A Year of NCIS, Day 19: Dead Man Talking (Episode 1.19)

Episode: 1.19, Dead Man Talking

Air Date: April 27, 2004

The Victim: NCIS Special Agent Christopher Pacci.  Pacci, we hardly knew ye.

Emotionally Traumatized, But Ultimately Irrelevant, Witness Who Finds the Body: A building security guard hears a fire alarm, and he and a custodian find a dead and disemboweled Agent Pacci in the elevator.

Plot Summary: Tony and Kate think they’re getting off work, Kate to go see a fella and Tony to watch TV.  That would be a wretchedly boring episode of television, so Gibbs stops them on the way out.  He tells them that Agent Pacci was murdered.  Some expository dialogue and a flashback to last episode remind the audience who Agent Pacci is.  He sat behind Kate, helped out with the Terrorist (Bete Noire Episode 1.16), and notably for this episode, asked Gibbs for help with a cold case toward the end of UnSEALed (Episode 1.18).  Gibbs blew him off.

Yikes.

The team heads to the scene.  The LEOs immediately hand off lead on the investigation in light of the circumstances.  Ducky monologues about how hard it is to be detached when the victim is one of your own, and Gibbs demonstrates this.  As he interviews the security guard and the janitor, he almost says “Chris,” instead of  “the victim.”

Ducky thinks Agent Pacci died before being disemboweled: a bullet to the carotid artery would have taken less than a minute to kill him.  He surmises Agent Pacci was shot elsewhere and disemboweled in the elevator, but he can’t say whether the disemboweling was the result of “rage or ritual.”  Gibbs tells Ducky about blowing off Agent Pacci.  Ducky re-assures him, but Gibbs can’t escape the idea that this is his fault. 

Kate calls.  She has found the blood spatter from the gunshot and describes where the shot happened, and how Agent Pacci got to the elevator.

The team returns to HQ and checks out Agent Pacci’s desk.  They find his gun in his desk.  Gibbs explains that Agent Pacci must have been tailing someone, and didn’t want to risk setting off a metal detector or encountering the need to identify himself.  This whole scene is good.  The darkened HQ; the empty desk; Tony reminiscing about Agent Pacci harassing him for borrowing a stapler and not putting it back in the right spot; the somber mien of the agents; and their grief-driven impatience even with each other all combine to make the viewer feel the weight of Agent Pacci’s loss, even though he’s essentially a red shirt.

Tony and Kate go to Agent Pacci’s house.  Tony knew him from softball and post-work beers, but that’s about it.  He demonstrates barely contained rage when talking to Kate about whether he feels like he’s violating Agent Pacci’s privacy, and graphically describes the state of Agent Pacci’s body to establish his perspective.  Then the phone rings…and it’s…

McGee! 

McGee was doing work for Agent Pacci and pulled some civil court records courthouse on a cold case.  Tony tells him to bring the materials to HQ.

Gibbs visits Abby to ask about the bullet.  She has been at work since 4AM and Gibbs thanks her.  The slug came from a handgun, but Abby can’t match it to a specific gun yet.  Gibbs tells her to search Agent Pacci’s hard drive.

Ducky lists COD as loss of blood from a ruptured carotid artery.  The disemboweling was done post-mortem, but not for rage or ritual.  The assailant was looking for something.  And Ducky finds that something in Agent Pacci’s stomach.  It’s a memory card from a digital camera.  Agent Pacci knew he was dying, and he knew Ducky would find the card, so he swallowed it.

The memory card contains pictures of an attractive woman.  All candids, all taken in the last few days.  Kate returns from interviewing people at the scene.  Nobody remembers anything, but she found an NCIS camera at the bottom of the stairwell.  McGee arrives with court records related to a civil investigation of an auto accident.  Gibbs remembers the case: Lt. Commander Hamilton Voss was under investigation for bilking the Navy out of $10 million.  He died (burned to death in a car crash) before the Navy could file charges, and the money was never found.  Gibbs thinks Agent Pacci got a lead on the money, and that it relates to the woman in the pictures.  Gibbs assigns McGee to the investigation and sends him and Tony to check out the girl.

Kate wants Ducky looks at the autopsy report.  Agent Pacci clearly pulled it for a reason.  Meanwhile, she and Gibbs go talk to Captain Graves, Commander Voss’s former CO.  Commander Voss was a command supply officer at Norfolk.  He set up a fake company that made small charges against a large number of Navy credit accounts (I think) that Commander Voss had approval over.  He got away with embezzling for four years until he got cocky, and somebody noticed.  Nobody ever found the money.  Agent Pacci only asked Captain Graves who Commander Voss had dated, and Captain Graves had no idea.

McGee and Tony are on the computer searching for the elusive woman.  Tony tries to get McGee to spill about him and Abby, and McGee sort of falls for it.  McGee uses the photos from Agent Pacci, an oak tree in those photos, and a lot of research into botany registries and USPS information to locate the woman’s street address.  She is Amanda Reed.  Gibbs assigns Kate to dig up background.  He takes a coffee from McGee and starts to leave, drinks the coffee, realizes it has sugar and hazelnut in it (because it’s Tony’s coffee) and spits it into a trash can.  It’s a good moment of levity in yet another intense episode.

Gibbs and Tony canvas Ms. Reed’s neighborhood.  But Gibbs wants to keep his distance until they know why Agent Pacci was keeping his.  They realize Agent Pacci was taking pictures from a specific window with a “For Rent” sign.  So, Gibbs rents the place to set up a stakeout.  Tony is very excited about the stakeout.  But he admits to Kate he wouldn’t be as excited over surveilling a 300-pound bald guy.

Kate can’t find any dirt on Ms. Reed.  She doesn’t even have a driver’s license, although Tony connects her townhouse to one that Commander Voss’s family used to own. 

The stakeout begins, with equipment that McGee sadly notes was requisitioned by Agent Pacci, but never picked up.  Kate follows Ms. Reed on the street while Gibbs works the camera. 

Tony checks in with the chain-smoking real estate agent who handled the sale of Commander Voss’s family’s old townhouse to Ms. Reed.  It was a quick sale, all cash and no contingencies, and closed recently.  The agent says that Agent Pacci called her about the property three years ago and asked to be notified if it ever went on the market.  The agent thought Agent Pacci was interested in purchasing the home himself, but she forgot to call him until after it sold.  She was surprised that he was excited rather than angry.  And it seems her call may have been what got Agent Pacci re-interested in the cold case. 

Abby sends Gibbs Agent Pacci’s computer files and Gibbs doesn’t find anything other than seemingly random information on the Bangkok tourism bureau.  McGee and Tony show up for stakeout relief and notify Gibbs that Amanda Reed and Commander Voss seemed to travel in a pair.  She had residences in every town where he was stationed over the last decade or more. 

Gibbs visits Ducky.  The autopsy report he was looking at is pristine.  They ID’d the body with a DNA match, so Gibbs wants Ducky to see if the county still has the DNA material so that Abby can re-run it.  Ducky mentions that the Director asked Gibbs to speak at Agent Pacci’s funeral, but Gibbs declined.  It’s left unsaid, but Gibbs probably refused to speak because he feels like Agent Pacci would still be alive if he’d taken a minute to talk to him.  Also left unsaid: the fact that the Director now has to cancel golf and come to the funeral.

Tony sticks McGee with the chore of going through Ms. Reed’s garbage, while he looks thorough her window with the camera and ogles her in her bra.  Even murder suspects come off sympathetic when Tony is around.  McGee doesn’t find much in the trash other than that Ms. Reed uses a lot of beauty products.  Ms. Reed comes out to tend her flowers and Tony darts out of the room.

Ducky visits Abby, who notes that he’s dressed nicely for Agent Pacci’s memorial service.  He drops off the blood and tissue samples used to ID Commander Voss.  Together, they look at the surveillance feed to Abby’s lab and see Tony beginning to chat up Ms. Reed.  McGee puts the laser mic on Tony and Ms. Reed, and they’re both complaining about the local historical society restricting renovations.  Abby blanches at Tony’s use of the alias “Stringfellow,” but McGee allows, “It’s so he won’t forget it.”  Then Abby lets McGee know that “in the world according to Gibbs,” it’s his ass too if Tony’s ad-lib goes pear-shaped.  Abby instructs McGee not to volunteer anything to Gibbs, but also not to lie, because Gibbs will know. 

And right on time, in walks Gibbs. 

Actually, no.  Time has passed.  Tony is back, and Gibbs and Kate attended Agent Pacci’s memorial service.  The Director gave a nice eulogy, per Kate, but, knowing the Director, one suspects he referred to the deceased as “Ken Pacci” and/or “Carl Pacci” at least a few times. 

Gibbs knows something’s up with his agents, but he hasn’t figured out what yet.  Kate takes a call from her new dude, and Tony puts the laser mic on the call to catch her promising to make it up to him this weekend.  One imagines the Ghost of Agent Pacci staring dejectedly at the floor.  Although Gibbs appears to give Kate permission to shoot Tony, so that might move the investigation along.

Speaking of moving the investigation along, Abby calls.  Gibbs is in no mood for her usual prevarication, but he likes the fact that the body formerly thought of as Commander Voss didn’t have the correct blood type to be the actual Commander Voss.  So, the actual Commander Voss is alive. 

Gibbs and Kate go looking for the tech, Josh Lurie, who certified that the burned-up body was Commander Voss.  But he died in a car accident two years ago.

Back at the stakeout, Tony and McGee are trying to bond when a mailman drops off a package for Ms. Reed.  Tony sees that she’s doing her nails in the window and runs down to look at the package.  And she busts him.  Absent any better card to play, he tells her he just wanted to see her again.  It works.  She invites him in, and he gives McGee the thumbs up.      

Back at HQ, Kate determines that Josh Lurie and Commander Voss graduated from high school together.  That means that Commander Voss is alive, faked his death, and has killed at least three people (Agent Pacci, Josh Lurie, and whoever was in the crashed car).  Gibbs has a new appreciation for the danger presented by this case.  Gibbs thinks Commander Voss is out there watching the watchmen.  He calls the stakeout to urge caution, only to quickly intimidate out of McGee that Tony has charged straight into the lion’s den. 

Ms. Reed invites Tony to a pub around the corner and goes to change.  Tony says he’ll wait outside and runs off to check in with McGee.  He is not happy to learn that Gibbs is on the phone.  But Gibbs isn’t mad- he tells Tony he’s the bait for a watching Voss and to enjoy his date…and stay out of elevators.

Alright, here’s where the episode starts getting played for comedy, and your mileage may vary on how funny you find all of this.  But I’m gonna write it as I see it.  As Gibbs and Kate are leaving to help McGee back up Tony, Abby excitedly stops them in the elevator, saying she ran Amanda Reed’s fingerprints from the trash McGee swiped.  Gibbs yanks Abby in the elevator, which pisses her off; and Kate explains that Tony is going to a pub with Ms. Reed and probably being stalked by Commander Voss.  Abby laughs a full body laugh and says, “Really?”  There’s some goofy Abbot & Costello-esque humor as Abby explains that the prints are from Amanda Reed and Commander Voss, and they are the same person!  Gibbs does a pretty impressive (if not at all PC) double-take.  “She’s a HE?” 

Kate wants to be sure that Tony is on a date with a guy, and Abby gleefully affirms.  We immediately switch scenes to Ms. Reed rubbing Tony’s leg under the table at the pub.  It’s probably not appropriate humor, but I laughed.  Also laugh-worthy, Ms. Reed calling Tony “Stringfellow.”  And her not letting Tony answer Gibbs’s “Tony!  Stop!” phone call before they start making out in the booth.  Ms. Reed gets up to go to the restroom, Tony looks at McGee across the bar and gives the celebratory fist pump.  And then he calls Gibbs.  Again, Gibbs’s “She’s a he, bonehead!” is not even sort of OK, but as stark revelations go, it’s hard to top.  Tony wilts, less I think out of personal disgust, and more because he knows how much karmic payback Kate and McGee have saved up in their accounts.

Ms. Reed returns, and Tony is a changed man.  He puts his gun on her and tells her to open her purse, so he can see if she has the gun that killed Agent Pacci.  She pushes his gun up and fires it, and yells “Terrorist!” as she runs away.  Drunks are always eager to help a damsel in distress, so the bar patrons attack Tony, and also McGee as he tries to assist.  Ms. Reed gets her gun out as she heads for the door…

…and runs almost head first into the barrel of Gibbs’s weapon.  He tells her a little about Agent Pacci and, Ms. Reed, maybe understanding that Leavenworth isn’t going to be so great for someone of the trans persuasion in 2004, tries to raise her gun.  Gibbs shoots her dead.  Jamie Luner does a great job portraying the emotion and the hopelessness, and even though I know she’s a vicious calculating murderer, I felt a little sorry for her.  Although, admittedly, I don’t know that I would have had the same reaction if she’d been a 300-pound bald guy. 

Kate seems oddly perturbed by the whole scene.  I guess she’s never seen Gibbs snuff anybody before?

We move back to HQ where Kate, still sad, asks Gibbs why he’s going through all of Agent Pacci’s things before boxing them up.  Gibbs says “Force of habit,” as he doesn’t want Agent Pacci’s family to find any unpleasant surprises.  The team does a little bit of a post-game and it turns out Ms. Reed was scheduled to have re-assignment surgery in Bangkok (hence the reference on Agent Pacci’s computer) next month.  Then, never one to let the blues keep her from scoreboarding on Tony, Kate asks him what it was like to tongue a guy, and the episode ends with Tony dejectedly leaving the room.

Quotables:

(1) “Oh my God.  Tony’s on a date with a guy.”  -Most days the bear gets Kate.  But today, Kate gets the bear.  And she can barely contain her glee.

(2) “His name was Special Agent Christopher Pacci.  And he was a friend.” -Gibbs has his Inigo Montoya moment before ventilating Amanda Reed at point blank range in front of a bar full of patrons. 

Time Until Sexual Harassment: Almost immediately.  Tony answering Kate’s phone may not be sexual harassment per se, but, in the context of everything else, it will certainly be brought up at Kate’s deposition. Also, at 31:00, Tony puts a laser mic on Kate’s call with her boyfriend.  Again, it’s a bit of a gray area, but I’ve seen HR called in for less. 

Ducky Tales: Still no Ducky Tales.

The Rest of the Story:

-Agent Pacci is the first NCIS agent to be killed in the line of duty.  He will not be the last.

-Ducky has a new Gerald, but he’s kind of a dork.  He also finds it weird that Ducky talks to corpses.  He lasts this episode.

-For all his goofy bullshit, Tony is loyal to the Navy badge and he’s mad as hell over Pacci’s death.  It’s a well-acted bit of grief-rage that we’ll see Weatherly perform even better in Season 3.

-Abby asks McGee if he needs a place to stay in DC when he gets pulled on to the investigation.  Apparently, they are still friendly.  But with benefits?

-Gibbs’s computer continues its dogged search for the Terrorist.

-In questioning whether McGee should have to work stakeout with Tony, Kate refers to Tony as Special Agent Bligh, a reference to the Mutiny on the Bounty, a famous 18^th Century sailing mutiny against a harsh and vicious captain.  Of course, when Gibbs offers to let Kate work with Tony instead, she throws McGee under the boat, as it were.

–Tony references the movie Stakeout with Richard Dreyfuss and Emilio Estevez.  Somewhat Gibbs-like, McGee has never heard of it (has has also never heard of The Crying Game).  We seem to be heading into the period of Tony constantly spraying movie references everywhere. 

-While trying to get the goods on Amanda Reed, Tony takes an impromptu trip undercover and selects for himself the alias “Stringfellow,” after Jan Michael Vincent’s character Stringfellow Hawk on the 80s military helicopter drama Airwolf.  McGee has never heard of it, which makes no sense, given his age.  Ms. Reed not at least having enough familiarity with it from her Hamilton Voss days to remark on it is a bit of a stretch too.  They’re missing out.  Airwolf has the best 80s action theme song ever.  And, like a college basketball game, you only need ever show up for the last ten minutes or so.  All of the shit that leads up the helicopter blasting the hell out of other aircraft with machine guns and rockets is completely superfluous. 

-McGee writes mysteries in his spare time.  That will be played for solid comedy later. 

-Tony is probably hell on Christmas presents.  When he gets to the package outside Ms. Reed’s home, he manically shakes it just like shook the package for Gibbs in Enigma (Episode 1.15).  Good thing it was anti-aging cream and not Faberge eggs.

-Pauley Perrette crushes the reveal about Commander Voss and Ms. Reed being the same person.  She perfectly expresses the restrained joy that pretty much anyone would feel at (a) finding out a co-worker as stereotypically jock-y as Tony is unknowingly out on a date with a trans female; and, (b), for that brief moment in the elevator, being the only person who has all the relevant knowledge of the situation.

-Two episodes ago, in The Truth is Out There (Episode 1.17), the genesis of the fatal prank involved one of the Petty Officers looking to get back at his buddy for setting him up with a trans person without his knowledge.  One figures this episode must have written itself from there.

-One thing we’ve learned from the first season of this show is that servicemembers get murdered on the home soil and on their own vessels ALL THE TIME.  The other thing we’ve learned is that it’s clearly not that hard to steal a bunch of money from the Navy.

-Not to try and draw patterns where patterns shouldn’t be drawn, but, counting Mrs. Curtin in UnSealed (Episode 1.18), this is the second episode in a row where someone of the LBGTQ persuasion dies.  Granted, Mrs. Curtin was eating a married man’s pie (a deployed SEAL no less), and Ms. Reed killed and disemboweled a federal agent, in addition to killing at least two other people.  So, they had it coming.  But, optics… 

-Agent Pacci will appear again in flashbacks.

Casting Call: Why, yes, that is Jamie Luner from Melrose Place and Growing Pains spin-off Just the Ten of Us playing Amanda Reed.

Real estate agent Pat Stone is Cristine Rose, who played the Petrelli matriarch, Angela, from Heroes.

Man, This Show is Old: Tony mentions watching Jackass, a show where dudes intentionally hurt themselves performing dangerous stunts.  It was as awesome as it sounds.

Tony tells Ms. Reed anecdotes about his time on the Ohio State basketball team.  He probably wouldn’t try this today, when a suspicious person could use their phone to Google “Stringfellow” and “Ohio State” and “UCLA” and “Final Four” and quickly determine that he’s full of shit.  Also, depending on whether NCIS is intended to take place in an alternate universe from our own, his story is fabricated and easily disproven from a sports standpoint as well.  Ohio State and UCLA have only overlapped in two Final Fours, in 1962 and 1968, and did not play each other in the semis or in the finals.  Plus, Tony would have to be Gibbs’s age to have played on the 1968 team. 

Attitudes about trans people have changed a bit since 2004.  So, Gibbs’s remark about charging Ms. Reed with a misdemeanor for going to the ladies’ room, while just a clever bit of dialogue in 2004, would instigate a dinner-destroying discussion today.  See more below.

VIP: It’s clear Tony took one for the team.  But Gibbs got the kill shot, and dead perps are the coin of the realm on this blog.  RIP Pacci.

Rating:  Hmmmm.  This episode doesn’t age too well if you consider the heightened sensitivity to the feelings of trans folks in 2019.  Granted, you have to go a few pages into a general Google search to find any criticism of this episode, but it’s there.  Most of the complaints I saw centered on the indifference of the agents to proper pronouns- they refer to Ms. Reed as a “he” universally in the last minutes of the episode, whereas trans people prefer the pronoun of their chosen gender.   Also questioned: the script’s choice to have Gibbs dispatch Ms. Reed with extraordinary prejudice.  The former criticism is probably legit, and I read the show issues a veiled mea culpa the next time the pronoun issue comes up.  The latter criticism, essentially that Gibbs wouldn’t have killed Ms. Reed in that fashion if he truly thought of her as a woman, is, I think, overwrought.  Gibbs is very upset about Pacci (and certainly feeling quite a bit of guilt).  Gibbs, while old school, is not afraid to make tough decisions, so shooting a woman, even a woman from birth, is hardly out of character for him.  Ms. Reed went for her gun with a gun drawn on her, and made her choice: suicide by cop.  Nothing about this is in anyway inconsistent with the Gibbs character or what the character would or should do under the circumstances.  And the show itself has a pretty routine pattern of dishing out vengeance, so it’s hard to argue that a trans person who killed an NCIS agent somehow got it worse than the dozens of other non-trans individuals who kill agents or friends and family of agents on this show.  Or its cousin shows.  Hell, if this had been NCIS: Los Angeles, at least three agents would have emptied their clips into Ms. Reed at once.

That said, I don’t think the writers would set up Ms. Reed’s demise this way in 2019. In the Age of Trump, it would be way too easy to characterize it as a fictionalized snuff-film intended to pander to bigots.  I don’t think this show has ever been cynical enough or disrespecting enough of its audience to think, “Oh, if we kill her, it will be a nice wink to all the people who hate trans people.”  Even if you buy the stereotypes that NCIS primarily markets itself to grumpy old white men, it certainly wouldn’t have been actively sucking up to such a narrow demographic in its first season.  Also, even assuming such a narrow demographic, the show routinely pursues arguably progressive moral messages (albeit in an evenhanded, non-threatening way).  The idea that, then or now, it would countenance or encourage violence against a marginalized group is simply ludicrous.  But appearance is reality, and, in 2019, a trans woman who makes out with an unknowing male and gets shot in the head minutes later is going to be interpreted as a symbol of something ugly.  Ms. Reed’s death is a consistent script outcome, but the optics of such a scripting choice would not fly today.         

Similarly, in the here and now, playing Tony’s make-out session with Ms. Reed as a joke (and it comes up as a joke again in later episodes) would probably be a bridge too far in the current age.  Because even though no self-respecting (or self-preserving) trans person would attempt to ensnare an unknowing stranger, depicting it would be viewed as stoking fears of people who are different.  And frankly, I can see certain “media” outlets taking the laboring oar to spread such a message if put forth, even unintentionally, by a military drama in 2019.  “NCIS Explores Danger Posed by Subversive Trans!” an on-line clickbait headline might blare.  No show needs that.

I like this episode.  I think it’s well-acted, I think it’s daring in its way and for its time, I think the mystery is legitimately interesting, I think it’s touching the way the agents mourn and then avenge one of their own, and I think Jamie Luner did a great job making her character relatable.  But I don’t think they could air this one today. 

Seven Palmers.