We’re back from a brief hiatus, taken so that I could pull Summer Dad duty. Let’s get back on track with Season 6.
Episode: Last Man Standing, Episode 6.1.
Air Date: September 23, 2008. This was the season I started watching this show, albeit mostly in rerun form on USA. I did see the NCIS: Los Angeles backdoor pilot, but it didn’t make a whole lot of sense to me, since I wasn’t familiar with Gibbs’s back story.
The Victim: Petty Officer Steven Vargo.
Emotionally Traumatized, But Ultimately Irrelevant, Witness Who Finds the Body: This happens off-screen.
Plot Recap: We start Season 6 with a recap of last episode’s re-assignment of our favorite agents. For those who don’t recall, Shepard died, Vance took her job, Vance decided to clean out Gibbs’s cult of personality, and everybody got new jobs. Tony became an agent afloat. Ziva got sent back to Mossad. McGee was re-assigned to the basement to be the cyber crimes guy. Gibbs got a bunch of personnel files for replacement agents.
After the recap, we’re told we’re in Morocco, and we get a shot of Ziva in a sexy dress playing the role of a lounge singer. If that’s her real voice, it’s not bad. Also, to be fair, the rest of her is OK. She struts around the restaurant, coming on to the patrons, and then takes particular notice as an attractive woman gets up to leave. A man, clearly working with Ziva catches her eye and leaves to follow. Something else catches Ziva’s eye near a lounge table. And then a bomb goes off.
Cue credits. Season Six credits, adding Rocky Carroll to the cast as NCIS Director Leon Vance.
We open post-credits with a man working on a computer, tapping his fingers really fast. We’re meant to assume it’s McGee, but it’s not. It’s new McGee, sitting at old McGee’s desk. He looks up irritated over a ringing phone and testily asks new Tony to pick it up. New Tony is Special Agent Brent Langer, whom we met last season in Tribes, Episode 5.11, and who used to work for Gibbs in the old days before he went over to FBI. Now he’s back for more. Langer has his feet propped up on his desk and puts aside some paper he’s reading to answer the phone. He tells the caller that Special Agent DiNozzo was re-assigned several months ago. The person hangs up on him.
Langer looks across the way and New Ziva is sitting with her head obscured beneath her desk. She looks up when Langer comments that all the people who call for Tony are women. “And that surprises you?” says our old friend Agent Lee. Welcome back, Lee! NCIS was way less titillating last season without Lee and Palmer having closet sex, both literally and figuratively.
Lee asks where her Oman threat assessment is. Langer has been reading it, and teases Lee by keeping it out of her reach. New McGee tells Langer to give her the file. And then, so does an arriving Gibbs. New McGee gives a really uptight good morning to Gibbs, Lee stands at attention. Langer thinks it’s all funny but is nonetheless respectful as he eases out of his chair and leans on a file cabinet. Gibbs asks after the Oman threat assessment and Lee takes it from Langer but then drops it on the floor. She keeps calling Gibbs “Sir,” which he reminds her he hates. New McGee helps Lee pick up the papers and Langer gives Gibbs that look that says, “Because we’re old friends we’ll have private jokes and lord it over the dweebs.” Gibbs gives him a look back that establishes a very different dynamic. So, Langer gets on the floor to help Lee as well.
New McGee tells Gibbs he got a call. New McGee is named Keating and is very interested in making sure Gibbs knows he took the message. Gibbs already knows because, as he tells Keating, Keating’s name is in the “taken by” box on the message slip.
Gibbs calls someone named Detective Reynolds. Langer tries to tell a flustered Lee that things will get better. And she thinks they will too- when Gibbs retires.
Gibbs hangs up and it’s time for the newbies to grab their gear. They don’t move with purpose, so he gives them a look and they speed up. Then Gibbs takes a long moment to stare impassively up at Director Vance, positioned on the balcony above. Too long because the elevator door shuts on Gibbs. Only to re-open to frantic new agents apologizing. Which is another thing Gibbs hates. We see Gibbs roll his eyes as he enters the elevator and the door shuts.
At the crime scene, Lee is taking pictures. Palmer accidentally ends up in one of them. He apologizes and they have this awkward moment where both want to say something but neither does. Maybe she got an infection when they hooked up in that bar bathroom at the end of Season 4 (Angel of Death, Episode 4.24) and things soured after that.
The crime scene is a trailer park where the body has been in the trailer 4.5 months. The park manager tells Gibbs she left the victim alone after he paid 18 weeks of rent in advance. Keating finds a big pile of money in a truck and we get our victim’s name: Petty Officer Vargo. He has been UA at the Navy yard for 4.5 months. Per Langer, PO Vargo was in strategic planning, stationed in the building right next door to NCIS, and had a significant security clearance. Gibbs tells Langer to get a statement from the manager.
Ducky is examining the very decayed body and tells Gibbs he can send in the B-Team. Gibbs tries to put a brave face on the personnel changes and argues that they’re all A-teams. But nobody believes that. Either way, the victim is in bed. Single gunshot wound to the head, probably while asleep.
In Abby’s lab, Gibbs visits. He took the stairs and probably shouldn’t have because Abby tries to psychoanalyze this behavioral change as Gibbs trying to forget his old team. He asks what she has. The casing found at the scene of the murder is from a .9mm and the slug is of the variety that government agents use- NCIS, Secret Service, FBI, SEALs. It’s not the kind of slug that normal people can get. Also, we learn that it has been 126 days since Vance re-assigned Gibbs’s team, and Abby is mortified that Gibbs hasn’t done anything about it. She even has a shrine set up in her lab with pictures of everyone, which has to make the B-Team feel good. She says she misses them, and Gibbs points out that she had lunch with McGee yesterday. To no avail. She begs Gibbs to get them back and gives him a 14-day deadline.
In the squad room, Keating links PO Vargo with another Petty Officer, Brian Roberts. They served together and look like friends based on photos Keating puts up on the plasma. But PO Roberts was killed the previous night in a bomb blast in Morocco- the one that opened the episode. Langer and Lee think coincidence, and Keating pulls up the ZNN feed covering the incident. Gibbs appears and asks about casualties, and Keating reports four dead, thirteen injured. The agents see footage of an unconscious woman being loaded in an ambulance. Langer, Lee, and Gibbs recognize Ziva.
Gibbs is in crisis mode. Langer is working his Israeli contacts (why would he have them?), but Lee says Mossad is unhelpful. Gibbs tells her to get everything on POs Vargo and Roberts, including the last time they had any interaction. He tells Keating to find Ziva.
We catch up with McGee, where Vance has re-assigned him: Cyber Crimes. McGee is in charge of a team of mega-nerds, one of whom has glasses and unkempt hair and the other of whom keeps screwing up crypto-equations. They call him, “Boss,” which Gibbs finds amusing when he magically appears behind McGee. Give Sean Murray credit for the relief McGee expresses here as he says, “Boss.” You really do feel like they’ve been apart 126 days. McGee stammers out that he’s not really the cyber team’s boss, but since he carries a gun and is a field agent, they call him boss. Gibbs has better things to do than listen to McGee’s explanations and wants to know if he has heard from Ziva. It has been a few weeks since she emailed McGee, and Gibbs tells McGee she went undercover. Her cell phone is no longer connected.
At that moment, Keating calls and says he found Ziva. Keating tries to explain how smart and connected he is to have accomplished this, but Gibbs just tells him to put her on.
We see the call from Ziva’s end and she appears to be in once piece. She is in an office with the guy from her earlier op in Morocco and an old guy we’ve never seen before. She says she was tracking a person with an unhealthy interest in a Chechnyan terrorist group. Gibbs predicts this is PO Roberts and now Ziva wants to know what he knows. Gibbs explains the Vargo connection (and McGee looks up, interested). Per Ziva, PO Roberts was meeting a Chechnyan op named Milaana Shishani who just happened to escape the explosion. Mossad believes PO Roberts was the target, maybe for housecleaning purposes.
Gibbs wants to know how Ziva got tipped off about Roberts, and the men in the room with her shift, interested. She identifies Director Vance, although she looks around the room as she does it. Gibbs says they miss her (and calls her “Ziver”) and she takes the phone off speaker. She reciprocates and says she misses everyone. Even Tony. Ziva’s new partner reacts uncomfortably at Tony’s name, but says nothing. Gibbs says he has to go. They say their goodbyes.
The older gentleman tells Ziva to go home and rest. But he asks for, “A kiss for your father.” So, this is Mossad Deputy Director Eli David. Ziva complies and says, “Good night, Papa.”
She seems sad.
Gibbs has picked up on McGee recognizing Vargo’s name. But McGee has been ordered to keep his mouth shut. Gibbs leaves. His nerds ask if McGee is OK. He tells them to get back to work and they say, “Yes boss.”
Vance is admiring a photo in his office of Muhammad Ali having polished off Sonny Liston. Vance gives Gibbs and us a history lesson on the fight. It happened so fast people thought it was fixed. Vance concludes with the lesson that it’s easy to jump to conclusions before you have all the facts. He tells Gibbs to “swing away.” Gibbs fires off a roundhouse: “You didn’t break up my team because of Jenny’s death.” Vance admits it. He was contacted by PO Vargo. PO Vargo, a Middle East specialist, said he had gambling debts and was being blackmailed into providing classified information to someone. PO Vargo wouldn’t say what kind of data, but that he had downloaded a critical file that he was supposed to pass on. Director Shepard had Vance fly to DC to meet PO Vargo and get the name. That was when PO Vargo vanished. That’s a fun tale, but, as Gibbs notes, it doesn’t answer the question. Vance says he broke up the team because whoever was blackmailing Vargo was an NCIS agent. And, based on PO Vargo’s remarks, Vance had it narrowed down to three agents. Vance broke up Gibbs’s team so he could form a new one with all three suspects: Langer, Lee, and Keating.
Gibbs wonders whether Vance was ever going to tell him about this. Vance had no proof and figured Gibbs’s radar would go off and he’d come to Vance with doubts. Gibbs gets exasperated. Since he has an FBI guy who doesn’t listen (Langer), a boy genius who doesn’t drive (Keating), and a lawyer who doesn’t shoot (Lee), he’s pretty full up with doubts. Vance provides a little expository plot correction to help us figure out how Langer got from Tribes, Episode 5.11 to here: Langer made the jump from FBI back to NCIS eight months ago (which jibes with the timeline) on Gibbs’s recommendation. Gibbs insists that Langer got no special treatment, but Vance says he’s nonetheless Gibbs-endorsed, so apparently Gibbs didn’t get the agent he thought he was getting. Vance thinks Langer used Gibbs to get into the agency, but Gibbs says that doesn’t make him guilty.
Vance also explains that McGee is in Cyber specifically to work on Vargo’s computers. Seven levels of encryption in and they’re still not done. Vance also tells Gibbs that PO Vargo confided in his old buddy PO Roberts. Then PO Roberts turned up in Tel Aviv. Since PO Vargo was an Israel specialist, Vance sent Ziva back to figure him out. Mossad was making ready to pick up PO Roberts. They weren’t quick enough to keep him from being exploded. So, someone is tying up loose ends. Vance thinks PO Vargo told PO Roberts the name of the rogue NCIS agent, and PO Roberts was trying to sell it. Which, per an irritated Gibbs, means “Four months, you got nothing.” “We got nothing,” Vance corrects.
In the squad room, Langer has determined that PO Vargo’s computers were seized four months ago. Keating thinks that’s SOP. Lee wants to know who seized them and Langer says NCIS. Keating can’t figure out why the seizure isn’t logged. Langer figures the computers must be in the building somewhere. Lee worries about a chain of custody. Keating suggests the computers are in the basement with the cyber geeks.
Gibbs arrives and wants updates. His not exactly well-oiled machine all talk over each other. They get it together and Keating reports that PO Vargo closed out some bank accounts and withdrew $11k. No credit card activity since he did it. Lee reports that PO Vargo’s CO is refusing to see NCIS without representation, and she can’t find a JAG officer with the requisite clearance. Langer reports the issues with the computers. Gibbs plays dumb and says he’ll handle the computers. And now Gibbs is over-cautious, quietly watching his agents…and getting caught by Langer doing it.
In Cyber, all the geeks wish McGee good night. Gibbs returns to the dungeon and McGee apologizes but said Vance told him to keep quiet. Gibbs thinks this wouldn’t have stopped McGee in the past, but McGee is discombobulated by the lack of his team. He says he’d give anything to be working with Gibbs and Ziva again. “And DiNozzo?” Gibbs asks, and McGee grudgingly admits that too. Although it’s unclear whether he’s telling Gibbs what Gibbs wants to hear.
Vance arrives. McGee tells them that he cracked the eighth level of encryption and cryptobabbles a lot. A lot. Even for him. He admits he has been in Cyber too long. He explains that the day before PO Vargo disappeared, he connected a flash drive and downloaded a 2.75 gb file. McGee hasn’t de-encrypted what was taken, but it will be easily hidden in a safe place. Vance thanks McGee and tells him to keep Gibbs in the loop. Gibbs and Vance eye each other as McGee leaves for the night and Vance says, “Solve this first, then we’ll talk.” Gibbs responds with “Ziva too.”
In autopsy, Gibbs joins Ducky. Ducky explains that PO Vargo had a broken jaw. He summarizes that PO Vargo may have been asleep and was disturbed but then struck with a gun before he could react. That would have given the assailant time to grab a pillow and smother the gunshot. Ducky doesn’t have much out the ordinary to help with the investigation, though. Gibbs mentions “the pillow” and then abruptly leaves.
Abby is looking at a card from Tony. She hangs it up with others. Gibbs arrives and wants to see the pillow the killer fired through. Abby is perplexed that there were not more powder burns. She doesn’t think the use of the pillow was effective at silencing the gunshot. Gibbs says the person didn’t want to silence the gunshot. They wanted to cover the victim’s face. Abby suggests a squeamish shooter.
Gibbs gets a call from McGee and takes off. When he arrives back in Cyber, Gibbs sarcastically asks McGee if he wants to call Vance. McGee hesitates, but says Vance can wait. McGee tells Gibbs they searched PO Vargo’s phone records. Nothing unusual showed up, but then McGee checked the trailer park pay phone and found three calls to NCIS. To the legal department. And Special Agent Lee.
Lee is in Vance’s office and wonders if she needs counsel. Gibbs and Vance explain PO Vargo’s calls to her. Lee is at a loss, but then looks at the call log and says that anonymous caller telephoned her for legal advice about stealing from the Pentagon. She assumed money, but the guy wouldn’t say. Gibbs wonders why she didn’t tell anyone, but Lee said it was small ball and she filed a report on it. They can check her log for that week. Vance says it shouldn’t be a problem then. He thanks Lee and asks her to send McGee in.
Vance thinks Lee’s story sounds credible since it’s the story PO Vargo gave him. Gibbs is non-committal. Vance asks McGee to check Lee’s files and Gibbs wants full backgrounds on all three members of the B-Team. McGee is still working on the de-encryption, but he notes that they have a hash number for the downloaded file and since no two are the same, looking through the Pentagon’s system and comparing to see what’s missing might allow him to ID the file. Going through channels would take time and Gibbs asks if there’s a faster way. McGee was afraid Gibbs would ask that and Vance makes his first leadership mistake by letting Gibbs rope him into a hacking scheme. Vance simply says, “We never had this conversation.” Which is permission.
McGee puts Tony on-screen in MTAC. They banter and McGee grudgingly admits it’s good to see Tony. Tony reciprocates. Tony is NCIS agent afloat on board the USS Seahawk now after a stint on the USS Reagan. Tony does a pirate impression but chokes it down when Gibbs appears. Tony says hello and Gibbs smiles. They have work to do. McGee asks if Tony is alone, but, per Tony, “I am never alone!” Such is the life of NCIS agent afloat. Tony whispers, “I really need to come home, boss.” Gibbs says he’s working on it. Because McGee needs some kind of secure Naval transmission hub for his hack, Tony is it. But when McGee begins describing what needs to happen, Tony balks at being roped into one of Gibbs’s and McGee’s circumnavigations of the law. McGee tells him to man up and gives him the codes. Then the hash number. Meanwhile, because there are sailors around, Tony keeps pretending he’s talking to his father about his brother Tim driving his car. It’s not even remotely believable and not one of Weatherly’s better ad-libs. Tony gets a hit, downloads the summary file and emails it to McGee. Tony figures he’s headed to Gitmo but keeps up the “talking to the folks on the farm” bit. Gibbs gets his attention and tells him to take care of himself. Tony looks around and says, “Miss you too, Dad.”
McGee gets the email from Tony. PO Vargo downloaded something called Domino. And as we move to Vance’s office, we see it’s the Joint Chief’s battle plans in the event of an attack on Israel. Vance says if this gets in the wrong hands, every ship in the Gulf will be in danger, and he needs to brief SecNav. McGee takes a call and reports that Agent Lee logged into the Strategic Planning Office at the same time every Friday for a six-month period prior to PO Vargo disappearing. She logged in and logged out thirty minutes later like clockwork. Gibbs says she was meeting someone.
And then we head to interrogation where Lee is being interrogated by Vance and Gibbs. Lee denies meeting PO Vargo and says she never saw him before they found his body. But she was meeting someone, and Vance and Gibbs demand to know who. She hesitates…
…and we shift to autopsy and everyone favorite autopsy gremlin and kinky sex freak Jimmy Palmer. He shuts an autopsy drawer and then spins to face Gibbs. And here comes Vance. Not a great day for the high-strung members of the team. Brian Dietzen does a good job making his Adam’s apple twitch with nervousness as Vance strides up. Gibbs (who really should have figured this out in Season 4) states rather than asks, “You’ve been seeing Agent Lee, Jimmy.” Palmer lies and immediately corrects himself but then stammers out that he was seeing her but he’s not seeing her anymore. “Where and when?” Gibbs asks and the audience pauses the viewing to go make some popcorn. Palmer says here and there and mostly here, meaning autopsy, until Ducky almost caught them. Then they had to change locations to the building next door. Every Friday morning. Per Palmer, Lee would log in, then open a service garage and then they would copulate in the paint locker near the basement. Why not just do it at home? Even Vance is like, “Paint locker?” “Think she got off on the fumes,” Jimmy grins.
Gibbs asks if Palmer is still seeing Lee and Palmer says that it ended a few months previous. And, because Palmer is always full of surprises, it turns out he ended it because he thought he was being used. Gibbs just stares, the way he always stares at Palmer, like he’s not quite sure who he is or how he came to be. Then Gibbs and Vance walk off in unison. Palmer asks if he’s going to be fired and they both turn. Vance says, “No. But it will not happen again.” Palmer agrees that it will not happen again, anywhere. But then corrects because he’ll probably keep having sex with people just not at work and he…yeah, they don’t care and they’re already gone.
In Vance’s office, McGee says tells his superiors he found the report Lee filed. He thinks she’s in the clear.
In the squad room, Keating asks what’s going on. He wrote a program to guard against identity theft, and just caught Cyber going through his bank records. Then he back-traced it and caught Cyber having gone through all the B-Team’s records. Gibbs arrives, and Langer asks if he’s under investigation. Gibbs asks, “Should you be?’ and Langer wants a straight answer. Gibbs orders Keating to the interrogation room. He tells Langer to stay put. Langer asks what’s going on as Gibbs leaves and Lee tells him. “They think one of us is a spy.”
Keating gets to be the meat in a Gibbs-Vance sandwich. Vance compliments his computer skills and then asks if he has ever hacked the Pentagon.
In the squad room, Langer figures if it’s computer stuff then Keating must be involved. Keating’s bag is still there so, against Lee’s protests, Langer goes to examine it. He opens the bag pocket and Lee sees that Keating has a military ID, even though he’s a civilian. Langer reasons that it’s Vargos’s ID and Keating lifted it from evidence. There’s an access code included. Lee suggests telling Gibbs, but Langer wants to look himself and since only Lee can them into Building 3, where PO Vargas worked, she gets to come too.
We cut to Langer and Lee entering the building. It’s deserted. They enter a restricted area and we see that McGee is being alerted at his station as to the entry. Lee lets them into a server room and tells Langer that they shouldn’t be there because if they get caught, NCIS will think the spy is one of them. Langer is looking at Lee. He stares harder. She looks back and says, “What?’ He reaches for his gun.
Back in interrogation, Vance has asked Keating a simple question as to whether he has ever met PO Vargo, but Keating seems unable to answer it. McGee pipes in, interrupting interrogation, which used to be a no-no, and is now just accepted as something that happens every other episode.
Vance and Gibbs meet with McGee and McGee tells them that they put a trace on all of PO Vargo’s access materials and that someone is using his card right now to gain access next door. Gibbs gets a call. It’s Lee, and she’s panicking. Gibbs hears shots fired. We cut to Lee, hunkering down as bullets shatter glass over her head. She hangs up and begins flipping off the lights in the server room. Gibbs declares, “It’s Langer!” He tells McGee to watch Keating and Gibbs and Vance take off.
Gibbs and Vance arrive in Building 3. The lights are out, an alarm is blaring. They find Lee, sitting on the floor shaking, holding a gun out in front of her. Gibbs gently plucks the gun from her and tells her it’s OK. Langer is dead on the floor and Vance finds PO Vargo’s access card on Langer’s body. Gibbs hugs a sobbing Lee and looks off in another direction.
We shift to Tel Aviv. Vance calls Eli David. They appear to know each other well. Eli thanks Vance for sending his daughter home, even if he thinks Vance had other motives than reuniting a family. For some reason Eli wants to wax philosophical on people asking him why he would raise his daughter to be an assassin. Vance doesn’t give a shit about stuff like that because jobs need doing. Eli says “Every day is a fight to survive,” but he hopes one day his grandchildren can live in a different world and grow old and fat having worked as doctors and architects and so forth and my what a strange conversation. Eli decides to cut to the chase and says, “You want her back don’t you?” Vance says he does. Eli asks, “Are we winning?” Vance doesn’t know. Eli wonders too. He tells Vance to use Ziva well. She’s the “sharp end of the spear.” They bid farewell and Vance turns on the TV to watch a video of the Ali-Liston fight.
Lee is packing up her desk. Gibbs asks if she is done. She is. She tells him she knows he never thought much of her as a field agent or even a lawyer. Gibbs gracefully sidesteps part one by telling her that part two is more about the profession than the person. Lee gets a cell call but doesn’t take it. Gibbs wonders if it’s important, but she says it can wait. He picks up her box of stuff to carry for her. Lee looks at Langer’s desk and asks why he did it. Gibbs says money probably. Lee thanks Gibbs again and says goodbye.
Abby enters the squad room with McGee, and she is very excited that he’s back. She thanks Gibbs for reuniting their team. At the elevator, Lee watches, wistfully maybe. She sees Vance on the stairs, and they smile cordially at each other. The elevator opens, and Ziva exits. Lee welcomes her back, but an excited Abby is beckoning so Ziva says it’s good to be back and walks off. Lee watches them all hug each other, and you feel a little bad for her for never fitting in with the core group and getting fired from the field team twice now. Gibbs looks up from hugging Ziva (which is nuts in and of itself) and makes eye contact with Lee, who smiles as the elevator closes.
Inside the elevator, Lee looks at her phone. A text says, “Do they suspect?” Lee flashes back to planting PO Vargo’s ID in Keating’s bag and to shooting Langer and making it look like he attacked her in Building 3. Then she types back, “No.” And we end the episode with Lee, staring and grimly confident.
Quotables: Nothing of note.
Ziva-propisms: None. Ziva is not in the episode enough to befoul English.
Tony Awards: None. The brief scene in which Tony appeared did not lend itself to movie references.
Abby Road: Abby feels like she’s going deaf and goes off on a lightspeed tangent about it. She tries to imagine how she would shoot someone.
McNicknames: McGoo. Probie. McShipmate.
Ducky Tales: Ducky does not regale us this episode.
The Rest of the Story:
-Langer came up under Gibbs back in the old days. He was at FBI before he came back to NCIS.
-Agent Lee spent all of Season 4 annoying Gibbs and having filthy office sex in every corner of NCIS HQ with Palmer. She did not appear at all in Season 5, and this is her first appearance since she and Palmer vanished into a bar bathroom to have liters filthy sex during Angel of Death, Episode 4.24.
-If Abby can hear Gibbs come off the elevator and Gibbs always takes the elevator, then how has Gibbs snuck up on Abby so many times?
-Credit Abby. Or the screenwriters. As of the air date of this episode, it has in fact been 126 days since Vance sent everyone packing.
-I don’t think a real-life news agency would show the face of an unconscious woman being loaded into an ambulance. Even a woman in a foreign country.
-This is the first appearance of Eli David.
-Vance’s enlarged print of Ali and Liston is a mainstay of his office and is, I believe, still there today. I’m interpreting its presence in this episode, and Vance’s describing of the fight, to symbolize Vance’s efforts to come into NCIS swinging and knock out Gibbs (and, to a lesser extent, Eli David) in the early rounds. They are both at least back on their heels now even if the status quo was restored relatively quickly from the perspective of the audience.
-Despite the script’s best efforts, Langer being a suspect doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. An NCIS veteran and former Gibbs agent, he was still with FBI as of January 2008. See Tribes, Episode 5.11. There’s no way he could come back to his old agency after that op and have time to set up a spy mission that was reported to Vance by April.
-Gibbs’s issues with Langer also don’t make a whole lot of sense. Did Langer become a shitty agent at FBI. Or is this a case of the old student being independent for too long, picking up bad habits, and coming back to work for an old boss.
-Tony head-slaps himself.
-We get a fascinating resolution to the Palmer/Lee subplot. A subplot that half-dominated Season 4, albeit mostly for laughs, yet was completely ignored in Season 5. But, assuming NCIS tracks a real-world calendar, Palmer and Lee knocked boots at work for about 17 months without anyone finding out. As Darth Vader might say, “Impressive. Most impressive.”
-Vance has a daughter named Kayla. He also has a son, whose name is not mentioned here. We meet Vance’s family later.
-Gibbs hugging a field agent, even Ziva, is strange.
-Keating ends up being cleared and working in Cyber Crimes. We never see him again.
Casting Call: Keating is Jonathan Mangum. He had a recurring role on The Drew Carey Show.
Man, This Show Is Old: We get a bit of a dated presentation of nerds. Pay phones are part of the plot. When Tony balks at helping McGee hack the pentagon, McGee tells Tony, “Don’t be such a girl,” which would not fly in this day and age.
MVP: Is there one? I guess we can pin an award on Langer before we lower him into the dirt. He sussed out Lee on instinct and without much information. You know, right before she filled him with lead.
Rating: This is a good start to the season. We miss the old agents, but we’re confident that they’re coming back sooner rather than later. There’s a good mystery, and even though Lee is a surprise traitor, some of her behavior in Season 4 makes it believable: the sneaking around with Palmer, her out of character confidence/competence when she goes undercover in Once a Hero, Episode 4.8.
Eight Palmers.
Next Time: McGee’s back. Ziva’s back. Can Tony return as well?
A Year of NCIS 