An Illuminating NCIS - TV Guide 28/04/10

Sonja Flemming/CBS An Illuminating NCIS by Chris Willman April 28, 2010 12:23 PM EST This week’s NCIS was titled “Moonlighting,” but you’ll pardon us if we call it “Palmer-palooza,” for how unusually significant an amount of screen time Brian Dietzen was afforded. Yes, we know they tape these things more than a couple of days in advance, but it was if the producers saw the reaction to the "Men of NCIS" TV Guide Magazine cover package, with all the women gushing over the series’ least regular male regular, and immediately decided: “Must… have… more… JIMMY.” Our boy wonder was all over the hour, from his comic banter with Ducky over what sand “mites” “might” do (you half-expected them to break into a reprise of “Who’s on first,” if not a round of “How much wood would a woodchuck chuck”) to Palmer’s final, non-mite-related itchiness, thanks to a Henna tattoo allergy. DiNozzo dubbed him “Autopsy Gremlin,” which allowed Gibbs, of all people, to come back with a movie-related punch line (“Don’t get him wet”). Maybe if we ever get a glimpse of Gibbs’ bedroom, we will see he has a secret stash of 1980s videocassettes after all. There was a lot of comedy in this one, which provided a perfectly affable smokescreen for the more outlandish elements of the plot. This week’s dead sailor turned out to have simply stumbled onto what may have been a mob hit. (The glimpse of a Black-Eyed Peas song on his MP3 player looked suspiciously like product placement, though, if so, I don’t how efficient a “Be distracted by BEP and die” sales message is.) Once it became clear this was just one of many deaths, the investigation became a joint one with the FBI, and their possibly sole agent in Washington, the redoubtable Fornell (Joe Spano). These two sleuths were eventually able to deduce that the villain of the show was the least likely suspect this side of Jimmy Palmer’s new girlfriend…a female judge with a taste for vigilantism. If you followed this plot, you are a better man or woman than us, and merit badges all around. Which was harder to swallow: that a judge guilty of some of the worst crimes imaginable would willingly submit to a polygraph test just for the hell of it, or that Gibbs (Mark Harmon) would? Still, unlikely as these occurrences were, they did effectively set up the themes we’re all expecting to come into play at the climax of the season. Gibbs is said to be staring down some tough choices come the end of May in Mexico. And from the flashback to his past vigilante actions, wreaking vengeance for the deaths of his wife and daughter, that kept him from following through with the lie-detector test, it’s safe to surmise that these issues are about to come back and haunt him, and not just in a Jiminy Cricket conscience kind of way. And though you could—should?—take issue with the realism of the basic plot mechanics, as if often the case, there was an even trickier weaving together more realistic psychological elements that the writers pulled off, under the guise of comedy. In a final scene that was as sharp as a lot of this season’s denouements have been, McGee (Sean Murray), having absorbed Tony’s manly advice, decided to ask out stalkerish polygraph operator Susan Grady (Jackie Geary, returning from last October’s “The Inside Man”) after all. Earlier in the episode, she’d moaned to Ziva about her lack of a Gibbs-like “gut” instinct. Believing that she’d finally achieved the ability to read people without the aid of a machine, Susan sussed that McGee was just being polite about the offer of a date, and turned him down. Of course her lack of giftedness in people-reading hadn’t changed… and, because of that, she was wrong about the shift in McGee’s attitude. For a show that is constantly offering the tease of whether its regular characters are or aren’t capable of change, it was a particularly fun and twisty little anticlimax. Susan probably won’t be back, but there’s no doubt that Fornell will. And Joe Spano is so welcome a presence on the series that it’s hard not to wish that he would be the focus of the next NCIS spin-off… even if such a show inherently couldn’t have “NCIS” as part of the title, which might defeat some of the purpose. Not that we’d want to put a stop to Spano’s guest appearances in this part of the franchise, when NCIS suddenly turns into a very wittily scripted buddy show, with Gibbs and Fornell as the grown-up versions of the crime-fighting pal partnership on NCIS: Los Angeles. It’s always nice to see Gibbs meet his match, whether it’s with one of the shrewd women guest stars that have been popping up lately or a guy. Maybe someday they’ll grow Tony up to fill that role, but until then, maybe we’d better hope Spano doesn’t get his own show.

Sonja Flemming/CBS

An Illuminating NCIS

by Chris Willman April 28, 2010 12:23 PM EST

This week’s NCIS was titled “Moonlighting,” but you’ll pardon us if we call it “Palmer-palooza,” for how unusually significant an amount of screen time Brian Dietzen was afforded. Yes, we know they tape these things more than a couple of days in advance, but it was if the producers saw the reaction to the "Men of NCIS" TV Guide Magazine cover package, with all the women gushing over the series’ least regular male regular, and immediately decided: “Must… have… more… JIMMY.”

Our boy wonder was all over the hour, from his comic banter with Ducky over what sand “mites” “might” do (you half-expected them to break into a reprise of “Who’s on first,” if not a round of “How much wood would a woodchuck chuck”) to Palmer’s final, non-mite-related itchiness, thanks to a Henna tattoo allergy. DiNozzo dubbed him “Autopsy Gremlin,” which allowed Gibbs, of all people, to come back with a movie-related punch line (“Don’t get him wet”). Maybe if we ever get a glimpse of Gibbs’ bedroom, we will see he has a secret stash of 1980s videocassettes after all.

There was a lot of comedy in this one, which provided a perfectly affable smokescreen for the more outlandish elements of the plot. This week’s dead sailor turned out to have simply stumbled onto what may have been a mob hit. (The glimpse of a Black-Eyed Peas song on his MP3 player looked suspiciously like product placement, though, if so, I don’t how efficient a “Be distracted by BEP and die” sales message is.) Once it became clear this was just one of many deaths, the investigation became a joint one with the FBI, and their possibly sole agent in Washington, the redoubtable Fornell (Joe Spano). These two sleuths were eventually able to deduce that the villain of the show was the least likely suspect this side of Jimmy Palmer’s new girlfriend…a female judge with a taste for vigilantism. If you followed this plot, you are a better man or woman than us, and merit badges all around.

Which was harder to swallow: that a judge guilty of some of the worst crimes imaginable would willingly submit to a polygraph test just for the hell of it, or that Gibbs (Mark Harmon) would? Still, unlikely as these occurrences were, they did effectively set up the themes we’re all expecting to come into play at the climax of the season. Gibbs is said to be staring down some tough choices come the end of May in Mexico. And from the flashback to his past vigilante actions, wreaking vengeance for the deaths of his wife and daughter, that kept him from following through with the lie-detector test, it’s safe to surmise that these issues are about to come back and haunt him, and not just in a Jiminy Cricket conscience kind of way.

And though you could—should?—take issue with the realism of the basic plot mechanics, as if often the case, there was an even trickier weaving together more realistic psychological elements that the writers pulled off, under the guise of comedy. In a final scene that was as sharp as a lot of this season’s denouements have been, McGee (Sean Murray), having absorbed Tony’s manly advice, decided to ask out stalkerish polygraph operator Susan Grady (Jackie Geary, returning from last October’s “The Inside Man”) after all. Earlier in the episode, she’d moaned to Ziva about her lack of a Gibbs-like “gut” instinct. Believing that she’d finally achieved the ability to read people without the aid of a machine, Susan sussed that McGee was just being polite about the offer of a date, and turned him down. Of course her lack of giftedness in people-reading hadn’t changed… and, because of that, she was wrong about the shift in McGee’s attitude. For a show that is constantly offering the tease of whether its regular characters are or aren’t capable of change, it was a particularly fun and twisty little anticlimax.

Susan probably won’t be back, but there’s no doubt that Fornell will. And Joe Spano is so welcome a presence on the series that it’s hard not to wish that he would be the focus of the next NCIS spin-off… even if such a show inherently couldn’t have “NCIS” as part of the title, which might defeat some of the purpose. Not that we’d want to put a stop to Spano’s guest appearances in this part of the franchise, when NCIS suddenly turns into a very wittily scripted buddy show, with Gibbs and Fornell as the grown-up versions of the crime-fighting pal partnership on NCIS: Los Angeles. It’s always nice to see Gibbs meet his match, whether it’s with one of the shrewd women guest stars that have been popping up lately or a guy. Maybe someday they’ll grow Tony up to fill that role, but until then, maybe we’d better hope Spano doesn’t get his own show.

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An Illuminating NCIS - TV Guide 28/04/10

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