A Year of NCIS, Day 8: Minimum Security (Episode 1.8)

Episode: 1.8, Minimum Security

Air Date:  November 25, 2003

The Victim:  Petty Officer Second Class Khalil Sa’id, a translator at the U.S. base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Emotionally Traumatized, But Ultimately Irrelevant, Witness Who Finds the Body:  Some biker is taking his girl on a ride when his bike breaks down.  As in Hung Out to Dry, we have a fella making time with a lady when her father wouldn’t approve, and she’s desperate to get home before dad finds out.  Then a car comes along and smashes the guy’s bike.  He mad, but you can’t kill a dead guy.

Come on, you know you can’t hear this theme music enough…

Plot Summary:  We’re moving quickly, and already in autopsy with our victim after the credits.  He died of massive internal bleeding in his abdominal cavity.  Caused by having swallowed some emeralds.

Our victim is Khalil Sa’id, a translator at Gitmo, and a naturalized U.S. citizen born in Egypt. In his personal effects, Abby finds the scent of cologne on his shirts, half a box of condoms, and a number of letters postmarked from Gitmo by Special Agent Paula Cassidy.  Gibbs decides that NCIS is going to Cuba!  They book a priority Navy transport, which Gibbs thinks will involve riding on a supply pallet like real soldiers.  He’s not happy when they get a Navy Gulfstream.  Tony, however, is ecstatic.

Paula Cassidy is an interrogator at Gitmo.  Gibbs stresses that she is not to know Sa’id is dead.  Gibbs is suspicious of Paula because of the letters.  When they arrive, Paula is suspicious because she’s suddenly being frozen out of everything, and her interrogation transcripts have been pulled.

Abby finds another scent on Sa’id’s clothes.  It is definitely feminine, and Abby gets permission from a too-trusting Gibbs to shop for comparator perfumes.  $1500.00 later…

The team arrives at their lodgings, Kate and Tony fight over a room, but Gibbs steals it from them and dumps Tony’s luggage outside.  This is just the beginning of his rampage this episode. 

In one of the show’s better comedic moments, Tony wakes up to see a gigantic iguana sitting placidly on the pillow next to him.  He jumps, up and actually pulls a gun on the thing and yells, “Halt!”  This brings in Gibbs and Kate in their pjs, guns drawn on a lizard.  It’s quality.

Abby has a friend who knows gems.  He appraises the emeralds, and tells her they were mined in Afghanistan.

Back in Cuba, we meet Bill the translator, who brings over Paula’s interrogation transcripts.  The team focuses its investigation on Nasser Al Jazair, one of Paula’s subjects.  Gibbs assigns Tony to look into Paula.  Tony reports back that Paula has a lot of male friends and hangs out at a local club.  So Gibbs sends Tony to observe Paula in her native environment, but tells him to drink “sarsaparilla.”  No booze.

We then get a back and forth scene between Gibbs interrogating Nasser, and Tony at the club with Paula.

During the interrogation, Nasser wants to know where Paula is.  Gibbs doesn’t comply, but tells Nasser that Sa’id is dead.  Gibbs also tells Nasser how Sa’id died, shows him a photo of the emeralds, and says he thinks Sa’id got the emeralds from Nasser.  Nasser tries to end the interrogation, by asking to go back to his cell, but  Gibbs sends him to isolation.  This makes him agitated as he says Paula promised him minimum security.

Meanwhile, Tony meets Paula at the bar, while drinking root beer.  She tries to interrogate him, seemingly but wants nothing to do with his flirting.  But that’s just part of the game.  She dances with some guys and wanders back.  She tells Tony she likes the game.  Tony disregards Gibbs’s orders about drinking on duty, and asks her to dance.

Kate calls in the middle of a dance and Tony is back on duty.  He tells Paula she’s back on duty too and takes her back to the house where the agents are staying.  Gibbs leans on Paula and wants to know what’s going on with her and Sa’id.  She explains the envelopes as asking Sa’id to do a mail drop for her on his trip to the States since mail is slow out of Gitmo.  Gibbs tells Paula that Sa’id is dead and how.  Paula angrily allows Gibbs to open the letters, and also allows Tony to search her apartment.  Tony says “Sorry, Paula.”  Gibbs tells Tony and Kate to search Sa’id’s apartment too.

Gibbs reads Paula’s letters and realizes there’s nothing to them.  Then, hilariously, he tells Paula to take the chip off her shoulder.  Which is funny, because Gibbs walking onto her turf, freezing her out, and treating her like a suspect is what put the chip on her shoulder. This is what the kids call gaslighting, yes?

Tony and Kate get to the apartments and determine that Sa’id had a key to Paula’s apartment.  But Paula does not have one to his.  Per Kate, women like to have sex in their own beds. Gibbs later backs her up on this.

Abby looks at Sa’id’s hard drive.  She tells Gibbs that Sa’id deleted gigs and gigs of porn from his hard drive.  Abby also tells Gibbs that she tagged one of the perfumes as a brand called Escada, and Tony mentions that he saw that brand in the search of Paula’s apartment.  Gibbs believes Paula and Sa’id were doing the “horizontal salsa,” but Tony claims the information he got from the club bartender demonstrates Paula always went home alone.  Gibbs pushes it a bit far when Tony opines that Sa’id copied Paula’s key without her knowing it, and says, “Now which brain is thinking that DiNozzo?”  Tony says he’s going to bed, slams his chair, and gives us an excellent exit.  He’s so pissed at Gibbs he can’t trust himself to stay in the room and Weatherly sells it.  Even Kate calls Gibbs out for being a bastard.  Gibbs tells Kate that romances between agents don’t work.  So, really, Gibbs is helping, and I don’t understand why his agents aren’t more appreciative.

Gibbs does say that his gut is telling him that Paula is telling the truth.  Not that this stops him from continuing to kick her while she’s down throughout the remainder of the episode.  Case in point, Gibbs meets Paula for coffee and they discuss Sa’id’s room key.  Gibbs continues to be a raging asshole, but he gets Paula to start thinking about why Sa’id would want to steal her key.  Paula begins putting it together, and talks about how she noticed that Sa’id’s conversations with Nasser seemed longer than the translations, and that she noted that in her computer.  Sa’id took leave and left for the U.S. the next day, so he clearly saw the note.  Paula starts to feel dumb now, and Gibbs keeps smirking.  You get the idea that this is Gibbs’s annoying idea of a teaching tool.  He really is like a senior partner at a law firm.  Gibbs shows Paula the emeralds, and tells her the theory about Sa’id getting them from Nasser.  Paula asks how Nasser would have gotten them in to Gitmo, and, again having harsh realizations of how much she has missed, answers her own question and tells Gibbs that they gave Nasser a laxative after he complained about constipation upon arrival. Mmmm…butt emeralds.

Abby continues to examine Sa’id’s porn and finds Easter eggs hidden inside porn that has bigger file sizes than it should. The porn contains hidden diagrams of the camp, documents in Arabic, etc.  Then, for no good reason other than it’s awesome, there’s a cut away scene with ominous music and a frame-by-frame zoom-in on the Iguana, sitting on a rock.

Translator Bill reviews the documents hidden in the porn and determines that one of Osama bin laden’s disavowed son-in-laws is present at Gitmo, and Nasser’s mission is to kill him.  The point of all this was for Nasser to obtain a transfer to minimum security for his “cooperation” with Paula, and then kill the son-in-law.  He paid Sa’id off in emeralds to help make this happen, and Sa’id took off when Paula got wise.  He just didn’t take proper care in how he hid his emeralds.

In order to find this son-in-law, Gibbs opts to take the path of craziest resistance and transfer Nasser to minimum security and let him show the way.  The head of base security’s response might as well be, “You want me to do what?!”  Gibbs, persuasively, argues that once the son-in-law knows Osama took a hit out on him, “He’ll sing like a bird in Islamic paradise and maybe that prevents another 9/11.”  Of course, it’s not like anybody has the sack to fire Gibbs if this kacks up, so I get the security head’s concern. 

But they need Nasser to buy the reason for the transfer.  Enter Paula to say she can sell it to him.  There are protests, but Paula admits she screwed up by letting slide her suspicions about the scheme being hatched right in front of her.  Ever helpful, Gibbs agrees that she screwed up.  But Gibbs, tiny warm heart beneath that angry, frozen exterior, loves a comeback story.  So he lets Paula have a shot at redemption.  Gibbs expresses hope that Paula is a good actress, and she pulls out as Exhibit 1 her having played Tony.  Tony is pretty bummed and even Kate feels bad for him.  Gibbs just piles on.  He brought extra helpings of charm to this episode.

Paula works Nasser in interrogation.  She tells him, over the protests of the translator, that Gibbs is a loose cannon and has been recalled.  Then she apologizes to Nasser, but also asks if he has a conscience and says she trusted him.  I’m not sure what the intended context there is, but she begins to leave, forcing Nasser to ask about his transfer.  Paula says she’ll see what she can do.

The team sets up the sting and move Nasser to minimum security.  They’ve got surveillance, they’ve got sharpshooters, they’ve got a tiny camera on Nasser’s prison duds.  They figure the hit will happen in the exercise yard. Sure enough, Nasser creates a distraction with a soccer ball, heads to the wrong barracks, and goes in for the kill on a prisoner  (who flinches hilariously and makes a child’s noise).  Paula gets there in time and shoots Nasser.  Tony would have killed him, but Paula figures being shot by a woman and failing the mission is way worse than dying and being a martyr. 

We end on Tony’s favorite Gulfstream.  Paula is with them, which, I guess means she’s being re-assigned.  Gibbs doesn’t give a shit, but Kate thinks Paula’s lonely, and Tony goes to sit with her and buck her up.  It looks like it’s going well when the credits roll.

Quotables:

(1) Tony: Miss me?

Paula: like Herpes. 

(2) [Tony previously apologized to Paula when Gibbs asked him to search her apartment]

Paula: Is this interrogation over?

Gibbs: Yeah.  Yeah, almost.  Why is Special Agent DiNozzo sorry?

Paula: He blew his chance to get laid.

(3) Gibbs: Why is it that women always want to fix what doesn’t need fixing?

Kate: Makes us feel all warm inside. 

Gibbs: So does scotch but it doesn’t cost you a house.

Time Until Sexual Harassment: 10:30.  But the shoe is on the other foot this episode.  After the Iguana’s attack, Tony is standing in the middle of his bedroom naked.  Kate sees Tony’s dong and winks at him.  Tony is embarrassed and quickly covers up.

43:05.  Gibbs asks Kate why women are always trying to fix things that don’t need fixing.

Ducky Tales: Ducky animatedly relates a story about a sumo wrestler with huge gall stones.

Not specifically a Ducky Tale, but Duck does go all “dirty old man” while looking at porn from Sa’id’s hard drive.  Abby notes that the files are too big, and Ducky says, “Not just the files…mmm.”  Dude, leave that shit to Tony.

The Rest of the Story:

– This episode, Tony spills Gibbs’s coffee.  He’s more menacing to Tony than he was to Kate in Sub Rosa.  “You’d better have a good reason for spilling my coffee.”

-This is Tony’s second tropical “vacation” this season.  He’s as excited about Gitmo as he was about Puerto Rico.

-According to Gibbs, he doesn’t use cologne because the women he dates find the smell of saw dust to be sexy.  Although he admits he doesn’t date many women.

-Gibbs likes Navy priority rides over flying commercial because, “It makes me feel like I’m back in the Corps.”  I believe this is the first overt mention of Gibbs having served as a marine.  Not that there weren’t all kinds of tells.

-Gibbs makes a reference to the cowboy Shane, as played by Alan Ladd.  Kate gets it, but Tony does not.  Tony will later be revealed as something of a cinephile, so apparently the writers came up with that secondary character trait later.  The reference also plays to the notion that Gibbs knows some pop culture.  If it’s old enough.  

-Tony also hasn’t seen The Maltese Falcon, which is really at odds with his later personality.

-I originally caught all of the Paula Cassidy episodes in almost exact reverse order.  So, watching Gibbs treat her like garbage while knowing she’s a solid agent is a little off-putting.

-Tony tells Kate he does not have any sisters.

-As in The Immortals, we have a sailor who had to clean some porn off his hard drive.

-It’s a little hard to dope out just from the dialogue and without knowledge of subsequent seasons, but this is the first reference that Ducky lives with his mother.  It sort of sounds like she’s still sexually active and has dudes over too.  Which is not a Ducky Tale anybody wanted.

-When Gibbs makes fun of Tony for defending Paula, and Kate calls him out on it, Gibbs says that romances between agents don’t work.  Kate asks if he knows this from experience, and he doesn’t answer.  He does know this from experience, but that story is a few seasons away.

-Does the military not record foreign language interrogations and QC them with other translators as a matter of course?  Seems like a pretty big omission.

-Tony and Paula have really good chemistry.  The episode leaves you wanting more for them.  But it’s not in the cards.

-Paula will re-appear once briefly this season, once in 2004, have a star turn in 2005, and appear once more in 2007.  She’ll cameo in 2015.  I really like her, I think she adds to the dynamic, and I’m a little surprised and disappointed she didn’t pop up more.

Casting Call: Special Agent Paula Cassidy is played by Jessica Steen.  If you watch Heartland, she’s a regular.  I only know her from NCIS.

Man, This Show is Old:  More like, man, we’ve had a prison at Guantanamo Bay for a long time.  Still, Gitmo was a much bigger deal in 2003 than it is now.  There was a lot of noise about human rights abuses and lack of due process during the Bush Administration.  So much so that Barack Obama campaigned in 2008 on shutting down the prison.  Then he won the election, got into office, presumably saw some classified material, and decided we should let Gitmo be Gitmo.  Since that time, nobody has said much about it.  If Presidents from two different parties think we’re keeping very bad people there, then we’re probably keeping very bad people there.

Tony is a little too psyched that the Gulfstream carrying the team to Cuba has a monitor that tells them the progress of the flight and the general weather conditions.  This sort of thing is standard in coach on all commercial flights now.  Oddly, I can remember watching a live football game on a commercial flight fairly early in the 2000s, so I’m not sure Tony’s excitement was warranted in 2003.  I’m particularly skeptical of his efforts at the end to use what might as well be a Delta air map to impress Paula.

Nasser is looking to kill one of Osama bin Laden’s sons-in law.  Osama bin Laden was a huge deal in 2003 on account of 9/11,  He’s not talked about so much in 2019 on account of being dead.  But it took the U.S. 6-7 seasons of this show’s run to find and kill the fucker.

Geez, Paula. Even in 2003, nobody wrote letters. Maybe they didn’t allow email at Gitmo?

VIP: The Iguana.  It’s not even close. 

Rating: Once again the ending is a little pat.  Nasser knows that Gibbs knows about the emeralds, so the idea that Gibbs’s superiors recalled him because they thought he was off on a wild goose chase is pretty ludicrous.  It’s not like the U.S. government is going to find smuggled emeralds in one of their Gitmo translators and decide they were naturally occurring.  Nasser is smart enough to know that, so he should have been skeptical of anything else that came out of Paula’s mouth regardless of how well-delivered.  Gibbs’s plan also depends on Nasser acting immediately once he’s in minimum security, when it would have made more sense for Nasser to bide his time and assess the landscape.

But these are problems only if you get out your magnifying glass.  And the character work papers over them.  In that regard, Gibbs is such a jerk you almost stop liking him, which is Gibbs at his best.  Tony and Paula have an excellent, multi-layered interaction.  Kate shows significant range.  The Iguana lets us know who’s really to be feared.  And the scheme is both interesting, and grounded in the real world (if a little dependent on things going perfectly).  Honestly, what’s not to like?  Two 8s in a row!