A Year of NCIS, Day 154: Mother’s Day (Episode 7.16)

Episode: Mother’s Day, Episode 7.16

Air Date: March 2, 2010.

The Victim: Captain Joseph Norton, USN.  Also, the very concept of justice.

Emotionally Traumatized, But Ultimately Irrelevant, Witness Who Finds the Body: A man and a woman are walking on some kind of paved bike trail while the woman sings to an infant.  The dad would like to stop walking but the mom thinks the baby will wake up and boy do I not miss these days.  They hear three gunshots, and damn that gunman, the baby woke up!

There are second-level consequences too.  An older woman is holding an older man, who is lying prone on the ground.  She is yelling for help.

Time for credits.

Plot Recap: In the squad room, Tony walks in very happy. He is excited about seeing a Kurosawa film festival.  Ziva is reading the Declaration of Independence on account of she is boring.  And also studying for her citizenship test.  McGee arrives.  He was up late wiring his entire apartment to a single remote control.  Coffee would probably help, but coffee is for closers.  Gibbs announces a body and declines to allow McGee the time to fuel up.

At the scene, the Norfolk Police detective, Detective McCadden,  is familiar with our leads, but he has not appeared on-screen before.  He seems especially familiar with, and enamored of, Ziva. Detective McCadden identifies as witnesses our happy family and the victim’s fiancée, currently seated hunched on a bench and giving a statement to a local LEO. 

Ducky arrives, yelling at Palmer about texting.  Palmer seems to be setting up a date with a girl who works in a funeral home, and when he announces that she said “Yes,” Ducky is excited for him.  Tony tries to give Palmer hook-up advice, but Gibbs would like the team to focus.

McGee IDs the body as Captain Joseph Norton.  There’s still cash in his wallet.  But there’s an empty ring box.  Ducky notes the wounds to the torso and the loss of blood.  He starts to call out TOD, and Gibbs points out the witness.  Heh.  Ducky replies that these scenes usually don’t come with witnesses to the actual murder.  In fact, we have a whole section of this blog devoted to that concept.

Ziva is interviewing the witness when Gibbs walks over.  She goes to make the introduction and both Gibbs and the woman look shocked.  Gibbs flashes back to a sad-looking younger (but still old) woman holding a crying baby.  In the present, she calls him Jethro and he says, “Hey, Joann.”  Ziva asks the obvious question, and Gibbs identifies her as Joann Fielding, “My mother-in-law.”  “Ex-mother-in-law,” she grimly corrects.  “Shannon’s mom,” Gibbs clarifies; “Kelly’s grandmother,” Joann adds.  Unsurprisingly, they haven’t seen each other since the girls’ funeral.  Well, unsurprising to everyone except Ziva, based on the look on her face.

Back at HQ, the field agents gossip.  This time, Gibbs is nice enough to tell them he’s listening when he sneaks up on them.  McGee reports that the cameras didn’t pick up anything, so it stands to reason the assailant knew where they were located.  He also backgrounds the victim.  Captain Norton was assigned to the Navy Supply Corps, had a spotless record, and was six months from retirement.  He was engaged to Joann, but never married before that.  Tony describes the missing ring, says they have a BOLO on the stone, and that Detective McCadden is checking with local fences.  Gibbs gives the rare “Good work” compliment to Tony.  Causing everyone to stare.

Vance breaks up the party by mentioning that Joann is in the conference room.  He’d like to speak to Gibbs afterward.  Probably about the vicious conflict of interest that probably shouldn’t be tolerated.  Gibbs tells Ziva to let him know when the sketch artist arrives, puts McGee on the finding the murder weapon, and keeps Tony on the ring search.  Gibbs leaves, and the agents express their belief that someone should maybe monitor Gibbs since he is being nice to them. Vance smirks and says it’s not really their decision.

In the conference room, Joann insults Gibbs for his shitty taste in coffee.  She asks about Jackson, Gibbs’s father.  He asks about his former father-in-law and finds out that they divorced about two years after Shannon and Kelly were murdered.  Joann says things weren’t the same afterward.  Joann asks about Gibbs and then, without waiting for him to answer, tells him he didn’t have to go through it alone.  Gibbs says he called, and she never called him back.  She doesn’t remember it that way, but Gibbs has shit to do and arguing with an old lady isn’t on the list.  He asks her what happened with Captain Norton.  They went to a friend’s retirement party- for an admiral.  Then he wanted to ask her something and took her down by the water where he proposed.  She was looking at the ring on her finger when a stranger walked up, pulled a gun.  She describes the guy as white and in his twenties.  She says Captain Norton went for the gun too fast for her to react.  She screamed and wanted to help but froze.

Ziva interrupts to announce the sketch artist.  Gibbs takes Joann’s arm and asks if she’s OK to do this.  She says she is, so he leaves.

In Vance’s office, Gibbs arrives for his talking-to.  Gibbs obviously knows the score and cues up the dance.  Vance asks him to step aside, Gibbs refuses.  Vance points out, quite correctly, that it’s Gibbs’s ex-mother-in-law and another violent crime and there’s no way Gibbs isn’t affected.  Gibbs says Shannon and Kelly died a long time ago.  Vance calls that “BS.”  Gibbs goes “off the record,” whatever that means in a closed-door conversation with his boss that isn’t being recorded.  He says he needs to do this for Shannon.  “She would have wanted it.”  Vance is a remarkably easy room and just agrees, only warning that if Gibbs’s judgment comes into question even once…Gibbs says he’ll take himself off the case.  Then they measure over who will take him off the case.  To the amusement of the audience, all of whom know Gibbs isn’t coming off the case no matter what procedurally horrifying compromises he makes.

Gibbs is washing his face in the bathroom, and flashes back.  We get young Gibbs, again played by Sean Harmon.  He and young Shannon and young(er) Joann are arguing over Gibbs getting transferred away from Joann.  Which seems like an odd thing for a Marine family to be arguing about.  “Oh shit, I got orders; we have to move!” is the one thing in the military that I would think wouldn’t be up for discussion.  This just makes everybody who isn’t Gibbs seem unreasonable.  I guess an argument could be made that Gibbs re-upped and was cagey about where he’d get stationed (or the Marines jerked him around to get him to re-up), but either way, Marines get transferred.  It’s a thing.  Young Gibbs ends the argument by taking a sobbing baby Kelly away from Joann (sort of forcefully) and piling the family (sans carseat for baby Kelly) into the shittiest, rustiest truck I’ve ever seen.  And off they go.

Tony finds Gibbs woolgathering and announces that Detective McCadden is in the squad room.  Perhaps realizing he has interrupted…something…Tony asks if Gibbs needs anything.  Gibbs, always appreciative of the solicitude of others, says, “For you to leave.”

Detective McCadden and Tony are measuring when Gibbs arrives and tells everyone to play nice.  Detective McCadden has some issues with Joann’s witness statement.  She told both the PD and NCIS that she had the ring on at the time of the robbery.  But, per Detective McCadden, her fingers are covered up with arthritis and he doubts she could have put on a size 4 ring.  Gibbs bristles and Detective McCadden also asks about a GSR test, but McGee thinks that would be useless given Joann’s proximity to the gun shot. 

McGee downloads the sketch Joann provided and the team begins running facial rec.  Detective McCadden offers to help with BOLOs and is impressed that hits are already coming in on facial rec.  Gibbs has had his fill and says, “Get out of here, McCadden.”  Gibbs is clearly troubled by the sketch, though.

So, he puts it in front of Joann in the conference room.  She swears it’s the perp and Gibbs identifies it as “Kyle Buckley.  I went to high school with Kyle Buckley.”  Joann is insistent.  Gibbs says that Buckley died in a car accident three year previous.  The scene ends on Gibbs asking whether Joann really saw anything or not.

Tony drops Joann off at home.  She has a nice place.  She tells Tony she knows he’s a good man because Gibbs doesn’t trust many people.  So, naturally, Tony abuses that trust by working Joann for info on Gibbs’s past.  Joann says she always liked Gibbs and was very happy when he and Shannon got married, but she never understood him.  They made a nice family.  Then everything changed.  Even Tony knows when to peel off and they part ways.

Back at HQ, McGee reports that the team acquired a laptop and some cell phones from Captain Norton’s residence.  Two of the phones were burn phones.  Tony asks the obvious question as to why a Navy captain would need a burn phone.  McGee says he bought them in Arizona while assigned to a carrier battle group in the South American territory.  He was mostly calling Nogales, a US/Mexican border town. And a key base of operations for the Reynosa drug cartel.

Gibbs asks about the laptop.  McGee cracked it and reports that Captain Norton had three different Swiss bank accounts.  And $10 million.  A nice tidy little drug smuggling nest egg, that Gibbs surmises ended when the Captain retired and was no longer taking trips to South America for the Navy.  McGee found ten years of encrypted emails from Mexico as further corroboration.  Gibbs wondered if someone wanted their money back and killed Captain Norton for refusing.

In autopsy, Ducky is angry over Palmer’s shitty cologne.  Gibbs enters and notes that autopsy smells like a French whorehouse.  Palmer takes his lumps until Ducky discretely disposes of him by directing an errand to Abby’s lab.  He then gets down to business with Gibbs, calling Captain Norton’s COD as a bullet to the left lower ventricle. But that’s not why Ducky called.  The captain’s gut was inflamed with a parasite from Mexico.  Which is additional confirmation for what the team already knows.

Upstairs, Abby is ballistic-testing by shooting at mannequins.  She gives Gibbs spatter pattern results for Joann and she doesn’t think Joann was standing where Joann claimed to be standing when the gun went off.  They head to the lab proper, where Major Mass Spec has gotten the results from the fibers under Joann’s fingernails.  It’s a Navy peacoat.  But with some additives that indicate time on an active carrier flight deck during takeoff.  The fibers are specifically from epaulets.  Pea coats don’t have epaulets, but officer bridge coats do.

Joann is sitting on a bench by the river near the crime scene.  Gibbs joins.  He announces that her story doesn’t add up.  Joann doesn’t budge and says the man she loved died in her arms, so what does Gibbs want from her?  Respect and honesty are his answers.  She dodges on honesty but says she has always given him respect.  Gibbs says maybe when Shannon was alive.  Joann decides to remove the kid gloves and says that in her family, one has to earn respect and, when the girls died, Gibbs did nothing.  Little does she know… 

Gibbs stares at her for a minute but decides he doesn’t give a shit and changes the subject.  He asks if she knew her fiancée dealt drugs.  She calls it ridiculous.  Gibbs says he can prove it with the captain’s millions in the bank from the Reynosa cartel, “The same man who killed your daughter.” Joann tells him to shut up and Gibbs says that Shannon, Kelly, Mexico, and Captain Norton have one thing in common: Joann.  Then she slaps him right in his face and says Gibbs is the one who took her family from her.  He makes the, again, obvious point that he didn’t have a choice.  Then she blames him for their deaths.  Gibbs doesn’t bite.  This might have worked in Season 3 or even Season 4, but Gibbs, while far from at peace, is at peace enough to deflect these assaults.  She demands to know why he didn’t protect their girls.  Gibbs re-focuses and says this is about the murder of Captain Norton.  Joann defiantly tells him to go do his “damn job.  Nothing ever stopped you before.  Nothing’s gonna stop you now.”

Shit, what are we gonna do for twenty-one more minutes?

Tony is watching a samurai movie on his computer.  Gibbs calls.  We only hear Tony’s side, but Tony reports to McGee that they are to check financial and phone records for Joann.

Gibbs returns and McGee reports plenty of phone calls by Joann to the US side of Nogales, Arizona.  None to Mexico, though.  The number in AZ is for a retired cop named Hendricks who locates missing persons.  She was paying the guy on and off for two years to the tune of $28k.  Gibbs tells Tony and Ziva to go to AZ and chat with Hendricks. 

We shift to Arizona.  Tony and Ziva arrive at a small house in the middle of nowhere.  Nobody answers the knock.  Ziva sees that someone has broken off something inside the lock.  They kick in the door and find a dead Hendricks.

Now Gibbs has Joann in interrogation.  He shows her a photo of Hendricks’s corpse.  He also tells her he disabled the interrogation room video.  She continues to be evasive.  And spins some nutty yarn about hiring the PI to find Captain Norton after she met him in Baja and lost his number.  “You took out a bank loan to go on a second date?” Gibbs laughingly asks, to the chagrin of his mother-in-law.  She stays feisty, so he makes clear he’s unimpressed with her amateur hour antics, the dead people, and the easily followed trail she’s leaving while messing with very dangerous people.  Gibbs says he doesn’t know what Joann did or why she did it, but, because of Shannon, he’ll give her a chance.  He asks if she wants his help or not.  When she declines to respond, he says, “Good luck,” and leaves.

Gibbs is at home, looking at photos of his family in happier times.  There’s a knock at the door.  It’s his annoying lawyer semi-hook-up/stalker Allison Hart.  Who at least knocked instead of breaking in this time.  See Masquerade, Episode 7.14.  She’s still calling him “Mr. Gibbs,” and not “Agent Gibbs,” or “Special Agent Gibbs,” or “Jethro” or “Sugarlumps.”  So that’s weird.  He offers her a beer, which is as close to hospitality as he gets most of the time. 

He heads to the kitchen.  She talks shop while quietly going through his family photos.  He returns with beer and cold pizza and asks if she’s still offering volunteer legal services.  Guess we know where this is headed.  As one might expect, Gibbs’s new hook-up is not enthused about representing his old mother-in-law.  But she takes the file when he hands it over.  Then he says, “Turn out the lights when you leave,” and walks out of the room, which made me laugh out loud.  He at least looks back in when she calls it the worst date she’s ever had.

Ducky is doing the autopsy of Hendricks the PI.  Gibbs arrives to shut down Palmers verbalized dreams of bringing a(nother) girl back to autopsy after a date.  Turns out our victim was baked to death.  He was held in place to thirst to death.  Ducky typically finds that cartels are usually more public in their executions, but they made an exception here. 

McGee calls to say they found Captain Norton’s phone in a nearby dumpster.  There were two calls earlier that day to the same number: Lt. David Shankton, who is also registered as having a gun of the same make and model as the gun used to kill Captain Norton. 

Cut to interrogation, where Lt. Shankton is surprised Captain Norton is dead.  He just saw him at the admiral’s retirement dinner.  Lt. Shankton served under the captain, but they met in Mexico.  Lt. Shankton used to work fishing charters, and Captain Norton inspired him to join the Navy.  Tony is touched.  So touched he compared the two men’s credit card records and determined they were both in the same town at the same time in Mexico 18 different times.  And it turns out that town was a Reynosa base.  Lt. Shankton doesn’t budge, so Gibbs asks about his .9mm.  He says someone stole it from his house.  At that point, Tony leans in with the drug connection and accuses Lt. Shankton of offing his partner for not sharing the cash.  He takes some material from the lieutenant’s coat.  Lt. Shankton is nervous now and claims someone is trying to frame him. 

Outside, Tony thinks our perp is the lieutenant.  I guess he (and the show) forgot about Joann’s sketch session.  Or explaining how Joann wouldn’t recognize a co-worker from the party she just attended shooting her husband…and at the level that she’d provide a sketch of a wholly different (conveniently dead) person.  Gibbs tells Tony to get the samples to Abby and then to go keep an eye on Joann.

Tony arrives at Joann’s house to find Joann with Hart.  Hart at least calls Tony “Agent.”  And apprises Tony of the attorney-client relationship as she puts Joann in her car to take her somewhere “safe.”  Then she forbids Tony to speak to Joann and bids him good night.  Joann jauntily, but not maliciously, waves out the window.

Back at HQ, Gibbs visits Vance.  Detective McCadden is there.  Both want to know why Gibbs is holding Lt. Shankton.  Gibbs notes motive, weapon, and the cartel connection.  Detective McCadden clearly likes Joann and both he and Vance think Joann set up Lt. Shankton.  Vance even lays the cards on the table and says he knows both men are linked to the cartel that caused Shannon’s and Kelly’s deaths.  Gibbs suggests this would make Joann awfully clever: “My mother-in-law, the vigilante.”  Vance is not impressed with Gibbs’s smarm and says, “Go ahead Gibbs, cross it.”  Detective McCadden is wondering if he should leave.  Vance reminds Gibbs about their deal re: his judgment.  And then he asks if Gibbs will be able to arrest Joann.

In autopsy, Ducky reveals he took another look at the evidence.  Ducky believes that Joann was facing Captain Norton when the shots were fired.  Moreover, Ducky says he is confident she fired the shots.

Back to Gibbs’s living room where he’s drinking with Hart.  He wants to talk to Joann alone.  Hart says no.  For obvious reasons.  Gibbs presses and says they’re family.  Hart says she’ll advise her client against it, but it’s up to her.  They philosophize a bit, but it’s the same shit we’ve heard before.

Gibbs and Joann drink bourbon in the basement.  He tells her he knows everything.  She knew she couldn’t get Shannon’s and Kelly’s real killer, so she went after Captain Norton because he was guilty by association.  He tells her about Hendricks and the Reynosa cartel catching him snooping around and killing him.  So, Joann found Captain Norton and charmed him and killed one guy and framed another and planned it all like a pro.  “Really, are you that smart?” Gibbs asks.  Joann claims she’s just a mother who lost everything she loved.  Gibbs isn’t impressed since Captain Norton didn’t kill Shannon and Kelly.  Then Gibbs drops the hammer he’s been holding on to: “But I know who did.”  We get the ubiquitous flashback of Gibbs sniping Pedro Hernandez in Mexico (complete with the following scream of anguish, so viewers always know this wasn’t easy).

Back in the present, Gibbs asks, “How’d it feel?  Satisfying?”  She hugs his neck and tells him how it happened.  How Captain Norton proposed, and they were embracing, and she said Shannon’s and Kelly’s names, and pulled the trigger, one, two, three times and watched him die.  She says, “Nobody ever need know.”  Then she compares them and says they did what they did “for them.”  Gibbs takes Joann by the hands, stands her up, and tells her she is under arrest.  He recites the charges while cuffing her.  

Then, Hart appears on the stairs, and tells Gibbs he just interrogated her client without reading her Miranda rights, and coerced a confession.  She threatens to pursue legal action if Gibbs doesn’t release Joann.  Gibbs says, “The case will never stick, right?’  Hart affirms, “You just made a very big mistake.”  Gibbs manages not to shrug and says, “You won.”  “Did I?” asks Hart, suddenly realizing she has been played.  Gibbs tells Joann to take care of herself.  Joann touches his face and says, “You too, Jethro.”

In the squad room, the other agents look on as Vance grimly approaches Gibbs.  Gibbs notes that Abby matched the fibers to Lt. Shankton’s coat, and that he had about $10 million worth of motive.  Gibbs figures a drug dealer like that deserves to do time.  McGee, perhaps being a moron; but more likely being a bit too noble for this place on this day asks about Joann.  Vance announces that Joann is no longer a suspect or a person of interest.  Tony asks if they can go home.  Gibbs dismisses them, and he and Vance nod silently at each other.       

We end on a light note.  As the agents are leaving, Palmer comes up to introduce his date.  Her name is Breena, and she’s a very attractive blonde.  So attractive that Tony, seeing the autopsy gremlin supping after midnight on a such a dish, declares, “Life isn’t fair.”  She asks, re: Palmer, “Isn’t he the cutest thing ever?” and Brian Dietzen gives a brilliant cheese grin that can only say, “Yes!”  The agents just shrug and bail, and I’m sure Tony kicks a tire or something on the way to the parking lot.

Gibbs is in his living room, reading his mother-in-law’s file in front of a fire.  Then he tosses the file onto the fire and watches it burn while some female folk-singer croons in the background.

Quotables:

(1) Allison Hart: Crazy day at the office. Amazing how people keep suing each other even in the worst economy in years.

Gibbs: Yeah? Better than them killing each other.

Allison Hart: Oh, they do that, too, when they lose.

(2) Joann: Is this your personal torture chamber?

Gibbs: The only person I ever torture down here is me.

                                     -Perhaps the most succinct, yet apt, description of Gibbs’s basement ever.

Ziva-propisms: Ziva would like to pass her citizenship test with swimming colors.  Or flying colors.  Per Ziva, any colors will do.  In one of her better ones, she describes reading about the Kennedy assassination and describes Lee Harvey Oswald as shooting from the “book suppository” as opposed to the “book depository.”

Tony Awards: Tony mentions Seven Samurai (1954), Hidden Fortress (1958), and Rashomon (1950) as part of the film festival he wants to attend.

Abby Road: Abby wasn’t much in this one.  Which is surprising, given that one of Gibbs’s relatives was hanging around, and Abby is usually second only to Tony in trying to dig up dirt on Gibbs.  I guess since this relative was guilty as hell and Abby almost certainly knows it, that might not have been appropriate.

McNicknames: Gibbs calls McGee “Butternuts.”  Which is random.  Tony calls him McNosy.

Ducky Tales: Ducky took second place in a poetry competition when he was fifteen.

The Rest of the Story:

-Ziva has to be a citizen to be a full NCIS agent.  She has been studying for her test since Outlaws and In-Laws, Episode 7.6.

-Gibbs’s wife Shannon and his daughter Kelly were killed by Pedro Hernandez, then described as a drug dealer who did not want Shannon to testify against him for killing a sailor.  The entire heartbreaking story is told in Hiatus Part One, Episode 3.23.

-I get that it’s TV and Mark Harmon is too old to play himself in a flashback to 1985 or so when show continuity says he’s 27.  But it’s funny to see Sean Harmon playing Gibbs in a flashback where Kelly is 1-2 after having seen Mark Harmon play Gibbs in a flashback when Kelly is 8-9. Hiatus, Episode 3.23; Requiem, Episode 5.7.  That was a quick metamorphosis.

-Oh, Detective McCadden.  The best way to get on Tony’s bad side is to make eyes at Ziva.  It’s a character trait that I’d hoped was gone after the end of last season but seems to be reasserting itself in recent episodes.

-I believe this is the show’s first reference to the Reynosa drug cartel.  Pedro Hernandez, the man who killed Shannon and Kelly Gibbs, has made a gradual evolution over the course of the show from a dealer who killed a sailor (the crime Shannon Gibbs witnessed and to which she was going to testify) to a drug lord and now to a drug lord working with a specified cartel, the Reynosas.  It’s almost like the show is trying to set up a plot point for future episodes. 

-Don’t know too many characters who would have the guts to slap Leroy Jethro Gibbs in his face.

-Tony hates Arizona.  See South by Southwest, Episode 6.17.

-Jimmy asks Ducky if he can bring his date to autopsy after dinner and, before Ducky can answer, Gibbs says, “No.”  Probably remembering all of Season 4, when Palmer and Agent Lee were constantly finding new and different places to have filthy office sex.

-Gibbs makes an early remark about trying to contact Joann over the years.  That seems out of character, so one wonders if the show threw in that line to make the point that Gibbs tried to tell Joann about killing Pedro Hernandez years ago.  Since this would have averted her own dark path, the show may want Gibbs to have some plausible deniability on the ultimate consequences of his not coming clean with her and giving her some closure back in the day.

-While Detective McCadden has never appeared before, he will appear again.

-Breena will also appear again.

-Joann Fielding will not. 

Casting Call: Joann Fielding was played by Gena Rowlands.  She has been around forever, will turn 90 in a couple of months, and has screen credits dating back to 1954.  The main thing I associate her with is the late 90s Sandra Bullock film Hope Floats (1998).

Man, This Show Is Old: There’s nothing about this one that stands out as dated.

MVP: Palmer.  For out-punting his coverage.  And for being the only NCIS team member not tainted by this ridiculousness.

Rating:  I genuinely hate this episode.  It’s enjoyable from 50,000 feet if you turn off your brain.  But, even in being entertaining, it manages to cheapen everyone.  Joann is unequivocally guilty, not just in a legal sense, but in a moral sense.  As Gibbs correctly notes, this wasn’t a revenge killing of anyone who had anything to do with the deaths of Shannon and Kelly Gibbs.  This was anger and hate directed at a randomly selected target that had an unrelated association with the killers.  I’m not going to argue that Captain Norton didn’t have it coming, but this is the kind of random vigilantism that even I can’t support. 

And while Lt. Shankton also had it coming…well…he’ll beat murder one (see below) so the frame-up was only aspirational.  And the evidence NCIS uncovered on the drugs should be sufficient to at least end his career.  So that’s not as big a deal.

Either way, it’s galling when Gibbs breaks every rule in the book to cover for his mother-in-law’s murder of one man and attempted framing of another.  And does so in such a way that everyone around him, including a Norfolk police detective, knows what happened.  I understand that loyalty is Gibbs’s schtick, and I also understand that loyalty to Shannon’s memory would be particularly powerful.  And I also understand that it would be equally out-of-character for Gibbs to do nothing and let his mother-in-law swing.  And I understand that makes for compelling drama…particularly when you consider that Joann only enacted this plan because she had no idea that Gibbs killed Pedro Hernandez nearly two decades ago.  And I can see why that would make him feel selfish/guilty- if he’d just had a basement/bourbon session with her, she never embarks on this path. 

But, in dealing with all of this, Gibbs’s moves are so out in the open that he makes everyone, except Palmer, an obvious and ascertainable accomplice to his crimes.  Abby knows who killed Captain Norton.  Ducky knows who killed Captain Norton.  McGee at least suspects who killed Captain Norton, and Ziva is no dummy.  Tony suspected Lt. Shankton and I guess we can assume from past episodes that confirmation bias will prevent the character from thinking too hard about it, and thus protect his integrity that way.  Most importantly, Vance knows who killed Captain Norton and, more than all the rest, bears ultimate responsibility for this.  For all his tough talk at the beginning of the episode, Vance let Gibbs do exactly what Vance feared Gibbs would do.  And then lets him off the hook with barely a grunt.

And finally, there’s Alison Hart.  Despite all her high-minded talk, Gibbs got her just as dirty as he is.  

I get why Gibbs did what he did.  But this decision taints the character at such a level that it would have been better to just not make the episode.  Knowing, but not entirely remembering, what’s coming, it’s possible that the show is setting up these moral failings for payback (or payoff).  But either way, nobody comes out looking rosy.

The plot, at least to my eye, also made a couple of glaring mistakes with regard to the evidence.  The idea that Joann, the eyewitness to the crime, saw the perp well enough to provide details to a sketch artist, but didn’t recognize a guy she saw at a party that same night, is probably exculpatory on its face.  Certainly, she’s not a reliable witness given that she provided a sketch of a completely different guy.  Maybe that was intentional by the writers, so we don’t worry about Lt. Shankton getting the death penalty for a murder we know he didn’t commit. 

More troubling from a scripting standpoint is that the script doesn’t mention Joann getting close enough to the perp to get leavings from his jacket under her fingernails, as Abby found.  So, the primary evidence that puts Lt. Shankton at the scene isn’t even supported by the script’s account of the murder.

Finally, none of this saves Joann.  I’m not totally sure how the jurisdiction works, but I don’t think Norfolk is estopped from bringing a case for Captain Norton’s murder if NCIS decides not to.  So, if Lt. Shankton is acquitted, or even pleads to things that aren’t murder, I think the Norfolk DA can go after Joann.  And there’s plenty to nail her with even without the suppressed confession to Gibbs.  Even assuming Gibbs burned up all of Abby’s and Ducky’s findings, there are going to be a lot of questions when the Norfolk DA comes sniffing around for the file.  Or when he/she simply subpoenas Ducky and Abby to testify.  Gibbs decided to leave an awful lot to chance, and potentially hang his friends and co-workers out to dry if things don’t go his way.  And all over a murder that wasn’t justified in any way.

Just awful.  Two Palmers, and that’s only because it wasn’t painful to watch in real time.

Next Time: A fun little mystery involving a Marine who returns to life, only to get shot again.

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.