Episode: 5.13, Dog Tags
Air Date: April 15, 2008
The Victim: Petty Officer Kyle Hansen, USN.
Emotionally Traumatized, But Ultimately Irrelevant, Witness Who Finds the Body: Not in play.
Plot Recap: We start strong with our agents raiding a home. McGee takes the back. Gibbs, Tony, and Ziva take the front where Gibbs announces and proudly says they have a warrant (for once). The back is open and when the agents burst in the front, a giant dog runs out the back and takes poor McGee to the ground. The music in the house is so loud that the other agents can’t hear McGee struggling to get his sleeve loose from the dog’s bite and reaching for his gun, which has fallen to the ground several feet away. The agents inside find the bloody remains of a service member. Tony suggests they stop serving warrants after lunch and bets $10 that McGee will vomit when he sees this guy. Only at that point does Ziva question the junior agent’s absence. They hear a gunshot and run out back to find a bloody McGee standing over a wounded whimpering dog.
Post-credits, Ducky and Palmer arrive, and Palmer calls the wound to the dog a through and through flesh wound. Ducky is seeing to McGee. Ziva wants to know if the dog is going to the vet, and Gibbs says it’s evidence. Ziva is not pleased by this and reminds everyone that the dog is a “he.” Palmer seems to know a little bit about dogs, from his college summer job. So, he offers to patch the dog up, and even gives Ducky some instruction on how best to sedate poochie. Nobody seems all that concerned that this dog could have killed McGee.
Gibbs tells McGee to take the dog to Abby. He wants the rest of the team processing the scene. The victim is Petty Officer Kyle Hansen, a military dog handler at Pax River. He worked with the drug enforcement unit. Ducky thinks PO Hansen was the victim of a dog attack. TOD is at least 36 hours ago.
Tony has the snark turned up today. He has already noted that McGee isn’t a very good shot since the dog is still alive. When McGee told Ducky earlier he hadn’t had a tetanus shot since he and the neighbor boy got in a fight over Star Wars toys, Tony figures this was last year. Ducky’s seemingly obvious comments about COD are met with a bad British Dr. Watson accent and a congratulations for solving the case. Tony claims he’s pissed because the dead PO was the best lead to whoever is filling Pax River Naval Base with drugs, and “Semper Fido” killed him. But we’ll see if there’s more to Tony’s bad mood than that.
Ziva finds a big ole’ bag of cocaine under a bed in PO Hansen’s bedroom. It has been ripped into, and Tony thinks it may explain why the dog chomped on its handler. Tony finds cash in PO Hansen’s sock drawer. Looks pretty straightforward.
McGee arrives in the evidence garage. Abby is very concerned. But more concerned about the dog he shot. She wonders who the hell would shoot a dog. But not for long. McGee pleads self-defense. Abby is still ashamed of him and will hear nothing of his being attacked by a vicious dog. Sometimes she’s a bit much. Especially when she covers the dog with McGee’s expensive sports coat and then yells at McGee for complaining about it.
This is going to be a long episode.
Shepard comes down to the squad room to tell Gibbs that the Pax River CO is closing the case since the suspect is dead. Gibbs shouldn’t have to inform the Director of NCIS that stopping the front guy in a big drug operation doesn’t stop the big drug operation, but he does anyway. He plans to keep investigating. Shepard can sympathize with the CO’s impatience. Gibbs doesn’t care. Shepard tells him that the clock is ticking and that she plans to reassure the base commander that Gibbs’s disruptions of operations will be prudent. She asks if there’s anything else. But Gibbs walks off.
McGee arrives in the squad room and Tony starts messing with his head about rabies and/or diseases from the dead perp that might have wandered into McGee’s bloodstream via the dog’s teeth. Gibbs arrives and wants to know how to get the case back on track. McGee recaps the investigation for the audience, demonstrating that PO Hansen had phone contact with Diego Delante, a known drug dealer in Panama, who has disappeared. Delante also claimed he’d bribed a flight crew and had access to an airfield in Panama where numerous armed forces C-130s make supply flights from Pax River. Cross-referencing flight crews making those runs turns up five suspects, but none can be linked to Delante. Gibbs sends Tony and Ziva to Pax River to talk to other dog handlers.
Gibbs, the only person on this show who doesn’t suck today, also quietly asks McGee if he is OK. McGee says he is.
Down in Abby’s lab, Abby has named the dog Jethro. She asks, “Who’s a good Jethro?’ and Gibbs arrives to claim that title for himself. Abby has no results, but she collected plenty of blood and hair from the dog. They debate over whether she’s too personally involved…to the extent debate can be had when one person is clearly right, and one is clearly wrong. Gibbs tells Abby to put the dog in a kennel. She resists but cages the dog. Because Gibbs is boss.
At Pax River, Ziva is showing pics and interviewing potential witnesses. And not having much luck. Her questions about Hansen are directed at a K-9 unit service member who has no interest in talking. Even when Ziva baits him by pointing out that the dog guys can’t sniff out a drug ring that NCIS now has to find, the interviewee remains impassive. He finally admits PO Hansen was a showboat who liked to flaunt his cash.
Tony isn’t having much better luck with a female dog trainer. Although she admits that a dog getting ahold of cocaine would be bad. She shoots him down when he tries to get her number.
Back at autopsy, Ducky and Palmer are trying to prove or disprove that the dog killed the petty officer. McGee comes down, newly filled with shots, and wants to know if he has rabies. Ducky outsources managing McGee’s hypochondria to Palmer. Gibbs arrives and takes Ducky with him…
…to talk to Abby, who is still playing with the dog. Ducky doesn’t have good news. A neck wound from a dog severed PO Hansen’s carotid artery. And the dog clearly bit the dead guy, although Abby claims it was because he was trying to pull his owner to safety. But then the DNA match comes back on the dog’s saliva.
He’s named Butch by the way.
The agents are watching security video feed at the Pax River airfield. But so far, they just have a guy eating food from a package someone passed him. Tony reports that the Pax River suspects are shipping out to Panama and the team will lose access to them. But Gibbs still doesn’t want to bring them in. He wants to go to them and catch them off guard.
Abby calls and Gibbs visits. She has more false alarms about how Butch didn’t kill this PO. Gibbs tries to gently explain that they have to give the dog back. And since it has tasted human flesh, it’s probably a corpse-to-be. Abby, objectivity still fully compromised, says she’ll give the dog back when she finishes collecting evidence. Gibbs loses patience at this point and figures the coke in the dog’s system, the flesh in the dog’s teeth, the dog saliva on the victim and the attack on McGee should settle the issue. Abby doesn’t buy it and Gibbs says she’s just making things rougher on herself.
Gibbs comes off the elevator and sees Shepard and Ducky conversing. Shepard makes eye contact with Gibbs and then leads Ducky away. Which is sure to allay any suspicions he has. See Stakeout, Episode 5.12.
McGee is in the squad room and gets a visit from Petty Officer Perelli, the dog handler Tony interviewed at Pax River. She wonders if McGee is the one who shot Butch and then acknowledges that Butch bit him pretty bad. McGee pretends to be a dog person. Mostly to impress the petty officer. But he’s bad at it. And the flirting. Really this is awful. While talking about dogs, he says, “I like boys,” and Gibbs arrives with a well-timed, “Don’t ask, don’t tell.”
Anyhow, PO Perelli is here to collect Butch the dog and put him down. McGee volunteers to take PO Perelli to Abby. Gibbs takes yes for an answer and hurries away from the land mine.
I wish we could hurry away. As McGee warns PO Perelli, Abby is not going to surrender gracefully. And, sure enough, Abby and the dog have fled.
The agents appear at the Pax River airfield. They rally the troops…to question the hell out of them. They split up and encounter denial after denial from their five Panama crew suspects. It’s a good scene, probably the highlight of the episode, but impossible to write about because we see each agent in succession speaking to different suspects for short snippets of a uniform set of questions. One service member calls the investigation “Bull crap,” and Tony snarks at him and searches the plane anyway. One makes a pretty good argument that if he were smuggling drugs he’d live better. The agents offer deals, play prisoner’s dilemma, threaten, and brag about their prowess. Nobody breaks. But the suspects might be rattled.
Abby drives an old school Model T looking car. She and Butch drive up to the Pax River gate and Abby flashes her ID. Says she’s looking for fleas. She gets onto the base, but as soon as she parks, Butch escapes and runs off barking. Abby runs after him screaming, “Jethro!” Amusingly, two jogging servicemembers declare in unison, “I’m Jethro!” to try to get her attention.
Abby catches up and Butch (I refuse to call him Jethro), is digging. McGee calls and Abby answers right as Butch digs his way down to…bones?
We cut to Ducky trying to excavate a corpse. Butch is barking. McGee wants him muzzled. Abby again has more sympathy for a dog that was shot than the man who only shot him to prevent himself from being mauled. Abby sort of apologizes to Gibbs for taking Butch, but not really. Ducky determines that the corpse is of a dog. Abby covers Butch’s eyes. Which I admit made me laugh.
Tony has determined that one of the Panama crew suspects, Lt. Cmdr. Warfield, has a cousin, Phillip Granger, who got busted for coke and went UA. Tony posits a family connection to the drug trade. Gibbs says keep digging. Ziva, however, hands Gibbs a file on Lt. Cmdr. Warfield and Gibbs reads it and sends Tony and Ziva to collect him.
PO Perelli walks by as they leave and ignores Tony to say hello to McGee. McGee takes her back to Abby’s lab for round two. Abby has locked herself and Butch in her office. When McGee tries to talk to her, she turns up the music and makes a scene. Despite him telling her not to make a scene. She has enough Caf-Pow and dog food to last a few days, so hopefully this is the last we’ll see of her this episode.
Lt. Cmdr. Warfield is in interrogation. He claims he was in a sickbay in Panama during the time NCIS thinks the drugs were smuggled in. Ziva confronts him with records, however, and these records demonstrate Lt. Cmdr. Warfield signed out of sickbay from 2PM to 5PM each day. She threatens to have his entire life scrutinized if he doesn’t come clean. So, he admits he was seeing a woman. Rosa, a translator. She has a sick 6-year-old kid with a bad respiratory infection. In observation, Tony calls that, “Sad.” Gibbs grunts and calls it “Leverage.” Essentially, Lt. Cmdr. Warfield went to sickbay complaining about a respiratory infection to get drugs for the boy. Ziva lists out the various grounds for dishonorable discharge facing Lt. Cmdr. Warfield for his good deed but then offers to forget them all if he gives up people in his crew who have been acting suspicious. Ziva knocks it out of the park with the interrogation but doesn’t break the suspect. She leaves and tells Gibbs in observation that Lt. Cmdr. Warfield is telling the truth.
In the elevator, Gibbs encounters Shepard. She perfunctorily inquires about the investigation, and then stops the elevator between floors for a conference. She tells Gibbs he has been looking at her all week like he wants to ask her something. He asks if she’s sick. She starts the elevator back up and says her health is fine. She threatens his health if he doesn’t wrap up the investigation.
Shepard heads to Abby’s lab and beats on the locked office door. Abby doesn’t want to admit her but knows better than to die on this hill. Shepard leans down to pet what appears to be an ailing Butch. Abby figures Shepard will order her to give up the dog. Shepard wonders if she’ll have to. Abby makes a speech about right and wrong and standing up for principles that I can almost hear in the voice of any number of Peanuts characters. Shepard tries to feed her some realism. Abby doesn’t drink realism, though. Most of the time, that’s a strength, so we’ll see how it cuts here.
In the squad room, Tony has rigged the plasma to play dog attack videos when McGee queues it up. Funny stuff. He then gets an email from Abby saying the cocaine contained minute traces of hydraulic fluid. Ziva says the flight engineer would be the crew member most likely to have that on his hands. That’s Petty Officer Bidwell, so the team heads out to Pax River to get him. McGee asks if his injured ass can come, and Gibbs even agrees.
The team arrives at the Pax River airfield and begins searching planes for PO Bidwell. Ziva finds a trail of blood and a dead PO Bidwell.
The team processes the plane and it looks like PO Bidwell got crushed by a loading mechanism. This is not likely to be an accident, but the team processes the scene, with Tony assigning an incredulous McGee to dust the whole plane for prints.
Back at HQ, Abby wheels Butch down to Ducky and Palmer on a stretcher. Butch has been coughing up blood. Ducky tells Palmer to take x-rays. The show’s musical score revs up as if one of the agents is dying and I simply don’t care enough about animals to take this seriously. Still, they do find something in Butch’s stomach that doesn’t belong.
Ducky is going to operate. Palmer is not optimistic. Abby is nervous. I’m watching the run time tick until this episode is over. That said, this scene is done about as well as it can be done, and if you love dogs, you’re probably tearing up a bit. Ducky holds up the foreign object after removing it from Butch, and Abby asks if it’s what she thinks it is. We don’t get to see.
Gibbs calls and Ducky assigns Palmer to close up Butch. Gibbs wants Ducky down at Pax River, but Ducky informs Gibbs that the foreign object in Butch’s stomach is the tip of a knife- a tip that matches a wound that Ducky couldn’t place on PO Hansen’s body. Meaning that regardless of what the dog did when, he had a human co-conspirator in the murder. Then Ducky has an idea. He looks at the skeleton of the dead dog Butch dug up. The knife point fits the wound structure of the vertebra of the dead dog too.
Gibbs hangs up and saves McGee from dusting the plane. They head back to HQ, leaving Tony and Ziva to process the scene. McGee gloats.
Abby comes around and is taking up a collection for flowers for Butch. McGee wonders why he would give flowers to a dog that attacked him. Abby threatens (again) to kill him without leaving evidence behind (See Silver War, Episode 3.4). He coughs up some cash.
Tony and Ziva return to the squad room from Pax River. Gibbs arrives and McGee reports that the surveillance can’t get a good look at PO Bidwell’s attacker. Yet, somehow, McGee manages to match the knife piece found in Butch to a Navy issue tactical knife (what, through the federal knife registry?). McGee finds three people who ordered a new boot knife at Pax River, and one stands out. They don’t tell us who.
Gibbs and the gang arrive again at Pax River and confront PO Perelli about the knife she ordered. She hasn’t received her new knife yet and claims she lost the old one. The agents lay out the scheme, which is about as paint by numbers as you’d suspect: PO Perelli found out about the investigation, framed PO Hansen (a call to the drug dealer on his cell, the coke and cash planted in his house), killed PO Hansen, made it look like his dog got him, and then killed her accomplice, PO Bidwell, when he got squeamish. PO Perelli says she’s no lawyer but feels like she’s hearing a lot of conjecture. But Gibbs has a plan. McGee has some sample coke from the evidence locker and waves it in front of her dog. He doesn’t react. Because he’s an attack dog she replaced her drug dog with (the dead dog buried on base) so she could walk around with a dog that wasn’t barking at her drug-covered ass all the time.
Man, that’s complicated.
Anyway, they arrest her, and she goes quietly. The attack dog tries to get Ziva but McGee shuts the car door and locks him up. It’s…well, whatever, it’s almost over.
Back at the lab, Abby is hugging Butch when McGee walks in. The base commander said she could keep Butch. Her landlord said no. Now she wants McGee to keep him. McGee naturally doesn’t desire to own a beast that bathed in his blood. But they shake on it and it looks like McGee has a dog now.
Sucker.
Quotables:
Abby: How could you shoot an innocent animal, McGee?
McGee: Abby, that dog is not innocent! He killed someone!
Abby: Dogs don’t kill people, McGee! People kill people!
McGee: People with dogs that kill people, kill people!
Time Until Sexual Harassment: 4:15. Ziva is bent over under a bed at the crime scene. Tony enters the room, ogles her ass, and declares it a “room with a view.” Gibbs at least regulates with a head slap.
Ziva-propisms: Ziva wants to know if Tony woke up in the wrong bed. Always a good question with Tony, but she means. “The wrong side of the bed.”
Tony Awards: Tony compares the dog to Hannibal Lecter from The Silence of the Lambs (1991). And makes a rather obvious Cujo (1983) reference.
Abby Road: Abby’s whole personal involvement with this dog is a tangent.
McNicknames: McGruff, as a reference to McGruff the crime dog. Excellent work. Tony also refers to McGee as his “personal McMuse.” He also calls him Probie-Wan Kenobi. Banner episode for this section.
Ducky Tales: Ducky is still quiet.
The Rest of the Story:
-Tony gets a head slap.
-Gibbs learned last episode, Stakeout, Episode 5.12, that Shepard has some health issue that she is keeping on the down-low. Their initial conversation makes clear that he’s not sure how to approach her about it.
-NCIS agents have a long history of dating or trying to date the perps, so both McGee and Tony are in good company here when they try to pick up on PO Perelli. See e.g. anything involving Kate and Ari; Silver War, Episode 3.4 and Heart Break, Episode 2.8 (Ducky); Dead Man Talking, Episode 3.19 (Tony); Doppelganger, Episode 2.12 (Gibbs); and Lt. Jane Doe, Episode 2.4. (McGee).
Casting Call: Rachel Kimsey played PO Perelli and also voices Wonder woman on Justice League Action.
Man, This Show Is Old: The don’t ask/don’t tell rule for gay servicemembers was in play from roughly 1993 until it was repealed in 2011.
MVP: Gibbs is the only one who gives more of a shit about McGee than the dog who tried to eat McGee.
Rating: Woof! This was awful. We’re on a real downhill stretch here. As you probably picked up, I’m not a big fan of dogs so I’m admittedly not the audience for this one. But even then, we had drug crimes, which make for lackluster viewing, even dating back to Season One; we had a boring perp; we had a dumb scheme; and we had a dull episode. Three Palmers.
Next Time: An oasis in the midst of a desert of dreck as Fornell comes to investigate the team for the death of Le Grenouille.
A Year of NCIS 