Episode: 5.3, Ex-File
Air Date: October 9, 2007.
The Victim: Captain Trent Reynolds, USMC.
Emotionally Traumatized, But Ultimately Irrelevant, Witness Who Finds the Body: A woman is home from an out of town trip and got her gal pal to pick her up at the airport because her husband was too busy. We hear the two women complaining as they come in the door. The blonde hears loud music and wants her husband, Trent, to turn it down. They see Trent sitting at his computer, and if you spend any time watching this show, you know what that means. The redhead walks over and finds Trent dead, with a spear sticking through his back and out his chest.
Plot Recap: Ziva shows up to work listening to hip-hop on her headphones. We haven’t seen her jam like this Shalom, Episode 4.1. Gibbs says good morning, and Abby zips in and pulls a present out of Gibbs’s drawer. She has one for everyone on the team. Tony glides in, also listening to headphones and singing Luck Be a Lady, from Guys and Dolls. Gibbs walks over to McGee’s desk and he is wearing headphones too but listening to daily affirmation messages. He is confident. He is appreciated. He is pulling off his headphones and lying to Gibbs about listening to a MIT lecture. So yeah, Abby’s present is a 2007 model of an iPod and she got Gibbs one too. Gibbs says he only listens to five songs- and that is totally believable- so it’s a gift wasted on him.
“Dead Marine” says Gibbs, and the team heads to Fort Belvoir Army Base.
Oh boy. It’s Lt. Col. Mann, Army CID, and Gibbs’s girlfriend(?) We haven’t seen Lt. Col. Mann since last season when she was begging Gibbs to love her (In the Dark, Episode 4.22). The victim is a dead Marine, but it’s an Army base, so Tony thinks Lt. Col Mann’s rock smashes Gibbs’s scissors which puts Lt. Col. Mann on top.
Lt. Col Mann agrees with Tony’s assessment (although he was smart enough to make it out of earshot). Gibbs knows when he’s beat. Somehow, they’re still together, and Lt. Col Mann asks Gibbs if his team knows that. The scene quickly shifts and we learn from their conversation over by the NCIS truck that they do not.
Per Lt. Col. Mann, the victim is Marine Captain Trent Reynolds, who worked for Defense Intelligence Agency on an interagency task force. His wife was at a convention in Charlottesville. Ducky arrives and is told to report to Lt. Col. Mann. Tony gets caught snarking about that and has to backpedal. We learn that Capt. Reynolds was killed by a spear gun. He was a recreational diver so that’s something he would naturally own.
The back door was forced, but there’s nothing missing from the home. Ducky calls TOD between 0700 and 0900 the night before. Lt. Col. Mann assigns Tony to review witness statements, McGee to pull prints off the back door, and Ziva to work on the victim’s phone records.
Back at HQ, we see Director Shepard grew her hair back out. Hurray. She introduces Gibbs and Lt. Col. Mann to Major Sweigart, Capt. Reynolds’s CO at DIA, and tells the Major about the joint investigation. Sigh…and she makes sure to throw a passive aggressive double entendre in there when describing the joint investigation between her ex and his current. Major Sweigart doesn’t care- he wants Captain Reynolds’s laptop back. Lt. Col. Mann calls it evidence, so Shepard tells Maj. Sweigart he can either read in NCIS/CID as to anything classified or send a cyber operative to oversee the forensic work. Maj. Sweigart opts for the latter. Gibbs and Lt. Col. Mann ask the Major and his fellow officer, Lt. Marsden, about who would want to kill Capt. Reynolds. They claim not to know him well- he got along with folks at work and was seemingly always rushing home to hang out with his wife.
Tony and Ziva are riding in the elevator with some sad sack we’ve never seen before who has to listen to them talk. Tony thinks that Gibbs and Lt. Col. Mann will crash and burn in a matter of time. Ziva is more optimistic. The sad sack exits the elevator and reveals himself as Fred Rinnert, DIA, who will work with Abby on the case.
McGee delivers Rinnert to Abby. Abby isn’t happy.
Gibbs and Lt. Col. Mann are trying to both use Gibbs’s computer. And failing. McGee comes over to rescue what turns out to be the positive fingerprint ID from Capt. Reynolds’s back door. And it’s Major Sweigart.
At DIA, Gibbs is questioning the Major. Maj. Sweigart says he dropped off some documents with Captain Reynolds. He left by the back door because the captain’s wife had some friends over and he didn’t want to disturb them. There’s a picture in Maj. Sweigart’s office of the Major holding a spear gun. He says lots of guys dive and he was with a lady when Capt. Reynolds was killed the previous night anyway. Her name is Stephanie Flynn, and she’s the redheaded woman who found Capt. Reynolds in the opening. Gibbs seems to know Stephanie Flynn and even asks after her middle name. Maj. Sweigart confirms the woman’s identity and Lt. Col. Mann asks if Gibbs knows her. Gibbs turns and mutters under his breath that he used to be married to her.
Oh-ho!
Gibbs and Lt. Col. Mann go to report Gibbs’s conflict of interest to Shepard. Shepard isn’t super-professional about it and intentionally mixes up all the details about Gibbs marriage to force him to correct her. Stephanie is the third ex, and she and Gibbs lived together in Moscow for a little while during one of Gibbs’s overseas assignments. Lt. Col. Mann is amused. Shepard asks Lt. Col. Mann if Gibbs should “divorce” himself from the case, and this is solid wordplay on her part. Lt. Col. Mann and Shepard both think Gibbs can stay on the case as long as he doesn’t have an issue with Lt. Col. Mann interviewing his ex-wife. And even then, he doesn’t have a choice.
We cut to the interrogation room. Stephanie places Maj. Sweigart at her place between 6:30-10 the evening of the murder. Then she asks where Gibbs is. Lt. Col. Mann says he’s busy. Stephanie thinks some things never change. In observation, Tony asks Ziva who he thinks is prettier, and Ziva thinks Lt. Col. Mann is disadvantaged by her army uniform.
Stephanie admits she’s in love with Maj. Sweigart (although she has only known him 8 months), but preemptively denies she’d lie for him. Stephanie thinks Gibbs is in observation and starts beating on the one-way glass. Gibbs does appear in time to hear Tony say, “Feisty,” so Tony quickly changes the subject and he and Ziva report that Captain Reynolds got along with everyone at Fort Belvoir. Then they both tactfully exit. Gibbs stares at his ex through the glass.
In the lab, Rinnert is looking over Abby’s shoulder and she doesn’t like it. But, he directs her to a sniffer file and lets her access it. This tells her that Captain Reynolds was a hacker.
Back in interrogation, Stephanie is bored and irritable about having to talk about what she made for dinner the previous night. Gibbs enters and even brings Stephanie coffee. She drinks decaf, which seems weird given the number of times she has yelled at him through one-way glass. And now she’s accusing him of targeting her boyfriend in an investigation to prevent her from being happy. Gibbs denies this and mostly wants to leave, and Stephanie wonders if she’ll ever finish a conversation with him and he’s starting to feel like they’re still married and she wonders if they ever were. Whew. Lt. Col. Mann allows this because she was done with the interview, but this can’t be a fun thing for her to watch. Because the dysfunction is not all on Stephanie. Stephanie tells Gibbs not to screw “this” up for her. He points out, correctly, that it’s not about her and then she tells him it never was. Ouch. Gibbs tells Stephanie he’s happy she found someone.
Gibbs turns to see McGee watching from the hall and wishing he were anywhere else. McGee takes Gibbs and Lt. Col. Mann to Abby.
Abby and Rinnert are bonding over crazy things native tribes do for death rituals. She calls him “Fred” now. The agents arrive. Abby tells them that Fred found a sniffer, which we now learn, is a keystroke detecting program used to figure out passwords. Abby says that Captain Reynolds was hacking into Major Sweigart’s computer. And Captain Reynolds opened a file sharing application at 0730 in which he shared a song that recites all the elements from the periodic table. Gibbs tells Abby to find out why and leaves. Rinnert and Abby slap five and now McGee is jealous.
Lt. Col. Mann is down in autopsy getting dirt on
Gibbs’s third marriage from Ducky. Ducky
says you won’t find a better man than Gibbs, but he comes with challenges. Lt. Col. Mann complains that Gibbs shuts her
out and wonders what she can learn from Stephanie’s experience. Ducky says they weren’t married long, and Lt.
Col. Mann already knows that answer: 14 months.
Lt. Col. Mann says she doesn’t want to be another one of Gibbs’s
mistake, since he has been married three times.
And unfortunately, Ducky is a better ME than he is a poker player. He reacts to the undercount and Lt. Col. Mann
picks up on it immediately:
“More than three times?” she asks. This
is not Ducky’s story to tell, but he says that Gibbs was divorced three times
and married four. Lt. Col. Mann first
interprets that as Gibbs being married now.
Ducky says, “Heavens no,” because if there’s one thing Gibbs isn’t, it’s
a cheater. Then Lt. Col. Mann figures it
out and Ducky also adds in the whole “lost his daughter too” bit. And then Lt. Col. Mann tells Ducky that Gibbs
named the boat he was building “Kelly” (she saw this in Sandblast, Episode 4.7).
Ducky confirms that Kelly is Gibbs’s daughter, who died when she was
8. Lt. Col. Mann asks what happened and
Ducky tries to tell her to go ask Gibbs, but she’s having none of that, so
Ducky tells the whole story.
Gibbs arrives with no idea that the most traumatic moment of his life has just been dissected for his girlfriend by his best friend. Ducky says the COD is, you know, spear to the chest. But Ducky notes that there was residue from tears on Capt. Reynolds’s face. I’m interpreting that as Ducky saying that Capt. Reynolds was crying before the spear hit him. Lt. Col. Mann spends this conversation staring sadly at Gibbs. Tony and Ziva enter autopsy. They reveal that Major Sweigart called Jill, Captain Reynolds’s wife, ten times in the last several days. Hot.
In the squad room, the team works through motive and opportunity. Mrs. Reynolds could easily have driven home, killed her husband, driven back to her convention in Charlottesville, flown home, and found him while accompanied by a witness. The life insurance in play is $650k. Lt. Col. Mann says to get a warrant.
In Abby’s lab, she still listening to the periodic table song. And it is catchy. Abby and Rinnert start talking about steganography, which, according to Wikipedia, is the practice of concealing a file, message, image, or video within another file, message, image, or video. Rinnert sort of asks Abby for a job and is also buttering her up.
Gibbs and Lt. Col. Mann hit the elevator. And then Gibbs shuts the elevator down for one of his private conversations. That’s not a euphemism for stalled elevator sex. He genuinely wants to know what’s bugging her. Given her own absence of a poker face in autopsy, it’s not surprising that he picked up on a problem. She asks how long they’ve been together. He turns the elevator back on. I’m cracking up. Gibbs can be a self-absorbed bastard, but he’s not going to make people walk up the stairs while he sits through a relationship “talk.” Unfortunately, Lt. Col. Mann does not share these scruples. Off goes the elevator. Gibbs answers the question and says, “Weeks.” She says, “Months.” He wonders why they can’t both be right and turns the elevator back on. She turns it back off and notes that they’ve shared a lot. And I’m wondering what the sound of Ducky being heaved under a bus is going to be. Will he tell a long, weird story about the pattern of tire tread or the history of vulcanization as his bones and organs are pulped? Will it just be an extended quack, suddenly extinguished? Or will he go quietly, suffused with shame? Let’s find out.
Yeah, so she goes there. “You never told me about your first wife Shannon, or that you had a daughter, Kelly.” Shit. Maybe Ducky gets a head start while they’re in the elevator? He’s old, but if he can get to his Morgan, he might be able to make it onto the highway before Gibbs escapes Lt. Col. Mann’s elevator feelings trap.
She asks why Gibbs never told her. Gibbs says, “They’re dead. End of story. I’ve put it behind me.” “Have you?” Lt. Col. Mann asks. And Gibbs starts up the elevator. NCIS employees are getting extra steps they don’t want, and he has a case to solve.
They exit into the squad room. Gibbs asks about the investigation into Mrs. Reynolds’s movements in Charlottesville, but McGee is still waiting. And still feeling threatened. He asks to go down to the lab and make sure Abby and Rinnert have the door open and both feet on the floor. If there was ever was a time to wear relationship insecurity on his sleeve, it’s not after Gibbs’s elevator conversation with Lt. Col. Mann. McGee reads the room and gets back to work. Gibbs stalks out of the squad room.
Run Ducky!
For reasons unknown, McGee decides to bare his soul to Lt. Col. Mann, and talks about how guys like Rinnert are a dime-a-dozen at MIT. Then he proceeds to describe something that is neither Rinnert nor, I suspect, at MIT: charming, funny, good-looking. Lt. Col. Mann says women see right through that, and she leaves too.
Finally, we cut to the two characters in this episode who don’t have drama, Tony (this is new for him after recent events) and Ziva. They are at the Reynolds house and encounter Lt. Marsden as he exits. He says Mrs. Reynolds is in back. Command sent him to go over death benefits with her (Marine efficiency- the corpse isn’t even cold). There’s some tension in the encounter, but the agents let Lt. Marsden go. They find Mrs. Reynolds cleaning the crime scene. In fairness, they released it before they knew she was a suspect, but she still looks suspicious scrubbing up her husband’s blood and claiming that cleaning is therapeutic.
Groan. Here comes McGee with a Caf-Pow and some overcompensating swagger. He walks into the lab where Abby and Rinnert are running a password cracker. They already have Caf-Pow. Abby thinks the password cracking on the computer could take a while. McGee suggests that it if’s a complicated password, there will be a record of it somewhere. Rinnert says they already checked, but Abby thinks they didn’t check the hardware. For chain of custody purposes, they have only been working on the laptop’s image, and not the physical device, which is in the evidence locker. She hugs Rinnert for being so smart and McGee looks sad because wasn’t it his idea? And now McGee and Rinnert face off with their Caf-Pows and western music plays in the background.
Mercifully, we head to Shepard’s office where Stephanie is complaining to Shepard about Gibbs leading an investigation into her boyfriend. Did I say mercifully? It’s like I’ve never watched Shepard interact with other people who have seen Gibbs naked. Shepard and Stephanie talk about bad habits that Stephanie picked up from Gibbs, but Shepard nonetheless trusts him and she’s leaving him on the case. Stephanie is worried about Maj. Sweigart’s career, but Shepard promises that if the Major is not involved in the case, she will personally make sure he suffers no career repercussions. Then Stephanie wants to ask a personal question. I guess Shepard and Gibbs hooked up between wives 2 and 3 because Stephanie, who clearly knows Shepard, says she got the impression that Gibbs and Shepard had a thing before Stephanie and Gibbs got married. Shepard lies and says she and Gibbs have always been strictly professional.
Ziva and Tony return to HQ. They see Shepard coming down the stairs with Stephanie, and Gibbs and Lt. Col. Mann in the squad room. Tony gleefully declares, “Train wreck” and says he wants to look away, but he can’t. Shepard makes a show of getting assurances from Lt. Col. Mann that she will keep any eye on Gibbs and make sure any inherent biases don’t affect the investigation. Gibbs rolls is eyes but has to be enjoying standing in a circle with three women he has slept with. Tony is enjoying it too and can’t quite get his mouth to close. Gibbs says that Stephanie is free to go and then checks in with Tony and Ziva. They report that Mrs. Reynolds cleaned the hell out of the crime scene, but they still got a partial print in the kitchen. Gibbs says to run it.
Mrs. Reynolds is in interrogation. Not cleaning. Lt. Col. Mann and Gibbs join. Lt. Col. Mann leads with Mrs. Reynolds’s affair with Maj. Sweigart, and Gibbs says her husband knew. Mrs. Reynolds admits the affair, but says her husband didn’t know, so they tell her about the hack and that he was crying when he died. Lt. Col. Mann also mentions the life insurance. Mrs. Reynolds denies being a murderer and pitches her alibi. They tell her that she slipped out of the conference to make the kill. She still denies it, so Lt. Col. Mann hits the table and yells at her just like Gibbs would. Then Gibbs gets a call and that messes with the mood. Either Tony or McGee says there’s something he needs to see, so Gibbs says they’ll be right there and steps on Lt. Col. Mann’s interrogation.
In the squad room, McGee clears Mrs. Reynolds. They have ATM footage of a random woman outside the location of Mrs. Reynolds’s convention. Mrs. Reynolds can be seen in the background at a time that makes it impossible for her to have killed her husband.
The team tries to talk out a new suspect. The kitchen fingerprint is so far a bust. Maj. Sweigart has an alibi and Gibbs says Stephanie wouldn’t lie. Lt. Col. Mann isn’t so sure and thinks Stephanie might change her story when she finds out her best friend and her boyfriend are hooking up. Lt. Col. Mann tells Tony to bring Stephanie back in and Tony winces. Gibbs says, “Wait.” Tony stops. Lt. Col. Mann says go. Gibbs says “Wait.” McGee’s eyes get wide. Lt. Col. Mann turns. Tony says, “This never turns out well for the kids.” Lt. Col. Mann questions Gibbs’s objectivity. Lt. Col. Mann goes through all the possible permutations of Stephanie either having a motive to lie or to even kill Capt. Reynolds. Gibbs isn’t buying it. But he tells Tony to call Stephanie and tell her to come back because Gibbs needs to chat with her. Tony clears his throat and gets to work. Tony keeps getting voicemails. He calls Stephanie’s work and finds out that Stephanie quit her job that morning. Ruh-roh.
Abby found a program in Capt. Reynolds’s hard drive that creates the password blah blah blah. Rinnert is still flirting with her and buttering her up. She finds a program uploaded by Capt. Reynolds around the time of his death and decides to see what it does with the periodic table song. It filters the sing so only some elements are mentioned, and Abby puts the atomic numbers of those filtered elements together. She doesn’t get it solved before Rinnert takes a call on the lab land line. He says Gibbs wants to see Abby. She puts the laptop back in an evidence bag and marvels at Gibbs’s ability to know when she has found something.
In the squad room, Abby explains the song and the numbers but says she’s not sure what they mean. Tony still can’t find Stephanie. Abby wants to know how Gibbs knew she found something, and Gibbs says he didn’t. Then why’d he call her? He didn’t. Rinnert said he did. McGee pipes up and says that Rinnert came back as a potential match for that partial print in the Reynolds kitchen.
The same Rinnert who is unattended in the lab with all the evidence? Oh boy.
Gibbs, Abby, and Lt. Col. Mann return to the lab to find Rinnert has cleaned the laptop of all data. Well, the laptop is cleaned of all data, but Rinnert denies responsibility and starts to leave. Abby asks if she can punch him. Gibbs says no. Abby snatches Rinnert’s cell phone from him as he approaches the elevator and finds the last number dialed was her lab (pretending to be Gibbs) and his last email related to a flight out of the country. Abby asks Rinnert what the element numbers mean. He shrugs. He walks through the squad room as Ziva announces thatshe checked and Lt. Marsden said that Rinnert volunteered to oversee Abby’s work. Abby says Rinnert didn’t erase the laptop at Capt. Reynolds house when he killed the Captain because he figured nobody would be smart enough to crack the code.
The agents try to get Rinnert to admit that he and Capt. Reynolds were working together to sell DIA secrets to foreign governments (this is out of nowhere) and either had a falling out or Rinnert got greedy. But Rinnert denies everything. Abby asks if she can hit him again. Gibbs says no. Tony blocks the elevator, but Rinnert says he knows his rights and to either arrest him or he’s gone. McGee saves the day. He traced the coded numbers, and they’re from a joint offshore account in Captain Reynods’s and Rinnert’s names. Complete with $500k of money transferred in from a bank in Beirut. Lt. Col. Mann tells Tony to make the arrest. Gibbs asks who Rinnert’s buyer was. Rinnert says he might tell…in exchange for a deal. Gibbs tells Abby to go ahead, and she punches Rinnert in the nose as Gibbs walks off. Rinnert should count his blessings. The last perp who got punched near that elevator died. Jeopardy, Episode 3.22.
Later, Gibbs and Lt. Col. Mann return to Gibbs’s basement after a night on the town. They’re having a good time, probably feeling the alcohol…and then they find Stephanie in the basement, hanging out with the Kelly boat. Talk about a buzzkill. Stephanie tells Gibbs he still never locks his door. She has as her excuse for a visit that she’s returning his dog tags from six years ago. Gibbs offers to walk her out. Stephanie tells Lt. Col. Mann bye, and good luck with Gibbs.
Outside, Stephanie says she quit her job because she’s moving back to Philadelphia to help out with her aging parents and to be near her sister who just had another baby. She broke up with Maj. Sweigart after finding out about his affair with Mrs. Reynolds. She feels stupid because she knows Gibbs knew and after all the mean shit she said to him, he never threw it in her face. Gibbs says he wouldn’t do that, and Stephanie agrees that he wouldn’t. She wonders if marriage will ever work out for her, and Gibbs promises that the failure of their marriage was never her fault. He hugs her and kisses her on the head, and she gets in her car and says, “We’ll always have Moscow.”
Back in the basement, Lt. Col. Mann finds a tape in a tape player and decides that Gibbs has set up music for them. She plays it and it’s a very amateurish piano tune. She listens, puzzled, for a few seconds and then a girl’s voice comes on and says “Daddy” and talks about her improving piano skills. It’s Kelly, and Shannon too, and they tell Gibbs how much they love and miss him. This is almost certainly a recording sent to him during his Desert Storm deployment around the time of their deaths. Lt. Col. Mann shuts off the tape. She looks over and sees Gibbs, sitting grimly on the basement stairs. Lt. Col. Mann looks at him sadly. And Gibbs doesn’t react.
And that’s how we end it.
So much for being over his family.
Quotables:
(1) Lt. Col. Mann: We have a little issue.
Shepard: We?
Lt. Col. Mann: You, you want to tell her, Agent Gibbs?
Gibbs: No, not particularly.
Shepard: Is this issue going to involve lawyers?
Lt. Col. Mann: It already did. It’s his ex-wife. She’s a material witness.
Shepard: And which ex would that be?
Gibbs: Stephanie.
Shepard: What number is she again? Second?
Gibbs: Third. Oh, right. You lived in Europe with her for a while, Frankfurt.
Gibbs: Moscow.
Shepard: Two years?
Gibbs: One.
Shepard: Well, it’s hard to live in Moscow. With anyone. Do you think he should divorce himself from this case, Colonel Mann?
Lt. Col. Mann: No, ma’am. No.
Shepard: Nor do I. I don’t see a problem if you conduct the interview. Do you have a problem with Colonel Mann interviewing your ex-wife, Agent Gibbs?
Gibbs: Do I have a choice?
Lt. Col. Mann and Shepard: No.
Shepard: Problem solved.
(2) “Who do you think is prettier: Ex-wife #3 or future ex-wife #4?” -Tony, watching Lt. Col. Mann interrogate Stephanie, and focusing on the essentials.
Ziva-propisms: Ziva refers to insurance proceeds as a “waterfall.” She means “windfall.”
Tony Awards: Tony referencesJames Bond movie Thunderball (1965) and does his Sean Connery impression, which we haven’t heard since arguably Sandblast, Episode 4.7. Stephanie’s closing line about Moscow references the “We’ll always have Paris” line from Casablanca (1942).
Abby Road: Tribes roasting dead people? Tribes roasting dead people.
McNicknames: None.
Ducky Tales: He kinda told a doozy about Gibbs’s family.
The Rest of the Story:
-Based on prior stories, Stephanie is the ex to whom Ducky introduced Gibbs and who doesn’t speak to him anymore. She either hit Gibbs with a baseball bat or a seven-iron, but I forget which. Stephanie and Ducky don’t interact, which seems like a missed opportunity.
-The sniffer is the second mechanism for stealing passwords that we’ve encountered recently. The perp employed a sub-audible keyboard bug in In the Dark, Episode 4.22.
-This is the second time in five episodes that someone has trojan horsed their way into NCIS to mess with evidence. See also the aptly named Trojan Horse, Episode 4.23. If you add in Frame Up, Episode 3.9, this is the third time the evidence facilities have been infiltrated. Fourth if you count Bête Noire, Episode 1.16.
-Ducky and Gibbs spent half of last season passive aggressively fighting like an old married couple over Gibbs not telling Ducky about the murders of Shannon and Kelly. Ducky demonstrates in this episode why Gibbs was right not to tell him. Although, in fairness, Lt. Col. Mann finding the recording of Shannon and Kelly mitigates any culpability Ducky might have had in a break-up. Absent Ducky prepping her, that’s a much uglier scene if Lt. Col. Mann finds the tape cold. “Who’s the little girl?” “Um…”
-And break-up it is. Lt. Col. Mann won’t appear again until 2014. Which makes sense. We see now, more than ever, why none of Gibbs’s post-Shannon relationships have worked. Shepard is probably the only one who came close, and she Dear John’d him from the looks of things. See Model Behavior, Episode 3.11. More to the point, Lt. Col. Mann, as an investigator, is a lot more intuitive than any of Gibbs’s ex-wives- certainly 2/3 of them anyway. It’s unspoken, but I suspect she both understood why he got divorced three times and why any future she might try to have with him would be doomed. You can’t compete with ghosts.
-Army CID might want to fire their profiler. Lt. Col. Mann’s CID profile of Gibbs should have picked up on the marriage to Shannon. In fact, in Sandblast, Episode 4.7, the episode where she tells Gibbs she ran a profile, Lt. Col. Mann makes an offhanded remark to Tony about Gibbs being married four times. And it made sense since the profile talked about Gibbs having a death wish, and why the hell else would have a death wish? I guess it was a misstatement, since Lt. Col. Mann didn’t know about Shannon in this episode.
-Stephanie never appears again. I guess she liked Philadelphia. I hope she found love.
-Based on her reaction to the boat, it seems Stephanie knew about Shannon and Kelly.
-The provenance of the boat in this episode is a little unclear. Gibbs had a large-sized, almost finished boat named Kelly that he had been working on since the beginning of the show in his basement as of Sandblast, Episode 4.7. Then it was gone as of Sharif Returns, Episode 4.13. Gibbs appeared to be working on something smaller in Brothers in Arms, Episode 4.21. But that something smaller is named Kelly as of this episode. Does he just name all his boats Kelly?
-Gibbs’s street has a really nice view of the Capitol.
Casting Call: Stephanie is played by Kathleen York, who appeared on Dallas, the original, as a teen, and who also had a fairly lengthy role on The West Wing. She is a songwriter and was nominated for an Oscar related to a song she wrote for Crash (2004).
Rinnert is John Asher, who played Gary in the Weird Science TV show in the mid-90s.
Man, This Show Is Old: Those iPods Abby gifted the team are awfully large.
MVP: McGee. I feel like the team could have held Rinnert for some period of time even with almost no evidence, and certainly until he got a lawyer to come spring him. But McGee found the necessary evidence in time to avoid that altogether. Abby gets an honorable mention for having a mean jab.
Rating: This was an episode that had a lackluster plot/mystery but great characterization and interactions between characters. Well, except for the McGee jealousy thing. And while everybody didn’t always behave at their best, everybody behaved interestingly.
Seven Palmers.
Next Time: NCIS searches for the Eraser. No, not Arnold Schwarzenegger.
A Year of NCIS 