Cove and Corbett killing Agent McGregor, the McGee analogue.  Gibbs says the killer must be out to protect McGregor.  Tony wants to know who the third threat to McGregor might be.  McGee said he decided not to kill McGregor precisely because everyone likes him so much.  Ziva notes, not everyone- forensic scientist Amy Sutton gave her heart to McGregor but he rejected her.  So, Amy told her deaf mother in sign language that McGregor “had to go.”  McGee says he meant, “leave the agency,” not die.  Gibbs sarcastically notes that the killer may not know that and they all rush to Abby’s lab.

She ain’t there.  She’s not answering her phones.  The security detail missed her entirely because she’s not staying at her apartment because of the flooding and didn’t return home.  Instead, she’s staying with the nuns with whom she bowls.

We cut to the convent (I guess).  We see a bowling trophy and a sleeping Abby, wearing a night cap like she’s Little Red Riding Hood’s grandma.  Her phone rings and the caller ID denotes McGee.  A hand reaches out to get the phone before Abby can.  It’s Landon from the coffee shop!  He says, “Hi, Amy.”

The team is en route.  McGee notes that the nuns are on a spiritual retreat, so Abby is on her own.

Back at the convent, Abby asks if Landon is here to see someone.  Landon says if she was smart, she’d just let “him” go.  He knows rejection is hard but she was never good enough for “him” anyway.  Abby asks who, and Landon specifies Agent McGregor.  So yeah, he’s cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs.  Abby tries to penetrate the fog and Landon says not to talk to him like he’s stupid.  He wonders how she was planning to use her forensic skill to kill McGregor.  Abby has a knife nearby and goes for it, but Landon pulls a gun.

Tony and Ziva arrive with their weapons.  Landon is in awe and IDs them as “Agent Tommy” and “Officer Lisa.”  He tells them he is just trying to protect their endangered partner.  McGee and Gibbs arrive as well.  McGee is shocked that it’s Landon and asks what he thinks he’s doing.  Landon says, “I’m protecting you.”  McGee also tries to pierce the insanity and says it’s just a book, but Gibbs tells him to lean into the delusion.  “Tell him the ending, Agent McGregor.  Tell him what happens.”  McGee tells Landon that Mcgregor and Amy get married.  Gibbs keeps the gun on Landon, as do the other agents.  They could probably kill him before he killed Abby, but for whatever reason they don’t feel like executing the crazy person if they can avoid it.  McGee lays it on thick, saying that if Landon shoots Abby, he’ll be killing only woman “I” ever loved.  McGregor really loved Abby, it just “took me a while to figure it out.”  There are a few more moments of tension, and then Landon drops the weapon.  Tony and Ziva cuff him and Landon asks if he’ll be invited to McGregor’s and Amy’s wedding.

Abby tells McGee they have to talk.  She makes clear that Amy and Agent McGregor cannot get married.  They’re all wrong for each other.

And we’re done.       

Quotables: Nothing of interest.

Ziva-propisms: Ziva tells McGee he looks like he has “seen a goat.”  She means, “seen a ghost.”  She tells Abby that Gibbs is “chomping out” McGee instead of “chewing” him out.

Tony Awards: Tony works his way through some John Hughes films, including Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986), The Breakfast Club (1985), Sixteen Candles (1984), and Uncle Buck (1989).  He also references Coyote Ugly (2000).

Abby Road: Abby’s uncle used to own a bar in New Orleans.

McNicknames: Just McGeek.

Ducky Tales: Ducky offers up a brief discourse on javelins.

The Rest of the Story:

– Of course, we know from watching Season 4 that McGee wrote about his teammates in Deep Six and changed their names- Tommy, Lisa, L.J. Tibbs, Pimmy Jalmers, etc.  See Twisted Sister, Episode 4.9 and Smoked, Episode 4.10.  McGee’s teammates were less than pleased when they learned about his creative efforts.

-McGee has never played beer pong.  He spent college studying.  Like a nerd.

-Gibbs has no damn idea who P. Diddy is.  The show hasn’t much relied on Gibbs’s pop culture ignorance in Season 4.

-McGee’s love interest for L.J. Tibbs is obviously patterned after Lt. Col. Mann, who has appeared throughout the season beginning in Sandblast, Episode 4.7 and whom we last saw in Grace Period, Episode 4.19. 

-Ziva is still wearing Lt. Roy Sanders’s orange running cap.  He died in Dead Man Walking, Episode 4.16. 

-“Camp fires” are the informal meetings Tony used to call to brainstorm cases when he was running the team at the beginning of the season.  See e.g. Escapeda, Episode 4.2.  McGee and Ziva hated them, so McGee calling for a camp fire is amusing.

-Abby and McGee dated very briefly in Season One.  She appears to have ended it, but there are indications that they hooked up on the side for a bit thereafter.  Like “Amy,” Abby has a deaf mother and knows sign language.

-It was revealed that Abby bowls with nuns in Season 3, Under Covers, Episode 3.8.

-Abby’s stuffed animal, Bert the Farting Hippo, first appeared in Twilight, Episode 2.23.

-Abby remarks that she feels like she dates Spider-Man because of all of the bad guys that have come after her.  Like Ari (Kill Ari (Part One), Episode 3.1), Chip (Frame up, Episode 3.9), the hitman AND her stalker in Bloodbath, Episode 3.21, and now Landon.

-That’s a hell of a gamble for Crawshaw to voluntarily identify and hand over letters she faked to federal agents.  Of course, she fooled Ducky, who worked out that all three letters were written by the same person but not that a descent through all three stages of obsession over the course of a few weeks is unlikely.

Casting Call: Crawshaw was played by Jayne Brook.  She had a bit part in Superman IV: The Quest for Peace, which, coincidentally, I watched with my 3-year-old the same night I reviewed this episode.  Todd Ryder is played by Wilson Cruz.  My wife picked him out as one of the kids on My So Called Life.

Man, This Show Is Old: Nothing really stands out.  McGee’s poor writing is timeless.

MVP: Gibbs, for being the only person who didn’t lose his dignity in the process, and for understanding that sometimes you lean into crazy.

Rating: Sometimes, you need a break. This episode is largely self-contained and does nothing to advance any of the subplots involving Jeanne, Lt. Col. Mann, or Le Grenouille.  It’s not good on its merits as most of the good gags about McGee’s book were already used in prior episodes.  But it was a nice palette cleaner. 

Six Palmers.

Next Time: Shepard loses an informant to a drive-by and tries to retrace his steps to the elusive Le Grenouille.