A Year of NCIS, Day 213: Phoenix (Episode 10.3)

Episode: Phoenix, Episode 10.3.

Air Date: October 9, 2012.

The Victim: Sgt. Raymond Hill, USMC.

Emotionally Traumatized, But Ultimately Irrelevant, Witness Who Finds the Body: We’re at a cemetery.  Looks military.  Ducky is there.  They are exhuming a body.  The funeral director needs the case number, but Ducky blames Palmer for forgetting it and says he’ll fax it over.  The funeral director is on the jaunty side.  Lots of awkwardly inappropriate jokes about digging up bodies.  Ducky’s polite enough, but clearly just humoring the man.  He’s also clearly bothered by whatever is going on, because he sighs heavily before we head to credits.

Plot Recap:  Tony arrives at work to find McGee buying a life recorder- a device that records every moment of your day and uploads it to the cloud.  It’s being beta tested and McGee is a beta-tester.  Tony finds it horrifying but thinks it would help him find his keys.  Ziva suggests that perhaps moments, like the last three months, should not be remembered.  Tony agrees.  He also thinks it’s funny that McGee thinks Gibbs would allow a recording device within three miles of an active investigation.  Gibbs walks in to Tony running off at the mouth, delivers the obligatory headslap, and tells him to get to work.  There’s a dead sergeant in to investigate.

Palmer is in autopsy and super-annoyed.  Almost frantic.  And it turns out that he didn’t forget to supply the case number.  Ducky never had a case number to begin with because he exhumed a body without authorization.  And all-knowing Gibbs arrives wanting to know what the hell is going on.  Palmer takes full responsibility as active coroner.  Or tries to.  Gibbs throws him out.  Ducky identifies the body as Commander Bruce Roberts, the subject of an autopsy Ducky performed 12 years prior.  So roughly three years before the start of the show’s official timeline.  Some things never sat right with Ducky and he wanted to take another look.  Gibbs gets that Ducky is bored on medical leave, but what the hell, man?  Gibbs goes back on his kick of protecting Ducky’s health since his recent heart attack.  Ducky guilts him with the idea of just wanting the old man to retire given that the world has gotten on fine without him in the intervening months since said heart attack.

Gibbs caves for now.  Ducky concluded that the commander died of accidental alcohol poisoning.  But two days ago, Ducky was reading obits.  And saw that the commander’s father died of a rare genetic liver disorder.  One that would have been passed on to the commander.  Had Ducky known that, he would have performed the autopsy differently as there is a class of poisons that mimics fatal alcohol intoxication in someone with Commander Robert’s defect.  So, his death could have been murder.

The team is processing our dead sergeant, who is lying dead on his couch.  The sergeant was about to fly to Malta according to paperwork Tony has located.  Palmer arrives and tries to tell stories like Ducky.  Tony shuts it down.  But McGee is all in on a story about why Ducky exhumed a body without asking Gibbs.  Palmer plays dumb.  Tony weaponizes Ziva, who asks him to get the blinds.  Palmer tries to laugh it off.  Ziva approaches, cracking her knuckles.  Tony puts his hands on Palmer’s shoulder from behind.  Palmer gets more nervous. Then Tony suddenly says, “Look sharp!”  McGee opens the blinds, Tony and Ziva turn away from Palmer and Tony says, “Yeah, that black light’s not going to show us anything,” as Gibbs walks in.  And rolls his eyes.  He says that Ducky is working on a cold case and that’s the end of it.  Then asks for a report on the warm case.  Or the less cold case, I suppose.  It still being a dead body and all.

The victim is Sgt. Raymond Hill.  A cab driver was waiting to take him to the airport and then looked in the window and called the police.  The TOD is around midnight.  Palmer has a preliminary COD of carbon monoxide poisoning, which is obvious to Gibbs too given the pinkish discoloration of the skin.  Tony notes the gas furnace and that all of the vents were fried shut.  All of the CO detectors are out of order and McGee notes they can’t all be faulty.  The agents also found $50k in cash in a case.  Needless to say, way above the sergeant’s pay grade.

Back at HQ, the team backgrounds Sgt. Hill as having been assigned to the Marine Corps Security Force Regimen out of Yorktown.  They secure high-value military targets like nuclear subs and satellite recon centers.  The sergeant was not authorized for travel, so he was about to go UA with a one-way ticket.  No criminal record, above average reports.  His neighbors had no info, and bank statements, credit cards, and other standard background checks came up empty.  So, no motive, and our victim is remarkable only for being unremarkable.

Gibbs checks in with the lab, and Abby puts a lei around his neck and hands him a drink glass with an umbrella.  She thinks he’s been a sourpuss since the bombing (she’s one to talk after the last two episodes) and wants his kind sunny inside to be reflected on his outside.  She praises what he did for Ducky, which Gibbs dismisses as simply retroactively approving an exhumation.  Abby approves because her tissue analysis demonstrates Commander Roberts was murdered with a poison that has to be synthesized from the oleander plant.  But, weirder, Abby switched cases and started working on Sgt. Hill’s laptop…where she found a copy of Ducky’s exhumation order related to Commander Roberts.  So the new dead guy was really interested in the old dead guy, and it was one of the last things he looked at before his death.

Ducky, Gibbs, and McGee are out for a stroll, discussing this certain non-coincidence.  Ducky seems pretty satisfied that his work is relevant again.  It’s short-lived.  Gibbs and McGee want Ducky’s files and a list of the people he talked to about the exhumation.  Ducky recalls angrily that he’s barred from working on a case in any medical capacity until he is cleared for duty.  Gibbs pauses.  And then, to McGee’s astonishment, cites Rule #38.  Your case, you’re lead.  Ducky gets to run an investigation, and he’s oh so very excited.

In the squad room, Tony is skeptical.  He suggests to Ziva that, given Ducky’s moping, “the old coot” planted the poison on Commander Roberts himself to drum up business.  Ducky overhears and takes exception to coot, but it’s good natured exception.  Tony takes the lifeline and exchanges the clicker to the big screen.  Gibbs informs them that Ducky has point.  Tony and Ziva are incredulous but take their cue from Gibbs that now is not the time.  Tony gives Ducky the background on the cases.  Commander Roberts taught Avionics at Annapolis, but had suffered only rejection in his various efforts to get into flight school and even NASA.  Ziva tries to hand a sheet of investigatory material to Gibbs, but he insists she hand it to Ducky.  Commander Roberts came from old family money and inherited a bundle.  He also lived below his means.  His wife is deceased, he has one grown daughter.  Ducky, with no idea what he’s doing, tells them to talk to the daughter and comb the archives for evidence from the Commander Roberts case.  When they hesitate, he gets them moving with a little more force.  Ducky tells Gibbs he thinks he’s gonna like this assignment, and Gibbs tries hard not to laugh. 

In the conference room, Ziva and Ducky join Commander Roberts’s daughter, Ellen.  She’s understandably mystified that anyone is still concerned about her father’s death.  She offers what sounds like a confession to killing him.  But we’ve still got 28 minutes left, so it obviously isn’t.  She just feels guilty because Commander Roberts was having a bad day after getting negged for a position at NASA and she was supposed to stop by and didn’t.  She thinks that because he wasn’t a big drinker, he overdid it and died. 

Which…if you have any familiarity with how alcohol works, makes zero sense.  Alcohol overdoses kill chronic drunks and people doing dumb shit, like playing unfortunate drinking games or mixing their booze with other substances.  A depressed guy who almost never drinks drinking by himself is not going to kill himself with booze on accident.  He’s going to give himself a night of toilet hugging, unmanly emotional expression, and a massive headache the next day.  It’s not heroin, where you can miscalculate the dosage by a skooch too far and accidentally kack yourself.  Somebody should have been looking at this case as a murder 12 years ago.

Anyhow, Ziva cuts through the self-pity and she and Ducky play the murder card.  She’s shocked but doesn’t recognize Sgt. Hill.  Ducky takes her hand and promises they’ll get to the bottom of things.  You can tell by the look on her face that Ziva doesn’t care for making promises to victim family members.  Or potential suspects.  The daughter leaves, and Ziva lectures him on all of the above.  After all, per Ziva, Ellen inherited $4 million when dad died…

Gibbs is hanging with Palmer in autopsy.  And not thrilled to be there.  Ducky joins.  Palmer found chemical burns on Sgt. Hill.  They’re about a decade old.  Ducky thinks the x-rays are blurry, but Palmer took them three times.  That’s a probably a clue of some sort, but Ducky falls to blaming Palmer for carelessness.  Gibbs shuts this down, and Palmer continues, saying the burn pattern is consistent with a glass bottom flask.  Ducky is not of a belief that the chemical can be determined, but Palmer has been creative.  Technobabble ensues, and Palmer hands over a short list of chemicals that could have created the scarring.  All are precursors to the poison that killed Commander Roberts.  Making Sgt. Hill the prime suspect in the murder.  Ducky offers a rare compliment on Palmer’s cleverness. 

Ducky suggests that’s why Sgt. Hill was concerned about his inquiry.  Although he’s a little too cocky about the investigation leading back to Sgt. Hill.  The only reason it did so is because Sgt. Hill died, and the team thus had reason to check his computer to find the exhumation request.  So far, there’s nothing independent that links Sgt. Hill and Commander Roberts beyond that.

Suddenly, the radiation alarm goes off.  And Palmer says it’s the code for Abby’s lab.  We shift up there where Abby is yelling to be heard that nobody should evacuate because it’s a false alarm.  Gibbs arrives.  She explains her sensors did detect a radiation source, but it was too small to be dangerous.  Abby found a strange dust on Commander Roberts’s uniform.  It appeared volcanic- and she has identified it as a lunar soil simulant.  NASA researchers cooked it up to mimic the soil on the moon.  She has no clue why Commander Roberts had it or why it’s irradiated.  But she got the name of a guy who might know. 

At the Goddard Space Flight Center, Tony and Ziva are interviewing Dr. Blackwell, an old scientist who looks and acts like Dr. Noonien Soong from Star Trek: The Next Generation.*  He looks at a photo and technobabbles and tells a science joke that’s over the agents’ heads.  Tony zones out and starts flying the doctor’s space shuttle model around the office, and that’s really funny.  Ziva stays focused and learns that NASA created the material for obvious reasons- the real stuff is too expensive to come by.  The doctor says they irradiated batches for various tests.  He thinks Commander Roberts could have come across regular moon simulant in any number of places, but the radioactive stuff is disposed of with great care.  He thinks the only thing it would be good for is making one’s lawn glow as a party trick.  And then, in a classic case of burying the lede, he suggests you could also use it to make a dirty bomb.

Ducky is in the squad room holding forth on the case and summarizing it for the audience.  Ziva steps in and wonders why Commander Roberts had the hot dirt.  He wasn’t a terrorist, and he was loaded, so he didn’t need to work for terrorists.  With an assist from Gibbs, Ducky sends the team to talk to Commander Roberts’s old CO. 

So, we head to a military firing range.  Captain Beverly Sharp has no interest in or patience with Tony and McGee and thinks they just want to trample on a man’s grave.  McGee wins her heart by taking target practice with her and showing off with a mass of head shots.  Captain Sharp calls Commander Robert her finest officer, although she admits he didn’t take rejection very well.  After his third rejection from flight school and NASA, Commander Robert started writing letters, which Captain Sharp pulled from his file because they didn’t reflect well.  He said DoD would be sorry they rejected him.  But Captain Sharp thought he was just letting off steam.  That said, she still has the letters.

In the lab, Abby is examining (and lecturing?) the CO detector from Sgt. Hill’s apartment.  Gibbs arrives with Caf-Pow, but Ducky already beat her to it.  Gibbs gets technobabble in exchange anyway, and Abby says the CO detector was digital and thus hackable.  Someone introduced a virus and shut it down.  Abby has also examined Commander Robert’s old computer (who the hell kept that?)  The hard drive is corrupted, but Abby has determined that Sgt. Hill and Commander Robert were arranging some sort of purchase.  Commander Robert was the buyer, and he was very paranoid about the police.  Abby suggests Sgt. Hill was part of some WMD smuggling ring because the deal fell apart and Commander Robert, three days before his death, threatened to turn Sgt. Hill into the feds.  Gibbs tells Abby to search for other buyers.

A nervous Palmer barges into Gibbs’s home and heads into the basement.  He is worried that Ducky is losing it.  Palmer’s evidence is that Ducky yelled at him.  Now he’s issuing orders “like he’s Atilla the Hun.”  Atilla the Hun-kered-down-in-Gibbs’s-basement, it turns out (I’m so sorry).  Ducky is off in the corner, sitting on a stool, listening to Palmer ramble. 

I enjoy Brian Dietzen as a comedic actor and he does a great job stammering through this awkward horribleness.  And then Palmer leaves.  Brilliant.

Gibbs continues sweeping his basement floor.  Ducky admits that Palmer is doing well, but he’s overwhelmed.  Gibbs thinks he’s doing great.  He almost singlehandedly may have uncovered a WMD smuggling ring.  Ducky is worried about the promise he made Ellen Roberts, though.  He’s not thrilled at maybe having to tell his daughter that dad was a terrorist.  He’s also not sure he’s up to doing what Gibbs does: being point man on a case potentially involving terrorists.  He remarks on Gibbs’s ability to do his job with aplomb even when the building he works in explodes around him.  Ducky was dismayed that the world could get on without him, but now he’s having a pity party and figures the world might be better off.  Gibbs hates pity parties.  Fortunately, Abby interrupts so he can leave.  He hands Ducky a broom, I guess so Ducky can finish sweeping his basement?

Tony and McGee are standing on a street at night and Tony is laughing.  McGee is unimpressed.  Gibbs joins.  Tony is still laughing.  McGee got an email and is not going to be a beta-tester in the life recorder rollout after all.  Tony says it’s because you have to have a life to record it.  Gibbs would like them to work.  Abby found an old email to Sgt. Hill from a potential buyer.  He didn’t use his name, but the agents traced the email to a cell phone which led to a PO box.  Whoever it is, he’s good at staying off the grid.  The boys couldn’t find a name or any digital or financial footprint.  But they have the address across the street, and whatever is happening inside uses a greater than average amount of electricity. 

Ziva joins, ninja-like, frightening McGee.  There’s a back exit and someone is definitely home.  So Gibbs sends McGee with Ziva while he and Tony take the front. 

Tony picks the lock.  Rock music is playing loudly.  Oh hell, they find Michael Des Barres, who played MacGyver’s arch-enemy, Murdoc.  The building is a large living space that looks like the home of, well, an aging British rocker, which is what Des Barres is playing.  He is Del Finney, a rock star that none of the agents remember.

In observation, Tony updates Gibbs and Ducky on Finney.  He was a one-hit wonder in the 80s but lost all his money in the 90s.  Now he’s a maintenance man for the building where they found him.  Oh wow, Gibbs is gonna let Ducky run an interrogation.  They leave, and Tony speaks for us all when he says, “This should be entertaining.” 

(One has to wonder if Gibbs would allow this if the suspect were less farcical).

Ducky shows Finney the picture of Sgt. Hill.  Finney feigns ignorance, but Ducky claims to be able to detect a lie by the pulsing of Finney’s carotid artery.  Finney talks about being how big he was in 1982 and says he learned from that experience to be wary of people showing up unannounced.  Ducky also suggests, given the amount of money Finney owes people, that he might also be concerned about creditors.  Ducky tries to bond with Finney over fallen glory and having one’s best days behind him.  Finney blames profligate spending.  But when Gibbs presses on the relationship with Sgt. Hill, Finney figures he needs a lawyer.  Or he does until Ducky starts signing the inspirational words from Finney’s lone single.  Finney sings back.  And he’s so impressed with Ducky that he cooperates.

Tony and Gibbs return to the squad room, and Tony gushes to the gang over Ducky’s effectiveness in the interrogation room.  Sgt. Hill was not running WMDs or guns.  He was selling moon rocks.  Ziva scoffs, but McGee, naturally, explains that moon rocks are an expensive item that it also happens to be illegal to own.  Per Tony, Sgt. Hill told Finney that this particular rock was stolen from a museum.  McGee gets it now.  NASA distributed moon rocks to museums, and, twelve years back, someone broke into a Naval museum in North Carolina and stole their moon rock.  Ziva figures it was Sgt. Hill.  But he didn’t sell the moon rock to Finney.  Or even steal it.  McGee says NASA investigators quietly recovered the moon rock from a janitor.  McGee knows this because he was at a Star Trek convention in 2002 and……and Gibbs shuts him down before he can spread his nerd toxins too far.  So what did Finney buy?

A knock-off, Abby says. Finney’s moonrock is made out of NASA’s artificial rock.  Ducky calls it a con.  He says Sgt. Hill took advantage of the high-profile theft to sell knock-offs.  Del Finney, Commander Roberts and others, all thought they were buying moonrocks.  So then was Sgt. Hill killed by a disgruntled buyer?  Again, Finney didn’t think he had a fake.  In fact, Sgt. Hill told Finney to check it out with a NASA lab and to tell them he found a common lunar meteorite.  Raising the question, who was running the lab?

Tony and Gibbs find Dr. Blackwell in his lab, newly returning from recreation.  He’s more spry than he let on last time.  Not only doesn’t he need a cane, he’s pretty good at racquetball.  He reaches sheepishly for the cane and Gibbs slings it across the room.  Dr. Blackwell still denies knowing Sgt. Hill, but Tony says they’ve determined that Sgt. Hill did security at the NASA lab where Dr. Blackwell was verifying fake rocks.  Dr. Blackwell wisely lawyers up.

Back at HQ, Ducky announces the case is closed to the plaudits of Ziva and McGee.  He’s flattered, but feels like he’s forgetting something.  Ziva reminds him of his promise as Gibbs leads Ellen Roberts into the room.  She thanks him and hugs him.  Gibbs has good news too.  Ducky has been cleared for duty.  In autopsy.  McGee can paper the investigation file.  Ducky is a little wistful to return to a supporting role after sitting in the big chair.  As he walks off, Ziva says, “We are finally whole again.”

In autopsy, Ducky is looking around pensively.  Palmer enters.  He is on the phone and frantic about all the things he has to do.  Ducky announces himself and frightens Palmer.  Then he tells Palmer he is cleared for duty.  If you were expecting a measuring contest between the new guy and the old guy, then you don’t know Jimmy Palmer.  He says, “Oh thank God,” and covers Ducky with a warm grin and a huge hug.  They have a body and a local coroner wanting a second opinion, so Ducky tells the body he’ll be right there, as soon as he changes into something more comfortable.

Quotables:

Palmer: [to Ducky]: When Agent Gibbs finds out that you exhumed a body without…!

Gibbs [entering]: He found out.

Palmer: Agent Gibbs! As Acting Coroner, I take full responsibility, but…

Gibbs: Go.

Palmer: Leaving.

Ziva-propisms: None.

Tony Awards: Tony likens Dr. Blackwell to Keyser Soze, the criminal mastermind in The Usual Suspects (1995).

Abby Road: Abby keeps it together.

McNicknames: None.

Ducky Tales: Palmer would like us to know about Malta.  He tries to school Gibbs on exhumations and their significance in various cultures.  But he blows it and has to get corrected by Ducky.

The Rest of the Story:

-Ziva’s reference to the last three months encompasses a terrorist bombing of the Navy yard and the disappearance and subsequent murder of a beloved co-worker (that no one had ever mentioned before).  See Till Death Do Us Part, Episode 9.24, Extreme Prejudice, Episode 10.1, and Recovery, Episode 10.2.

-Tony gets a headslap.

-Ducky has been on medical leave since his heart attack at the end of Till Death Do Us Part, Episode 9.24.

-Rule #38: Your case, you’re lead.

-I wonder if a scene involving Dr. Blackwell exaggerating his cane usage got cut.  He handles a cane in his interview with Tony and Ziva, but it’s so subtle I had to go back and look for it.  He remains seated at his desk throughout the interview.  That’s not really enough for Gibbs and Tony to later accuse the guy of trying to pull a Keyser Soze.

-They never explicitly lay it out, but Dr. Blackwell apparently had enough computer savvy to kill Sgt. Hill via hacking his heater and CO detectors.  He probably also taught a then-private in the USMC how to slap together oleander poison in a lab to kill Commander Roberts.  Presumably Commander Roberts figured out the moon rock scam (while breaking the law himself and trying to illegally buy a moon rock, so he’s hardly a saint).  Commander Roberts then threatened to blow the whistle on Sgt. Hill, which would have led to Dr. Blackwell going down.  So they teamed up and killed him.  When Sgt. Hill found out about the exhumation, he got skittish, and Dr. Blackwell killed him too.  Which is less ridiculous than it first appeared since there was a link between Commander Roberts and Sgt. Hill in the form of the email traffic.  Which the team would have inevitably found even if Sgt. Hill’s death hadn’t drawn their attention to his interest in the exhumation investigation.

The only hole is in how Dr. Blackwell knew enough about Commander Roberts’s medical condition to know that oleander poison would not only kill him but make it look like an alcohol overdose.  We’re left to work out that, since Commander Roberts applied to NASA jobs on several occasions, Dr. Blackwell somehow had access to his medical files.  And also, as a NASA scientist on TV, Dr. Blackwell is presumed to be one of those Lex Luthor intellects who has myriad specialties in astrogeology, human biology, chemistry, pharmacology, and computer hacking. 

Seems a bit much.

Casting Call: *Or even Odo from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, since I now realize Dr. Blackwell was played by Rene Auberjonois.  Auberjonois also played Clayton Endicott on Benson.  Michael Des Barres, who played Finney (and the aforementioned Murdoc on MacGyver) also played an over-the-hill rocker in a great episode of Just Shoot Me.                                  

Man, This Show Is Old: Everything old was intended to be old.  Part of the episode involved a cold case after all.

MVP: Ducky, yo.

Rating: The characterization was good, and the episode was fun, but this plot was a little nutty and required the audience to put too many pieces together on our own.  Also, moon rocks? What the hell? Five Palmers.

Next Time: Borin returns, and the team investigates a lost Navy helicopter.

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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, grumbles about Atlanta sports, and looks for other television shows to obsess over. He can be reached at albarfie@hotmail.com or on Twitter at @AlexBarfield1 or on Facebook.