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Wednesday, October 19, 2011

NCIS: "Bend Over DiNozzo"

Episode 5: Safe Harbor

This episode brought an excellent and classic NCIS mix of dramatic procedural and great comedic moments. The return of Special Agent Abigail Borin was a treat especially in her double role as Gibbs clone and now a "matchmaker"? Let's get to it!


After the team received several late night phone calls from Gibbs and smelling leftover chinese that he left in the office over the weekend, the team decides that Gibbs needs a new woman. It's been a while since we've seen Gibbs with a good love interest, maybe since Col. Mann? I do miss the intrigue from the earlier seasons of Gibbs being picked up by random redheads in nice cars, but I digress. This week's murder brought NCIS and CGIS back together, when a Coast Guard officer is shot on the deck of a ship that entered the port illegally. Searching the ship, they discover a family locked in a closet of some sort seeking asylum in the US from Lebanon.

When Borin rejects herself as a future Mrs. Gibbs, she decides to help the team find him a match. To do so, she turns over her address book to DiNozzo. How very Gibbsian of her! Her contacts are not in a smartphone, but a hardcopy address book, full of women. DiNozzo, Ziva and McGee begin going through the book and pulling up pictures of the women, leading to some very funny scenes. This one seems perfect, but she's over six feet tall! Another one might be a keeper, but she's a New Age High Priestess, yikes!

As the mystery unfolds, Mariam (the mother of the asylum-seeking family), develops a nice relationship with Ziva. It was interesting to hear Ziva reference her brother at the same time as her mother and sister. Mariam tries to take the blame for shooting the Coast Guard guy, but slips up when Ziva asks how far away she was. The older son's anger seems like a tip-off, until we learn that dear old dad was involved in a bombing that killed Americans and now he's in interrogation. SECNAV makes several appearances in this episode and I still can't figure the guy out. Although it was amusing that the woman from the State Department(?) called him Vance's assistant. Heehee. When Ziva learns that the dad is a terrorist, she goes to tell DiNozzo, who's hanging out with him in the kitchen, where something soapy-smelling is on the stove. When they confront him, he runs, spilling the pot 'o soap in the process, which leads to the excellent scene where Borin tries to get some leftover soap off of DiNozzo's ass, telling him to bend over as she tries to get it off saying "it's really in there!" LOL!!! Borin fails and the pants are sent to Abby, who learns that they are actually dealing with explosives. Dad claims that it's the older son who's the bad one, but when they find him tied up, they realize that the younger son is about to blow up the ship that is full of fuel and is right near some other ships full of weapons and such, bound for the Middle East. Mama intervenes too and he's led away in handcuffs.

As the mystery dealt with parents and sons, so did our funny subplot. When the team finally hits on a match for Gibbs, he looks at the screen with her picture and says "what is she doing up there?" Turns out, he dated her! TWIST! She's perfect, but not for him. Of course, the best moment of the night was the last one. In the darkened bullpen, Gibbs tells Ziva, who'd worried that he's lonely, that you're never lonely when you have kids. She looks at him and he says "Good night, kid". Awwwww.

Minor sticking point: when they found the family locked in the closet, the handle of the door was broken. Since there was no crew in the end, how did they lock themselves in?

2 comments:

  1. A good episode. I was a little disappointed that there wasn't even a mention of the Abby adoption subplot. When you think back to the early seasons when Gibbs was tracking Kate's killer, they always made sure to show you the facial recognition software running in the background and I always LOVED that detail. The show is too good to drop what will eventually be a season storyline (Abby's origin story) just one episode after introducing it.

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  2. TV Watcher, I agree, but I think it will be more like the Port-to-Port Killer then tracking Ary was. They'll let it rest for a bit and then bring it back with a bang.

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