A Year of NCIS, Day 81: Driven (Episode 4.11)

Episode: 4.11, Driven

Air Date: December 12, 2006.

The Victim: Lt. Roni Seabrook, USN.

Emotionally Traumatized, But Ultimately Irrelevant, Witness Who Finds the Body:  We’re at a driving course, where a young woman is testing some kind of automatic driving technology that she refers to as OTTO.  The woman is seated in the passenger seat and typing on a keyboard, but otherwise letting the robot drive.  It mostly passes its obstacle course and only kills one dummy.  Good enough for the military.  The woman tells OTTO to take her home and it pulls into a garage.  She feels good about the test, but there are still bugs that she is verbally making notes about.  Suddenly, the seatbelt traps.  The doors lock, and the inside of the car begins filling with exhaust.  The woman continues to verbally describe the problems with the car and says she’s going for the kill switch.  She can’t reach the kill switch though, because of the seatbelt,* and she coughs and coughs and panics and coughs and dies.

*(Rule #9: always carry a knife.  So that you can cut your seatbelt loose).  

Plot Recap:  The team begins the episode proper in sexual harassment training.  Last time, the agents got out of training when some military wives got shot to death (Light Sleeper, Episode 3.14).  They’re so lucky today.  The nerds (Palmer and McGee) are attentive.  The class cut-ups (Tony and Ziva) are not.  The weirdo (Abby) is looking for clarity and precision beyond what a normal person would need.  The bosses (Shepard and Gibbs) are hopelessly bored, but Shepard is at least faking it.  I’m surprised Gibbs even attended.

The instructor is using a green light, yellow light, red light formulation.  Hugging co-workers falls under the yellow light. Abby asks why she can’t hug people.  The instructor says she must ask permission (I don’t even recommend that.  A non-hugging workplace is a less-likely-to-get-sued workplace).  The instructor moves to unwanted red-light touching.  Tony has fallen asleep.  Until Ziva leans forward and licks his face, causing him to jump out of his chair and scream.  The instructor views that as Tony seeking to ask a question.  Tony asks what happens if you slap someone in the back of the head, “Like this” and whacks McGee.  McGee slaps Tony in the nuts in retaliation.  The instructor says that head slapping is off-limits and asks if this has happened to Tony.  Everyone looks at Gibbs.  Gibbs looks back at Tony.  Tony knows better and slows his roll.  Palmer asks about touching naked dead people and a predictable misunderstanding ensues with the instructor.  It could go on for a while, but Gibbs gets the call about a dead Navy lieutenant at an R&D facility in Fairfax and makes his excuses to the Director.  High school kids at the bell on the last day of school have never cleared out faster than this team when Gibbs yells, “Gear up.”

Ducky had to take his mom to the doctor, so Palmer is in charge of the body.  Gibbs gives him a little tough love but lets him work.  Palmer proves he knows his stuff.  TOD is about two hours previous; COD is likely hypoxia from carbon monoxide poisoning.  A co-worker removed the body from the car, doors closed engine running, and attempted CPR.  Tony is interviewing this person.  McGee and Ziva try to explain the concept of a self-driving car to Gibbs.  They should have used shorter words because he looks into the car and sees the machinery in the driver seat and the first thing he asks is where the driver is supposed to sit.

Tony is interviewing Torsten Engler.  He is speaking about the pressure the entire team is under because of an upcoming demo involving a variety of competitors working on the same technology.  All in search of a DOD contract.  Engler thinks Lt. Seabrook killed herself.  He says all she had to do was flip the kill switch, which as right in front of her.  The fact that she didn’t indicates that she was tired of all her failures and missed deadlines.  Dr. Russell Pike enters and chastises Engler for speaking in this manner about his co-worker.  Dr. Pike sees Palmer wheeling the corpse by on a gurney.  He asks to see her, and Palmer, with Gibbs’s permission, unzips the bag.  Dr. Pike asks, “Roni, what have you done.”

McGee is underneath OTTO and is impressed with the CPU.  Ziva comes to look but trips and falls on him.  Tony begins taking pictures and using the lingo from the sexual harassment training, calling it a classic yellow light situation.  Engler comes around and wants to know what the agents are doing.  He becomes even more distraught when he realizes their investigation is going to involve them confiscating OTTO’s AI as contained on Lt. Seabrook’s laptop and, oh, OTTO itself.  Ziva already ordered the tow truck.

Dr. Pike talks about how Lt. Seabrook was one of his best students at MIT, and he has known her for ten years.  Dr. Pike also tries to explain AI to Gibbs and seems less aware than Gibbs’s co-workers of what a fruitless endeavor this is.  Gibbs asks for surveillance tapes and access logs.  Dr. Pike says Lt. Seabrook wasn’t even supposed to be here this morning.  Dr. Pike gave her the morning off, but she must have come in to run a test.  Still, Dr. Pike is sure Lt. Seabrook didn’t kill herself.

Back at HQ, Ziva backgrounds Lt. Seabrook, who, despite being Navy, had no deployments and never set foot on a ship.  Ziva wonders if working on something that was essentially weapons design drove Lt. Seabrook to suicide.  McGee has a better idea: Azion, the company working with the Navy on OTTO, was highly leveraged and dependent on OTTO winning the upcoming DOD drive-off competition.  Failure would equate to bankruptcy.  McGee is thinking sabotage.  Tony has something even better.  Security footage shows Chief Engineer Jamie Jones sexually assaulting Lt. Seabrook with a classic red light touch ass-grab and getting slapped for his trouble.  Unfortunately, someone erased the security footage after roughly 5:00 AM and up until Lt. Seabrook’s death.  Which is pretty good evidence of murder. 

Palmer enters autopsy with lipstick on his face.  From Agent Lee, no doubt.  Ducky, returned from his mom’s doctor’s appointment, asks if Palmer found Ducky’s medical bag.  And last time Palmer Ducky sent Palmer looking for it, Palmer and Lee had sex in the autopsy-mobile (Once a Hero, Episode 4.8).  This will get positively Pavlovian if it continues, and Palmer will spike a chubby every time Ducky says “bag.” 

Palmer and Ducky do a fun little dance where Ducky never quite sees Palmer’s face until Palmer catches his reflection and removes Lee’s scarlet territory marker from his face.  Ducky asks if Palmer is hiding a secret, though.  What ensues is a TV-only conversation where Ducky thinks Palmer has been working out, but only speaks of it in terms of euphemisms and generalizations. This causes Palmer to think Ducky’s knows he’s routinely pulling his train into Agent Lee’s station.  Fortunately, Ducky speaks plainly before Palmer confesses, and even more fortunately, Gibbs arrives to save us all from this runtime-gobbling nonsense.

Ducky confirms Palmer’s COD.  Lt. Seabrook had five times the fatal dose of CO and was probably unconscious within 30 seconds.  Which is only possible if someone pumped the CO directly into the vehicle.  Ducky found evidence of assault- bruised wrists and bite marks on Lt. Seabrook’s inner thighs and back.  Ducky ran a rape kit and found an IUD and fresh semen from either last night or this morning.  Ducky also found traces of engine oil and a kind of lotion on her hair and skin.  Except Lt/ Seabrook’s hair and nails are clean.  So, it’s someone else’s lotion. 

Ziva says Jamie Jones, the engineer who assaulted Lt. Seabrook on the tape, was once arrested for assault and battery.  But the victim dropped charges and married him.  And then divorced him.  And then he got a restraining order on her.  Gibbs comes in and watches the tape of Jones and Lt. Seabrook.  Given the tape and Ducky’s rape suspicions, Gibbs heads off to bring in Jones.  Tony and Ziva get sent to process Lt. Seabrook’s apartment.  Tony tosses Ziva the keys and says he’ll meet her there after he drops something off at the hospital.  She questions this and Tony holds up a bag and says it’s a stool sample and does she want to see?  Only if he wants her to stab him in the eye, Ziva responds. 

McGee gets sent to the evidence garage to help Abby find out how the CO was pumped into the car.  Abby rolls out from under the car and is looking up at McGee’s junk.  He asks if this is a yellow light or a red light situation and she says he only wishes she was still sexually harassing him.  Abby then starts to geek out about OTTO’s code.  Lt. Seabrook was operating at a whole different level.  But that means that, in order to prove someone coded OTTO to pump CO into the car, they’re going to need help from Azion.  And the employees are all suspects. 

Engler is kvetching to Gibbs about NCIS having OTTO.  He’s a little too obvious as a suspect, but he’s so unpleasant that I’m actively rooting for Gibbs to shoot him.  Dr. Price admits that the OTTO performance for DOD is make or break.  He has tried to reschedule it, but multiple competitors are flying in and DOD won’t budge.  Gibbs asks where Jones, the chief engineer, is and Dr. Pike can’t believe he’s a suspect.  So, Gibbs tells him about the assault.

At a hospital, Tony walks in on his girlfriend, Dr. Jeanne Benoit, getting a shoulder massage from a male nurse.  “Definitely yellow light,” he says.  Tony brings Jeanne jewelry she left at his place and asks about the guy.  Jeanne says he’s gay.  Tony was too busy to see Jeanne last night, but he promises to make it up to her tomorrow night.  She fastens a red medical ID bracelet around his wrist to remind him.

Tony joins Ziva at Lt. Seabrook’s home.  Ziva sees the medical ID bracelet and wants to know what kind of tests Tony is getting done and why he’s spending so much time with doctors.  Tony deflects by telling her to check out the bedroom, unless she wants him to join her.  He snaps his glove suggestively as he says it and she wonders, seemingly not seriously, whether he is sexually harassing her.  But then she enters the bedroom and yells for Tony.  Tony enters and Jamie Jones is tied naked and spread eagle to four bedposts.  And ball-gagged.  Hot.

We revisit Jones in interrogation where NCIS has replaced his clothes but never his dignity.  Tony and Ziva discuss Jones in observation.  Tony’s phone rings.  It’s Jeanne.  She wants sushi tomorrow night.  Tony is curt and says he’s at work.  Ziva grabs for the phone, and Tony calls it inappropriate touching.  She sees that the caller ID identifies the university hospital, and wonders if Tony’s tests came back so quickly.  Tony says he’s pregnant and McGee is going to be very proud.  Then he leaves, but Ziva is very suspicious.

Abby and McGee are still checking out OTTO in the evidence garage.  McGee finds a number of MP3 files and thinks Lt. Seabrook was recoding her observations while working with OTTO.  He goes looking for one she might have made while she was dying.  Abby gets into OTTO to try and figure out the positional dynamics of Lt. Seabrook’s death.  Somehow OTTO’s death protocol activates, trapping Abby with the seatbelt, locking her in, and turning on the car.  CO gas starts flooding the car and Abby is screaming for McGee to help her.  But he is looking away, headphones on, concentrating on the MP3s.  This show almost never shifts to commercial with team members in danger, so it’s noticeable when it happens here, and we get a black and white still of Abby choking to death and desperately trying to signal for help. 

McGee is still cluelessly working when we come back, but fortunately Gibbs comes off the elevator and sees what’s happening.  OTTO’s door won’t open, so Gibbs sets off the evidence garage alarm, smashes out OTTO’s drivers side window with a fire extinguisher, and hits the kill switch.  Gibbs gets Abby out of the vehicle.  She asks for permission to hug, but Gibbs says she never needs permission (take that, mean HR lady).  The garage alarm gets McGee’s attention and the other agents emerge from the elevator.  Abby is lightheaded, but has many seasons left on the show and will thus live.  McGee feels extraordinarily guilty.  Tony wonders if it was a malfunction, but McGee thinks there were too many variables in play- locks, windows, seatbelt, gas.  Gibbs agrees OTTO has a murder protocol and Ziva suggests a talk with Jones might be in order.  Gibbs wants to know how Jones turned OTTO into a death car and yells at McGee when he hesitates.  Whether Gibbs has a right to be pissed at McGee for almost letting Abby die, he is.  Gibbs asks what Tony and Ziva said to Jones and they report that Jones is asking after Lt. Seabrook as if he thinks she’s still alive.  Gibbs aggressively sends Abby to visit Ducky for an exam and then stalks down the hall toward interrogation.  Tony says, “This is not good” as he and Ziva walk into observation.

Gibbs enters the room and Jones immediately starts saying that Lt. Seabrook can clear this whole thing up.  Gibbs shoves him into a chair and asks if he’s saying Lt. Seabrook is his girlfriend.  Jones says they’ve been dating for six months.  Gibbs shows him the video of the assault.  Jones claims it’s role-playing and says it’s not like they’re freaks and he wonders if he’s going to lose his security clearance.  And true to Tony’s prediction, Gibbs grabs Jones by the collar and pins him to the table and hisses that Jones almost killed one of “my people.”  Jones is confused and Gibbs says OTTO, the same thing that killed Lt. Seabrook.  Jones refuses to believe the lieutenant is dead, even when Gibbs yells that she’s lying on a steel slab downstairs and shows him a pic of the corpse (that he had cued up on the TV monitor for the interrogation, the vicious bastard).  Jones is either an amazing liar or genuinely horrified and even thinks it’s a role-playing joke, demanding to know if Lt. Seabrook is behind the glass laughing at him.  He looks at the picture of her cropse again and starts crying.

In the evidence garage, McGee announces aloud to an absent Abby that he knows how OTTO was hacked. And then she’s there after all.  And he didn’t know.  McGee still feels terrible, but Abby forgives him and hugs him.  Without permission!  And McGee wryly notes it, but Abby says, “Never with you, Tim.”

Abby and McGee have summoned Gibbs back to the evidence garage.  McGee tells Gibbs that the perps didn’t hack OTTO.  They set up a program of pre-set commands, and when the right conditions were met, the program turned OTTO into a killer car. Then, the code was set up to purge itself and the only trace was an extra space on the motherboard.  Gibbs jokes that he figured it would be something like that.  The murder program was loaded from a memory chip.  The team just needs to find the chip, but Gibbs isn’t optimistic about them accomplishing that, given the size of a memory chip and the amount of technical hardware inside OTTO.

Tony visits the Director in MTAC.  She tells him he has plans tonight.  The three Le Grenouille associates (two bald dudes and a pretty lady) whom we met at the airport last episode (Smoked, Episode 4.10) have a dinner reservation with a fourth person.  Shepard wants to know who the fourth person is.  However, she doesn’t want Tony inside the restaurant where he can potentially get made as the baggage handler (his undercover role last time).  So, he gets stuck playing guitar as a street musician.  And, amusingly, he describes the scenes he’s witnessing in his song.  While a nearby dog whimpers.   

A man shows up at the restaurant and sits down to talk with the people we already know.  But then Kort, one of the bald men, looks out the window at Tony.  Tony communicates (in song) that he thinks he has been made.  Shepard is optimistic and thinks Kort is just checking his reflection in the glass.

McGee and Abby find the memory chip.  Gibbs arrives and is impressed.  Then he tells Abby and McGee to put OTTO back together.  He’s not joking.  Shepard told SecNav that NCIS didn’t screw up OTTO and Azion is coming by in two hours to confirm that.  McGee protests that it took them ten to take OTTO apart.  But that’s why Gibbs brought them help, and Jones steps off the elevator.  I guess he’s in the clear.

Tony is asleep at his desk.  Ziva asks if he found out the results of his medical tests yet (it’s sweet that she cares).  She tells him that Gibbs and Shepard are upstairs stalling the Azion team.

We shift to Shepard’s office where Gibbs reveals that OTTO was sabotaged.  Engler is ranting.  Dr. Pike is thinking it might be a competitor since it has to be an AI specialist (read: not Jones), and whoever wins this weird competition gets the entire DOD contract, and not just the Navy’s business.  But, per Shepard, the Navy is banking on Azion, so that’s why she’ll let them check out OTTO even though the investigation is ongoing. 

Gibbs leads everyone down to the evidence garage.  Jones, Abby, and McGee are standing by in the squad room.  Gibbs, Shepard, Dr. Pike and Engler arrive in the evidence garage and OTTO is not there.

Hmmmm…when we went to commercial, I totally didn’t think OTTO actually escaped.  But that’s what happened.  OTTO is loose on the streets of DC.  And Shepard is pissed.  Ziva issues a BOLO.  Tony goes on a physical hunt.  Abby, McGee, and Jones work on accessing OTTO remotely.  McGee reasons that whoever killed Lt. Seabrook has summoned OTTO, so they’re thinking they can back trace the signal.  The question is whether they can then control OTTO.  Jones thinks he can get into OTTO through his mechanic program that he uses to monitor tire pressure and other mechanical metrics when OTTO is performing test runs.  He does.  Abby and McGee get to work, and Jones says that Lt. Seabrook would have really liked them.  McGee is only receiving from OTTO, so he asks if Jones can use his program to tweak some parameter.  Jones picks fuel injection, and Abby follows Jones’s command downstream into OTTO’s command structure.  McGee pulls up the navigation and finds OTTO, parked in Fairfax. 

The agents arrive at the location.  The killer summoned OTTO so he could steal the memory chip back.  And he did.  Gibbs is annoyed because what the hell were McGee and Abby thinking by putting the chip back where they found it?  But McGee isn’t stupid, and he and Abby plugged in a copy.  McGee accesses OTTO’s cameras looking for a picture.  Whoever is behind this knew where OTTO’s cameras were and a blurry shot of someone moving is all McGee can find.  Gibbs reasons that this is a lot of trouble to get the chip, so it must be traceable to the killer somehow.  McGee isn’t so sure.  He says there were no prints on the chip.

Gibbs gets a call from Abby.  She has back traced the program used to activate OTTO.  She says whoever it is in Azion’s network and they’re online now.  There’s a disconnect, and Abby tells Jones the agents are going to get the perp…but Jones is gone.

Back at Azion, the employees are all assembled, and McGee is hunting for the computer used to access OTTO.  Jones arrives and his body language says he’s looking for revenge when he asks Tony if they found the perp yet.  Unfortunately, while I picked that up, our special agents did not.  So, when McGee’s search fingers Engler, Jones grabs him and starts punching his face loose.  The agents get Jones clear and cuff Engler, but, as stated earlier, this is too easy. 

Engler asks what evidence they have, and Gibbs shows him the memory chip.  Ziva announces that the killer took a copy, not the original.  Engler wants to see the code on the memory chip.  He feels certain that if he sees the code, he can pick out the culprit based on coding style.  Dr. Pike says he can do this as well and asks for the chip.  Gibbs hands it over.  Dr. Pike inserts the chip into a computer and then tells Gibbs that the chip is blank.  Gibbs almost smirks and tells Tony to let Engler go.  Engler was the one who found Lt. Seabrook.  If he wanted the chip, he would have taken it before anyone got to the scene.  Gibbs knows Dr. Pike erased the chip, but tells him that the only thing he erased from the chip were some photos.  The real chip is in NCIS’s evidence locker.

Jones goes on the attack again.  But this time Ziva stops him.  Dr. Pike says it was an accident.  Lt. Seabrook was supposed to be off work and…ohhhh…Engler was supposed to be driving.  And dying.  Well, at least after nearly an hour of listening to Engler be a pain in the ass we understand the motive.  Turns out Engler owns half the company so when OTTO won the contract, everyone would be stuck working with Engler forever.  As motives go, that’s damn identifiable.  Ziva is impressed and asks Tony, if red light is for sexual assault of a co-worker, what represents attempted murder of a co-worker?  They agree that black light is best.   

At the squad room, Gibbs tells Ziva to go home.  She is doing research on Y pestis.  She thinks Tony may be relapsing after his exposure in SWAK, Episode 2.22.  She asks Gibbs if he knew Tony has been having tests done and wearing a hospital bracelet.  Gibbs says, “No.”  He figures Tony has a good reason for not telling her.  But as he gets in the elevator, his face says he’s not sure about that.

We cut to Tony and Jeanne in post-coital embrace.  He asks if he can take the hospital bracelet off yet.  It’s for the psych ward.  She says she picked it out special for Tony and they start making out.

Credits.

Quotables:

“In my perspective, I see the people from the big jet plane. The woman looks Teutonic. She drinks a vodka tonic and two bald men sit with her, waiting for a fourth. They are not going to order than main course, until that person comes.”  -Tony the undercover street performer improvs a song.

Time Until Sexual Harassment: 8:40.  Tony takes photos of Ziva’s ass.  He hits on her later, at Lt. Seabrook’s residence, but, her remarks about harassment aside, she rarely expresses that this sort of behavior is anything other than amusing to and accepted by her.

Ziva-propisms: None that I caught.

Tony Awards: Tony references A Beautiful Mind (2001).

Ducky Tales: None.

The Rest of the Story:

-As someone who teaches sexual harassment training, zero tolerance doesn’t allow for “borderline behavior.”  I tell clients not to allow their employees to hug each other. 

-Palmer and Agent Lee have been banging since Dead and Buried, Episode 4.5.

-Who knew Tony could play guitar and sing (sort of)?

Casting Call: Dr. Russell Pike is played by Lawrence Pressman.  Dr. Pike has a doppelganger in the NCIS universe because Pressman played a Director in Yankee White, Episode 1.1. 

Jones is Kevin Alejandro, who has had roles on Arrow, True Blood, and Weeds.    

Man, This Show Is Old: McGee compares the tech in OTTO to the tech in the Martian rover.  Rovers Opportunity and Spirit launched in 2003 and landed on Mars in 2004.  It doesn’t seem that long ago.

An episode on self-driving cars would still be quite topical today. Although it would probably invlve OTTO running over a Petty Officer trying to cross against the light.

Abby and McGee discuss Brittany Spears’s ultimately abortive marriage to dancer Kevin Federline.  They were married from 2004 to 2006 and had two children together.

MP3 is a bit of a dated concept.

MVP: Gibbs is the only reason Abby isn’t dead.

Rating: This episode is neither particularly bad nor particularly good. It gets bonus points for actually putting a lead in danger and for a cast of guest stars that stood out. Dr. Pike, Engler, and Jones all delivered good performances and were compelling in their way. The ball continued to move on our season-long subplots. But, the plot is still run-of-the-mill for police procedurals.

Six Palmers.

Next Time: Arabs and rednecks.