Time: Tuesdays, 8:00-9:00pm
Cast: Mark Harmon, Michael Weatherly, Cote de Pablo, Sean Murray, Pauley Perrette, David McCallum, Rocky Carroll
Creator: Donald Bellisario
Summary: When we last left our heroes, the team was in disarray. After finding out that Tony killed her boyfriend, a fellow Mossad operative, Ziva was called back to Israel to deal with the fallout. Gibbs, Tony and Director Vance followed. After several different confrontations, Ziva told Gibbs she could no longer work with Tony, and he had to choose which one of them to transfer. Gibbs looked very apologetic as he said goodbye to Ziva, and they returned to the States without her. Just when we thought it couldn't get worse than that, with moments left to the season finale, we found out Ziva was captured (somehow, somewhere, doing something), and she is now being tortured for information about NCIS.
Review: I'm going to start off with this: best NCIS episode ever. Having seen every episode at least twice, I can offer my expert opinion on this subject. Without a doubt, hands down, best episode.
Where should I start? Let's start with Tony. Michael Weatherly gave one of his best performances in this one. We got to see NCIS through Tony's eyes through a series of monologues and, let's face it, monologuing is hard. Actors feed off each other; that's why good dialogue works so well. Without having someone else's emotions and words to play off, Weatherly was forced to do it all himself. Not only did he have to keep his character recognizably Tony (after seven years, fans would be able to sense if he was out of character), but he had to act like all this information was being squeezed out of him by truth serum. And it worked, on all levels (especially when he was talking to Ziva towards the end and his voice got really high and tight like he was trying so hard to keep the words in).
P.S. Major props to Don Bellisario and the writing staff for recapping everything we already know and making it fresh with a first person point of view instead of our usual omniscient third person. It had the dual benefits of keeping it interesting (and entertaining!) and drawing us deeper into the story than we usually are when we're objective observers.
Let's talk about the McGee/DiNozzo relationship for a few minutes, shall we? Being down a team member has clearly been good to McGee. Sometime over the summer, he grew a pair and became a much better developed character than we've ever seen before. Fans of the show are used to the nervous, stuttering McGee, who still--five/six years later--gets easily duped by Tony. And, yes, he's been growing up steadily since he first became a member of the team all those years ago. But this first episode showed a brand new side to him. He's not Tony's probie anymore, despite was DiNozzo still calls him. They're much more like equals, and it's a welcome change. Not only does it open the door to some funny situations, but the chemistry between them is better than ever before. Weatherly and Sean Murray have always worked well together, but it seemed like they were their best yet in this episode.
And, for once, an episode with great character interaction and dialogue was not lacking in plot. There's a whole terrorist thing going on in this one, and I actually managed to follow it! One of my long-time problems with NCIS has been that they have two settings: super-easy and way-too-complicated. Either I figure out the cases in the first fifteen minutes, or I can't figure them out after having watched them two or three times. It's okay, because I didn't fall in love with this show because of the plots; I fell in love with the characters and their interaction with each other. As long as that is working, everything else is gravy. But this was one of the few episodes that kept me interested in both the plot and the characters, and that's why I think it was the best episode yet.
NCIS is one of the few shows I've seen that has gotten better with age. Most shows start dying out around or slightly before season 7 (if they make it this far). If they last much past this, their audience usually shrinks. But the NCIS audience is growing, and it's for good reason. This show was too complicated in the first couple seasons, trying to explain all these complex characters and their relationships while still maintaining crime-solving plot lines. Persistence paid off though, because eventually we fell in love with the characters. After that, the rest started to click into place.
This is my most highly anticipated show of the season. I like the other things I'm watching, but I don't feel the same compulsion to watch any of them as I do NCIS. In fact, I haven't felt this way since 2005, when Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip aired its lone season (and talk about a show that got canceled prematurely! But that's a conversation for a different time and place). I'm excited to see where this season will take us.
Rating (this episode):
[1] Run in the other direction
[2] Don't bother
[3] Worth a watch if you've got nothing better to do
[4] Definitely try it out
[5] A total keeper
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