A Year of NCIS, Day 146: Power Down (Episode 7.8)

Look, if we’re all going to be trapped indoors for weeks on end, the least I can do is generate some content.  And there are some odd similarities, in terms of the inconvenience to routine, between a quarantine and and a blackout. So, off we go…

Episode: 7.8., Power Down

Air Date: November 17, 2009.

The Victim: Lt. Emma Paxton, USN.

Emotionally Traumatized, But Ultimately Irrelevant, Witness Who Finds the Body: We begin with a guy playing a video game and talking with a weird voice into a headset. His Internet connection craps out and he screams the rage of the interrupted gamer (Why? Doesn’t this shit get backed up on the game server?) He’s grown as hell, but yells for his Mom, which is a fairly standard depiction of “nerds” on this show (See, e.g. The Voyeur’s Web, Episode 3.6). And then he starts hitting his modem. This at least has a storytelling purpose as we see the modem says Swift Cast.

We then shift to what looks to be an office for Swift Cast, and two security guards, one black, one white, in a vigorous shoot out with a ski-masked intruder. The white guard takes a round in the shoulder, and the other guard pulls him out of harm’s way around a corner. The shot guard says he got the jump on one of the intruders and cuffed him to a pipe. They wonder where their back-up is when a masked guy presses a device and all the power goes out in the building. And, as we see via an aerial shot, the power also goes out all over DC.

Begin credits.  And- Ha!- the credits always end on a shot of the C apitol, and, this time, we see lights go out, and then the TV flickers as if our power went out too.

Fun.

Plot Recap: At NCIS, the agents are operating without electricity and handing out flashlights. Tony is grumping, trying to make his computer work. Failing that, he opens up his phone.  Palmer informs us that the cell towers are out too, but Tony just wants to play a video game.

Ducky has sent Palmer up for a sit-rep, so Tony gives an assessment of systems that are down. Palmer adds autopsy freezers and Tony figures things will get ugly soon.  Especially ugly when Gibbs finds out McGee and Ziva aren’t in the office yet.  This leads to Palmer apprising Tony that McGee and Ziva never left.  He gestures toward the elevator.

Inside, we learn that McGee and Ziva have been trapped in the elevator for over 9 hours and McGee is starting to freak out.  Ziva uses tough love to handle McGee, smashing his watch so he can’t focus on the amount of time in the elevator.  Then she reminds him that things could be a lot worse: “We could be trapped with Tony.”

“I heard that.”  Tony is at the squad room elevator door, using a traffic cone as a bullhorn.  Ziva figures ignoring him will make him go away.  McGee knows better (and really, so should Ziva).  He asks Tony for an update.

We’re apprised by Tony that an explosion happened at a Potomac electric substation, and this caused a cascade failure that blacked out the city.  Ziva wryly notes, “I’m sure Gibbs is feeling right at home.”  Tony agrees, pointing out that you don’t need electricity to use hand tools or drink a bottle of bourbon.  Inside the elevator, we hear Tony laughing, but then it cuts off.  McGee knows the score and asks if Gibbs is right behind Tony?  We shift to Tony and see that this is the case. Tony still has the cone to his mouth, Gibbs is smirking.  Tony looks scared.  “Yes, he is.”

“Grab your gear,” Gibbs orders and tells tale of a dead Navy lieutenant at an internet service provider location.  As Gibbs and Tony are leaving, the techs get the elevator open.  “You’re late, McGee,” says Gibbs as he hands McGee and Ziva their bags.

No rest for the weary it seems.

At the crime scene, Tony is examining the body, which appears to be the perp the guard cuffed to the pipe.  Ducky and Palmer arrive, arguing as always about who got them lost en route.

Our victim is Lt. Emma Paxton.  The Local LEOs ID’d her with a credit card they found on the body.  With no servers or computers, NCIS can’t get any more info.  Including why she was taking part in an armed assault on an internet service provider.

Gibbs and Ziva are interviewing the guards, Stone (white) and Frazier (black).  They report three intruders.  Stone tackled the woman we know to be Lt. Paxton and cuffed her, and she was fine when he left her.  He thinks her pals shot her.  Neither guard has any idea what the perps were after.  They think they were headed to the farm- the brains of the place.  Basically, where all the servers are stored.  Even the guards don’t have access.  Lucky for the company, the power went out or the perps might have made it inside.  Ziva wonders if it actually was luck, but things are left cryptic.

We cut to McGee examining the farm.  Gibbs looks on while McGee explains the function of the farm.  Gibbs asks if anything was worth stealing, and McGee figures millions in proprietary trade secrets.  But they will have to wait for a full inventory.

McGee notes an iris scanner and says it’s uncrackable.  Gibbs suggests this as a motivation for killing the power, although it’s not clear why he suspects a connection between this attack and the blackout.

McGee’s camera runs out of power.  But Gibbs whips out an old school military camera from his bag.  McGee, having spent 9+ hours in an elevator, asks for some food.  Gibbs whips out MREs.  McGee takes a pass.

The agents re-group.  Tony and Ziva found tire tracks and an eyewitness who may be able to give a sketch.  Ziva called the power company and they may be without power for days.  Tony and Ziva and McGee wonder how they’ll take photos or run prints through AFIS or use facial rec.  Gibbs reaches into his bag and provides a Polaroid camera and a notepad to Tony and Ziva.

Back at headquarters, the gang is backgrounding Lt. Paxton.  Absent a working plasma screen, they put her pic up on a cork board.  McGee manually found her service record in the annex.  She worked for Armed Forces Entertainment, setting up concerts for units deployed overseas.  Which doesn’t say much about why she’d be robbing a server farm.  Lt. Paxton has a clean record, never saw combat, married her high school sweetheart, and is active in her church.  The agents work through this slowly as McGee pins each piece of paper with info up on the board.

Abby is looking at the tire track, and Ziva has the eyewitness sketch.  So, Tony goes with a BOLO, and McGee will check Lt. Paxton’s finances.  Gibbs tells Ziva to contact the husband.  All three go for their electronics: fax, phone, computer.  All three fail. No electricity for you.

“It’s going to be a long case.”

In the lab, Abby is making her own CafPow, and she’s upset that the power outage may have destroyed her sensitive lab equipment. She also doesn’t understand why autopsy gets back-up power and she doesn’t. “What does Ducky have that I don’t?”

“Corpses,” Gibbs succinctly replies. He asks what she’s “got” and is unimpressed with her “Nothing.” She only called him down to manage his expectations and to remind him that doing tire track analysis by hand is hard, and to not expect normal miracles. “Great, I’ll see you in an hour,” Gibbs says, letting her know who actually manages expectations up in this cut.

And then her batteries die, and the music runs out. Abby rages.

In the squad room, our agents are trying to figure out how to work a manual copier.  Gibbs smiles at them.  McGee says, they found the device in storage but they “need to find a brontosaurus who knows how to use it.” Gibbs takes his cue and demonstrates.  Tony is very impressed, and hopes McGee was paying attention.

In the conference room, Lt. Paxton’s husband is distraught.  His wife was supposed to be in Baghdad, not dead in NCIS’ morgue.  He does not recognize the face in the eyewitness sketch but swears his wife was a good servicemember and, here, a victim.  He and Gibbs bond briefly over losing a spouse when Paxton says, “I don’t expect you to understand,” then pauses, reads the room, and says, “But you do.” Gibbs says simply, “You want answers.”

Paxton sings his wife’s praises as a proud American, third generation Navy, one of the good guys.  He wants to do one last good thing for her: bury her with the full military honors she deserves.

McGee interrupts and says the Swift Cast CEO finished his inventory and the intruders didn’t get anything.  So why is Lt. Paxton dead?

In the squad room, Tony has a big map and a lot of TV cops show references.  Gibbs would like him to do actual work.  So, Tony recaps that nothing was stolen from Swift Cast and, nothing, like a bomb, was left behind.

Tony is still waiting on BOLO results for the sketch, so the current best lead is Lt. Paxton.  Tony makes to talk to her CO.  But McGee has a box of bank and credit card statements and McGee doesn’t do hard copies.  They agree to flip for it, but while McGee searches for a coin (since Tony used a trick coin last time), Tony leaves.  Ziva leaves with him, but she at least apologizes.

Sad trombone.

In autopsy, Ducky is using a head lamp and performing an autopsy on Lt. Paxton in the dark.  He identifies the COD as 2 gunshots fired at close range into the heart.  Contusions on the wrist corroborate the security guard’s story of Lt. Paxton’s capture.  But the bruising is too much for her to have done it all to herself which means her pals tried to free her before they killed her.  Either way, they really didn’t want her to talk.

We see a random agent come down and get his lunch out of one of Ducky’s fridges, and that’s pretty funny.

Ducky continues, noting that the swelling of Lt. Paxton’s extremities, but says he found no indication of an accompanying medical condition.  He’s still waiting for Abby on blood work, but she can’t provide timely results without a working mass spectrometer.

Another agent comes down for his lunch, but Gibbs stares him in the other direction.

Ducky also found systemic evidence of widespread trauma to the body- broken bones, stab wounds, etc.  But Lt. Paxton has never been in combat.

At Lt. Paxton’s assignment, her CO, Cmdr. Resnik, is having trouble dealing with the reality of an entertainment officer dying.  Tony is over her emotions and pulls another Dragnet reference: “Just the facts, ma’am.”

Cmdr. Resnik last spoke to Lt. Paxton three days prior.  Ziva asks if this was before the lieutenant was to leave for Baghdad.  But Cmdr. Resnik says Lt. Paxton was not going to Baghdad.  Rather, they spoke when Lt. Paxton called in sick.  Ziva and Tony realizes that if Lt. Paxton was never going to Baghdad, then she was lying to her husband.  Cmdr. Resnik notes that Lt. Paxton lied to her as well because she said she was sick and needed to stay home a few days.  But an hour later, Cmdr. Resnik saw Lt. Paxton walking down the street with a man.  She can’t provide a description, though.

Back at HQ, McGee is having a rough time analog-ing it.  He has paper cuts.  Gibbs tosses him band-aids.

[We’re left to wonder how there is light in the squad room, but the windows in the area are pretty big, so I guess I’ll let it slide].

Tony and Ziva return.  They were following the lead from Cmdr. Resnik and, apparently, they had to walk a lot in the absence of email.  Or maybe they kept each other warm in a cold shower.  You can never tell with these two.  McGee found nothing of note in the bank and credit card statements.

But Abby has a trace on the tire tracks.  It only took her 72 hours longer than it otherwise would have.  Gibbs announces they are looking for a Chevy Impala, and McGee heard a police report about an abandoned ’99 Chevy Impala.

They find the car in some kind of yard filled with shipping containers and trucks.  The car has bullet holes, the engine is cold, there’s a blood trail to a nearby shipping container.  The agents pull their guns and enter.  Someone has turned the container into an office, with an armory.  There are multiple guns, multiple passports, and multiple identities for Lt. Paxton.

We return from commercial with a funny montage of polaroid pictures replacing the usual camera shots of processing a scene.  Still at the scene, Ziva and McGee are trying to figure out what the cargo container is for.  Ziva says Mossad uses sites like this as sanctuaries to prepare for upcoming operations.  The container has its own generators and McGee is very excited to hang out with his computer friends again.  But it’s a pump fake because the generator cuts right off and you can feel McGee’s disappointment as he sags.  So much for answers.

Ziva is looking at a passport and ominously notes that she found a new question.

Outside, Tony is looking at the tire tracks, which demonstrate that the perps abandoned their car and got away in another vehicle.  Gibbs is processing the car.  McGee and Ziva come out and show Gibbs the evidence, including blueprints for Swift Cast.  And for the electric power substation where the power to the city was cut.

Tony notes that Lt. Paxton’s husband is not going to like learning he was married to Mata Hari.  Ziva figures he’s also not going to like the fake passport they found for him either.

We change scenes to find Gibbs is in a darkened interrogation room with an analog tape recorder from the late 70s.  He shows Paxton the passport.  Paxton denies having seen it.  So, Gibbs tells him about the container. Then shows him the pictures.  Paxton’s shock is palpable.  But he still maintains that his wife is a victim.  Gibbs is unmoved, and Paxton acknowledges that some things weren’t adding up with Lt. Paxton’s stories.  He didn’t say anything to Gibbs before because knows his wife was a good person and he’s not going to help Gibbs prove otherwise.

Either way, Paxton had doubts and thought she was cheating.  He hired a PI to follow and record his wife.  Paxton offers to surrender the tapes.

MTAC has power, so the agents watch the tapes there.  Tony asks if McGee needs help.  McGee does not, so Tony should go do analog work.  Tony was hand filing evidence custody documents from the crime scene.  He holds up a bandaged finger.  McGee laughingly sends him on his way.

And keeps laughing until he turns to see Gibbs.

“Hey Boss. I was just…”

“Just what? Rubbing it in? Because he left you with the paperwork earlier?”

“Yeah.”

Gibbs just smiles. He doesn’t care.

They discuss the videos, which are mostly ordinary perambulations by Lt. Paxton.  McGee spoke to the PI and learned pretty much what they learned from the husband.  But Gibbs is more observant than a PI and sees a common guy in the recordings on different days.  Somebody was tailing Lt. Paxton.  Gibbs sees him touch a wall and wants the prints.  McGee tries to get one of the others to do it so he can stay in MTAC with the electricity, but…a glare fixes that.

In the lab, McGee has the latent prints from the park where the perp was tailing Lt. Paxton.  Tony has prints from suspects matching the description on the sketch.  Ziva arrives with lemons. Excitedly.  But with no understanding of why they’re needed.

Abby uses lemons to power her boombox.  Abby assigns the various fingerprint parts to each agent and then blows a whistle to tell them to get to work.

We get a view of an analog clock that shows us this is taking a very long time.

Abby gets a hit.  And it only took all night.  Donavan Graham.  He matches the sketch.  He’s also a small-time hood, gun seller, gun for hire.

We shift scenes and all four agents converge on Graham’s address.  Tony and Gibbs take the front.  Ziva and McGee take back.  Tony looks inside and sees Graham and another dead guy on the floor, so they enter.  Cmdr. Resnick then appears in plain clothes and gets four guns drawn on her for her trouble.  Dramatic, but not something you’d risk in real life.  She says that the two perps (the other corpse is a guy named Leo Harper) were roommates.  Until they shot each other.

Tony and Ziva lower their weapons.  Gibbs and McGee do not, being at a disadvantage as to who this woman is.  Cmdr. Resnik says she tried to divert Tony and Ziva, but it didn’t work and she’s impressed they found this place. Tony tells Gibbs she’s Lt. Paxton’s CO at Armed Forces Entertainment.  Cmdr. Resnik says, “Not quite,” and Ziva smiles a bit. Instead, Cmdr. Resnik is NSA.  Lt. Paxton and Cmdr. Resnik were colleagues on a top-secret op and this is all much bigger than Gibbs and company think.

Back at NCIS HQ, Cmdr. Resnick explains.  NSA had agreements with major biometric security companies to program a back door into their iris scanners.  Lt. Paxton’s iris was hard-coded into the devices, like a master key.  The other master key is Cmdr. Resnick, who demonstrates on NCIS’s secure evidence garage elevator.

Gibbs catches on (although he can’t be pleased the security incursion).  With AFE as their cover, Cmdr. Resnick and Lt. Paxton could travel around the world assisting other agencies with covert activities.  Of course, Cmdr. Resnick has no idea why Lt. Paxton used her capability to break into Swift Cast, but the mission has been compromised.  Gibbs asks about Lt. Paxton’s husband, but Cmdr. Resnick thinks the fake passport was a standard, harmless insurance plan in case they needed to disappear.

But if Lt. Paxton turned, there is no limit to the damage she could have done.  McGee notes, however, that it makes no sense to kill the power for the break-in if Paxton could get them through the iris scanner anyway.  So, per Cmdr. Resnick, now there’s concern in all quarters that the power shut-down was the point and that the purpose was to make DC vulnerable to terrorist attack.  She suggests NCIS and NSA pool resources.

In autopsy, Ducky has determined that the two perps in the house didn’t kill each other.  The crime scene was staged.  The kill shots were delivered from behind, and the chest shots were delivered post-mortem.  Which is a sloppy staging.

Gibbs and Ducky figure the masterminds behind whatever this plot is were tying up loose ends. Palmer gets out over his skis by saying, “The question is who?”  Gibbs is not Ducky or Tony and responds sarcastically, “I don’t know Jim, do you have any ideas?”  Palmer backs off when Gibbs shines a light in his face.  Ducky says that one of the dead guys was digging for something.  There’s copious amounts of dirt under his fingernails.

We move to the squad room.  Ziva and Tony, acting on the fingernails clue, return with something they found underneath the shed at the house where our two dead guys lived.  Whatever it is, it’s from the server farm at Swift Cast even though the company said nothing was stolen.  And supposedly the perps left nothing behind.  But Tony thinks something was.  They replaced the found device with something different.

And maybe that’s why the power was cut.  The only way to swap a server without anyone knowing would be if the system was down.  McGee hypothesizes that a bugged server would connect directly to the internet backbone.  Which means every federal agency connected to the Internet would have their entire infrastructure exposed

(That seems highly unlikely, but the episode is almost over).

But why would Lt. Paxton go bad?  The team wonders if it was about the money.

In the lab, Abby has finally finished manually analyzing Lt. Paxton’s blood work.  She determines that Lt. Paxton ingested a vasodilator described for high blood pressure.  Which explains the swelling in her extremities.  But she wasn’t trying to commit suicide because the dosage was nonlethal. What she was trying to do was make her eyeball blood vessels distort so the scanner wouldn’t work.  In short, Lt. Paxton was not a willing part of break in.  She was trying to prevent it.

Abby also found the lieutenant’s prints at the home where they found the two dead perps.  But only in the bathroom.  Which means she was held there against her will and tried to fight back with what was in medicine cabinet.  Abby holds up the bottle of vasodilator medication.  The label is scraped off, but Abby knows who it belongs to because she found traces in a blood sample found at Swift Cast after the shootout.

Which takes us to Swift Cast.  Ziva and Gibbs show Stone, the white security guard, the passport for Lt. Paxton’s husband.  Stone, conveniently and very confidently, IDs Paxton as the perp and says the photo looks like the eyes of the fella he saw wearing a ski mask.  He’s hilariously positive in light of the circumstances.  Ziva smiles and says they have forensics and an eyewitness and its enough to make the arrest.  “Just let me know when you need me to testify,” says Stone.  They start to leave, and the power comes back on.  “Nice timing,” Stone says, and they look at him.  He says the Wizards are playing tonight and takes a bite of his sandwich.

The scene shifts and we see the power come back on in the server farm.  Then we see a pair of legs stride purposefully through the area.  It’s Stone.  He approaches a server bank and messes with it, and we see a re-routing signal message.  Then Tony comes around the corner.  Stone tries to run but Ziva is there with Gibbs.  She compliments Stone on getting shot to divert suspicion.  Of course, then she tells him that’s how they caught him.  Gibbs is in a good mood and even makes a pop culture reference to Hawaii 5-0, when he says, “Book him, Dan-ozzo.”  Then Gibbs tells McGee via walkie to kill the generator.  So, the power being back on was just a trap.

Back at NCIS, Gibbs is updating Paxton and tells him Stone’s real name: Dimitri Verenikin. Verenekin used to work for the Russians until he went freelance.  Gibbs thinks Verenekin learned about Lt. Paxton when she was on a mission in Kiev.  With her eyeball access, he could name his price to espionage buyers.

Gibbs: Your wife tried to stop him.  And when she couldn’t she cuffed herself during the break in.  She knew we’d find the body.  She knew we’d dig deeper.

Paxton: There’s a lot I never knew about Emma.  But one thing’s for sure, she was a fighter.  Stubborn as hell.

Gibbs: Been there.

Paxton: Emma had to do it right?  She didn’t have a choice.

Gibbs: No, she had a choice.  That’s what makes her a hero.

Back in the squad room, Tony proclaims the case a “high tech case, low tech ass kicking.”  Then the agents wax philosophically about being unplugged during the outage and how relaxing it is.At least until the power comes back on and they all excitedly jump to their electronics, as if it’s Christmas morning, and begin typing vigorously.

Gibbs enters, and puts all his old timey gear back in his bag.  He watches his agents attack their technology like junkies looking for a fix.  Then he turns off his own monitor and sits back in his chair with a satisfied smile on his face.

Quotables: Nothing beyond what’s discussed above.

Ziva-propisms: Not an intentional Ziva-propism, but Cote de Pablo tells Gibbs that she and Tony were “running down a lead from Lt. Resnick’s CO.”  Resnick is the CO.  Paxton is the dead lieutenant.

Tony Awards: Tony starts off with a lot of TV today, including a cop-show meta-retrospective that includes Dragnet, Baretta, Columbo, and Kojak.  He quotes a portion of the Dragnet opening narration while arresting Stone.  Gibbs supplies the Hawaii 5-0 reference.

McGee references Dr. Who, forcing Tony to ask, “Who watches that?” I do. I particularly recommend the Matt Smith seasons.

Tony references Lord of War (2005).  He also compares Lt. Paxton’s many aliases to Jason Bourne of The Bourne Identity (2002).

Abby Road: Given the lack of tech, Abby is a little sidelined.  Her powering her music with lemons is quirky enough to qualify, I guess.

McNicknames: McToma.

Ducky Tales: None.

The Rest of the Story:

-Palmer forgets for a minute that just because he was Tony’s sounding board doesn’t make him Gibbs’s sounding board.  See Bounce, Episode 6.16.

-The show used to routinely point out that Gibbs is completely ignorant of pop culture.  I don’t know if the writers got tired of the bit or if Mark Harmon put his foot down, but it’s not anywhere near as ubiquitous as it used to be.  So, his Hawaii 5-0 reference is a funny nod to that period.  And it’s completely in character because even early-season Gibbs could generally place references to pop culture that pre-dated 1980 or so.  

-This is the kind of plot where you wonder at what point the city-wide blackout entered the script.  Obviously, with technology, this case gets solved a LOT quicker.  At the very least, the bloodwork is virtually instantaneous.  One wonders if the writers scripted for a while and then realized the agents needed a tech handicap for this plot to work.

-Speaking of plot, the episode’s biggest weakness is that the plot is either wrong in places, or not very well explained.  The blackout was intentional, but was it for purposes of knocking out the eye scanner as a back-up plan to Lt. Paxton not cooperating?  Stone and the other guard claim they don’t have access to the server farm as part of their job duties, so it’s difficult to see how Stone got in there at the end of the episode unless the security system didn’t come on-line when the power returned.  And if that was the plan, why use Lt. Paxton- the squeaky wheel that ran the caper off the road- at all?  Why not just institute the blackout?  It wasn’t an improvisation based on her handcuffing herself as it takes planning to blow a power grid with a remote-control device.

Also, the perps had lifted the original server and buried it at their house.  When did that happen? How did that happen?  How did it go undetected?  Did it happen after the outage?  And, if the power outage was necessary for the Trojan server to boot up with the other servers in order to work properly, but the Trojan server was already in place, then why not just blow the power?

The answer is probably there, but I generally consider a plot to be on the weaker side if I have to work this hard to find it.  I guess the original plan was to use Lt. Paxton to get into the farm, replace the server, then blow the power so that the reboot would install the Trojan.  And, presumably, when that didn’t work, they blew the power and replaced the server off-screen.  But, if it was that simple, then why introduce Lt. Paxton as a variable?

-As always, NCIS is fully capable of making up for wonky plot with compelling character work. Here, the parallel between Lt. Emma Paxton and Gibbs’s wife, Shannon, are clear, but the show doesn’t rub the viewer’s face in it or wallow in Gibbs’s misery.  In fact, if you haven’t seen Hiatus Parts One and Two, Episodes 3.23, 3.24, it wouldn’t register at all.  But Shannon Gibbs was killed because she put herself in harm’s way to do the right thing and testify against a murderer.  While the consequence of Shannon’s choice was not so bleakly inevitable as compared to Lt. Paxton’s situation, it’s still poignant to see Gibbs commiserate with Paxton at the end of the episode.

Casting Call: Cmdr. Resnick is Cara Buono.  She has been around, but her most recent big role is as Mike’s sexpot mom on Stranger Things.          

Man, This Show Is Old: Bingball looks a lot like Brickbreaker.  Apropos of nothing, I once scored so many points on Brickbreaker that the game began shutting down.  It’s the only video game I was ever exceptional at playing.  How sad is that?

MVP: Gibbs is the only agent who bothered to prepare for an analog age.

Rating: This episode aspired to be clever and poignant. It is poignant and it is sort of clever if you don’t think too hard (or maybe I missed the brilliant piece of dialogue that tied it all together). And, credit to the plot and the actors: the episode does a really good job of communicating the tedium of life without electricity.  I experienced a low level of discomfort while watching that I didn’t even notice until the fictional lights came back on.  All told, this one aspired to be more than it was and fell a little flat, but it was still entertaining.

Seven Palmers.

Next Time: Another now-standard NCIS precocious child plot.