A Year of NCIS, Day 111: About Face (Episode 5.17)

Episode: 5.17, About Face

Air Date: May 13, 2008.

The Victim: Rick Baxter.

Emotionally Traumatized, But Ultimately Irrelevant, Witness Who Finds the Body: Two guys in construction hats are riding in what appears to be a crane elevator talking about some attractive girl they work with.  As an employment law attorney, I’m always thrilled to hear this.  One of them is going to ask her out, but the other one beats him to the punch.  Terms like “dibs” and “bro code” are invoked to no avail.  The friend with agency gets in the elevator and the friend with naught but perceived entitlement has to watch in dismay.  Dismay which turns to horror as the crane elevator lowers and bachelor number zero sees a dead body on top.

Now that’s a classic opening.   

Plot Recap: Tony is on the phone as he gets off the elevator.  He sees McGee and Ziva playing Scrabble, ostensibly to improve her English.  McGee is counting tiles, because only a true douche would Rainman Scrabble, and thus knows Ziva has a Q but no U.  But Ziva has a play.  Is it a good one?  McGee tells her to give it up.  She goes with “Qi,” which is a word.  But I don’t know if it counts in Scrabble.  If it does, however, it is worth 62 points and bridges the gap between their scores to give Ziva the win.  McGee yells, Ziva exults, Tony taunts, Gibbs arrives to announce a body and declare play time over.  McGee says they weren’t actually playing because it was a language exercise.  Tony notes that McGee means he didn’t actually lose.  Gibbs wonders if that means he’s not actually humiliated.  Everyone laughs but McGee.  But since he counts tiles in Scrabble, nobody cares about his feelings. 

Good scene.

At the crime scene, the foreman says nobody on his team recognizes the body.  They’re retrofitting an old Navy facility, and the crew has been the same for a while.  The victim is not one of them. 

NCIS processes the scene.  The dead body looks like the end result of a fight.  The victim fell, landed on the elevator, died, and rode the elevator until he was found.  Tony picks up the victim’s cell phone, but it’s out of juice.  Ziva pulls the victim’s wallet and his license identifies him as Rick Baxter, from Virginia. 

Ducky and Palmer arrive, and Ducky is betting on blunt force trauma as the COD, presumably because Ducky has working optic nerves.  Ducky calls TOD at 4:00 AM, and then leaves Palmer to move the body while he goes to get the gurney.  We don’t usually get into these kind of logistical details, so either this episode is going to have massive run time problems or Palmer gets to be part of the plot for once.

Looks like the latter.  As Palmer is moving the body, something falls out from its pockets.  Palmer picks up the item to look and it’s a passport for a man named Milos Suskacevik.  Ducky calls Palmer from down below and Palmer walks to the edge.  Ducky isn’t fond of Palmer’s parking job since he can’t get the gurney out.  Palmer apologizes and walks back to the body, but the passport is gone.  Palmer hears construction plastic rustling and calls out for McGee to see if he took the passport.  Then he hears a thud.  He advances back into the construction area as Ducky comes up the elevator.  Palmer sees someone running and, give Palmer credit, he gives chase.  Until the perp turns and starts shooting.  Palmer manages to get out of the way.  Ducky, hearing the shots, runs after Palmer.  There are no cowards on this team.   Although, I suspect Palmer is going to take some time psychologically adjusting to taking fire.

Later, Palmer is sitting nervously in the NCIS conference room.  Vance is super-irritated that, given the absence of evidence at the scene, Palmer isn’t worth more on the witness front.  Gibbs is having to defend Palmer which probably chaps his ass a little.  Vance thinks Palmer is trained to observe things and Gibbs corrects that Palmer is not a field agent.  I think somebody should give Palmer a kudo for running after the perp, but if you turned Gibbs and Vance upside down and shook them, nary a kudo would fall out of those pockets.  Also, then they would shoot you for manhandling them in such a fashion.

But I digress.  Weirdly, Gibbs doesn’t claim Palmer as being part of his team.  “He works for Ducky.”  Vance isn’t having that double talk- “Who works for you,” he makes clear and Gibbs has to smile a little.  Gibbs wants to know why Vance is pissed.  Vance misses his family and the only thing preventing him from going back to San Diego in anticipation of Shepard’s return is this case.  Gibbs gets it and moves to question Palmer.  But, for some reason, Vance wants to do it.

Look, it’s not like either was a good outcome for Palmer.

Palmer has been looking at photos of people from the Navy facility, but none look like the guy who shot at him.  The photo on the passport was definitely the dead guy, but Palmer can’t remember the name on the passport (I wouldn’t be able to either- I typed it three paragraphs up and still had to look).  He just knows it wasn’t the name on the drivers license.  Vance is vaguely incredulous that Palmer saw a man with a gun and chased after him.  Palmer corrects that he chased after a man and then saw the gun.  Vance says, “I can’t tell if you’re dumb or brave.”  Either way, Palmer says, “Not brave enough.”

Vance asks about the gun.  Palmer remembers the barrel was big.  Brian Dietzen is doing a good job portraying Palmer as both nervously eager to help but traumatized.  Palmer is having problems identifying the man to Vance’s satisfaction.  He’s not doing any worse than an average witness who faced down a gun barrel, but Vance expects more from his non-agent.  And he’s a jerk about it when he asks how close Palmer was to the shooter.  Palmer takes some agency and grabs a pad and tries to work out the distance to the shooter using the Pythagorean theorem.  At that point, Vance reaches his nerd limit and tells Palmer to go home and work with Abby on a sketch in the morning.  As he leaves, Palmer starts to apologize.  Vance figures it’s for having a shitty memory.  But Palmer is apologizing for not catching the perp.  Vance seems impressed with that. 

McGee is backgrounding Baxter, the victim.  He has lived in Virginia at the same address for 11 years…but the address was demolished two years ago and turned into a strip mall, and there’s no record of a current address.  Baxter has a real driver’s license- the only fake part is the address.  Baxter has never applied for a passport or left the country as far as records show.  There are no fingerprints because Baxter is not in any system- no arrests, no military service.  Baxter hasn’t filed a tax return in ten years, no unemployment filings, and he has a dormant bank account that defaulted to the state.  He did purchase a burn phone, found at the scene, and a call was made at 4:03 AM, right around the TOD.  But he also called a burn phone, so a trace is difficult.   

Gibbs observes that the key is the passport, since that’s what the perp took.  Tony wonders if Palmer made a mistake.  Gibbs doesn’t buy that.  He tells the team to focus on the passport and connect the dots.

Gibbs gets a call from Ducky and heads down to autopsy.  The knock on the head didn’t kill Baxter and the blood in his lungs demonstrates he lived for a bit after his injury.  Gibbs confirms it would have been enough time to make a phone call.  Ducky figures the blow to the head knocked him off the ledge.  COD was bleeding to death because of the organ damage in the fall.  There’s also a foreign substance on the body and in the nose- some sort of particulate, and Abby is running tests. 

Ducky asks after Palmer.  Although he tries to play it off as just missing the extra set of hands.  Ducky then makes a good point: Palmer may not have gotten a good look at the shooter, but the shooter likely got a good look at Palmer.  Gibbs says to let him worry about Palmer’s safety.

Abby is working with Palmer on a computer sketch of the perp.  They banter and eventually get something…but it’s rather cartoonish.  Abby decides they should start over rather than put out a BOLO for Mr. Hyde.  Palmer is upset because he couldn’t catch the perp, and now he can’t even identify him.  He worries that Gibbs thinks he’s useless.  Abby is impressed he chased a guy with a gun and calls him a stud muffin and “Baby Gibbs.”  Palmer perks up and gets back to work.

McGee has tracked common numbers from both burn phones (dead guy and call made by dead guy) and traced them to a trailer park.  Gibbs tells Tony to get moving in that direction.

Tony and Ziva arrive at the trailer park.  The residence is gone from the trailer plot.

Back at HQ, Ziva confirms that the missing trailer was Baxter’s and positively ID’s him by showing his photo to neighbors.  He lived there for about a year and paid in advance.  The trailer left in the middle of the night, and there’s no hit so far from the BOLO.  Someone is going to a lot of trouble to clean up after Baxter, whoever he was.  As to what Baxter was doing at the construction site, Gibbs shows Tony a picture he took of the crime scene and identifies the five-gallon drum in the background as hydrofluoric acid…which they don’t use in construction.

McGee has photos of numerous countries’ passport formats and is asking Palmer what he remembers of the passport design.   Palmer is having trouble and he ruminates over how he responded to the perp with the gun.  He’s not happy with how panicky he became.  McGee tries to make clear that Palmer’s reaction is a normal one.  Palmer asks McGee how he handled getting shot at the first time.  McGee dodges the question. 

OK, we’e going to let Abby hypnotize Palmer?  Since when is Abby a trained hypnotist?  Also, since the team has used a hypnotist to help McGee remember a perp (Witness Episode 2.14), it’s a little odd that Abby is moonlighting.  This is goofy as hell, but funny enough that I’m forgiving it.  Also, Palmer appears to have a fancy shoe fetish so when Abby asks him to imagine picking up the passport at the crime scene, he describes picking up a brown boot, prompting Abby to say, “Jimmy, put Ziva’s boot down.”  Nice.  Made even better by the look on McGee’s face.  When Palmer starts to lustily describe Abby’s shoes, Abby snaps him out of it.  Jimmy asks if they learned anything about the perp and McGee perfectly deadpans, “No, but we certainly learned something about you.”  “Whatever it is, it’s not what you think,” Palmer says.

Abby and McGee want to abandon this approach (because God knows what Palmer will reveal next- probably the sounds Agent Lee makes when he’s boffing her in an autopsy drawer).  But Palmer is insistent and there’s run time to chew, so here we go again.  This time, Palmer gets them a description that they feed into the computer.  And his description is top-notch.  Of the guy who gives Palmer his coffee every morning.  But all is not lost in Abby’s lab.  The results come back for the substance found on Baxter.

And I’m sure we’ll hear about it.  But right now, we switch over to Vance asking Gibbs for an update on Palmer’s brain freeze.  But only for a moment.  Palmer arrives with Abby’s results- the substance is efflorescence, which happens when technobabble and sub-grade concrete mix.  Subgrade concrete was the whole point of the retrofitting at the Navy facility, but Vance wants to know how it would get in someone’s lungs.  “Drilling,” Gibbs answers and hurries off.  He tells the team they’re headed back to the crime scene.

McGee is using a sonar system to figure out what might be under the concrete.  Gibbs notes they found a drill with the dead guy’s prints all over it.  It matches several holes in some of the support columns.  They scan another column and they see the image of a skull.  There’s a dead body encased inside. 

Extricating a body from a column is hard, but the team has at least dug in to get at the hands and hopefully run prints.  The agents are working on theories for what Baxter was doing since he couldn’t have extricated the body with just a drill.  BUT, he could have pumped the hydrofluoric acid into the column and dissolved the body.  So that leaves the team wondering who killed Baxter.  “Probably the same guy who shot at me,” Palmer offers as Gibbs rolls his eyes.  Ducky gently leads Palmer away.

McGee tells Ducky that it will take a few hours for the construction crew to remove the body and Ducky figures he and Palmer will go get some specialized tools.  But Palmer sees a guy in the rearview mirror standing off to the side and hesitates.  A truck pulls into Palmer’s line of sight but Palmer tells McGee he saw the guy.  McGee pulls his weapon and moves behind the truck to investigate, but there’s nobody there. 

Gibbs visits Abby in her lab.  She has ID’d the weapon that hit Baxter in his noggin: a bolt-cutter.  Also, Ducky found a piece of metal in the wound.  Abby ID’d it as copper.  She matched it to an electric cable at the scene.  Gibbs seems to know what this means, but it’s not 100% clear to me.

Ducky and Palmer are in the evidence garage getting our body loose from the concrete.  Palmer is still ruminating over his perceived lack of courage.  Ducky calls it a well-developed sense of self-preservation.  He says that he has no doubt Palmer has it in him to die a hero’s death, but right now, he needs his help to do dead body things.

McGee comes to collect Palmer.  It appears we have a suspect. Gibbs found the bolt cutters and linked them to a construction worker named Enis Watley.  Watley is in interrogation and Gibbs tells him they even found blood on his bolt cutters.  Then Gibbs twists the knife by telling Watley he should have used bleach.  Gibbs has Watley dead to rights and has figured out that Watley went to the site to steal copper- hence the copper in the bolt cutters.  Watley happened upon Baxter.  Watley sighs and admits he killed Baxter.  But he claims it was self-defense.  Per Watley, he wanted copper wire and went up to the third floor to steal it.  He found Baxter drilling into a support column.  Baxter saw him and chased him.  Watley claims he had his cutters, took a swing got lucky, and knocked Baxter over the edge.

Palmer arrives in observation as Watley is confessing.  But Palmer says that the case is still open.  Watley may be the guy who tried to kill Baxter, but he’s not the guy who tried to kill Palmer.

In the squad room, McGee reports that Abby’s analysis of footprints and blood spatter at the scene matches Watley’s self-defense story.  Gibbs tells Tony to search the phone book for Baxter’s relatives (desperation play).  He tells McGee to find a financial trail for Baxter.  Vance walks up and tells Gibbs he has a short leash.  Vance really wants to go home to his family.

Palmer is sitting in autopsy, still sad.  Gibbs puts a hand on his shoulder and startles him.  Amusingly, Palmer apologizes for jumping, and Gibbs reminds him never to say sorry.  Palmer is writing his mom an email and is trying to describe what happened (if someone shot at me, I would not tell my mom).  Gibbs is quiet.  Palmer asks Gibbs how he does it.  Gibbs asks what.  Block out fear, Palmer clarifies.  Gibbs says you don’t block it out.  It’s what you do with it.  Palmer says what he’s doing with it is nothing to write home about.  Gibbs smiles and says the look in a person’s eyes tells you a lot.  Palmer wants to know what his eyes say.  Gibbs smiles again, looks at the computer and tells Palmer to hold off on writing that email and predicts he’ll have something to tell his mom.  Palmer deletes the message.

Abby is eating popcorn and checking facial rec for the guy in the concrete.  How she got the face is inventive and highly technical, but basically, she pulled an imprint off the concrete that was poured over the victim and diddled with it on the computer.  While she’s explaining it, she gets a match.  It’s Rick Baxter.  The real Rick Baxter, who had his identity stolen by our dead guy.  Or, more to the point, our dead guy killed Baxter, disposed of his body, and took his place.  And he had to come back and get rid of the body before the retrofitters found it.  Gibbs wants to know why, and Tony reveals that the real Baxter won $2.1 million in a personal injury case against a construction company, to be paid over 20 years.  Replacing him seems like a good way to get that money.  Of course, that doesn’t tell them who took a shot at Palmer.  Gibbs says Fake Baxter had a partner and tells McGee to check the settlement payments.  They’ve all been cashed at the same currency exchange, so McGee says he’ll go there and see what he can find.

Palmer is sitting in autopsy, trying to remember the scene.  He flashes back.  Then he returns to himself, bangs the table and heads upstairs.  He finds Ziva and asks her what he should have done if he had caught the guy.  “To protect yourself?”  she asks.  He agrees.  But probably shouldn’t have.  Since now it’s demonstration time.  Ziva hands Palmer her unloaded gun and tells him to shoot her.  Then she swats his arm aside and slams him face first onto her desk.  Now it’s Palmer’s turn to be the victim.  He gets slammed again.  Ziva concludes that it was best Palmer didn’t catch the guy.  But this scene isn’t just for eating up runtime.  Palmer looks in the open drawer of Ziva’s desk and sees two Scrabble tiles next to each other.  “M.I.,” Palmer observes. 

In the conference room, Palmer is spreading out tiles with Ziva and Gibbs and remembers the first letters of the perp’s first name: M-I.  Which couples with the first three letters of the last name: S-U-S.  McGee gets an assist for coming in with the right passport cover.  The money from the settlement payment was converted into Serbian currency, so McGee narrowed it down to Republic of Yugoslavia, and Palmer agrees that the cover is correct.  Ziva adds that there’s an 80 percent chance our perps last name ends in I-C if he’s from that area of Europe.  Palmer has a breakthrough, and the team has the name of the perp.

Ziva and McGee background Milos Suskavcevic.  He’s a Serbian national who immigrated in 1998, two years after Baxter got his settlement.  He came with his brother Tesla, but when Tesla’s face shows up on screen, Palmer doesn’t know if that’s who shot at him.  Palmer’s assailant didn’t have a beard, unlike the guy in the picture.  Gibbs tells the team to find the suspect.  McGee looks at databases and such and traces a blackberry listed to Tesla to another trailer park.  The agents get their guns and depart.  Palmer tries to go too, but Gibbs tells him to stay.  Palmer says he can ID Tesla, and Gibbs says that can wait until the team brings him back.  The agents leave, but Palmer looks like a man who is going to do something stupid.

The agents converge on the trailer in question.  Someone is watching TV or listening to radio inside.  Ziva forces the door.  The suspect isn’t home, and the smoking cigarette says it’s a recent departure.  Gibbs finds a packed bag and a first-class ticket to Belgrade.  Gibbs tells McGee to check the park, Tony to check the manager’s office, and Ziva to stay put. 

Oh look.  Palmer came to the crime scene without telling anybody.  He sees the agents going about their separate tasks.  Gibbs sees Palmer too and comes around to the driver side window and slaps it to scare the piss out of Palmer.  There is yelling.  Gibbs is madder than he usually gets when his people show pluck.  But I guess Palmer is uniquely vulnerably for being untrained and a little on the lacking-common-sense side.  Gibbs orders Palmer to stay in the car.

Palmer sees a truck pull up.  He flashes back and recognizes the driver as the guy who shot at him and slumps lower in his seat.  But then he observes Tesla casing his trailer.  Ziva is clearly visible to Tesla in the window.  Tesla starts up his truck and drives off. 

And then Palmer turns into a maniac.  He takes off his glasses, accelerates his car and screams with rage the entire way.  Well, except for the part where he smashes the car through a picnic table and almost starts crying.  Then Palmer meets up with Tesla’s car and smashes into it, disabling it.  The airbag deploys and Palmer is dazed and bleeding out of his nose. 

Tesla looks over at Palmer and pulls his gun and, for the second time in maybe two days, Palmer is looking at a gun barrel.  But not for long.  Gibbs tells Tesla to drop it and the other agents surround him.  Tesla decides it’s over and drops the gun. 

Gibbs opens the car door and screams at Palmer.  “What the hell were you thinking?!”  Palmer notes, correctly, the he did not leave the car.  “Don’t ever do that again!” Gibbs screams.  But then he leans closer and looks at Palmer, hands him a handkerchief, and tells him that now he has something to write home about.  The lower half of Palmer’s face is covered by the bloody handkerchief, but the episode ends on the big smile in his eyes.        

Quotables:

“You suck the fun out of everything, McCheat.” -Tony takes issue with Mcgee counting tiles in Scrabble.  As Tony should.

Ziva-propisms: She thinks bolsterment is a word.  Maybe it should be.

Tony Awards: The Bourne Identity (2002).

Abby Road: One time, Abby got her lips stuck in the vacuum cleaner display in a department store.  She was 22 and it was either Fat Tuesday or Arbor Day and…wow.

McNicknames: McCheat.  Probie-Wan Kenobi. Apropos of nothing, Tony refers to Palmer as “Mini-Mallard.”

Ducky Tales: Ducky used to be interested in archaeology.  But it wasn’t in his bones.  His joke, not mine.

The Rest of the Story:

-Ziva seems to be back on the mend after her bout with poor characterization by the writers last episode.  Recoil, Episode 5.16.

-I doubt Scrabble would improve Ziva’s English as her problem is not her vocabulary, but her inability to nail down idiomatic English while nonetheless insisting on speaking it. 

-McGee is still afraid of heights, as we learned in Leap of Faith, Episode 5.5, but could have guessed before that since he’s scared of everything.

-Tony gets slapped in the head.

-Palmer once took a wilderness survival course and spent two weeks alone in the woods.  The show delights in putting out weird little tidbits like this about Palmer.

-That’s an old passport.  The Republic of Yugoslavia was dissolved in 1992.

-This is the second episode in a row where Ziva is sloppy as shit.  She totally appears in an open window and gets made by the exact schmoe she’s trying to surprise.

Casting Call: For the second episode in a row, nobody jumps out.  

Man, This Show Is Old: Two guys fighting over a girl while one of them calls dibs is probably best avoided today.

The average person today probably has a more sophisticated understanding of trauma’s effects on memory, particularly in the context of modern sexual assault discussions.  But Palmer’s experience is not depicted in an unrealistic way as near as I can tell.

Gibbs tells Tony to look through the phone book. 

As always, we pour out some beer for Blackberries.

MVP: Palmer.  Duh.

Rating: I would hazard that it was difficult to dislike Palmer before this episode.  He’s weird and quirky, but endearing, and the show enjoys dropping little tidbits that demonstrate that he’s tougher and much more interesting that meets they eye.  Also, there was the Agent Lee thing, which was pretty kickass (and hilarious).  But this was a new high.  Palmer was brave, he was committed, he was determined, and he felt bad when he couldn’t help.  He gets overlooked a lot, even by his own teammates, and I think Gibbs mostly dismissed him until this episode.  But Palmer is an essential and dedicated part of the team, and he showed it here.  I award Palmer eight Palmers.

Next Time: When have NCIS security details ever ended well?