Last night was my wife’s graduation. She received a Ph. D. from the University of Texas School of Nursing at ceremonies held at the George R. Brown Convention Center. Now she’ll have a picture of her in a floppy beret just like I do! People are a lot rowdier at graduations now than they were when I was marching across the stage. Or maybe it’s a reserved Canadian thing. Everyone seemed to be trying to outdo each other last night, like one of those contests where the faction that makes the loudest noise wins.
We might actually get rain today or tomorrow. Then again we might not. It’s all up in the air, so to speak. We desperately need it.
I’m all caught up with my catching up, I think. Today, it’s NCIS. Last week’s episode was a fun throwback to the era when Tony first met Gibbs. Tony was on the Baltimore PD and Gibbs was working undercover on a case. Tony arrests Gibbs (“you can’t outrun me — I’m wearing tube socks”), punches him and calls him a dirtbag. Not exactly a great first impression except it’s clear that right from the beginning the two guys get each other. Gibbs doesn’t need to finish his sentences or spell out his whole plan to Tony. They’re on the same wavelength, though Tony’s not a big fan of Gibbs’s job. “Who’d want to be a Navy cop? I’d rather have the plague.” At the time of their encounter, Gibbs is still married (“for now” — he’s ducking calls from a divorce lawyer). He tells Tony that he doesn’t have a lot of rules, but he spells out two of them: #5 is “you don’t waste ‘good'” and #35 is “always watch the watchers.” I think the fact that there is a #35 contradicts his claim that he doesn’t have a lot of them. The first slap on the back of the head: there’s a memory to cherish. I thought they did a decent job of making Tony and Gibbs look younger without overdoing it.
This week’s episode was grimmer and also a little bit meta. In the opening moments we see a body bag, and the question posed by that scene is: who is inside? We see Gibbs and Tony and McGee, so one’s mind goes to Ziva or Abby, but Tony and McGee aren’t as distraught as Gibbs is, so it’s probably not one of them. I also thought Vance, but he’s in the back of the limo. So, who, then? EJ? Again, Tony’s reaction doesn’t seem appropriate. And then Mike Franks shows up, but he’s obviously still alive so it can’t be him, right?
Huh, nice trick. Franks haunts the episode like a Greek chorus. He’s clearly there in person for part of it, but for the rest it’s like he and Gibbs are having this little catch-up conversation about the Port-to-Port killer that’s being played out as they watch. There a couple of funny moments, like when Gibbs is recounting a time when his team is reading the report on EJ’s trip to Hawaii to investigate another P2P attack. Gibbs is just sitting there, biding time. “Excruciating,” he admits. Franks tells him to skip this part, so Tony, McGee and Ziva speed-read through the document and then approach Gibbs’s desk and declare what they’re going to do next in a manner that approaches self-parody. “I will pursue this lead using ‘archaic and old school techniques,'” Tony says, with air quotes after McGee heads off to the lab to do high-tech stuff with Abby. Franks also comments on all the new names he has to keep track of in the new case, which is a problem viewers probably experience as well.
Franks was acting weird when he arrived from Mexico. He brought Gibbs a box of documents to help him keep Vance in line. He told a story about an old dog who knew when it was time to die. He’s also still smoking and coughing, so my take home message was that he was dying and knew it, which is why he was so brave when it came to confronting the P2P killer. “I figure I got one more fight left in me. You want it?”
Operation Frankenstein reminded me of an older episode of the show, which was also about trying to create super soldiers, except in this case it was about making assassins. Old “friend,” CIA agent Trent Cort, freshly short an eyeball (so that clears up that question), briefs them on the experiment that created a killer. Gibbs figures out what P2P is all about, but too late to save Franks and not before EJ’s team winds up in a trap. I figure the dialog about the total number of bullets Franks fired at Cobb was important. If you add up those shots with the ones Cobb fired in the warehouse, that probably means the next trigger pull will land the hammer on an empty clip. That’s my guess, anyway. Apparently there is going to be an impressive body count in the finale next week, so I might be wrong there.
Lots of nice moments in the episode, though. Ducky’s story about the mute swan and revisiting that fable after Franks dies, which tied in nicely with the episode title: Swan Song. Franks made no deathbed statement and Ducky admits that the story wasn’t true. The scene with Franks and Gibbs in Gibbs’s basement was nice, too. Franks talks about ghosts and how we create them all the time with our memories, which fill all the empty places where we live. In essence explaining Franks’ appearance throughout most of the episode. And the scene with Tony/Ziva and McGee/Abby mourning another loss.
