A Year of NCIS, Day 144: Outlaws and In-Laws (Episode 7.6)

Episode: 7.6, Outlaws and In-Laws

The Victim: Some mercs.

Emotionally Traumatized, But Ultimately Irrelevant, Witness Who Finds the Body:  We’re on a boat!  And things are exciting.  We know this because a woman asks if things are always this exciting.  But head above deck and we learn this is a Coast Guard ship.  There’s a small sailboat sailing right at the ship.  But there doesn’t appear to be anyone on the sailboat.  Regardless, the Coast Guard is nervous about a bomb attack.  Until the woman, Agent Cortez, looks at the sailboat and sees two dead bodies and a very bloody scene.  Agent Cortez continues to examine the boat through binoculars, and it is called Kelly.  And watchers of this show, or at least watchers of Sandblast, Episode 4.7, know what that means. 

That’s a Gibbs Basement original.

Plot Recap: We start in the squad room, where Ziva is asleep.  The boys are assessing.  McGee thinks it’s a trap.  Tony wonders what kind of a man he would be if he turned down the opportunity to mess with a sleeping Ziva.  McGee thinks he wouldn’t be a sucker.  Tony obtains a magic marker, but Ziva makes clear that any contact with her person will result in death.  She explains that she is tired because she came to work at 1:00AM to cover for Gibbs while he and Ducky and Vance traveled to San Diego.

We shift to the crime scene in San Diego.  Agent Cortez and Vance are discussing the boat, which, unsurprising to fans, is registered to Gibbs.  Vance seems to know Agent Cortez and calls her “Izzy.”  Agent Cortez hands over shell casings.  But she hasn’t moved the bodies.  Ducky says there’s no ID, only cash in dollars and pesos. 

Vance asks for speculation.  Agent Cortez thinks the boat came from Mexico.  Vance notes that “They usually light the thing on fire for a Viking funeral.  You know any Vikings that live in Mexico?”  Gibbs is amused.  ‘Cause they both do. 

But things quickly get testy.  Ducky notes Gibbs only took one vacation in the last year.  Vance knows Gibbs sailed a boat on at least part of that vacation and flew back one way.  Gibbs admits he left the DC area with the boat and trailered it to the west coast.  Agent Cortez is confused.  The audience is not.  Vance and Gibbs are talking about Gibbs having given the boat to retired NCIS Agent and all around grizzled good time Mike Franks.  Who, thanks to the boat’s “cargo,” already has an early lead on being this episode’s MVP.

The agents decide to head to Mexico.

And now we’re on Mike Franks’s beach.  Agent Cortez pulls her gun as they approach Franks’s shack.  Gibbs says it’s not necessary.  Agent Cortez and Vance enter as Gibbs walks the beach.  He finds a paintbrush.

Vance notes that nobody’s home and wants to know, “Where the hell is Mike Franks?”  Gibbs looks grim but doesn’t answer

Back at NCIS HQ, in the evidence garage, Abby is in awe.  She has a boat and a crime scene and a mystery to solve, all rolled into one.  However, the primary mystery for Abby is how Gibbs got the boat out of his basement.

In Vance’s office, Gibbs reports he hasn’t gotten any hits on Franks’s usual aliases.  He also summarizes info from Ducky: the TOD for the stiffs on the boat is at least 3 days, and NCIS has identified them as Calvin Blanchard, former Army, and Roy Keenan, former Navy.  Both were dishonorably discharged, but the Navy guy didn’t even enlist until after Franks retired.  So, there’s no obvious motive related to Franks’s old caseload.

The Mexican authorities have provided info that two guys were looking for Franks.  Gibbs has sifted through Franks’s connections and can’t find anyone with a grudge.  Either way, Franks got the drop on them, killed them, shoved them out to sea on the boat, and disappeared.

Vance’s biggest concern is that if Franks went to ground, this isn’t over yet.  He asks if Gibbs knows where Franks might be, and hilariously, seems to think Gibbs would share this information if he had it.  At least initially.  Then Gibbs denies knowing, and Vance doubts Gibbs’s sincerity. And, in fairness, Gibbs seems insincere.  But Vance is going to give Gibbs some leeway, at least unless/until another body shows up.

Down to autopsy.  As always with Franks, Ducky is having to forensically reassemble a small war.  He found six bullets in one corpse, five in the other, close range and with a large caliber weapon.  Ducky disdainfully likens the scene to the OK Corral, prompting Gibbs to ask if Ducky has something against cowboys.  Ducky says he can live with Gibbs, but thinks Franks is round the bend.  It’s not Franks playing Doc Holiday to Gibbs’s Wyatt Earp anymore.  Ducky thinks Franks crossed the line.

Gibbs thinks it’s too soon to accuse Franks of being an unthinking killer.  Ducky retorts that a great deal of thought went into killing and staging the crime scene.  The wood splinters taken from the backsides of our dead dudes demonstrates they were dragged onto The Kelly.

Back in the evidence garage, Abby confirms the bodies were moved.  She describes the wounds as demonstrating execution-style, downward vector shots.  She doesn’t think the fight happened on the boat and she is having trouble finding the slugs to match all the shots.  She also notes a smaller caliber graze in the boat’s hull.  Gibbs looks and thinks it came from a .22.  There are no slugs below the waterline, and Gibbs opines the boat wasn’t in the water during the shootout.  Abby says there’s too many variables.  Gibbs tells her to take the boat apart.  Abby asks if he‘s sure he wants her disassembling his craftsmanship, and he is.

In the Squad room, the agents are backgrounding the two dead guys.  Their bank records demonstrate similar size deposits.  They worked together but the receipts are all for cash.  There’s nothing they can link to Franks.

Tony wonders who would go after Franks and McGee suggests jokingly someone who didn’t know him.  Tony is inspired by that.  It doesn’t go anywhere- he just turns it into a lecture to Ziva on the American system and rags to riches and so forth.  Ziva interprets this as Tony saying in America, any idiot can become rich.

Gibbs arrives.  Tony starts to expound on his theory- maybe the killers didn’t know Franks at all (they were clearly hit men of a sort, so I’m not sure what kind of theory this is).  Gibbs isn’t that interested.  He tells the agents to find the connection and disappears into the elevator.

We head to Gibbs’s basement, where Gibbs is looking at a picture of him and Franks after fishing.  Franks caught the bigger fish because of course he did.  Probably shot it.

Gibbs hears a child chattering, and, for maybe the first time in 4.5 seasons of basement brooding, this isn’t a flashback to when Kelly Gibbs was alive.  Gibbs runs upstairs to find Franks’s daughter in law and her child, Gibbs’s goddaughter (See Iceman, Episode 4.18), in the living room.  The little girl’s name is Amira, and Gibbs takes her and welcome them.  Leyla, the daughter in law, says Franks is right behind them.

Gibbs gives Amira a room, and then Franks is there.  He says, “You gonna stand there glaring or give me a hand with the bags.  Or shoot me?”  Gibbs rejoins, “I have questions, then I may shoot you.”  He asks why the dead men were after Franks.  But Franks is no help.  “Damn, probie,” he says, “I was hoping you could tell me.”

Franks tells the story.  He popped into the local cantina, and Eddie the bartender said that two guys had been asking after a “gringo and two girls.”  Eddie claims he did his best to lead them astray, and Franks never saw them before they showed up on his beach.  He saw their guns, though, so he knew what they wanted.  At this point, Franks tries to smoke in Gibbs’s house, but Gibbs is having none of that.

Franks didn’t want to use the nice boat Gibbs gave him as a coffin for two dead hitmen, but he couldn’t risk the scene being investigated by the Mexican police.  He steered it to the Navy because better to be investigated by a friend.

Gibbs says what we’re all thinking: “You know Mike, I’m used to shells and bodies and cover ups as your big finale.  Something starts out like this, I don’t even want to think about the body count.”  Franks, justifiably, notes, “Can’t pin all those past capers on me.  Not all them messes were mine.”

Gibbs asks where Leyla and Amira were during the fight.  Franks, says he’s not a child, and he had them safe.  Gibbs allows that Franks is definitely not a child, and now Franks wants to know is Gibbs is “Calling me old?”  Gibbs lightly notes that there “Comes a time to hang up your spurs,” and Franks gets real real: “Won’t need you to tell me when that is, I’ll be dead.”

Leyla hates when Franks talks like that.  But Franks would never put his girls in danger.  That’s why he brought them to Gibbs.  Gibbs says from now on Franks leaves things to the professionals.

Back in the squad room, the team is still backgrounding our perps.  Blanchard cracked up in the service, and before he could get his act together, he got kicked out.  Keenan had authority figure problems.  They both ended up working for Colonel Merton Bell, a security contractor and former tank commander.  Bell is the largest security contractor in the Middle East, and he is usually protecting corporate assets.  Gibbs wants to bring him in. 

But Vance appears and asks if Gibbs has a line on Franks.  Gibbs lies to his face. Vance knows about Leyla and Amira and wonders at Gibbs not being able to find a fugitive on the run with an Iraqi woman and a child.  Gibbs says they’ve kept their focus on dead people, but, either way, Vance is concerned about hauling in Bell.

In Vance’s office, our favorite frenemies continue their discussion.  Vance and Bell have friends in common on the Hill and Bell is not someone Gibbs wants to crank up on a hunch.  Gibbs dismisses this as politics, but ultimately acknowledges that if he wants Vance’s political firepower, he’d better come clean.  Gibbs admits Franks is at his house and Vance allows that Gibbs was probably about to send some agents over to watch after him.  Gibbs snarkily agrees with this and asks if Vance would like to help him devise a more delicate way of contacting Bell.  Vance smiles and says it’s like they’re reading each other’s minds.

At Gibbs’s house, Tony arrives to the barrel of a gun.  And this is just fun:

Tony: Hello?

Franks: DiNozzo! You should have told me you were comin’.

Tony: I called and you didn’t pick up.

Franks: I’m not gonna answer the phone, I’m a fugitive!

Tony: So what do you want me to do?

Franks: Knock.

Tony: Why would I knock? There’s no lock on that door.

Franks: Someone may be on the other side with a gun.

Tony: Why would somebody be standing on the other side with a gun?

Franks: Because there’s no lock on the door!

Ziva enters and ends the “Who’s on first?” routine.  She tells Franks that McGee is waiting outside to drive him to NCIS.  Franks suggests that Tony put something in front of the door; but Tony, taking his cues from Franks thinks, “No I’ll just stand here with my gun.”

In the NCIS conference room, Merton Bell says he used Blanchard and Keenan for something called “public interface” in Iraq.  They would meet with tribal leaders regarding impending threats.  It wasn’t all negative- some of the meetings would be about building schools and such. 

Gibbs, understandably bored, decides to go the bad cop route and question Bell’s HR practices.  Vance is annoyed, but Bell gets it. As Bell notes, jarheads and mercs are like oil and water.  Although he’s gotten some of his best men off the Marine Corps scrap heap.  Either way, he thinks his hires are outstanding even if their former services might disagree.  Gibbs wonders what one would have to do to be disqualified, and Bell asks to cut to the chase.  So, Gibbs gives Bell the skinny on his dead employees.  Bell says he knew about the “contract,” but he doesn’t know everything.  When questioned about Franks, he asks, “Who the hell is Mike Franks?” and seems sincere.

Vance sees Bell out.  As McGee sees Franks in.  Bell expects to be kept apprised, claiming justice needs to be done.

It’s admittedly bold for NCIS to operate as if Bell doesn’t know who Franks is and parade Franks in front of Bell.  We’ll see if that comes back to haunt them.

As Bell leaves, Franks asks if he’s the guy.  Gibbs informs him that no one was after Franks.  Rather, Leyla’s family from Iraq hired the goons and Franks was the only lead they had.  Gibbs is pretty disgusted and thinks Franks killed the men as an overreaction to their poking around his family.  This…is an odd tact for Gibbs to take, but we’ll go with it for now

In Vance’s office, the director is on the same page as Gibbs.  He remarks that Franks doesn’t look very remorseful.  And Franks essentially shrugs.  Vance continues, noting, there was, “No reason to believe they meant your family any harm and you killed them.”  Franks is not impressed that this is the conclusion to which his own former agency has jumped.  Franks reminds Gibbs and Vance (and the audience) that Leyla’s family disowned her when she took up with Franks’s son and had his baby.  See Iceman, Episode 4.18.  Franks also gives the audience an additional infodump, noting that Shada, Leyla’s mother, is a hard-as-nails matriarch of a tribe in Iraq.  Shada buried most of her family members as a result of various regional conflicts and she’s in charge now.  “And when Shada cuts you off, you’re not supposed to get a happily ever after on a beach in Mexico.” Per Franks, if Shada was willing to pay to drag her family members back home, Franks is not gonna flinch at a couple of dead mercs.

Upon inquiry from Vance, Franks describes the scene.  He claims he used a .45 to kill the men, and used the boat as a decoy, leaving his radio on the deck and an open beer.  They went for it, guns drawn.  So, Franks emptied his magazine, putting two slugs in bachelor number one and three in bachelor number two.  Then he dragged them on board the boat and gave ‘em three more for good measure.  He calls all of this self-defense. 

Which works for me, but I’m not normal.

I guess it works for Vance too, because he tells Gibbs to take Franks statement, cautioning however that the evidence better confirm every bit of it.

Which raises a question that perhaps we should have asked earlier.  How is NCIS maintaining jurisdiction on this case?  If Gibbs’s ownership of the boat is the common denominator that creates the jurisdiction, he probably shouldn’t be the lead investigator.

Speaking of boats, we head back down to the evidence garage, where Gibbs’s boat is all in pieces.  McGee is horrified, but Abby says it was sanctioned.  She reports that she found a spot on the boat where Franks hid a gun, but that’s not news.  It’s more surprising that she didn’t find 3-4 hiding places.  Indeed, per McGee, Franks is covered up in weapons at all times and it took 15 minutes to get through the Navy yard’s security.  However, none of what Franks carries matches the .22 that nicked the boat.

Abby also found mangled piece of lead buried in the floorboard.  She thinks it’s two bullets smushed together.  A bullet in a bullet.  Which is an impossible shot.  But only if they’re in the air together. 

Tony is in Gibbs’s basement talking to McGee and Abby in the lab.  Tony doesn’t want to talk about the case in front of Leyla.  Abby doesn’t want to talk about the case at all and asks Tony to check the seams of Gibbs’s basement wall, or for a tunnel. They continue to discuss how Gibbs got The Kelly out of his basement.

They eventually wander back on task.  Abby confirms that there are two bullets smushed together.  Which means two shooters.

Upstairs, Ziva is playing with Amira.  Leyla tells Ziva she left Iraq to keep Amira from seeing all the violence.  She talks about meeting Liam, Franks’s son, and says it was difficult to leave but the right reasons make it easier.

Tony appears and likens it to Ziva’s struggle to rebuild her life. Tony asks what Frank’s place is like in Mexico.  And now we see the look on Ziva’s face as she realizes that Tony is, not so casually, working the case.

Leyla says she was inside when the fight started, and she ran to her daughter.  Tony asks where Amira was.  Leyla stares back silently.

In the squad room, McGee is backgrounding Shada.  She’s a very outspoken tribal leader.  Local bombings led to increased security, and that’s how she met Bell’s company and his mercs.  Gibbs Phone rings, Franks answers.  It’s Ducky, craving an audience.

In autopsy, Ducky and Abby are both present.  They give Gibbs a lecture.  Or even an intervention, since they start with the enormous respect they have for Gibbs and the loyalty he shows his friends.  “What the hell is this?” Gibbs demands.  They cut to the chase.  Abby calls Franks a gut-buster, and Ducky says Gibbs is compromised.  Either way, Franks is lying, as Ducky succinctly puts it.  Abby finds it insulting enough “when people we don’t know try this stuff.”  Duck affirms, “When it’s a colleague, it’s insulting.”

They try to summarize their forensic conclusion, but Gibbs cuts it off and lays out the whole case.  The mercs were killed with a .22 rifle, Franks shot through the bullet wounds to destroy the evidence.  Mike Franks did not kill these losers.  Then Gibbs walks out.

Abby looks shocked.  Ducky looks resigned.  Because yes, Gibbs is compromised, just not in the way they thought.

Back to the squad room, Gibbs stops Franks from signing his statement.  Then he tells a story about one of their old cases where a sergeant and best friend took a little boy duck hunting.  A hunting accident occurred, and the boy killed his dad’s friend.  The sergeant fired into the wounds and covered it up.  Franks gets the point and says, “This ain’t gonna work” while tearing up the statement.  He asks when Gibbs figured it out, but McGee interrupts to notify that Shada is on her way to America, to DC.

At the airport, McGee holds up a sign with Shada’s name on it.  She imperiously walks right by him but announces herself.

And then she’s in interrogation.  Vance is in observation and wants to know what Shada is doing in the States. Gibbs figures her first effort lacked finesse.  Vance smiles, and asks about Franks’s statement.  Franks admits it was a load of crap and Gibbs called him on it.  Vance, mock surprised, asks, “You lied to us?!”  Franks says, “I’m sure you’re shocked and appalled.”  But Vance is relieved.  Of all Franks’s most unsavory character traits, Vance finds his predictable dishonesty the most palatable.  Honestly, Vance is psyched that there haven’t been any more bodies.  But Franks isn’t promising anything.  Especially if Vance turns Shada loose.  Of course, Vance can’t hold her.  She hasn’t committed any crimes.  And, in America at least, Frank’s suggestion of “Conspiracy to be a bitch” isn’t a prosecutable offense.

Vance calls this a family thing and tells Franks to go in there and work it out.

Which he does.  Franks and Shada measure a bit.  She says, “I’ve been tracking your every move since your accursed offspring ruined my daughter.”  He ponders aloud his having never hit a woman before.  She finds that difficult to believe.  I also find that difficult to believe.  But Franks finds a loophole: “Not sure you’re a woman.”  Then there’s yelling.  Gibbs is amused.  Vance is probably wondering what Jackie is making him for dinner.

Shada explains that, despite having disowned her family, she had second thoughts.  “Things change.  I have lost too much family.  She is my child and the little girl is my granddaughter.  My blood.”  And then she sits.  They hash out the scene with the mercs.  Shada sent them to rescue Leyla and Amira from Franks but allows she’s willing to travel to Franks instead if there’s a chance for reconciliation.  Franks isn’t sold and accuses Shada of endangering the girls.  Shada accuses Franks of turning the scene violent. 

So, Franks tells the story.  He was playing with Amira, and the mercs got the drop on him.  Suddenly there were two guys pointing guns at him.  Leyla saw this and got 5/6 shots off his .22.  Presumably, number six hit the boat.  After that, Franks cooked the scene to protect Layla.  Franks thinks Leyla and Amira are safer with him than they are with Shada.  And, objectively, this is certainly true in 2009.  And now.

But there’s one last thing…and this is where the plot goes off the rails… 

Shada notes that she made the payment for the, er, re-acquisition, to Bell already.  And Bell’s not one to give up on a contract. 

Really?  Even when the client says to stand down and tells him he can keep the money.  That seems unlikely.

The show doesn’t care.  Franks, fear on his face (for maybe the first time ever), looks back at the observation window.  We see Gibbs makes a phone call.  Gibbs tells Vance that Shada went up the ladder to Bell, and Bell has nothing but his rep, which suffers if he can’t do the job.

Again, really?

Vance agrees, that, with that chip on his shoulder, not even Shada can call Bell off.

And I think the show is done making sense now.  It happens.  Sometimes you write yourself into a corner.

At Gibbs’s house.  Ziva gets the call.  Tony asks if trouble is brewing and they lower the shades.  Ziva gives Leyla a gun and tells her to take Amira downstairs.  Outside, we see Bell’s team kill the fusebox and the team then lobs a flash bang grenade through the window.  Then they storm the house. 

Tony has his hands up.  Ziva is on the ground, but she’s disoriented and can’t get her gun before someone kicks it away.  Not a great showing for Ms. Super Assassin.  Has she gone soft after her Somalian vacation?

Lucky for her, one of the mercs knows her.  “Ziva is that you?”  “Damon?” she responds.

“Corporal Damon Werth,” he confirms.  “USMC dishonorably discharged.”  Oh yeah!  It’s Corporal Punishment, from the episode Corporal Punishment, Episode 5.10!  Remember the super-‘roided guy who beat up Gibbs, McGee, and Tony all at once before Ziva took him down?

Werth has an almost humorously casual conversation with the downed NCIS agents.  Tony remembers him too and Ziva says Werth’s team is actually abducting, not rescuing.  One of the other mercs isn’t happy with Werth, who says they’re making a mistake.  The second guy says Bell has a lot of money on the job, and that’s all he says because Werth hits him in the face and takes him out.  Werth and Ziva finish the rest (there she is!).  “I think we should hear them out, don’t you?” Werth snarks.

We change scenes.  Bell appears on a deserted road to meet his team and acquire the targets.  Werth steps out of the car and says he quits.  Tony, Ziva and Gibbs get out too.  Gibbs is not happy about his house being beat up by Bell’s hit team.  Bell wonders if Gibbs wants to go punch for punch with a man who has access to the type of arsenal Bell has.  Tony notes being a little off his game after the flash bang that Bell’s men threw at a federal agent on protective detail.  Which is a bit of a crime.  Bell calls his men over-exuberant but claims he has not personally broken any laws.  Except that the Federales in Mexico don’t care much for bounty hunting south of the border.  We will just have to take the show’s word for that. 

Bell says he tells his men that if they take a swing, make sure the other guy goes down.  Whatever that means.  The NCIS team takes a swing by arresting Bell.

In Vance’s office, the director asks Gibbs if he thinks Amira’s grandparents can work it all out.  Gibbs tells a story he was told by his dad, and we get shots of Leyla and Amira playing on Franks’s beach while Gibbs talks.  Gibbs tells of two of his grandfathers, on different sides of the family, who also fought on different sides of the Civil War and even shot at each other.  They couldn’t look at each other afterward.  But, in their old age, they ended up in the same house on the same front porch in rocking chairs.  We see Franks and Shada on Franks’s porch, drinking lemonade.  Probably loaded with tequila.

Vance figures, “We got better things to do than be Franks’s family counselors.  But I figure your relatives worked out their difference over time.”  Gibbs smiles, “Way I heard it, those two never said a word.”

We end on Vance smirking.

Quotables:

Ziva: What do you know about the American Dream?

Tony: Well, let’s see: I’m a white male, between the ages of 18 and 49, with a loud mouth and a gun… I am the American Dream.

Ziva-propisms: Ziva notes that they have been instructed to sit on the baby.

Tony Awards: McGee gets there first by calling out Tony’s Dr. Strangelove (1964) reference.  He also mentions Annie (1982).  Although Annie appears in numerous media, so it’s not clear if he’s going comic strip, movie, musical, what have you.  Tony makes reference to the TV show Hogan’s Heroes.

Abby Road: Is Franks a hero or a sandwich, both or neither?

McNicknames: None that I caught.

Ducky Tales: None.

The Rest of the Story:

-We first learned Gibbs was building a boat named Kelly when Army CID investigator and former Gibbs flame Lt. Col. Hollis Mann found him working on it in his basement.  Sandblast, Episode 4.7.  He got that boat out of his basement sometime before Sharif Returns, Episode 4.13.

-Vance used to work out of the NCIS San Diego office when he was Assistant Director of NCIS.  See Internal Affairs, Episode 5.14.

-We met Gibbs’s then infant goddaughter for the first time in Iceman, Episode 4.18.  Not sure where Gibbs kept the boat between getting it out of his basement and giving it to the child.

-Franks was Gibbs’s supervisor when he started with NCIS, then NIS, and still calls him “probie.”  See Hiatus, Parts One and Two, Episodes 3.23, 3.24.

-Vance and Franks have a history and they don’t like each other.  It’s implied that Franks has something on Vance.  See Judgment Day, Part Two, Episode 3.19 and Deliverance, Episode 6.15.

-We haven’t seen Franks’s digs in Mexico since early Season 4.  See, e.g., Shalom, Episode 4.1.

-Gibbs’s upstairs later becomes a routine setting on this show, but I think this is the first time we’ve seen it.

-It’s a little surprising that either Gibbs or Tony agreed to Tony watching Franks.  Franks knocked Tony out and escaped last time.  Faking It, Episode 4.4.

-On that subject, readers of this blog know that NCIS is routinely horrible at security detail. We thought the curse might be broken as Vance survived a trip with Ziva and McGee in Knockout, Episode 6.18, and Ziva killed two hitmen at once while guarding a witness in Dead Reckoning, Episode 6.20.  But no, Ziva and Tony get taken like amateurs and need Damon Werth’s fortuitously coincidental presence to save them.  I wonder if that was intended in the script from the beginning, or if was simply a viable exit from a locked plot room.

-Speaking of, we met Corporal Damon Werth in Corporal Punishment, Episode 5.10.  And we will see him again.

-Col. Bell won’t do a minute of time (ETA: actually, he ends up in Mexican jail, which seems like a failure of legal representation). 

Weirdly, he never appears again.  Or, if he does, another actor assumes the role (ETA: This paragraph ended up not being entirely accurate, but not being entirely inaccurate either. The whole Bell thing ends up being weird).

Casting Call: Colonel Bell is Robert Patrick, who played the T-1000 in Terminator 2.  Maybe that’s who/what Gibbs and Vance are thinking of when they decide that Bell would rather break lots of laws to complete a dubious contract instead of simply taking the money and heading to the golf course.

Man, This Show Is Old: This one isn’t particularly dated other than the heavy being a security contractor. Those still exists, but, for TV purposes, it’s very much a plot from the ‘00s.

I guess Franks’s comment about Shada being a bitch wouldn’t pass editing in today’s climate.

MVP: Leyla with the kill shots.  Honorable mention to Corporal Punishment.  Everyone else was kinda useless.

Rating: Bell’s Plot-o-Matic motivation killed it for me.  But it’s a Franks episode, so it can’t do worse than five Palmers.

Next Time: We get an unofficial crossover with NCIS: LA as a lady assassin from Vance’s past returns for a visit.