A Year of NCIS, Day 127: Love & War (Episode 6.14)

Episode: 6.14, Love & War

Air Date: January 27, 2009.

The Victim: Captain Thomas Jennings, USN

Emotionally Traumatized, But Ultimately Irrelevant, Witness Who Finds the Body: Not applicable.  The Beatles are playing as a man is driving down a dark lonely road in an SUV, singing along.  He feels a bump and stops the car.  The man gets out of the vehicle and we see he is dressed in a Navy Officer’s uniform.  He sees a man lying in the road and is horrified at the idea of having killed someone.  He turns it over and it’s just a dummy.  Rather than fleeing back to his car to avoid this clear ambush like a normal person, the confused officer beams his flashlight around and asks if anyone is there.  Of course, fleeing wouldn’t have done him any good.  His keys aren’t in the ignition.  His phone has no bars.  Then something approaches him from behind and we see him turn in terror before we cut to credits.

Not bad.

Plot Recap: As (almost) always, we join our heroes in the squad room.  Tony and Ziva are fighting with service providers- internet, cable, etc.  McGee zips into work very happy for a change and even makes an unsuccessful play for a piece of Tony’s pastry.  We learn that he met someone.  But on-line.  Tony gives him hell for meeting this someone on-line and even suggests that it might not even be a girl.  But McGee is smitten by how much they have in common and the fact that this new girl is a level 5 sorceress.

Gibbs arrives per formula and informs the team that they have a missing Navy captain: Thomas Jennings.  Problem is, he hasn’t been gone 48 hours, so the team’s jurisdiction hasn’t triggered yet.  Still, in anticipation, Gibbs would like the team to make some calls.

In the interim, Captain Jennings’s daughter Rebecca and her fiancée Kevin arrive in the squad room.  They called in the Captain’s disappearance.  The team adjourns to the conference room and Gibbs and Ziva learn that Captain Jennings was supposed to meet Rebecca and Kevin for dinner and never showed. Rebecca is surprisingly indifferent to her father’s whereabouts.  They have been fighting about her getting her life together, and she figures he vanished at random to teach her a lesson.  Which is a bit of an odd lesson for a grown man and a Naval officer to impart to his grown child. 

Adding to the weirdness, Kevin, who is actually Rebecca’s ex-fiancée, is not only really concerned, but keeps trying to convince NCIS that Rebecca is simply blustering to hide her fear.  He reveals that Rebecca lost her mother to cancer last year.  It’s a condescending and micro-managing performance, and Ziva notes the oddity of giving this much of a shit about one’s ex.  One suspects Ziva has not spent much of her life looking at old boyfriends in the rearview mirror.  Regardless, Kevin thinks Rebecca would do the same for him.  I’m not so sure.  She’s pretty feistily indifferent.  And he’s a bit of a creeper. 

Tony appears at the conference room door and tells Gibbs the local LEOs found a body.  And this body is dressed like a Navy Captain.

Off to the crime scene.  Gibbs and Tony meet with a ranger at Shenandoah State Park.  They found Captain Jennings’s body in a warming hut, a small hut that hikers can use to get out of the cold.  Tony calls them love shacks.  But no loving took place in this shack and the ranger shows them the body of our dead Captain.  With his stomach opened up and his intestines spilled all over the floor.

Tony and McGee are working the tire tracks near the scene.  McGee emphatically doesn’t want to go see the body and Tony makes fun of him.  They also discuss Tony owing McGee $40.00, and McGee’s new girlfriend.  Tony tries to warn McGee off, but McGee thinks Tony is jealous and they argue over Tony’s dating acumen.  McGee goes so far as to bring up Tony’s ex-girlfriend Jeanne Benoit (See e.g., Internal Affairs, Episode 5.14), with whom he fell in love while undercover.     

Back at the body, Ducky confirms that the disembowelment happened after Captain Jennings’ death.  And a head wound demonstrates that the Captain was struck in the head, knocked out and moved.  Moreover, the bright color of the blood on the floor seems to indicate the Captain was killed via carbon monoxide poisoning.  But if you think that’s all strange, you should see the pentagram impression on the dead officer’s back.

Brrrrrr. 

Tony and Ziva visit Captain Jennings’s house, although Tony is concerned about ghosts and demons and Satanists.  They discuss McGee’s new girl.  Tony has to sheepishly admit that he was bored one night and pretended to be a girl on-line to entice McGee.  Ziva is horrified, and even Tony thinks this has gone too far.  But he’s going to try to unravel the scam without having to come clean to McGee.

Tony and Ziva end the discussion when they encounter Adrianna Lopez, Captain Jennings’s housekeeper.  Ziva breaks the news and Ms. Lopez is very upset.  Tony interrupts and points out the basement door, but Ms. Lopez says Captain Jennings forbids anyone to go down there.  That sounds like an invitation, and one our agents accept.  But, instead of a Satan Den, Tony and Ziva find an advanced computer set up.  And a weird talking stuffed bear that introduces itself as Beary Smyles and offers to sing them a song.  No, I’m not high (although the writers might be).  This actually happens.

In the squad room, we discover that Beary Smyles was the Christmas toy find of 1989.  McGee is just the right age to remember being crushed at not getting one.  Turns out that right age is 12, so, group laugh at McGee for wanting a stuffed bear in 6^th (or 7^th) grade.  But McGee owns it and then tells this extremely sad story about building his own version of Beary out of a Pooh doll and a tape recorder. 

As to the investigation, the team has found Captain Jennings’s car.  They’ve also checked his cell phone records and found a very passive aggressive voicemail from Rebecca.  But it’s not particularly suspicious- just indicative that father and daughter had problems.  A little late in the game, we finally get the run down on Captain Jennings’s job.  He was stationed at a counter-espionage lab.  He’s one of theses super smart computer/encryption/engineering eggheads who are routinely killed or kidnapped on this show (See e.g., Honor Code, Episode 3.7).  He’s also a workaholic but has a suspicious travel schedule that has him leaving for destination X but never actually arriving.

Abby is doing her part in the lab.  And by “her part,” I mean performing invasive surgery on Beary Smyles.  Abby also has a Beary Smyles memory of her father waiting in-line for 2 hours to purchase one for her.  Gibbs says he waited in line for six hours on Christmas Eve that year to buy Kelly one.  Awww.  Anyway, someone has previously been rooting around inside this Beary, but Abby doesn’t know why yet. 

Abby is also working in ID’ing tire tracks from the warming hut, but she can confirm that the Pentagram is not properly shaped so as to be Satanic.  She doesn’t know what the shape means, though.  Really, she doesn’t know anything yet, so Gibbs says she can’t have a Caf-Pow yet.  He is a harsh master.      

Still making the rounds, we head to Autopsy.  Ducky has examined Captain Jennings and determined that his duodenum has a weird greenish discoloration.  He wonders if it’s from antibiotic use.  Ducky can confirm CO poisoning as the COD, however, although he has no thoughts on the pentagram other than to note that the impression was applied to the body after death.  Ducky thinks, based on the condition of the stomach and the intestines, that the killer was looking for something when he opened up Captain Jennings’s corpse.

Back to the squad room.  McGee is having a good time.  He has hooked Beary Smyles up to a computer and is using a program that allows Beary to speak the words that McGee types.  This is a good bit, because McGee has Beary do a Gibbs impression: “Gear up DiNozzo, got a body at Quantico.”  “Ya think, David?”  “DiNozzo, bag and tag.”  “David, witness statements.”  “McGee, I ever tell you how brilliant you are.  I love you McGee.”

OK, so it’s not a completely accurate rendition, at least outside of McGee’s head canon. 

The real Gibbs spoils the fun by showing up.  McGee saves his ass by having something useful to say and explaining that Captain Jennings turned Beary into a phreak box.  This is an old school 80s hacking application that McGee thinks someone, maybe Captain Jennings, used to hack DHS’s systems.  Possibly because Beary had technologically ancient protocols that the DHS systems would not be able to defend against.  Which is implausible because Beary isn’t a computer.  He’s just a recording device.  But whatever.

The agents also found encrypted emails on Captain Jennings’s email account.  They can’t read them, but the emails stopped whenever Captain Jennings went off on one of his business trips.  Gibbs thinks he’s meeting his contact, and this certainly looks like a treasonous espionage scenario.

Accordingly, Gibbs sends Tony and Ziva to talk to Captain Jennings’s CO while he heads back to Abby’s lab.  Before leaving, Tony tries to undo his catfishing expedition and asks McGee about the fake on-line girlfriend.  McGee says she’s been really clingy and nutty, but he really likes her and is going to keep giving her a chance.  Tony is displeased.

In the lab, Abby has finally ID’d the tire track.  It’s from a ’72 Buick skylark. Which just happens to have a pentagram symbol on the hubcaps that matches the mark on Captain Jennings’s back.  Per Abby, Captain Jennings died in the trunk of the car by choking to death on CO that Abby can match to the Buick.  The imprint on his back is from the Buick’s spare tire.

Caf-Pow unlocked.

At Captain Jennings’s workplace, Tony flames out hitting on the receptionist, and he and Ziva interview Dr. Rod Daniels.  Daniels describes a breach whereby they’re missing something called “keyhole” which would allow a user to hack into enemy computer systems.  Which seems like an implausibly powerful and also inconveniently dangerous device to have around.  It also seems like the perfect espionage target, but Daniels swears Captain Jennings didn’t take it, both because he was a patriot and because it was protocol to frisk Captain Jennings and every other employee every day before they left the location.  

In the squad room, the team wonders if Captain Jennings swallowed the keyhole and that’s what his assailant was trying to obtain when Captain Jennings was disemboweled.  The agents figure Captain Jennings was selling keyhole but something went south and the buyer didn’t want to wait for Captain Jennings to poop out the keyhole and took a more direct approach. 

Their musings are interrupted by a BOLO hit on the Buick, siting it at a nearby warehouse.

The team heads to the warehouse and finds the car parked outside.  They make plans to split up and enter, but, as they approach, a body smacks to the concrete right in front of Gibbs, narrowly missing him.  Because I am an awful person, I laughed at the abruptness of the thing.

Our new body is Brandon Sykes, drifter with a rap sheet for petty property crimes and suspicion of a homicide.  There appears to have been a struggle on the roof of the warehouse and Sykes has defensive wounds.  The Buick is registered to Sykes, and Gibbs thinks he was a hired gun for purposes of murdering Captain Jennings.  But he doesn’t fit the profile for espionage.  Still, Ziva figures someone, maybe the buyer for keyhole, was cleaning up loose ends.

Back in the conference room, Gibbs is interviewing Kevin, the ex-fiancée of Rebecca Jennings. Or ex-ex-fiancée, since Kevin announces they have gotten back together.  We learn that Sykes’s prints match partials from the warming hut where they found Captain Jennings’s body.  Gibbs wanted Rebecca to come in and ID photos of Sykes, but she is refusing.  Kevin claims to have never seen Sykes but offers to take the photos to Rebecca and report back.  Gibbs is annoyed by this, but ultimately relents and gives Kevin his card to give to Rebecca.  

In the squad room, the team backgrounds Rebecca.  She’s mostly clean other than a misdemeanor for disturbing the peace when she tossed Kevin’s belongings out a window.  Gibbs tells the agents to talk to Rebecca’s friends.  Intensively.  He figures that will get her attention.

McGee and Tony have another discussion about McGee’s fake girl.  They are supposed to meet up and now these interviews are going to interfere.  Ziva smirks while Tony offers to cover so McGee can go meet a non-existent person.  McGee is suspicious but grateful.

Gibbs is right.  Rebecca meets Gibbs at a BBQ joint.  The interviews got her attention, and she resents being investigated as a suspect.  Still, she doesn’t recognize the photos of Sykes.  And she’s mostly eliminated as a suspect when her façade cracks and she breaks down crying over having lost her mother and her father in so short a period and being all alone.  They discuss her getting back with Kevin and she talks about how she last broke up with him and then took him back after her mom died.  She got through one death but isn’t sure she can get through another.  Gibbs comforts her about the process of surviving loss.  While Gibbs is an authority at experiencing loss, I don’t know that he should be advising people on coping with it.  And yet, maybe it’s a “Those who can’t do, teach” kind of thing. 

Gibbs gets a call from McGee.  McGee’s date stood him up, so he went back to work and de-crypted the emails and determined they came from a laptop.  A laptop that happens to be in use at Captain Jennings’s house.  Gibbs grabs Rebecca’s hand as re-assurance and leaves.  

We move straight to interrogation, where Gibbs is interviewing Ms. Lopez, the housekeeper, whom they caught using the laptop.  But not really- Captain Jennings uses a maid service and Ms. Lopez is not employed there.  In fact, there’s no record of Ms. Lopez at all before very recently.  After some back and forth, we determine that she is not a spy or Captain Jennings’s contact for espionage.  He met her in Cuba and, both newly bereft of spouses, they fell in love, and all his clandestine trips were for purposes of meeting up with her.  They snuck around because, with his wife only dead a year, Captain Jennings wasn’t of a mind to introduce a new girlfriend to his mean-ass daughter. 

She’s still hiding something though, and Ziva, having posed as a girlfriend for spying purposes before, figures Ms. Lopez was after keyhole.  McGee arrives to scotch that theory.  The guys at the lab found keyhole.  It was secreted away, but still in the lab.  Basically, Captain Jennings positioned the keyhole for remote access in an on-site location and used his Beary Smyles-modem and keyhole to hack DHS and get Ms. Lopez a fraudulent green card.

Wait, instead of just marrying her?  That’s a lot of federal crime to avoid buying a wedding ring.  Did these guys not watch I Married Dora in the 80s?  But it’s not espionage and now we’re back to no motive for the murder.

In the squad room, we get our standard agent recap of the evidence so far.  There is no connection between Sykes and Captain Jennings.  But McGee has a lead on the location of Sykes’s apartment, so he and Tony head over.  They discuss McGee getting stood up, but McGee wants to keep trying, much to Tony’s chagrin.  McGee says he doesn’t meet many women, so he has to stay in the game.  Tony feels awful and tries to re-assure McGee. But he doesn’t come clean.

The apartment has been tossed, so the boys take the evidence back to Abby.  But Abby doesn’t think the apartment was tossed by someone looking for something.  She thinks it was trashed by somebody who had so much of an axe to grind that they beat Sykes’s dinner plates to shards with a hammer.  And thanks to the miracle of partial prints and government databases, Abby knows who: Jessica the attractive staff assistant from Captain Jennings’s lab.

Back to interrogation.  Jessica is mad y’all.  And not ashamed to admit she went psycho on Syke’s place.  They were dating and he’s a big ole’ loser, but she didn’t kill him.  She might have if he’d been home, but he wasn’t, and she has an alibi for being at work until late the night before.  Jessica is not aware that Captain Jennings and Sykes knew each other, although she did bring Sykes to a company Christmas party.  Still, he spent the evening puking in the parking lot.

Gibbs wants to know specifically why Jessica trashed Sykes’s apartment, and she says she was mad because he proposed, and the ring was fake and turned her finger green.

Hmmmmm.    

In the lab, Abby informs Gibbs that the discoloration on Jessica’s finger is the result of the copper in fake gold reacting with the skin.  She also confirms that Jessica’s finger is manifesting the same discoloration Ducky found in Captain Jennings’s intestines.  Traces on the ring indicate the ring from Jessica was in Captain Jennings’s body.

Gibbs visits Ducky and, do you remember that episode of the Simpsons where it’s determined that Homer has a crayon in his brain that makes him stupid and Dr. Hibbard never saw it on Homer’s numerous head x-rays because he always held the x-rays in such a way that his finger obscured the crayon?  This is about that level of contrived.  According to some pediatric records Ducky somehow located, Captain Jennings, when a child, swallowed his grandmother’s wedding ring and it was deemed too dangerous to operate and remove the ring surgically.  The Captain never pooped out the ring either because it got tied up in his intestines and the intestinal wall grew around it.  And, also, the ring was fake, as we know.  And, left unsaid, Captain Jennings’s grandmother either got remarried, or they had a grandkid before his grandfather made her an honest woman.  So yeah.  The only question is who knew that story?

McGee arrives with a photo to clear up that mystery.  I may have missed something, but I’m not sure where McGee got the photo.  And we don’t get to see it yet.

Gibbs and Tony arrive at Captain Jenning’s house, where Rebecca and Kevin are clearing things out.  Gibbs shows her the ring and tells her it’s why her father was murdered.  She recognizes it from pictures as her grandmother’s ring.  But she didn’t know it was fake.  And neither did Kevin, when he told Sykes about the ring and offered it as payment for a hit on the good Captain.  Kevin again denies knowing Sykes, but Tony has McGee’s pictures of them talking at a party.  Kevin denies some more, but Rebecca doesn’t believe him and slaps him.  Kevin then gets crazy eyes and offers up the convenient confession: they were broken up and, just like when Rebecca’s mother died, he figured she’d take him back if she was grieving her dad.  Which, as murder plots go, is pretty nuts.  “She’ll love me more if I kill her dad.  Also, I can pay a guy to kill her dad by offering up the Cracker Jack prize in her dad’s belly.”

We end where we usually end (and where we usually begin): in the squad room.  Tony asks about McGee’s girl.  McGee says she sent him an email and she’s getting back with her ex.  McGee is despondent but confident and says he knows they’ll be together if he keeps trying.  Tony is wretched but keeps his secret.  Still, unlike the pastry at the beginning of the episode, Tony is willing to share his pizza when poor McGee reaches for a slice.  And when McGee asks, Tony pays him the $40.00 he owes him plus an additional $20.00 for interest.  Tony leaves.  McGee chuckles and Ziva makes clear that she did not tell McGee about Tony’s ruse so that McGee could torture Tony.  But she quiets down when McGee hands her the $20.00. 

Quotables:

(1) Ziva: What did you think would happen?

Tony: I didn’t know! The flaw in the plan… was the plan. But I got another plan to end it.

            -Tony catfishes McGee.

(2) Ziva: You have to tell him the truth!

Tony: Maybe. Not until I’m absolutely sure lying won’t work.

(3) Tony: So, what’s a nice girl like you doing at a top-secret, government counterespionage gadget lab like this?

Jessica: Bet that sounded better in your head.

            -Jessica is a real firecracker.

(4) Tony: It’s like I said, “It’s always the maid.”

Ziva: No. You have said “It’s always the janitor, or the butler, or anyone assigned to Abby’s lab.” But you have never once said “maid.”

Tony: Anyone ever tell you your memory can be a real buzz-kill?

Time Until Sexual Harassment: 20:00 or so.  Tony hits on Jessica in the midst of the investigation.

Ziva-propisms:  None.

Tony Awards: Tony was watching Weird Science (1985) when he got the idea to catfish McGee.   He uses Fatal Attraction (1987) as inspiration for undoing his plan. Poltergeist (1982) the movie doesn’t get a specific mention, but is clearly being channeled with all Tony’s and Ziva’s references to poltergeists at the home of Captain Jennings the suspected Satanist.  Tony lists a bunch of hacker movies, including War Games (1983), Sneakers (1992), and Hackers (1995).  The gadget lab where Captain Jennings works occasions several references to James Bond.

Abby Road: Abby stays on task.

McNicknames: Just Probie.

Ducky Tales: Ducky talks to us about old school English executions.  In disturbing detail.  He lectures Tony on the usage of “who” versus “whom.”

The Rest of the Story:

-Shenandoah State Park routinely figures in NCIS episodes.  See e.g., Caught on Tape, Episode 2.15.

-McGee either can or can’t handle bloodbath crime scenes depending on the episode. Examples of him having difficulty include Hiatus (Part One), Episode 3.23.  But, in Bloodbath, Episode 3.21, he didn’t seem to care.

-McGee takes a shot at Tony for falling in love with Jeanne Benoit while undercover (See all of Season 4).  Tony is taking his lumps for that this season as Ziva also threw it in his face in Dagger, Episode 6.9.

-Gibbs waited in line six hours on Christmas Eve 1989 to get his now-deceased daughter Kelly (See Hiatus, Episode 3.23) a Beary Smyles doll.

-Recycling the classics, we last saw a perp disembowel a victim while looking for something in his stomach in Season 1.  Dead Man Talking, Episode 1.19. 

-As always, Tony knows more about tech than he lets on.  See, e.g. Dagger, Episode 6.9.  Here, he at least attributes his knowledge of old school hacking to his love of cinema.

-McGee, like Captain Jennings has also used old technology to hack through protocols that weren’t designed to defend against it.  Specifically, he hacked the FBI with Gibbs’s dinosaur computer in Internal Affairs, Episode 5.14.

-Gibbs and Rebecca talk about his relationship with his own father.  Gibbs reconnected with his father in Heartland, Episode 6.4 and gave him a call on Christmas in Silent Night, Episode 6.11.

-Absent parents and dysfunctional families are a routine theme on this show, so Rebecca fits right in.

-Ziva’s remark about Tony claiming the perp is always the person assigned to work in Abby’s lab references Abby’s old assistant Chip (Frame-Up, Episode 3.9) and a DIA goober who showed up to assist Abby and destroy the evidence of his plot (Ex-File, Episode 5.3).

-Sloppy of Tony and Ziva not to check the maid’s bona fides.  Or, you know, secure the victim’s house.

-Ducky is wearing a bandage from his injury last episode.  Broken Bird, Episode 6.13.

-McGee does in fact find his girl.  A real girl.  But much later.

Casting Call: Chris Carmack played Kevin and had a recurring role in the last few seasons of Grey’s Anatomy.  Rebecca is Christine Woods, who has a voice role on the new She-Ra cartoon.  Dr. Daniels is James Urbaniak, who also voices Thanos’s offspring Ebony Maw on the Guardians of the Galaxy cartoon.

Man, This Show Is Old: When McGee says he met someone, Tony asks, “What’s his name?”  Mocking your hetero male friends for hooking up with guys is still done of course, but probably isn’t a good look for a TV show anymore.

Meeting people on-line was still a little taboo in 2009, especially to people older than 30.  Now, I suspect it’s weird if you’re not dating on-line.

Beary Smyles is a reference to talking bear Teddy Ruxpin, even though Beary’s fictional intro in 1989 post dates Teddy’s real-world appearance in stores by a few years.

Tony catfishes McGee about four years before the experience of Manti T’eo of Notre Dame turned catfishing into a household term/concept.  I still think there was more to the story of T’eo’s fake internet girlfriend than what we learned in the media.  But, either way, it made for a funny distraction to ease the pain of my beloved Georgia Bulldogs falling just four yards short of the opportunity to beat that Notre Dame team (and their fake girlfriends) senseless for a BCS Championship.  Alabama beat us in the SEC Championship and got that honor instead.  I can’t imagine the T’eo sideshow helped Notre Dame, but it was hard to feel sorry for them.  

MVP:  Jessica, for being exactly the right amount of crazy.  Her revenge play broke open the case.

Rating: Offbeat, but not bad.  The perp was obvious, but only if you noticed the right things among all the espionage red herrings.  The ultimate explanation was goofy, but it made for a decent mystery, with decent characterization and dialogue.  Call it 6 Palmers.

Next Time:  Mike Franks is back.  And is someone trying to send Gibbs a message?