A Year of NCIS, Day 153: Jack-Knife (Episode 7.15)

Episode: 7.15, Jack-Knife

Air Date: February 9, 2010.

The Victim: Former Marine Nick Heatherton.

Emotionally Traumatized, But Ultimately Irrelevant, Witness Who Finds the Body: “Previously on NCIS…”  We get a recap of Corporal Punishment, Episode 5.10.  Including the best part, where then-Marine Corporal Damon Werth beat the tar out of the entire male portion of the NCIS team while punched up on steroids.  Good guy, bad decision-maker.  After the discovery of his steroid use and his not-even-slightly-honorable discharge, Werth ended up in Colonel Bell’s entourage. Until he defected rather than beat up Tony and Ziva and kidnap a little girl and her mom.  Outlaws and In-Laws, Episode 7.6.   Like I said, good guy.

Now, and following the recap, we encounter Werth as he wakes up in a trash pile.  He seems to recall being at a party and speaks out to a fella named Heatherton.  When Heatherton doesn’t respond, Werth turns him over.  To find his throat slit.

Now we shift to McGee as he and Gibbs enter Gibbs’s house.  Man, this is a busy opening.  McGee had to drive Gibbs home since Gibbs’s arm is still in a sling from getting hit by a car in Jet Lag, Episode 7.13.  McGee takes it upon himself to check Gibbs’s fridge for food (announcing that there’s nothing in there but fish food) and make lame jokes about the state of Gibbs’s home.  Gibbs emphatically sets his gun on the coffee table and McGee takes the hint, promising to pick him up in the morning.

After McGee leaves, Gibbs picks up the gun, points it at the kitchen and says angrily, “I know my goldfish didn’t eat a T-bone.”  Werth appears, hands up, and says he’ll pay Gibbs back. 

Credits.

Plot Recap: We start right where we left off, and with Gibbs letting Werth know the score: “Friends are welcome.  You’re not a friend.”  Cold.  Werth says he needs Gibbs’s help but doesn’t want anyone to see them talking.  Gibbs calls it paranoia, but Werth swears he’s clean and claims he’s being watched by a guy who owns a trucking company named Aaron Szwed.  A friend of Werth’s form the Corps has been doing work for Szwed.  Werth shows Gibbs a picture of Werth and Heatherton and Heatherton’s family.  Heatherton is also no longer a Marine, and Heatherton’s family is also no longer his family.  Per Werth, Heatherton had some trouble adjusting to civilian life after combat, which is an all-too-real problem in our own world.  Werth says he didn’t carry Heatherton out of the desert so he could wind up dead in an alley, and describes his friend coming over to drink and talk about some job he was concerned about.  Werth says he blacked out and woke up in the alley, but only remembers drinking two beers.

Gibbs is skeptical.  I would be too.  I was never the sort to plead, “But I only had x” to try and excuse a bad alcohol result, but I know plenty of people who are.  The default reaction even for people who aren’t seasoned investigators is, “Sure you only had two beers.”

Werth says Heatherton is still out there in the alley.  So, Gibbs calls McGee back for a pick-up. 

At the scene, McGee thinks the case may be Metro’s jurisdiction since Heatherton isn’t active service.  Gibbs invokes the “cooperating witness” doctrine, but that sounds suspect as hell.  McGee figures if they can get Metro to kick it to FBI violent crimes, FBI will slide it over to NCIS.  Gibbs tells him to get Tony and Ziva out of bed while he’s at it, which leads to a funny moment where McGee gets confused and thinks Gibbs is assuming Tony and Ziva are in bed together. 

Werth is in the car.  He describes Heatherton’s trucking job as cross country and back, but said Heatherton got nervous and said something about being a human being first.  Because Heatherton was trying to get work for Werth, Werth went to see Szwed.

We get a flashback of this encounter.  Szwed and a large African-American ex-Marine looking guy, named Lucas, have concerns that Heatherton has gone missing and is not reliable.  Werth affirms he’s reliable.  Szwed calls it a two-man job and to show up the next day.

Back in the present, Werth thinks Lucas, who carries a jack-knife, killed Heatherton.  Gibbs tells Werth it’s a murder investigation and Werth will not be getting involved.  Werth argues, but Gibbs is adamant.  Until Werth points out that he’s the guy taking a dead man’s place behind the wheel the next day.  So, Gibbs needs him to figure out whatever this company is transporting.

We shift to Gibbs greeting a sleepy Fornell with coffee at his door.  Fornell looks like he’s been punched recently, so they compare injuries.  Fornell, who has been up all night working deep cover on some mob hit case, takes a long pull off his coffee and then tells Gibbs to, “Go.”  Gibbs says, “I’m taking your crime scene.”  Fornell says, “Let me shower, and closes the door.” 

McGee and Werth are sleepy in the car.  But McGee keeps talking and keeping Werth awake.  Which is not endearing.  Then both men fall back asleep.  Suddenly, Gibbs is in the car.  And so is Fornell, both having entered while McGee was napping.  Fornell suggests going to process the scene but knows that Gibbs’s team is already there.

Any money on Gibbs having “forgotten” to tell Fornell that that the other person in the car is a very viable suspect?

Back at the scene, Tony and Ziva are arguing over whether it’s healthy for him to sleep in a massage chair.  Ducky notes that Heatherton’s throat was slit with a serrated blade.  He thinks death would have come quickly.

At NCIS HQ, Fornell gives Gibbs the file on Szwed, who we already know runs an over-the-road trucking business.  Two trucks, two men, one always armed.  He came across the FBI’s radar when one of his drivers shot a would-be hijacker.  The gun was legit, so Szwed didn’t get in any trouble.  Fornell describes Lucas as the head of security.  Fornell couldn’t find any employment records for Heatherton.  Werth says he was off the books.  Fornell says they don’t have enough to bring in Szwed.  They don’t even know what Szwed was allegedly moving in his trucks.

Ducky calls and Gibbs won’t let Werth accompany him.  And he makes clear the lab is testing Werth’s samples to make sure he’s clean of illicit drugs. 

Gibbs and Fornell have an elevator chat.  Fornell isn’t dumb enough to buy Gibbs’s cooperating witness yarn at face value.  Gibbs tells him about Werth hauling his squad-mates out of the desert.  Fornell asks about the outcome.  Gibbs just describes Werth as a Marine who broke the rules.  Fornell isn’t impressed Gibbs didn’t lock him up.  He’s even less impressed when he learns Gibbs gave Werth one of his own medals.  Fornell clearly thinks Gibbs may be a little compromised.

In autopsy, Gibbs and Fornell bicker for a bit.  Ducky, amazingly, is the person to return the discussion to work-related topics.  He describes Heatherton as having severe fractures of the fingers.  Recent.  In other words, someone tried to get him to talk.

In the squad room, Tony and Ziva catch McGee sleeping at his desk.  He wakes up paranoid and wonders if they tried to stick his hand in water or if they drew on his face with a sharpie.  Once he satisfies himself that things are on the up and up, McGee asks if Tony and Ziva found anything odd in Heatherton’s apartment.  They did not.  Tony asks about Szwed, but all McGee can find is speeding tickets. 

We learn that Werth is a “confidential” witness and even Tony and Ziva don’t know he’s involved.  When McGee refuses to come clean, Tony figures he won’t tell McGee what Ziva did to him while he was napping.  McGee brushes it off until Ziva refuses to commit one way or the other.  Of course, then Werth comes into the squad room and spoils the surprise.  He says he was just peeing in a cup.

Gibbs and Fornell appear and Gibbs says Szwed’s truck rolls in six hours and he would like to know what the team has.  Sadly, the team has nothing.  Fornell, despite seeming skepticism earlier, thinks Szwed’s a trafficker and a murderer now and wants a reason to stop the truck.  Gibbs figures they put somebody on it.  Tony is not impressed at the idea that “somebody” might be Werth.  Fornell is also unimpressed.  But Gibbs is undeterred.

McGee is in the lab, sleeping and using Bert the Farting Hippo as a pillow.  Per his request, Abby wakes him up.  She wonders if he got sleeping sickness while in Africa.  McGee makes clear that it’s not just one all-nighter that has him on the ropes.  Since he’s now Gibbs’s driver, he’s been having to keep up with Gibbs’s schedule, and, for a guy who is mostly a master delegator on the show, Gibbs apparently works very hard.  McGee is dying on his feet.  Abby thinks McGee should call it because who can keep up with Gibbs?  But McGee feels like he owes Gibbs because Gibbs got hurt pushing McGee out of the way of the speeding car.  Jet Lag, Episode 7.13. 

Gibbs appears and sends McGee for coffee.  Abby is annoyed at Gibbs essentially hazing McGee and using him as a valet.  But she does report that Werth was indeed roofied.  She asks if there’s anything else he needs.  Gibbs smirks and says, if there is, McGee will do it.

Tony and Ziva are cleaning the NCIS surveillance van.  Ziva is catching Werth up on her efforts to become a full agent and an American citizen (Good Cop, Bad Cop, Episode 7.4; Outlaws and In-Laws, Episode 7.6).  Werth and Tony perform the obligatory measuring exercise that Tony always insists on when he thinks some guy is sniffing around Ziva.  You also gotta figure Tony still resents Werth for breaking his nose a few seasons back (Corporal Punishment), even if he does owe Werth for a save from about nine episodes ago (Outlaws & In-Laws).  Primacy over recency.

Apparently, the plan is to get Werth into Szwed’s operation before wiring him.  McGee gives a mini-briefing on the op.  Fornell gives Werth a bit of a pep talk and then we learn that the second person on the job will be an NCIS agent.  The team will be following and, once Werth lets everybody know what’s in the truck, they’ll do the bust at both ends.  Fornell describes the surveillance as one team inside, two teams trailing.

At Szwed’s op, Tony is in the surveillance van.  Werth and Ziva are the inside team.  That should go over well with our alpha-crooks.  Actually, Ziva leans into Ziva being a woman and Lucas, the security guy, doesn’t much care.  He figures he’ll enjoy the pat-down more.  Werth tells him to try not to enjoy it too much,

McGee joins Tony in the van.  McGee is fully supplied with sugar and caffeine.  The telescopic mic starts to relay sound from inside.  The boys argue over whether and how much to resent Werth for kicking their asses.  McGee is over it, but he only suffered a dislocated shoulder.  Tony got a part of his face broken and wants Werth to stop coming around.  McGee relays a theory from Ducky’s about Gibbs feeling a connection because the team saved Werth.  McGee figures since Werth served his country, they owe him something even if he can’t articulate what.

Inside, Lucas seems to be fine with weaponry, but is checking for wires.  He confiscates their cell phones and asks if they have any questions.  Ziva and Werth would like to know where the truck is.   

At Gibbs’s house, Fornell is critiquing the décor.  He laughs as Gibbs struggles to extricate his ringing phone from the opposite-side pocket with only one good arm.  It’s Tony calling to report that a truck is pulling in at Szwed’s.  Gibbs says they’re switching cars and will be there too.  Fornell thinks it’s a big deal that Gibbs is letting him drive his car.  Gibbs figures Fornell already slept with his wife, and Fornell cracks up at that.

At Szwed’s, a truck pulls into the garage and Szwed gives order to swap the plates and strip the markings.  Which all legit trucking companies do before a run, right?  Szwed is making sexist remarks about Ziva, but she ignores him and asks what’s in the truck.  Szwed gives her a dangerous look but walks off as if he wants everyone to follow.

Szwed opens the back of the truck and we see a bunch of watermelons.  The entire team, inside and out, is confused by that.  Lucas clarifies that they’re moving melons out of the truck.  Ziva asks if they’re driving a truck full of nothing, and Lucas replies simply, “Not for long.”  He walks off and Ziva and Werth figure this caper not for trafficking, but for hijacking.  And they’re the hijackers.

The truck gets unladed at commercial and we get a hilarious moment where Szwed speaks full-on trucker lingo to Werth.  Werth seems fluent enough in trucker.  I am not, so I have no idea what this means:

“Alright, she’s a triple-digit ride. Big ol’ pumpkins in there, but don’t get tempted. We gotta get on the big slab and stay to the granny lane to keep it under the double nickle, even while you’re running deadhead. And bird dog on the dash so you don’t get shot in the back by bears. You got it?”

But if you think we’re lost, the look on poor Ziva’s face is f$%^ing priceless.  Ziva, who speaks nine languages but struggles with idiomatic English on her best day, just got a veritable truckload of the most idiomatic English dumped on her head and Cote de Pablo crushes the facial work.  Kudos to the writers. 

“Um, what language was that?” Ziva asks.  Werth translates it to, essentially, avoid cops.  Then Werth insists on a pit stop to fill the tank before heading out.

Szwed and Lucas pull out ahead in a Ferrari (subtle) and the truck follows.  Werth taps the breaks in Morse code to alert McGee as to the location of the impending fuel stop.  Tony phones to tells Gibbs about the stop.  Per Rule #27, Gibbs and Fornell are the obvious tail in Gibbs’s Dodge Charger (See Heartland, Episode 6.4).  How the NCIS van, even unmarked, is non-obvious is left unsaid.

Gibbs and Fornell pull into the gas station arguing like an old married couple and actively seeking to draw attention.  Gibbs goes inside while Fornell engages in loud car talk with Werth.  At present, it’s hard to see where this is going.  Especially because I don’t think I’ve ever seen this episode.

Ah.  Fornell gets nosier and nosier to the point where Szwed quietly instructs Lucas to intervene.  But Werth aggressively backs Fornell off, even subtly showing his firearm, to prove his, heh, worth.  Meanwhile, while all eyes are on this scene, Gibbs slips Ziva a wire.  Cute. 

Back in the Charger, Fornell is impressed with Werth and wonders at the skeletons in his closet.  Gibbs deadpans a “small bout of steroid-induced psychosis.”  “Oh great,” Fornell says cheerfully.

In the truck, Ziva hands out earwigs and makes contact with McGee.  Ziva conveys their theory about a heist and the ETA.  McGee experiments with trucker lingo and caffeine overdose.  He decides to check and see what over-the-road cargo is a likely target, and heads to the back of the van while Tony swerves and tries to make him fall down.  Ziva has had enough of McCaffeinated and pulls out her earwig.

She tells Werth to relax.  He starts to talk about Heatherton driving a Humvee in the convoy when they were hit.  Ziva, drawing off her own recent experience, and perhaps trying to signal a bit to the show’s audience, talks about the science of trauma and how it intensifies memory to the point of making it seem ever present.  They discuss whether this is an evolutionary trait or not, but the unmistakable message is that PTSD is not the result of a personal failure or anything to be ashamed of.  Ziva also gives Werth a bit of a pep talk about how he was in control the last time the team saw him, and he helped them.  She expresses her faith that Werth can find the right path.

It sort of feels like Werth might be wearing a red shirt right about now.  Maybe a self-donned red shirt.  He doesn’t seem like he’s in great shape.

Gibbs is chatting with McGee and the best bet, based on his research (the methodology of which confused me greatly), is that a truck carrying “assorted machinery” due at a specific garage is the target.  Gibbs tells Fornell to step on it so that they can meet the victim at his garage ahead of time.

At the location, Gibbs and Fornell chat with a fella named Devoisier.  He can’t shed light on why someone would want to hijack a machinery shipment to his garage full of fancy cars.  But when he hears the hijacking truck in question is out of San Diego, he identifies Szwed.  And then it gets weird, because apparently what is on the truck belongs to Szwed, but Devoisier won it in a wager.  Gibbs is pretty incredulous that all of this is over a bet.

Devoisier explains that Szwed wanted to prove he could run with a faster crowd and got in over his head.  He challenged his fastest car to race Devoisier’s fastest car in a cross-country race.  Fornell is grimly amused, and says “Winner takes pink slips,” meaning the winner pays all the speeding tickets.  Devoisier agrees it’s dangerous, but what’s an idle ne’er-do-well to do with his down time?  Now Devoisier is just waiting on his trophy- Szwed’s car.  Fornell asks if it was just the two of them, and Devoisier said each had a support team for emergencies and spare tires and such.  Hence Heatherton’s involvement.  Devoisier chuckles that he heard Szwed cursing Heatherton’s name at the finish line in San Diego.  Szwed was furious Heatherton was nowhere to be found when Szwed overheated outside of Barstow.  Szwed claimed Heatherton cost him the race.  Devoisier expresses surprise to learn that Heatherton is dead.  Gibbs asks if Devoisier can get ahold of the truck driver, and Devoisier says he can and asks if Gibbs wants to stop the truck.  Gibbs looks at Fornell, who looks back confused, and we shift scenes.

We rejoin Gibbs and Fornell on the road, where Gibbs is checking in with McGee.  McGee confirms Devoisier traveling from San Diego to DC.  McGee confirms speeding tickets for both men and Gibbs tells him to search for unsolved incident reports off that route.  Then Gibbs says he’s gonna lose McGee and hangs up for…reasons?

There’s something else going on here.

McGee rejoins Tony in the cab of the van.  He reports that Szwed was driving a Maybach and Devoisier a Plymouth Barracuda convertible.  Tony exposits that these are nice, fast cars.  The word “hemi” is used throughout this episode.  I don’t know from cars, so…

Back on the hunt, Lucas tells Werth to pull over and Szwed says to use the trailer to block the road. 

Ziva asks McGee for the plan, but McGee doesn’t have one since Gibbs went dark.  Then, of all the luck, the van has a blowout and Tony and McGee skid off the road.  They’re unharmed, but out of commission. 

So much for back-up. 

Back at the scene of the impending crime, the target truck comes up the road.  Szwed orders Werth to use his truck to fully block the road.  Werth asks Ziva for guidance.   Ziva tells him to stop the target truck.  I guess she figures she’ll improvise if lives are endangered. 

Werth pulls the truck out and blocks the road and he and Ziva, for some reason, stand in front of their truck in the middle of the road.  The trucker in the target truck blows his horn and then seems to speed up.    Ziva yawns.  Werth looks nervously at her.  The driver slams on brakes.  The trailer turns perpendicular as the truck slams to a halt, but the driver is good enough to keep the truck from jack-knifing.  Ziva watches the approach, unmoving, unblinking.  Werth watches with her, albeit much less icily.  But the truck stops with a little room to spare.  “And you people think I’m crazy,” Werth grunts.

Szwed tells them to put a gun on the driver and Ziva quietly urges the driver not to resist.  Szwed and Lucas run to the back of the truck, unlock it, open it, and find Gibbs and Fornell standing in back, guns drawn.  Fornell declares them under arrest.

I still feel like there’s more to this.  And we have four minutes left.

At the evidence garage, Devoisier thanks Fornell and Gibbs for returning his cars.  Abby declares herself a hot rod girl.  She asks the rude question, and Devoisier says he paid $1.2 million for his Barrracuda.  She thinks he’s mental.  Fornell gets it and explains how rare the car is.  Devoisier brags that it’s perfectly restored.  Gibbs laughingly disagrees and hands off a magnet.  Fornell takes it and, also laughing, tells Devoisier that you should always take a magnet when shopping for used cars.  The magnet sticks to the metal paneling on Szwed’s Maybach.  It does not stick to the bondo on the Barracuda. 

Gibbs says they arrested Szwed and Lucas for hijacking, but they swear they didn’t kill Heatherton.  Fornell says they believe them, so they went looking for another motive, and followed Devoisier’s path out west.  They found a nice hit and run accident with an 18-year-old girl crossing the street in Oklahoma.  Then they sent Heatherton’s picture to the location, and witnesses said Heatherton brought the victim into the hospital and stayed with her until she died.  Gibbs notes that Devoisier could avoid stopping for an injured girl, but he couldn’t make himself destroy the car, the one piece of evidence.  So, he killed Heatherton, the sole eyewitness, instead. 

Abby twists her own knife, figuring she’ll find traces of blood and hair on the Barracuda when she starts taking it apart, piece by piece by piece.  She smiles.

In the squad room, McGee is snoring at his desk.  Tony looks on, amazed.  Werth, miraculously not dead despite all my expectations, says he is not looking forward to the next conversation- with Heatherton’s wife.  Ziva says to say Heatherton died because he was a good man.  Werth leans in for a kiss and tells Ziva goodbye.  You can see Tony’s ass clench.  Then, because Werth is headed to Cleveland to see Heatherton’s wife, Tony offers to call some of his Ohio contacts and help Werth find work if he needs it.  Werth graciously thanks him even though everyone knows Tony is at least partially motivated by getting Werth the hell away from Ziva on a more permanent basis.

After Werth leaves, Tony asks if Ziva’s gonna see him again.  Ziva plays coy and lets him swing.  I guess we really are back to normal.

Quotables:

(1) Gibbs: Szwed’s truck rolls in 6 hours. What do you got?

Tony: We got nothing.

Fornell: I don’t like the sound of that.

Tony: Oh…

[Happier and more excited]

Tony: We got nothing!

(2) Abby: Hey, remember when you went to Africa?

McGee: Uh, yeah, it left an impression.

(3) McGee: He’s up at the crack of dawn, if he goes to bed at all. What exactly is running through that guy’s veins?

Gibbs: [appearing at the lab door] Coffee, McGee.

McGee: Right, boss.

Gibbs: No, get me some.

McGee: On it, boss.

Ziva-propisms: Ziva says there are a few strings being “tugged.”  She means “pulled.”

Tony Awards: McGee gets in a couple.  He uses the “Home again, home again,” line from Blade Runner (1982).  He also asks, “What’s in the truck?” with the same inflection Brad Pitt uses to ask, “What’s in the box?” in Se7en (1995).  He mentions First Blood (1982), Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (1991), and The World’s Greatest Athlete (1973).  This last one, starring a young Jan Michael Vincent, sends Tony off on a tangent about Vincent’s role as Stringfellow Hawke in the 80s-tastic heavily-armed helicopter drama Airwolf.

And naturally, Tony references the song Barracuda by Heart.

Abby Road: Abby’s side-hustle is trying to get McGee out from under Gibbs’s thumb.

McNicknames: None.

Ducky Tales: Ducky discourses on how both Eastern cultures and Western cultures view the saving of a life as creating a power bond between savior and saved.

The Rest of the Story:

-Gibbs has never been one for locking the front door.  But I guess he changed his mind after Allison Hart showed up for some nookie at the end of last episode.  Masquerade, Episode 7.14.

-Gibbs and Fornell have been chatting in the elevator since Enigma, Episode 1.15, back when the two were a lot more adversarial than they are now.  This was also the show’s first stalled elevator conversation.

-At the end of Corporal Punishment, Gibbs gives Werth one of Gibbs’s medals.  It was established in Model Behavior, Episode 3.11, that Gibbs couldn’t give less of a shit about being honored and that Tony holds onto all of his plaques and medals.

-Werth and Ziva have a special bond.  It at least has something to do with her kicking his ass even when he was pumped full of juice.  She took her licks doing it, though.  Corporal Punishment.

-Bert the Farting Hippo first appeared in Twilight, Episode 2.23.  My quick search indicates that we haven’t seen him since Judgment Day, Episode 5.18, but don’t hold me to that.

-Abby’s reference to McGee being in Africa pertains to McGee and Tony traveling to North Africa to intentionally get captured and rescue Ziva from terrorists.  Truth or Consequences, Episode 7.1.

-Rule #27: Two ways to follow someone.  One way they never notice you.  The second way, they only notice you.    

-As we learned in Twilight, Episode 2.23, Fornell is married to Gibbs’s ex-wife. 

-Tony had a hamster named Ferrari.  Magnum drove a Ferrari on the show Magnum P.I., and it has been established that Tony is a fan of the show.  Switch, Episode 3.5, Frame-Up, 3.9. He was such a fan of Airwolf that, on an impromptu undercover assignment, he introduced himself to the suspect as “Stringfellow.” Dead Man Talking, Episode 1.19.

-The last two times Ziva went undercover, it didn’t go well. See Recoil, Episode 5.16 and Good Cop, Bad Cop, Episode 7.4..  Good to see she’s not scarred by the experiences.  Actually, Recoil is an awful episode that did the character no favors.  Maybe the show also pretends it never happened.

-Tony has contacts in Ohio because he attended college at Ohio State University.  See e.g., SWAK, Episode 2.22.

-Given how much horror Tony’s and Ziva’s mutual jealousy culminated in at the end of last season, you’d think they wouldn’t wander down that path again.

-Werth may have defied my expectations and lived through the episode, but, probably much to Tony’s relief, he is never seen again.  I like to think he and Heatherton’s widow hit it off, he got a job, married her, and he’s happily ensconced in Cleveland.

Casting Call: Devoisier is Peter Woodward, who has a ton of credits on IMDB.com, and who put on a fantastic performance here. But I don’t recognize him from anything.

Man, This Show Is Old: I don’t think anything overtly dates the episode.

MVP: Gibbs and Fornell can share it.

Rating: ETA: Thanks to the Coronavirus quarantine, racing cross-country is more popular than ever in 2020.

This was another episode from this season that is largely saved in the last few minutes.  I like the Damon Werth character, but he can’t carry an episode at the level that was required here.  And, while Werth’s mental regression since the last time the team encountered him is realistic (particularly in light of him losing his second career), the show only dealt with it in a cursory fashion.

Also, I would have liked more explanation as to how Devoisier got the drop on two ex-Marines so as to roofie one and kidnap, torture, and kill another. Presumably, other arrests were made since I doubt Devoisier did all that solo.

However, while Devoisier ended up being an obvious suspect in Heatherton’s murder, it was an enjoyable ending “twist” all the same.  Indeed, Devoisier is only obvious because Szwed and Lucas are too obvious, and there’s nobody else (Werth has been given too much development to turn bad without equal development in the other direction).  And the show did such a good job making Devoisier likable that I found myself satisfied with the ending even once I saw it coming.

Not great, but not bad.  Six Palmers.

Next Time: The show begins what will become an awkward and implausible trend of having all roads lead to Gibbs, as we meet his mother-in-law. 

Alex Barfield is an attorney in Atlanta, Georgia. When not practicing law or writing about NCIS, he chases his children around, volunteers at his church, and looks for other television shows to obsess over. He can be reached at albarfie@gmail.com.