A Year of NCIS, Day 126: Broken Bird (Episode 6.13)

Episode: 6.13, Broken Bird

Air Date: January 13, 2009

The Victim: Petty Officer Kevin Lim, USN, who is even more of a plot device than the standard victim on this show.

Emotionally Traumatized, But Ultimately Irrelevant, Witness Who Finds the Body: Not in play.  We’re on a city street where a sailor is kissing his lady friend goodbye. She has to go because she is a flight attendant.  He would like more sexy time.  She kisses him goodbye and leaves and it’s a sweet scene.  Until he turns to find Cheryl.  We’re not sure who Cheryl is, but she accuses our sailor of stabbing her in the back.  Then she applauds herself for looking him in the eye.  Our sailor looks down and sees a knife sticking out of his torso.  Poetic.  Cheryl leaves and our foolish sailor pulls out the knife (never pull out the knife) and collapses.

Credits.

Plot Recap: We begin in the squad room, where Tony and Ziva are pondering the mystery of a giant package on McGee’s desk and debating whether to open it.  Ziva is going to go for it when McGee arrives and solves the problem for her.  The box contains all of his old computers from childhood and serves as instantaneous fodder for nerd jokes by Tony.

At least until Gibbs arrives to place the call to arms.

At the crime scene, our victim is Petty Officer Kevin Lim, USN and his death will be absolutely tangential to the story line.  Making this the second episode in a row where the dead sailor is an afterthought (See Caged, Episode 6.12).  Gibbs is speaking to the first lady from the opening, who is clearly distraught, and she blames Cheryl, the victim’s ex-fiancée, for the murder.  Well then. I bet you thought the guy was cheating and had it coming, didn’t you?  Tony leaves with the distraught lady to get her statement (and probably her number).

Ducky and Palmer arrive and fall into their standard crime scene practice of fighting over who got them lost.  But this time, the fight, and Palmer’s lack of knowledge as to why Washington DC does not have a J Street, have a deeper subtext.  It turns out that Palmer failed a class at medical school (probably because he attends medical school while working a full-time job).  Ducky is pissed and is taking Palmer’s lack of knowledge of the intricacies of Washington DC streets as a symptom of a more global lack of diligence.  Palmer is, naturally, taking exception to this fussy over-generalization.

An eyewitness saw the assailant run off and Gibbs calls Ziva to help track her.  As Ziva leaves the scene, a woman wearing a green scarf grimly observes her.

We follow Ziva to an alley where she locates a sobbing, bloody Cheryl hiding behind a dumpster.  That’s an easy case.  And so much run time left.  I guess we’ll get to see what the agents do in their daily lives.  Maybe Ducky takes in some golf?  Palmer hits the books?  Tony and Ziva adjourn for a nooner, while Gibbs hits the shooting range and makes McGee go too?

Or not.  We return to the crime scene, where Ducky makes Palmer do the analysis as penance for sucking at school.  Palmer is testy and a little conclusory but does OK.  Ducky is sort of hazing him, though.  The woman who eyed Ziva is still there, now eyeing Ducky.  And then eyeing the murder weapon, lying on the concrete.

The team brings in the perp, and since it’s a crowded street, there’s some hoopla.  In the melee, the scarved woman ties her scarf around her head, grabs the murder weapon from the ground and begins yelling in a foreign language and stabbing Ducky.  Stabbing him awkwardly because this is network TV and we only know she’s making contact because they dubbed in some off-putting flesh-ripping sounds.  Palmer, who, as we’ve learned, is never afraid of danger in the moment, fights the woman off, but she manages to escape as he turns to tend to Ducky.

Ziva moves off after the woman, but loses her quickly, seeing only the scarf (which Palmer described for her) on the ground, discarded.  Gibbs checks on Ducky.  We see that Ducky has the murder weapon sticking through his hand.

At the hospital, Abby arrives and asks about Ducky.  Palmer is a little technical about the injuries and neglects to lead with “He’s alive.”  Still, Abby, having ascertained life, is surprisingly calm.  Presumably after last episode, she has decided that she can either be more zen when the team members are in danger or it’s a one-way trip to Crazytown for her.

Some orderlies wheel Ducky through the area as Abby and Palmer are talking.  He is stoned on morphine.  Gibbs is trying to interview him, and Ducky is engaging in doped up wordplay, which impresses Abby.  He also tells Palmer to call Dr. Jordan Hampton, his ME friend from Maryland, to fill in while he’s down and out.

Hilariously, Abby asks Gibbs how she’s supposed to log the knife since it’s the weapon of interest in two separate cases.  I would also like to know the answer to that, but Gibbs just walks off and Abby says she’ll figure it out.

Back at HQ, the agents are watching a cell phone video of the attack.  Ziva identifies the woman’s language as something from Afghanistan, but it is not one of the 37 languages she speaks.  McGee decides to reach out to a real linguist.

In Autopsy, Palmer is talking to Petty Officer Lim’s body and doing it badly.  Ducky would not approve.  Dr. Hampton arrives and, once again, Palmer buries the lede on Ducky’s condition.  Dr. Hampton did not know about the nature or extent of the attack and seems subtly upset.  In her previous appearance and mention, it has seemed clear that she and Ducky have more than a casual friendship.

In the lab, Abby gives Ziva the rundown on the knife.  Turns out Abby used to sell knives as a side hustle in college and she knows her stuff.  There are numerous prints on the knife and Abby is searching.

Abby also found hair on the discarded hijab (which we know to be a scarf).  Ziva feels comfortable that the perp discarded the scarf intentionally.  McGee calls and tells Ziva that the linguist came back with a translation of the perp’s yelling.

At the hospital, Tony relays what is presumably the translation to Gibbs.  He seems surprised, but heads into Ducky’s room to inquire further.  Ducky talks about his RAMC days and how he ended up working with an American tank regiment in Afghanistan.  Idealistic little go-getter that he was, Ducky volunteered to work a refugee camp on the Pakistani border.  Gibbs wonders what happened there that caused this seemingly Afghani woman to shout, “Bringer of death” and “You killed my brother!” while stabbing Ducky.  Ducky doesn’t want to talk about it but makes clear that he killed her brother.

Back at HQ, the agents have identified Ducky’s assailant as Mosuma Daoub.  She is married with kids and works at a flower shop.  She is also in the wind, so Gibbs sends Tony and Ziva to pick up her husband.  Gibbs also assigns McGee to hack Ducky’s personnel file in an effort to figure out what Ducky won’t tell him.  Gibbs tells McGee to forget to ask Director Vance.

In the conference room, Mr. Daoub’s first contribution is to note that his wife is not so fundamentalist as to wear a hijab.  That was just a scarf, as we saw.  He has no idea where his wife is, and he is starting to panic.  He even forgot to give his kids their lunches before they went to school, and they’re sitting, unhelpfully, on the NCIS conference room table (the lunches, not the children).  That seems like a strange prop, but, hey.

McGee calls Tony outside and tells him that Ms. Daoub’s cell records corroborate the husband’s story about trying unsuccessfully to contact her.  However, the records also show that she made numerous calls to the Afghanistan Embassy.

We next get a split scene, between Gibbs, in the dark in Autopsy, reading Ducky’s file, and Ducky engaged in a voice-over describing the tribal history of Afghanistan.  We switch back and forth to Ducky’s residence where Dr. Jordan Hampton and two corgis are the captive audience to Ducky’s ramblings.  Ducky is putting some classical music on a record player because he knows how to work the ladies.   

Ducky discusses his time as a refugee camp volunteer near the Pakistan border with Dr. Hampton until his reminisces are interrupted by a bird flying out of his fireplace.  If you took 10^th Grade English in the US, you know this is called “symbolism.” The bird lands in a chair and the corgis look pissed.

We shift to a park.  Gibbs is sitting on a bench, which means he’s about to have a semi-clandestine meeting with some agency schlub, usually Fornell.  Today, that role is filled by…Trent Kort?  The CIA agent joins Gibbs and they give us some expository dialogue about how much they don’t like each other.  And given that NCIS’ admittedly clumsy efforts to catch Le Grenouille derailed the hell out of Kort’s career trajectory, his feelings seem reasonable.  But Gibbs needs a favor, and he’s willing to horse trade for it.  Kort doesn’t figure Gibbs is going to be too happy when it’s time to return the favor.  Gibbs will take his chances and asks broadly for info on CIA activity at a place in Afghanistan near the Pakistani border named Jalozai.

And we’re off to the Afghanistan Embassy.  As usual, Tony has no idea how to talk to people, and, as usual, Ziva clenches in embarrassment as Tony tries to push around the Afghani ambassador, Qasim, Saydia.  For his part, Saydia makes clear that Ms. Daoub is under Embassy protection while she prosecutes her case.  Tony balks at this, so Saydia informs the agents that Ms. Daoub only attacked Ducky in the heat of the moment when she recognized him.  She has now accused Ducky of violating Article 4 of the Geneva Conventions.  Which means, war crimes.

Back in the Squad room, McGee says that Article 4 forbids the harming of non-combatants, but the details of the accusation won’t be available until a formal charge issues.  At which point, those details will be public and one figures that won’t be great for Ducky’s CV.  Ziva thinks Mrs. Daoub is a big ole’ liar.  She would have been eight at the time events allegedly occurred at the Jalozai Refugee Camp that Gibbs already mentioned to Kort.  The team questions how Mrs. Daoub could have known about Ducky.  Since the crime scene and NCIS are proximately located to Mrs. Daoub’s work, the agent’s wonder if she saw Ducky on the street and then stalked him.  The agents get to work expecting Gibbs to show any second.  But he doesn’t.    

That’s because he’s in his basement.  Where Kort joins.  He gives Gibbs a file marked “Mallard.”  One of Kort’s old instructors was at Jalozai and Kort did not want to have to call in one of his own favors for this, but did.  Gibbs says he’s good for it.  Kort twists the knife a little by pointing out that this exchange could have taken place above board between the two agency directors.  Gibbs’s preference for avoiding a paper trail makes Kort think Gibbs should owe him another favor and he hands Gibbs a file marked “Vance.”  Gibbs decides to deal with the devil and Kort leaves.  Gibbs puts the Vance file in the secret drawer where he hides his rifle and begins examining projector film from the Ducky file.

At Ducky’s house, Gibbs arrives, and Ducky is concerned about the bird that flew into his house from the fireplace.  Under English superstition, that means someone is going to die.  Since Ducky’s mom has moved into a home (Silent Night, Episode 6.11), he worried it might be him.  He’s also saddened that the bird died.  Ducky was impressed with the bird and how chill it seemed to be hanging out in his house, hanging out with his dogs.  Until one of the dogs chomped on it, and now Ducky’s got the bird in a box and is looking for a place to bury it.  He is very sad.

Gibbs…really doesn’t care about Ducky’s bird or his philosophical waxings regarding his mother’s Alzheimer’s.  He sets up a projector in Ducky’s dining room, which seems weird enough that Ducky might stop monologuing and inquire.  But maybe Gibbs routinely shows up to people’s homes with slide shows. 

Gibbs asks about a war crimes tribunal.  Ducky already got a call from Ambassador Saydia.  He seems fatalistic about the whole thing.  Gibbs insists Ducky isn’t going, but Ducky clearly has some sort of burden on his soul and he and Gibbs do one of their rare dances of passive aggression. 

Back to the squad room.  The agents are still looking at footage of the crime scene.  McGee doesn’t think Tony is going to learn anything more.  Tony thinks there has to be something there.  Otherwise Ducky is Dr. Mengele- you know, the Nazi scientist who experimented on people in concentration camps.  Which is a comment that escalates things dramatically and seems to lack foundation based on what the script has so far chosen to reveal to us.

We get some of that foundation at Ducky’s house.  The film shows a guy Ducky identifies as Mr. Pain working out some enhanced interrogation techniques on some poor Afghani.  Pain has a rare condition whereby he doesn’t feel pain, and he and Ducky would sometimes play chess.

Ducky was treating Pain’s victims as routine injuries and eventually became suspicious that they were in fact the result of torture.  Essentially, Pain would mess up his captives and send them to Ducky to be sewn up and then mess them up again.  Ducky eventually figured out what was happening based on the stories of a man named Javid, who is Mrs. Daoub’s brother.  Pain was working Javid to determine what he knew about spies or troop movements.  Per ducky, Javid knew nothing, but that didn’t stop Mr. Pain. 

But that’s not the whole story.  Ducky is clearly hiding something, Gibbs knows Ducky is hiding something, and Ducky is willing to go to prison (or be executed) over it.  Ducky tells Gibbs to leave the matter alone.  Gibbs refuses.

They walk outside and encounter Dr. Hampton.  She says she found a place where they can bury the bird.  But the bird then flies out of the box and,…well, everyone watching loses a little bit of respect for the Medical Examiner who can’t tell the difference between a dead bird and a stunned bird.

Gibbs tells Dr. Hampton to keep an eye on Ducky and leaves.  Presumably to interview new ME candidates.

At NCIS, the agents determine that Daoub’s encounter with Ducky probably was random.  Which supports her claim to the Embassy that her attack on Ducky was a heat of the moment event.  Tony grinds his teeth at the coincidence, but Gibbs hates coincidence and calls it fate.  Which is just word play. 

Gibbs gives McGee the CIA tape and tells him to ID Mr. Pain.  Then Gibbs get a call from Dr. Hampton that Ducky has vanished.

Not too hard to figure out where he went.  So, the agents converge on the Afghani embassy for a good old-fashioned stand-off.  Gibbs is there to raise hell and swear that Ducky is innocent.  Gibbs threatens to arrest Daoub if Ducky is processed.  The Ambassador is seemingly indifferent to Gibbs’s threats and notes that the US State Department isn’t involved.  Which means Gibbs is trying to keep things on the down low.  Gibbs is all about causing an international incident. But Ducky is not.  He surrenders.  And declines counsel.

Ziva sits with Gibbs at the Embassy.  She probably regrets that because Gibbs hits her over the head with some basic Edmund Burke philosophy.  Which is about as un-Gibbs a move as I can imagine, and Ziva is a surprised as we are.  But it sounds better coming from Gibbs than anybody other than the indisposed Ducky.  Which probably means the writers should have left it out.

Ziva moves on, and lays a little game theory on Gibbs.  The Ambassador needs an out.  He does not want to push this trial given the state of US-Afghani relations.  Since it’s night in Afghanistan, Gibbs has seven hours to get something from Ducky that they can use to clear him, or the Afghani government is perhaps going to be less forward-thinking and pragmatic than their ambassador.

In Abby’s lab, she’s impressed with McGee’s aging program to examine what people might look like after decades.  She’s less impressed that he’s a Mac guy, based on his old school computers.

McGee has ID’d Mr. Pain based on his aging software and an examination of NCIS’s comprehensive face database.  Mr. Pain is Marcin Jerek, a retired, how shall we say, interrogation specialist.  And he lives close enough to NCIS HQ for efficient scripting purposes. 

So, we move back to the Embassy, where Tony shows up with Jerek.  What happens next is bizarre and strikes me as the result of a plot that meandered too long and now has to be resolved, logic be damned.  There’s no way Tony has the authority to arrest Jerek for war crimes.  So, Jerek has to have agreed to go to an Embassy with Tony where he no doubt faces significant legal jeopardy.  He also, recklessly, has a clearly monitored conversation with Ducky about his own Article 4 Geneva violations. Mrs. Daoub, the ambassador, and the agents all move into an observation room to listen to the conversation.

And this conversation is painful.  The dialogue.  The back and forth.  Everything is stilted and off, and it plays like a freshman year philosophy debate: how many POW eggs are we willing to break to make our particular security omelet?  Long story short, Jerek tortured people, Ducky was putting them back together, Jerek tortured them again.  That we knew.  We learn two new things: (1) Ducky mercy-killed Mrs. Daoub’s brother because he was going to die from injury/infection anyway and this was more humane than letting Jerek have him again; and (2) Jerek was playing Ducky.  Jerek thought Ducky was a bleeding heart and wanted him gone from the refugee camp.  Turns out a nice doctor gives torture subjects hope and makes them more difficult to break.  Which…well, isn’t that good cop/bad cop?  It seems like Jerek could have worked with that.  Regardless, Jerek wanted Ducky gone and, um, instead of having a military organization give a solider orders to go elsewhere, he put Ducky in a situation where his conscience would hurt him so bad he’d leave voluntarily (also not how it works in the military).  But then not report anything to anyone who could do anything about it.  Anyhow, Jerek accomplished this by continuing to send Mrs. Daoub’s brother to Ducky in increasingly worse shape until Ducky finally figured it out and mercy-killed the lad.  

I think.  It’s needlessly convoluted.  Jerek comes off like a Batman villain.  Ducky comes off like a guy with exactly zero agency.

Because it’s in the script, this ends things.  Mrs. Daoub now feels Ducky was well-intentioned (even though it seems clear he never reported any of this to anyone) and decides not to go after him further.  That’s a remarkable level of pragmatic understanding for a random person.  Presumably she could go after Jerek and then the Ambassador would be stuck with the same international relations problem Ziva thinks he had pursuing Ducky.  But this is all left undetermined

Either way, Ducky is not relieved.  When Gibbs tells Ducky he’s forgiven, Ducky responds, “For the crime, Jethro.  For the act, there is no forgiveness.”  Ducky was looking for expiation through martyrdom, and, instead he has to go back to Autopsy and listen to Palmer talk about how he figured out why there’s no J Street in DC.  Seriously.  Ducky tosses Palmer and then collapses, sobbing, in Dr. Hampton’s arms.  This is well-acted by David McCallum but a largely unearned character moment all the same.    

Yuck.  Glad this one is over.

Quotables:

(1) Abby: I was talking to the knife.  You wanna talk knives?

Ziva: Always.

(2) Gibbs: Are you going to make me ask again?

Ducky: I suppose it’s inevitable. When we’ve reached the tipping point when your curiosity outweighs your courtesy.

(3) “I cannot conduct conversations with the dead.” -Jerek, making a cute point with which Ducky would surely disagree.

Ziva-propisms: None today.

Tony Awards: No references to pop culture that I caught.

Abby Road:  Abby doesn’t have much of a role to play and thus stays on task.

McNicknames: McGarnagle.  McEgghead.

Ducky Tales: Ducky lectures on the city plan of Washington DC.  He tells anecdotes about how he almost became a surgeon.  We hear a voice over of Ducky discoursing on the history of Afghanistan while Gibbs reads his file.  He talks about starlings and bird omens and uses the word “augury” in a sentence.

The Rest of the Story:

-Palmer started medical school in Shalom, Episode 4.1.

-Palmer is not afraid to jump into danger.  See About Face, Episode 5.17.

-Abby tends to spazz when the team members get hurt or endangered.  See generally, Corporal Punishment, Episode 5.10, and, most recently Caged, Episode 6.12.

-Dr. Jordan Hampton first appeared in Identity Crisis, Episode 5.4.  She was also mentioned in Internal Affairs, Episode 5.14.

-Perhaps for the first time, Palmer tries to talk to corpses like Ducky.  In later seasons, he’ll do this more naturally.

-Palmer was named after Jim Palmer, a pitcher for the Baltimore Orioles.

-Trent Kort was last seen in Internal Affairs, Episode 5.14.  He is CIA and a right bastard.  He was the handler for Le Grenouille, probably killed Director Shepard’s father, and did a decent job of putting Tony through the ringer over Tony’s undercover efforts to nab Le Grenouille.  See Season 4.  These will pale in comparison to later acts.

-In light of those later acts, Gibbs asking Kort for favors is ominous.  And offputting.

-Ducky’s mom isn’t doing well.  She has Alzheimer’s, and we learned she has been placed in a care home in Silent Night, Episode 6.11.  Her last appearance to my recollection, was in Untouchable, Episode 3.20, and, as noted in our last post, Nina Foch, the actress had recently passed.

-The scripting is awkward and the episode doesn’t tell us what it is Ducky allegedly did until the end.  So, when Tony says that the alternative to Ducky being innocent is that he was Dr. Mengele, it comes out of nowhere.  One wonders if this scene was supposed to appear in sequence after Gibbs and Ducky watched the film at Ducky’s house.  But, even then, it’s not like Tony has those details.

-We learn that Jerek was Kort’s mentor.  That scans.  And Kort gets some subtle character development in terms of how indifferently he pushed Jerek under the subway for Gibbs, a guy he mostly hates but finds useful.

-Do Ducky’s good intentions matter for purposes of a Geneva violation.  And is a Geneva violation something you can sweep under the rug when a victim declines to push ahead?  Even when you have given a confession?

-That’s it for Dr. Hampton, which is a shame.  I think she’s the first woman Ducky has dated on this show who wasn’t the perp.  See Heart Break, Episode 2.8, and Silver War, Episode 3.4.

Casting Call: Jerek was played by William Morgan Sheppard, who had numerous roles in all manner of genres before passing away at 86 in January of this year.  RIP.

Man, This Show Is Old: Camera phones record crime scenes routinely now, but it was a newer phenomenon in 2009.

Gibbs refers to Petty Officer Lim’s girlfriend as a “stewardess.”  Which is so Gibbs.  Even in 2009, nobody said stewardess.

MVP: I’m giving it to the bird that flew down Ducky’s chimney.  For finding the strength to live again.

Rating: Boy, they botched this one.  It had everything it needed to be a really compelling episode, but something in the pacing- be it the slow boil on the revelations, the haphazard nature of the plot details, or the easy resolution- made it unremarkable.  Ducky feels bad, but the viewer can’t empathize because everything was so rushed.  When he collapses into tears at the end, it feels completely unearned.  Not a good episode, but the fact that it could have been a great episode is what irks me the most.  Two Palmers.    

Next Time: A Navy Captain is killed and found with a Pentagram on his back.